The photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula (1951-2013) was one of the most significant media intellectuals of the last fifty years, renowned for a sequence of compelling anti-capitalist artworks. This penetrating study pursues surprising paths through his practice, delineating the depicted top­ics as well as his dialectics of form. Posing new questions about the rela­tions between aesthetics and politics, Gail Day and Steve Edwards consider Sekula's examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of terraqueous capitalism.

Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions. Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects--and with it critical distance-- and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo.Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980s art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.

Representing a new generation of theorists who reaffirm the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late-twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical and challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions.Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects& mdash;and with it critical distance; the meaning of symbol and allegory in 1980s art and its limited reading of the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man; and common conceptions of mediation, totality, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions sets a new course for emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.

The photographer, filmmaker and theorist Allan Sekula (1951-2013) was one of the most significant media intellectuals of the last fifty years, renowned for a sequence of compelling anti-capitalist artworks. This penetrating study pursues surprising paths through his practice, delineating the depicted top­ics as well as his dialectics of form. Posing new questions about the rela­tions between aesthetics and politics, Gail Day and Steve Edwards consider Sekula's examination of image modes alongside his radical investigations of terraqueous capitalism.

Representing a new generation of theorists reaffirming the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical. She also challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions. Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects--and with it critical distance-- and interrogate the proposition of completed nihilism and the metropolis put forward in the politics of Italian operaismo.Day covers the debates on symbol and allegory waged within the context of 1980s art and their relation to the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man. She also examines common conceptions of mediation, totality, negation, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions recasts emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.

Representing a new generation of theorists who reaffirm the radical dimensions of art, Gail Day launches a bold critique of late-twentieth-century art theory and its often reductive analysis of cultural objects. Exploring core debates in discourses on art, from the New Left to theories of "critical postmodernism" and beyond, Day counters the belief that recent tendencies in art fail to be adequately critical and challenges the political inertia that results from these conclusions.Day organizes her defense around critics who have engaged substantively with emancipatory thought and social process: T. J. Clark, Manfredo Tafuri, Fredric Jameson, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others. She maps the tension between radical dialectics and left nihilism and assesses the interpretation and internalization of negation in art theory. Chapters confront the claim that exchange and equivalence have subsumed the use value of cultural objects& mdash;and with it critical distance; the meaning of symbol and allegory in 1980s art and its limited reading of the writings of Walter Benjamin and Paul de Man; and common conceptions of mediation, totality, and the politics of anticipation. A necessary unsettling of received wisdoms, Dialectical Passions sets a new course for emancipatory reflection in aesthetics, art, and architecture.