A Philosophy of Luxury

What is luxury? Is someone who finds luxury normal experiencing luxury? Luxury has received remarkably little sustained philosophical examination. This thought-provoking book explores these questions and more. It will be of interest to those in aesthetics, art, cultural studies, literature, and sociology.

Lambert Wiesing is Chair of Image Theory and Phenomenology at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany. His books include Artificial Presence: Philosophical Studies in Image Theory (2009), and The Philosophy of Perception: Phenomenology and Image Theory (2014).

Foreword to the English edition Introduction Part 1: First play, then war, fear and drugs - and now: luxury 1. Anthropology and the Idea of self-experience 2. Aesthetics and the search for moments of self-experience Part 2: Luxury: The Dadaism of Possession 3. The Judgment of Luxury 4. Luxury: a special aesthetic experience 5. Why Luxury? Bibliography Index.