For Want of Ambiguity focuses on the need innate within the human being to make sense of the world through symbol, metaphor, and similar modes of expression. On the basis of a select number of contemporary works of art, this book shows the need for symbol and metaphor to be psychological, and therefore ultimately physiological, and does so from the perspectives, specifically, of psychoanalysis and neuroscience.

The originality of the volume lies in its unique approach to interdisciplinarity: To enlarge knowledge in one discipline, it has become all too commonplace to turn to another with the result being a kind of epistemological contamination. Instead of explaining art either through neuroscience or psychoanalysis, the authors loosen the borders which limit agency and the sense of self, an expansion afforded by both art and psychoanalysis. For Want of Ambiguity shows that just as pixels are fused for improved image processing and perception, the nervous system - indeed, the human being - is not to be looked at pixel by pixel, but in the larger sphere of exchange where dynamic potential and possibility are endlessly freeing.

Each of the six chapters of this book is devoted to ways in which contemporary art lives on the border between perception and imagination, between the physical and the metaphysical.