To many, chance and art are antagonistic terms. But a number of 20th century artists have turned this notion on its head by attempting to create artworks based on randomness. Among those, three in particular articulated a well-argued and thorough theory of the radical use of chance in art: André Breton (writer), John Cage (composer) and François Morellet (visual artist). The implications of such a move away from established aesthetics are far-reaching, as much in conceptual as in practical terms, as this book hopes to make clear. Of paramount importance in this coincidentia oppositorum is the suggested possibility of a correlation between the artistic use of chance and a system of thought itself organised around chance. Indeed placing randomness at the centre of one’s art may have deeper philosophical consequences than just on the aesthetical level.

To many, chance and art are antagonistic terms. But a number of 20th century artists have turned this notion on its head by attempting to create artworks based on randomness. Among those, three in particular articulated a well-argued and thorough theory of the radical use of chance in art: André Breton (writer), John Cage (composer) and François Morellet (visual artist). The implications of such a move away from established aesthetics are far-reaching, as much in conceptual as in practical terms, as this book hopes to make clear. Of paramount importance in this coincidentia oppositorum is the suggested possibility of a correlation between the artistic use of chance and a system of thought itself organised around chance. Indeed placing randomness at the centre of one’s art may have deeper philosophical consequences than just on the aesthetical level.

At least since the Romantic era, poetry has often been understood as a powerful vector of collective belonging. The idea that certain poets are emblematic of a national culture is one of the chief means by which literature historicizes itself, inscribes itself in a shared cultural past and supplies modes of belonging to those who consume it. But what, then, of the exiled, migrant or translingual poet? How might writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue complicate this picture of the relation between poet, language and literary system? What of those for whom the practice of poetry is inseparable from a sense of restlessness or unease, suggesting a condition of not being at home in any one language, even that of their mother tongue? These questions are crucial for four French-language poets whose work is the focus of this study: Armen Lubin (1903-74), Ghérasim Luca (1913-94), Edmond Jabès (1912-91) and Michelle Grangaud (1941-). Ranging across borders within and beyond the Francosphere – from Algeria to Armenia, to Egypt, to Romania – this book shows how a poetic practice inflected by exile, statelessness or non-belonging has the potential to disrupt long-held assumptions of the relation between subjects, the language they use and the place from which they speak.

Analyzing complex social and political issues through their manifestations in popular culture, this book provides readers a strong foundational knowledge of the 1960s as a decade. 1969 went out in a way that could never have been imagined in 1960. While the president at the end of the decade had been vice president at the start, the intervening years permanently changed American culture. Pop Goes the Decade: The Sixties explores the cultural and social framework of the 1960s, addressing film, television, sports, technology, media/advertising, fashion, art, and more. Entries are presented in encyclopedic fashion, organized into such categories as controversies in pop culture, game changers, technology, and the decade's legacy. A timeline highlights significant cultural moments, while an introduction and a conclusion place those moments within the contexts of preceding and subsequent decades. Attention to the decade's most prominent influencers allows readers to understand the movements with which these figures are associated, and discussion of controversies and social change enables readers to gain a stronger understanding of evolving American social values.

Examines how postwar French writers constitute the thinking subject and reshape its relation to the external social world. Joseph Acquisto analyzes the writings of three thinkers during and shortly after the Second World War who address the question of what it means to think, and what it means to constitute oneself as a thinking subject – at a time that seems to come "after everything"; with the ruins of attacked cities echoing the remains of a philosophical tradition that was confident in its establishment of human beings as rational, of reason leading to progress, and of both the self and the world as knowable. What Georges Bataille calls "inner experience" and Emil Cioran labels "thinking against oneself" is something akin to a drama; not a mere representation of the self in relation to the world, but a process of remapping the relation of subject to object of thought dialectically. Acquisto argues that both writers adopt an anti-systematic approach to thinking that implicates fragmentary writing as a way of turning answers about subject-object relations into questions. Acquisto contends that this stands in contrast to the approach of Clément Rosset, whose affirmation of the inaccessibility of the real leads to an anti-intellectual, grace-filled affirmation of life as it is given, under the guise of what he calls the "tragic." Bringing together thinkers that have seldom been discussed in a comparative light, Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset examines the affective dimensions of thought as experience and considers the political stakes of postwar thought as "out of order" with the world from which it springs.

The Dada movement, revered as perhaps the purest form of cultural subversion and provocation in 20th-century Europe, has been a victim of the readiness with which cultural historians have swallowed its own propaganda. Based on extensive close analysis of French-language Dada work in its original form, and offering English translations throughout, this major reappraisal looks at a broad range of media and topics - including poetry, film, philosophy, and quantum physics - in order to get beyond Dada's typecasting as avant-garde anti-hero. Work by women writers and other marginalized figures combines with that of canonical Dadaists to present Dada in a radically new set of guises: poetic and textually subtle; intellectually and philosophically meaningful; peaceable and quasi-Buddhist; and, perhaps most uncomfortably of all, conformist and reactionary.

Humor and cruelty can be the best of friends. Many cruel domains have facilitated hilarity of all kinds, whether experienced directly or vicariously, stretching from the torture chamber to the living room—or wherever else a screen is to be found. Conversely, many jests have provided the vehicle with which to dispense cruelty, whether callously or gleefully, in myriad settings, from public events to intimate family dinners. Combining the sources and resources of the humanities and social sciences, this book investigates the mutually supportive liaisons of humor and cruelty. We unearth the brutal, aggressive, and/or sadomasochistic roots of mockery and self-mockery, sarcasm and satire, whilst addressing contemporary debates in humor studies focusing on the thorny ethics and existential challenges arising from the acceptance of the much-appreciated yet seldom innocent channel for human interaction called "humor."