Overview

"From prehistoric stone tools, to machines, to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of their production, emerging from diverse histories, and enveloped in multiple layers of meaning, things embody ideas, emotions, and symbols of which we are often unaware. The meaning of ""thing"" is richer than that of ""object,"" which is something that is manipulated with indifference or according to impersonal technical procedures. Things also differ from merchandise, objects that can be sold or exchanged or seen as status symbols. Things, in the philosophical sense, are nodes of relationships with the life of others, chains of continuity among generations, bridges that connect individual and collective histories, junctions between human civilizations and nature. Things incite us to listen to reality, to make them part of ourselves, giving fresh life to an otherwise suffocating interiority. Things also reveal the hidden aspect of a ""subject"" in its most secret and least explored side. Things are the repositories of ideas, emotions, and symbols whose meaning we often do not understand. In an unexpected but coherent journey that includes the visions of classic philosophers from Aristotle to Husserl and from Hegel to Heidegger, along with the analysis of works of art, Bodei addresses issues such as fetishism, the memory of things, the emergence of department stores, consumerism, nostalgia for the past, the self-portraits of Rembrandt and Dutch still-lifes of the seventeenth century. The more we are able to recover objects in their wealth of meanings and integrate them into our mental and emotional horizons, he argues, the broader and deeper our world becomes."

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Bodei's philosophical expertise is obvious, but he surpasses by far the level of most phenomenologies of 'things' thanks to his refined sensibility with regard to the vital, ethical, economic, aesthetic, and religious aspects of various types of things. --Adriaan T. Peperzak, Loyola University, Chicago Simple things. Bare objects still new or already worn out. Objects unscathed or consumed and so slated for insignificance and destruction. But is this really the fate of things today or is there instead another way of looking at them, one able to salvage things somehow from such an anonymous and listless end? This is the piercing and original question that Remo Bodei poses in The Life of Things, The Love of Things. --Roberto Esposito, La repubblica Bodei's brief philosophical text offers a profound, global exploration of an ontological approach to our understanding of what we perceive--the luminosity that our awareness casts upon the existence of the least significant thing. Especially valuable to art historians is Bodei's subversion of Walter Benjamin's notion that objects lose their aura of authenticity in modernity's mechanical re-productivity; instead, the aura is conveyed through the perception, at a distance, of the object's elusiveness and underlying content. The book ends with a brilliant explication of the facticity of Dutch art: Vermeer in relation to the spiritual naturalism of Spinoza; Rembrandt's self-portraits as revelatory storehouses of his psychological consciousness. The Life of Things, The Love of Things is beautifully written, beautifully translated, and a stimulating challenge to read. --Irving Lavin, Institute for Advanced Study The Life of Things, the Love of Things is a beautiful book. -The Los Angeles Review of Books

Author Information

REMO BODEI is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Pisa after having taught for many years at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa and at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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