Tension appears in many contexts and carries diverse meanings. It tends to be viewed as something to be avoided and reduced in politics; to be explained, worked through, and resolved in therapy or science; to be endured and sustained in modern art; or to be sought after and enjoyed in popular culture. This volume brings together contributions from several academic and artistic fields in order to question the self-evidence of the deceptively simple term ‘tension’ and explore the possibility of productive transfers among different forms und understandings of tension. Refusing the temptation of a stabilizing synthesis, it establishes a dense web of approaches, providing a new critical paradigm for further inquiry.
ISBN 978-3-85132-616-1 | Paperback | 32 EUR
294 pp. | 24 cm x 16 cm
Cultural Inquiry, 1
ISSN (Print): 2627-728X
ISSN (Online): 2627-731X
Table of Contents
I. Aesthetics
- Tension and Narrative: Autobiographies of Illness and Therapeutic Legitimacy in Eighteenth-Century French and English Medical Works
- Oblique Gazes: The Je Ne Sais Quoi and the Uncanny as Forms of Undecidability in Post-Enlightenment Aesthetics
- Strategies of Tension: A. Boissier’s Les amants électrisés par l’amour (1797)
- Kleist’s Puppet Theatre and the Art of Tango: Looking for the Back Door to Paradise
- ici uniglory, 2009: Installation. Ink, paper, images & text
- Disappear Here: Adventures in Subconscious Narrative Filmmaking
II. Politics
- Tension on Tension: Some Considerations that Might Help to Produce an Increasingly Precise Understanding of a Problem which Has No Specific Object
- On Social Forces: Tension as a Metaphor and the Image of Society
- The Topoi of Utopia: A Topology of Political Tensions
- Desiring Tension: Towards a Queer Politics of Paradox
- The Violence of Form: Philosophical Remarks on Mazen Kerbaj’s Sound Piece Starry Night
