Visconti : Insights into Flesh and Blood

Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Bloodis a book of philosophical aesthetics rather than film studies. Garcia Duttmann analyzes the work of Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti in the light of concepts such as "aesthetic seriousness" (Kierkegaard, Adorno) and the "cinematic circle" (Cavell). His general argument is based on Adorno's idea that it is always the possible and never the real that blocks off the path to utopia. The book shows how Visconti's films allow for a privileged understanding of this idea and how it can offer a unified access to the films themselves.

Alexander García Düttmann is Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths (University of London). He is the author of At Odds with AIDS: Thinking and Talking about a Virus (Stanford, 1997), Between Cultures: Tensions in the Struggle of Recognition (Verso, 2000), The Memory of Thought: An Essay on Adorno and Heidegger (Continuum 2002), and Philosophy of Exaggeration (Continuum, 2007).