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Using a broad definition of the Durkheimian tradition, this book offers the first systematic attempt to explore the Durkheimians' engagement with art. It focuses on both Durkheim and his contemporaries as well as later thinkers influenced by his work. The first five chapters consider Durkheim's own exploration of art; the remaining six look at other Durkheimian thinkers, including Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, Maurice Halbwachs, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Leiris, and Georges Bataille. The contributors-scholars from a range of theoretical orientations and disciplinary perspectives-are known for having already produced significant contributions to the study of Durkheim. This book will interest not only scholars of Durkheim and his tradition but also those concerned with aesthetic theory and the sociology and history of art.
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction Alexander Riley Chapter 1. Total Aesthetics: Art and
The Elemental Forms William Watts Miller Chapter 2. Durkheim, the Arts, and the Moral Sword
W.S.F. Pickering Chapter 3. Durkheim and Festivals: Art, Effervescence, and Institutions
Jean-Louis Fabiani Chapter 4. The Power of Imagination and the Economy of Desire: Durkheim and Art
Pierre-Michel Menger Chapter 5. Dostoevsky in the Mirror of Durkheim
Donald A. Nielsen Chapter 6. Durkheim,
L'Année sociologique, and Art
Marcel Fournier Chapter 7. Marcel Mauss on Art and Aesthetics: The Politics of Division, Isolation, and Totality
Michèle Richman Chapter 8. Too Marvelous for Words...: Maurice Halbwachs, Kansas City Jazz, and the Language of Music
Sarah Daynes Chapter 9. Total Art - The Influence of the Durkheim School on Claude Lévi-Strauss's Reflections on Art and Classification
Stephan Moebius and Frithjof Nungesser Chapter 10. Sex, Death, the Other, and Art: The Search for Mythic Life in the Work of Michel Leiris
Alexander Riley Chapter 11. Apophasis in Representation: Georges Bataille and the Aesthetics and Ethics of the Negative
S. Romi Mukherjee Chapter 12. Acéphale/Parsifal: Georges Bataille
contra Wagner
Claudine Frank Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Alexander Tristan Riley is Professor of Sociology at Bucknell University. With the aid of the late Philippe Besnard, he edited the war correspondence of Robert Hertz, Un ethnologue dans les tranchées. He is the author of Godless Intellectuals?: The Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented (Berghahn Books, 2010) and currently he is contemplating a book on literary autobiography, cultural sociology, and the writing of Michel Leiris.
William Watts Miller is editor of Durkheimian Studies/Etudes Durkheimiennes and a member of the board of the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies. He has published extensively in the field, collaborated in translations, and is a member of the team producing a new critical edition of Durkheim's Complete Works. His most recent book is A Durkheimian Quest: Solidarity and the Sacred (Berghahn Books, 2012).
W. S. F. Pickering (1922-2016) was a retired Lecturer in sociology from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1991, he helped found the British Centre for Durkheimian Studies in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford.
Summary
Using a broad definition of the Durkheimian tradition, this book offers the first systematic attempt to explore the Durkheimians' engagement with art. It focuses on both Durkheim and his contemporaries as well as later thinkers influenced by his work.
