Nots

by Mark C. Taylor

Overview

Nots is a virtuoso exploration of negation and negativity in theology, philosophy, art, architecture, postmodern culture, and medicine. In nine essays that range from nihility in Buddhism to the embodiment of negativity in disease, Mark C. Taylor looks at the surprising ways in which contrasting concepts of negativity intersect.

In the first section of this book, Taylor discusses the question of the "not" in the religious thought of Anselm, Hegel, Derrida, and Nishitani. In the second part, he analyzes artistic efforts "to figure not" in the work of artists Arakawa and Madeline Gins, architect Daniel Libeskind, pop artist David Sallee, and pop icon Madonna. The final section consists of a deeply personal and scientifically informed chapter that discusses the workings of negativity in immunology and illness.

Taylor's essays work toward a sense of the not as unnameable as it is irrepressible—an "unthinkable third" that falls between being and nonbeing. Bringing together concerns that span Taylor's early investigations of Hegel and Kierkegaard and recent studies of art and architecture, Nots is an important contribution by one of the most original and distinctive voices now writing on the American scene.

Religion and Postmodernism series

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226791319
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/15/1993
Series:	Religion and Postmodernism
Edition description:	1
Pages:	292
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mark C. Taylor is professor of religion at Columbia University and the Cluett Professor of Humanities emeritus at Williams College. He is the founding editor of the Religion and Postmodernism series published by the University of Chicago Press and is the author of over thirty books, including Speed Limits: Where Time Went and Why We Have So Little Left and Abiding Grace: Time, Modernity, Death.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Why Not?
Religion
1. How Not to Think God
2. nO nOt nO
3. Nothing Ventured/Nothing Gained/Nothing Ventured
4. Not Just Resistance
Art
5. Saving Not
6. Not Architecture
7. Adverteasing: Forget Not
Body
8. The Betrayal of the Body: Live Not
Not(e)s
Index