Through the study of exemplary media works and practices - photography, film, video, performance, installations, web cams - scholars from various disciplines call attention to the unsettling of identification and the disablement of vision in contemporary aesthetics. To look at an image that prevents the stabilization of identification, identity and place; to perceive a representation that oscillates between visibility and invisibility; to relate to an image which entails a rebalancing of sight through the valorization of other senses; to be exposed, through surveillance devices, to the gaze of new figures of authority - the aesthetic experiences examined here concern a spectator whose perception lacks in certainty, identification, and opticality what it gains in fallibility, complexity, and interrelatedness.

Precarious Visualities provides a new understanding of spectatorship as a relation that is at once corporeal and imaginary, and persistently prolific in its cultural, social, and political effects.

Contributors include Raymond Bellour (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University), Beate Ochsner (University of Mannheim -Universität Mannheim), Claudette Lauzon (McGill University), David Tomas (Université du Québec à Montréal), Slavoj Zizek (Ljubljiana University and University of London), Marie Fraser (Université du Québec à Montréal), Alice Ming Wai Jim (Concordia University), Julie Lavigne (Université du Québec à Montréal), Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Eric Michaud (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Hélène Samson (McCord Museum), and Thierry Bardini (Université de Montréal).

Olivier Asselin est professeur agrégé au Département d'histoire de l'art et d'études cinématographiques de l'Université de Montréal. Il est co-directeur de Precarious Visualities (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008). -- Olivier Asselin is associate professor of the Département d'histoire de l'art et d'études cinématographiques at the Université de Montréal. He is co-editor of Precarious Visualities (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008).

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Johanne Lamoureux is professor in the Department of Art History, University of Montréal

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Christine Ross is professor and James McGill Chair in Contemporary Art history in the Department of Art History and Communications, McGill University, and the author of The Aesthetics of Disengagement: Contemporary Art and Depression and Images de surface: l'art video reconsidéré.

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