Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood

by Alexander García Düttmann, Robert Savage (Translator)

Something needs to be changed—be it through the revolutionary overthrow of social conditions, the liberating force of passion, the contemplation and creation of works of art, or the exploration of an unresolved past. Luchino Visconti's films are models for the failure of such attempts. They show that this failure arises whenever people cling to possibilities that stand opposed to the reality of their lives. Does Adorno not write: "The place of utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality"? Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood draws on aesthetics, film theory, and practical philosophy to propose an original interpretation of the melodramas of a great European director. In the encounter with Visconti's art, we come to see that something has changed already.

169 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Alexander Düttmann is a philosopher with an interest in aesthetics and art, but also in moral and political philosophy. On more than one occasion, he has collaborated with artists. In 2004, the chamber opera Liebeslied / My Suicides, for which I wrote the libretto, and which featured music by Paul Clark and photographs by Rut Blees Luxemburg, opened at the ICA.