Artistic Agency

Thinking Creation With Post-War French Philosophy

Alistair Macaulay, Timothy Deane-Freeman, Antonia Pont

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English

Palgrave Macmillan
29 October 2025

Theory of art; Theory of music & musicology; Philosophy; Philosophy: aesthetics; History of ideas

This volume seeks to explain the notion of control artists possess, and given they are changed by the action, the sense in which they can claim an artwork as theirs. Standard explanations of action and agency struggle to explain various artistic practices. Requiring recourse to a prior intention, these accounts are challenged by the spontaneity of dance and musical improvisation, a painter’s realization of an artwork, and how writers manifest meaning in a piece of writing. Furthermore, in such artistic practices, the artist is changed by the demands of the action. This interdisciplinary volume combines thirteen contributions from various artistic practices, in photography, music, dance and painting, with philosophical perspectives from post-war France to consider the changing role of the artist. This identifies what it is about an artistic practice that is creative, and how everyday occurrences can become artistic, describing the ethical and political implications of various artistic practices.

Edited by: Alistair Macaulay, Timothy Deane-Freeman, Antonia Pont
Imprint: Palgrave Macmillan
Country of Publication: Switzerland
Dimensions: Height: 210mm, Width: 148mm,
ISBN: 9783031979682
ISBN 10: 3031979680
Pages: 299
Publication Date: 29 October 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Chapter 1: Introduction: The Challenge of Artistic Agency.- Chapter 2: Bacon and Deleuze on the Act of Painting: The Expression of Painterly Intentions and the Formation of Forms.- Chapter 3: Colour as Force.- Chapter 4: The Problematics of Art and Agency in the Field of Dance.- Chapter 5: Intentionality Without Ends and the “As-If” Agent: Reading Klossowski’s Nietzsche Alongside Practising Theory.- Chapter 6: Artistic Agency: An East-West Dialogue.- Chapter 7: Making Music Stutter: Reconstructing Jazz Improvisation Between Derrida and Deleuze.- Chapter 8: The Corporealisation of Language Through the Body of Music: Revisitng Barthes’s “Musica Practica”.- Chapter 9: The Aesthetic Underground: Alain Badiou’s Collective Subject in Art.- Chapter 10: Embedded Rupture: Castoriadis on Creating the New.- Chapter 11: “I’ve Led a War Against the Aesthetic”—Laruelle and Artistic Agency.- Chapter 12: Hybrid Artistic Agency: Experiment and Reflection with Creative AI.- Chapter 13: Informatic Agency: Feedback and Control in Norbert Weiner and Jimi Hendrix.

Alistair Macaulay is a scholar working across multiple universities in Melbourne, Australia. His research concerns the intersection between art and philosophy, publishing on the significance of improvisation. Timothy Deane-Freeman is Associate Lecturer of Philosophy at Deakin University, Australia. His research is primarily dedicated to the intersection of politics and aesthetics. He is the author of Deleuze, Digital Media and Thought (2024). Antonia Pont is Associate Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University, Australia. She is the author of A Philosophy of Practising with Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (2021).