Bøger af Malcolm Bull

Malcolm Bull offers a detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works. Along with accompanying commentaries by Cascardi and Clark, he explores the significance of Nietzsche's views given the fact that a wide range of readers have come to embrace his ideas as new orthodoxy. There seem to be no anti-Nietzscheans today, but Bull demonstrates that this wide embrace of Nietzsche runs counter to the very meaning of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it.

From here to utopia. New directions in political theory

A detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works

Nietzsche, the philosopher seemingly opposed to everyone, has met with remarkably little opposition himself. He remains what he wanted to be the limit-philosopher of a modernity that never ends. In this provocative, sometimes disturbing book, Bull argues that merely to reject Nietzsche is not to escape his lure. He seduces by appealing to our desire for victory, our creativity, our humanity. Only by ';reading like a loser' and failing to live up to his ideals can we move beyond Nietzsche to a still more radical revaluation of all valuesa subhumanism that expands the boundaries of society until we are left with less than nothing in common.Anti-Nietzsche is a subtle and subversive engagement with Nietzsche and his twentieth-century interpretersHeidegger, Vattimo, Nancy, and Agamben. Written with economy and clarity, it shows how a politics of failure might change what it means to be human.

Perhaps the single most revolutionary aspect of the Renaissance was the re-emergence of the gods and goddesses of antiquity. In the midst of Christian Europe, artists began to decorate luxury goods with scandalous stories from classical mythology, and rulers to identify themselves with the deities of ancient religion. The resulting fusion of erotic fantasy and political power changed the course of Western art and produced many of its most magical and subversive works.The first book ever to survey this extraordinary phenomenon in its entirety, The Mirror of the Gods takes the story from the Renaissance to the Baroque. Each chapter focuses on a particular god (Diana, Apollo, Hercules, Venus, Bacchus, Jupiter) and recounts the tales about that deity, not as they appear in classical literature but as they were re-created by artists such as Botticelli, Titian, Bernini and Rembrandt. And yet this is not a book simply about painting and sculpture. It is an attempt to re-imagine the entire designed world of the Renaissance, where the gods also appeared in carnival floats and in banquet displays, and entertained the public in the form of snow men and fireworks. This rich and original new portrait of the Renaissance will ensure that readers never see the period in quite the same way again.

Can painting transform philosophy? In Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth, Malcolm Bull looks at Neapolitan art around 1700 through the eyes of the philosopher Giambattista Vico. Surrounded by extravagant examples of late Baroque painting by artists like Luca Giordano and Francesco Solimena, Vico concluded that human truth was a product of the imagination. Truth was not something that could be observed: instead, it was something made in the way that paintings were made--through the exercise of fantasy. Juxtaposing paintings and texts, Bull presents the masterpieces of late Baroque painting in early eighteenth-century Naples from an entirely new perspective. Revealing the close connections between the arguments of the philosophers and the arguments of the painters, he shows how Vico drew on both in his influential philosophy of history, The New Science. Bull suggests that painting can serve not just as an illustration for philosophical arguments, but also as the model for them--that painting itself has sometimes been a form of epistemological experiment, and that, perhaps surprisingly, the Neapolitan Baroque may have been one of the routes through which modern consciousness was formed.

The completely revised second edition further explores one of the most successful of America's indigenous religious groups. Despite this, the Adventist church has remained largely invisible. Seeking a Sanctuary casts light on this marginal religion through its socio-historical context and discusses several Adventist figures that shaped the perception of this Christian sect.

Exploiting affinities between the work of Lukacs and American philosophers such as Rorty and Cavell, Bull argues that the central dynamic of late modernity is the coming into hiding of the contradictory identities generated through political and social emancipation.

Reviews 3000 years of apocalyptic thought. Tracing the history of millenarianism from ancient times to the 17th century, this book investigates the modern and postmodern debates in which apocalyptic themes are recirculated, from Zoroaster to Derrida.