Intro; Contents; Chapter 1 Introduction: Why Modernity Theory?; A Note on Sources and Footnotes; Chapter 2 Modernity and Modernism: Key Themes; Foundations of Modern Experience; The Art of the Self (Modern and Modernist); Between Kant and Romanticism; Fashioning the Modern; Chapter 3 Reflexivity and the Project of Modernity; Reflexivity: Aspects and Contexts; Reflexivity and Paradox; The Modern Project; Transparency; Chapter 4 Experience and Representation; Topographies of Modern Experience (Imagining Depth); Painting Modern Experience (The Hand, the Eye, and Colour); Experience as Allegory

Chapter 5 The Mediated WorldMediated Sensation: The Vicarious and the Transgressive; The Medium (From Art to Technology); The Mediated Image and the Mass (From Early Photo to Selfie); Chapter 6 Modernity and Civilization; The Aesthetic Encounter: Sensibility as Feeling and Form; Civilization: Conflicting Models; Civilization: Sublimity and Abjection; Chapter 7 The Nature of It All (Modernist Ontology); Boundaries and Folds; The Universe of Science; Speculative Metaphysical Afterword; Chapter 8 The Meaning of It All (Between Apocalypse and the Banal); Evil: Conflicting Models

The Spectacle of the ExtremeTendencies (The Horizon of the Modern); Slightly Optimistic Conclusion; Postscript: Some Key Terms; Judgement; Orientation; Cultural Aesthetics; Mediation; Circuit of Sensation; Spectacle of Sympathy; Haptic-Optic System; Image-Text System; Figuration; Index