Steven Connor

Why can none of us hear our own recorded voice without wincing? Why is the telephone still full of such spookiness and erotic possibility? Why does the metaphor of ventriloquism, the art of 'seeming to speak where one is not', speak so resonantly to our contemporary technological condition? These are the kind of questions which impel Steven Connor's wide-ranging, restlessly inquisitive history of ventriloquism and the disembodied voice. He tracks his subject from its first recorded beginnings in ancient Israel and Greece, through the fulminations of early Christian writers against the unholy (and, they believed, obscenely produced) practices of pagan divination, the aberrations of the voice in mysticism, witchcraft and possession, and the strange obsession with the vagrant figure of the ventriloquist, newly conceived as male rather than female, during the Enlightenment. He retrieves the stories of some of the most popular and versatile ventriloquists and polyphonists of the nineteenth century, and investigates the survival of ventriloquial delusions and desires in spiritualism and the 'vocalic uncanny' of technologies like telephone, radio, film, and internet. Learned but lucid, brimming with anecdote and insight, this is much more than an archaeology of one of the most regularly derided but tenaciously enduring of popular arts. It is also a series of virtuoso philosophical and psychological reflections on the problems and astonishments, the raptures and absurdities of the unhoused voice.

Although modern life provides many examples of exorbitance – of wealth, growth, information, ambition, consumption, violence – preoccupation with what is 'over the top' is not new. What is it about the idea of going unreasonably beyond what is reasonable that exercises fascination? In this wide-ranging work, essayist and scholar Steven Connor reflects on the considerable and persistent force of culture's appetite for the exorbitant—a dynamic that not only survives despite the disapproval which accompanies it, but thrives on that disapproval. Connor's discussion of the uses of hyperbole points to the essentially aggrandising function of all language, while chapters on the contemporary obsession with obsession and the unholy ecstasies of the ascetic fill out the orgiastic exorbitance of precaution. In the proliferations of modern bureaucracy, every attempt at reduction seems to stimulate further expansion. The long history of the ideas of usury and interest allows for new possibilities of exponential bubbles and crashes. The book reaches its climax with considerations of the libido of extremity in religious glory and apocalypse, along with the cultic rapture of the idea of extinction in Anthropocene thinking. Engaging thinkers from Erasmus to Freud and Agamben, Connor reflects on the Protean forms taken by the imagination of the exorbitant.

This is the first English biography of Gaston Bachelard, a philosopher who bridged the worlds of science and imagination. Raised in rural France, Bachelard served in the First World War, worked for the post office and pursued degrees in science and philosophy while teaching in his local school. His journey led to a professorship at the Sorbonne, where he influenced many prominent postwar French thinkers. Known as both a philosopher of science and author of works on the imagination inspired by the elements – earth, air, fire and water – Bachelard needed to negotiate a constant tension between science and poetry, calculation and dream. This biography provides a complete portrait of Bachelard, illuminating his struggles with the nature of knowledge itself.

In A Philosophy of Sport Steven Connor offers a new philosophical understanding of sport in its own terms, in distinction to previous writing on the philosophy of sport that has tended to see sport as a kind of testing ground for philosophical theories devised to deal with other kinds of problems – of ethics, aesthetics or logical categorization. In order to define what sport essentially is and means, Connor presents a complete grammar of sport, isolating and describing its essential elements, including the characteristic spaces of sport, the nature of sporting time, the importance of sporting objects like bats and balls, the methods of movement in sport, the roles of rules and chance, and what it really means to cheat and to win.Defined as games that involve bodily exertion and exhaustion, sports simultaneously require constraint and the ability to overcome it. Sport, argues Connor, is a fundamental feature of modern humans. It is shown to be one of the most powerful ways in which we negotiate the relationship between the human and natural worlds. Encompassing a huge range of different sports, and enlisting the help of Hegel, Freud, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Sartre, Ayer, Deleuze and Serres, A Philosophy of Sport will inform, surprise and delight thoughtful athletes and sporty philosophers alike.

Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as * George Orwell * William Golding * Angela Carter * Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo * Hanif Kureishi * Marina Warner * Maggie Gee Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.

Steven Connor provides in-depth analyses of the novel and its relationship with its own form, with contemporary culture and with history. He incorporates an extensive and varied range of writers in his discussions such as * George Orwell * William Golding * Angela Carter * Doris Lessing * Timothy Mo * Hanif Kureishi * Marina Warner * Maggie Gee Written by a foremost scholar of contemporary culture and theory, The English Novel in History, 1950 to the Present offers not only a survey but also a historical and cultural context to British literature produced in the second half of this century.