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Spyros Papapetros is assistant professor of history and theory in the School of Architecture and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.
"Essayism in its best form paired with a rich pictorial, at times
poetic language on the one side, and minute research and
philological exactitude on the other. . . . Papapetros looks at the
stark yet miraculously animated pictorial world of Léger as an
experimental field that embodies the contemporaneous discourses of
cultural history, anthropology, and crystallography--a form of
pictorial description that allows not only the history of animation
but also the history of abstraction to appear in a new light."
-- "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung"
"On the Animation of the Inorganic is a major contribution to
cultural studies, a lucidly written work of dazzling scholarship
and theoretical brilliance. For Spyros Papapetros, the vicissitudes
in the history of animation from the mid-nineteenth century to the
present are exciting chapters in the history of the mind's
incessant efforts to formulate the analogies and correspondences
between the human subject and the spaces and objects of the world
it inhabits. This ground-breaking study will be of great interest
to students and specialists of several disciplines, including art
history, architecture, psychoanalysis, and aesthetic theory."--Leo
Bersani, University of California, Berkeley
"Spyros Papapetros is a most attentive reader and subtle
interpreter, alert to nuance and innuendo, but equally weary of
snap judgments and free of ideological blinkers. On the Animation
of the Inorganic not only raises issues of enduring importance but
also brings out many implications of their presumed significance,
which leads to illuminating reconsiderations of the writings of
Alois Riegl and Wilhelm Worringer and opens up new perspectives
from familiar ideas expressed by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin.
There are many nuggets of insight and numerous felicitous
formulations in this book that will help secure a place for it in
current debates."--Kurt Forster, Yale University
"Things are not what they used to be, and perhaps they never were.
The boundaries between inanimate objects and living organisms, so
fundamental to norms of positive science and common sense, shimmer
and shatter in this elegant history of animation in modernist art
and architecture. You will never look at those annoying appliances
and perverse pillars in quite the same way after reading this
marvelous book, which should, by all rights, turn its own
pages."--W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago
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