The long-lasting impact of Pheidias, antiquity’s master of religious art, especially his Zeus at Olympia, is considered in the context of the theme of personal religion. The chapter adopts a broad chronological perspective and explores how the great master was perceived during the centuries following his lifetime, with a focus on his chryselephantine masterpiece, which he completed in the later decades of the fifth century BCE. It considers how later generations have conceived of his personal religious life, its relation to his famed artwork, and the position his figure has come to occupy within broader cult practices and devotional experiences. Close analysis of Pausanias’ Description of Greece alongside other evidentiary materials shows that by the second century CE, Pheidias was a figure of religious significance in his own right. Greco-Roman authors ascribed to him the qualities of a visionary endowed with unparallel access to Zeus. He left his detectable trademarks in his masterpiece, and his presence was felt in communal cult practices. Centuries after his departure from Olympia, his artmaking has come to be understood as a form of devotional practice.

The chapter probes the relationship between law and performance in the context of transitional justice. By analyzing cultural productions and public performances such as films and theater plays, the chapter examines the ways in which lustration has become dramatized through the themes of secrecy, deception, betrayal, and the desire to know and not to know. While these cultural practices offer insight into the public intimate life of lustration, they also show how they become a site and form of social opposition and critical engagement with the terms of lustration and moral autopsy. In particular, the chapter offers a detailed ethnographic study of the experimental theater play by Wojtek Ziemilski, Small Narration (Mala Narracja), which highlights the layered relationship between theater and law and shows the extent to which the judicial and moralized forms of examination and judgment might travel and be contested by alternative forms of knowing, not-knowing, and relating to life, history, and politics.

This chapter invites consideration of Bloomsbury as the Biography group. It details Bloomsbury’s founding and defining contributions to the “New Biography,” particularly in theoretical and creative works by Harold Nicolson, Virginia Woolf, and the most influential British biographer of the past century, Lytton Strachey. Focusing its attention most carefully on the latter two, it explores how both Woolf and Strachey, as “spiritual” writers of the modernist age (Woolf, “Modern Fiction”), understood biography as a means of revealing personality, while diverging on some essential matters. Woolf, whose initial understanding of biography as an art evolved into a more subdued description of it as (mere) craft, anticipated that this aim might be accomplished through archival assiduity over time by a succession of fact-bound biographers, each bringing a different perspective to facts, old and new. Strachey, for his part, who always considered biography an art form, thought such an aim might be accomplished in the present, using fictional means to reveal both the personality of the nominal biographical subject and the personality of the biographer. This chapter finally reads Strachey as the most important progenitor of biographical fiction.

This chapter explores Bloomsbury’s engagements with the United States of America between 1900 and 1960. It analyzes the personal and published writings of various members of the group about American art, politics, and culture. While there is no cohesive “Bloomsbury” position on the USA, it at once fascinated and appalled them, from their university days until late in their lives. From Roger Fry’s tenure at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, until his falling out with J. P. Morgan, through the widespread outrage in Britain at the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, and on to J. M. Keynes’ role at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 and Clive Bell’s 1950s lecture tours, the USA is a constant presence in their lives. Some welcomed the income that writing for American periodicals provided, while privately disdaining their readers. Others engaged with American politicians on the world stage in the wake of two World Wars. None of those who are associated with “Bloomsbury” held static views about the USA. This chapter explores how they refined and revised their opinions about it throughout the course of their lives.

Memory, shared realities, and political possibility through the remnant traces of an art installation. The unstable documentation of several related 1990s collective arts installations, all intentionally ephemeral within the abandoned spaces of condemned buildings on the eve of their destruction, opens up questions of plural achievement, the singularity of truth, and the possible contradictions among versions of evidence. These interconnecting collective arts projects were all intended to break free of the commodified gallery space, while calling attention to the vulnerability of both culture and city to rampant financial speculation. Despite the author’s and the archive’s confusion, different versions of the Khaneh Kolangi (the “To-Be-Demolished House”) together provided a key intervention in Iranian postrevolutionary arts culture and practice. They also offer a ghostly metaphor for the ongoing potential power of collective action, individual and shared memory, and political inspiration. Luce Irigaray’s conceptualizations of a plural self and its potentials offers insight into posibilities for differently understanding power, politics, and history.

This chapter distinguishes the work of thought experiments in exemplifying concepts from their role in aiding cognition of regulative ideas. Contemporary interest in thought experiments as a “method of cases” treats thought experiments as providing instances or exemplars. For regulative ideas as Kant understands them, however, no observable instances or exemplars are possible. Nevertheless, thought experiments can direct attention toward regulative ideas negatively (by distinguishing them from what is observable) or positively by indicating a direction for extrapolation or ongoing inquiry. These positive uses are forms of cognition. The distinction between regulative and constitutive concepts matters for thought experiments that deal with regulative ideas such as the self – for example, for thought experiments about personal identity, where a number of objections to the use of thought experiments have been raised. I argue in this chapter that some of these objections can be answered by distinguishing regulative from constitutive concepts.

This chapter turns to memetic experimentation. Meme blends, meta-memes, or cases of ‘memeception’ (or recursivity in memes) all manipulate aspects of form to create new meaning effects. Antimemes, on the other hand, do not alter the form, but change the viewpoint structure and so, the meaning. Some memes, finally, appear to enjoy memetic form for form’s sake, and border on art forms; the so-called Loss meme is our main example here.

In this chapter, the focus shifts from literature and philosophy to visual art, in the Near East (Mesopotamia and surrounding area) and Greece in the eighth to the sixth century bce. The approach centres on correlating the ideas of aggregation and antithesis with recurrent visual patterns and with underlying socio-political factors. In Near Eastern art in this period, aggregation predominates, though with some scope for antithesis. This pattern is similar to Homeric epic; however, Near Eastern patterns (by contrast with Homeric ones) reflect the dominance of kingly power, expressed in accumulation or in subordination. Lions are taken as a salient example: the Near Eastern king either overcomes the lion’s violence or exercises lion-like power. The lion-motif is also sometimes adopted in Archaic Greek art but incorporated in structural groups that do not express kingly power; similarly, in Homer, the lion-motif appears without stress on unitary kingly power. In Greek vase-painting of the Eighth-Seventh Century (the Geometric period), exemplified by a series of artefacts, we also find a predominance of aggregation, though with some antithesis. However, neither of these Greek patterns express unitary, kingly power; and the antithetical patterns especially reflect interactions within the family or local group.

This chapter explores the rap debates of philosophical aesthetics, where early academic discourse on rap was at its most active. Rap aestheticians (led by Richard Shusterman) accentuated rap’s nature as an “art form”. The chapter examines the key issues within this debate, including the aesthetic experience of rap, flow (Mtume ya Salaam), the need for public support (and Herbert Grabes’ criticism of this position), and rap’s affinities with the Harlem Renaissance (Marvin Gladney). Rap’s engagement with other cultural practices, like driving and everyday culture, was discussed very early within philosophical aesthetics. Right from the beginning the debate was very international, with many of the authors coming from the Nordic Countries (Esa Sironen, Stefán Snaevarr, Martti Honkanen). It argues that there is still a lot to learn from aesthetic discussions on rap, and these philosophical debates are an interesting historical phenomenon, which rap scholars should know more about.

Chapter 4 unpacks the complex ways in which claims to craft emerge in speechwriters’ metadiscursive accounts of their work. As theoretical background Mapes considers the ways in which more ordinary instances of language play are necessarily distinct from the “exceptional” creativity which defines speechwriters’ work (see Swann and Deumert 2018). Relatedly, she turns to poetics (e.g. Jakobson 1960) to examine how speechwriters exemplify a spectacular, institutionalized expression of the aesthetic or artistic dimensions of language. The subsequent analysis draws primarily on speechwriter memoirs and interviews to investigate the the microlinguistic choices which characterize speechwriters’ claims to artistry; their emphasis on persuasion as creative practice; and their proclivity for formulating themselves as distinctly neoliberal “bundles of skills” (e.g. Holborrow 2018). This chapter thereby demonstrates how poetics/creativity are used as key status-making strategies by which speechwriters shore up their privilege vis-à-vis peers and other language workers.