Series Editor’s Preface

Summary

The relation between philosophy and art history gestures towards a rich and complex intellectual lineage with ongoing relevance for the contemporary thinking of art and image. Yet it is rarely directly addressed or named. The writing and thinking that inhabits or implicates this relation is instead most often reclaimed by one or other of these disciplines, or subsumed into other terrains: aesthetics, philosophy of art, art theory, art criticism or visual culture. A long-standing misunderstanding in part accounts for such deflection: the judgement of the inadequacy or absence of the philosophical in art historical thinking, and of the ahistoricity in philosophical thinking on art.

Refractions challenges this outlook, constructing a zone for inquiry that examines, tests and renews modes of address too often reductively separated. Fostering unexpected synergies, volumes in the Series reveal how it is in the encounter of the conceptual, speculative and theoretical with the empirical, material and concrete that some of the most vital problems about art and image are posed. In the transhistorical zones where concepts and experience meet, and across borderlines of theory, criticism, historiography and practice, philosophy and art history are brought together in remarkable and creative ways.

Deflections of light or waves across media of different densities, refractions are passages that fracture whilst continuing. Refractions of thought may entail diversions and deflections from a previous course, oblique crossings of zones, splinterings into differentiated nuances, and the unsettling that sustains thinking's character as query. The title of the series is intended to evoke not only the moments when disciplines are brought into collision through the complexity and multidimensionality of their objects and problems, but also the indisciplined events of thought provoked when a discourse is made to explore the blind spots within its own histories and practices.

Volumes in the Series explore ways in which problems, concepts and objects are refracted across epistemic thresholds and discursive contexts, cultural traditions, historical periods and languages, and how they change in meaning and the effects they generate through this passage. The Series casts its net wide, to capture the horizon where philosophy and art history meet, juxtaposing emerging, established, alongside overlooked or forgotten writers to offer provisional groupings that mobilise intellectual history.