Sensible Life: A Micro-ontology of the Image

By Emanuele Coccia and Kevin Attell

We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings who think and speak, yet to live means first and foremost to look, taste, feel, or smell the world around us. But sensibility is not just a faculty: We are sensible objects both to ourselves and to others, and our life is through and through a sensible life.

This book, now translated into five languages, rehabilitates sensible existence from its marginalization at the hands of modern philosophy, theology, and politics. Coccia begins by defining the ontological status of images. Not just an internal modification of our consciousness, an image has an intermediate ontological status that differs from that of objects or subjects. The book’s second part explores our interactions with images in dream, fashion, and biological facts like growth and generation. Our life, Coccia argues, is the life of images.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Feb 29, 2016
• ISBN: 9780823267439

Emanuele Coccia

Emanuele Coccia (Fermo, Italia, 1976) se doctoró en Filosofía Medieval en la Universidad de Florencia y es profesor de la École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de París y de la Universidad de Friburgo en Alemania. Su obra, traducida a una decena de idiomas, es reconocida como una de las más originales dentro del pensamiento contemporáneo por su innovadora aproximación al vínculo entre las teorías de la imaginación y la naturaleza de los seres vivos.

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