The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency

The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency PDF Author: Ayon Maharaj
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441140840
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition — Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno — attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of "aesthetic agency"— art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics.

The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency

The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency PDF Author: Ayon Maharaj
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441140840
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book

Book Description
This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition — Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno — attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of "aesthetic agency"— art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics.

The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency

The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency PDF Author: Ayon Maharaj
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 144118693X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition - Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno - attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of “aesthetic agency”- art's capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian's attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics.

Thinking Through Art

Thinking Through Art PDF Author: Daniel T. O'Hara
Publisher: Thinking Through Art
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
In the eighteenth century the category of the aesthetic sought to bridge the gap between the prevalent dualities of Cartesian thought: art and science, history and science, prejudice and truth. This special issue of boundary 2 addresses current debates about the status of art in the context of global modernity. The range of arguments represented here cover a broad historical scope--from Cartesianism to present-day global modernity--of cultural discourse on the aesthetic to bring a focus to contemporary discussions of the corollary concepts of beauty, virtue, taste, and truth. These essays present a rich and provocative account of the place of the aesthetic in late-twentieth-century culture. Included in this volume are considerations of the relation between theories of art and the avant-garde; art's relation to cognition; the aesthetic as history; the aesthetic as a unique access to modernity; and its impact on problems of identity formation, ideology, and resistances to the institutional powers inherent in dominant social formations. Contributors. Charles Altieri, Peter Burger, David Carroll, Anthony J. Cascardi, Howard Caygill, Allen Dunn, Eric Gans, Agnes Heller, Ronald A. T. Judy, Marie-Rose Logan, Daniel T. O'Hara, Donald E. Pease, Alan Singer

Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal

Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal PDF Author: Caleb J. Basnett
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1487541465
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
Built upon the principle that divides and elevates humans above other animals, humanism is the cornerstone of a worldview that sanctifies inequality and threatens all animal life. Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal analyses this state of affairs and suggests an alternative – a way for humanity to make itself into a new kind of animal. Theodor W. Adorno has been accused of leading critical theory into a blind alley, divorced from practical social and political concerns. In Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal, Caleb J. Basnett argues that by placing the problem of the human/animal distinction at the centre of Adorno’s thought, we discover a new Adorno, one whose critique of domination is in dialogue with classic concerns of political thought forged by Aristotle, including questions of humanist political education and the role of art. Through a close reading of primary sources, Basnett identifies the principal conceptual structure entwined with the understanding of human life as antagonistic to other animals, and outlines how forms of aesthetic experience disrupt this problematic concept in favour of a reconceptualization of what we call human. His analysis displaces the centrality of the human and attempts to open up a space for its transformation, both in terms of how humans relate to each other and in how humans relate to other animals.

Being for Beauty

Being for Beauty PDF Author: Dominic McIver Lopes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192562126
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
No values figure as pervasively and intimately in our lives as beauty and other aesthetic values. They animate the arts, as well as design, fashion, food, and entertainment. They orient us upon the natural world. And we even find them in the deepest insights of science and mathematics. For centuries, however, philosophers and other thinkers have identified beauty with what brings pleasure. Concerned that aesthetic hedonism has led us to question beauty's significance, Dominic McIver Lopes offers an entirely new theory of beauty in this volume. Beauty engages us in action, in concert with others, in the context of social networks. Lopes's 'network theory' explains the social dimension of aesthetic agency, the tie between beauty and pleasure, the importance of disagreement in matters of taste, and the reality of aesthetic values as denizens of the natural world. The two closing chapters shed light on why aesthetic engagement is so important to quality of life, and why it deserves (and gets) lavish public support. Being for Beauty offers a fresh contribution to aesthetics but also to thinking about metanormativity, the metaphysics of value, and virtue theory.

Postmodern Racial Dialectics

Postmodern Racial Dialectics PDF Author: Richard A. Jones
Publisher: UPA
ISBN: 0761866817
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This collection of ten essays on African American philosophy addresses a wide range of issues beyond the bounds of traditional racial discourse. The essays are dialectical in the sense that they are conversations between personal histories, between ideologies, and between changing ways that the races talk to one another.

Aesthetic Theory

Aesthetic Theory PDF Author: Theodor W. Adorno Adorno
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965676
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 710

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Book Description
Perhaps the most important aesthetics of the twentieth century appears here newly translated, in English that is for the first time faithful to the intricately demanding language of the original German. The culmination of a lifetime of aesthetic investigation, Aesthetic Theory is Adorno’s major work, a defense of modernism that is paradoxical in its defense of illusion. In it, Adorno takes up the problem of art in a day when “it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying.” In the course of his discussion, Adorno revisits such concepts as the sublime, the ugly, and the beautiful, demonstrating that concepts such as these are reservoirs of human experience. These experiences ultimately underlie aesthetics, for in Adorno’s formulation “art is the sedimented history of human misery.” Robert Hullot-Kentor’s translation painstakingly, yet fluently, reproduces the nuances and particularities of the original. Long awaited and significant, Aesthetic Theory is the clarifying lens through which the whole of Adorno’s work is best viewed, providing a framework within which his other major writings cohere.

Dialectical Passions

Dialectical Passions PDF Author: Gail Day
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023152062X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
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.

Cool Characters

Cool Characters PDF Author: Lee Konstantinou
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674969472
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Lee Konstantinou examines irony in American literary and political life, showing how it migrated from the countercultural margins of the 1950s to the 1980s mainstream. Along the way, irony was absorbed into postmodern theory and ultimately become a target of recent writers who have moved beyond its limitations with a practice of “postirony.”

Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance

Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance PDF Author: William S. Allen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 150139388X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Adorno's aesthetics are one of the most important philosophical analyses of the 20th century, but their development remains unclear. Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance is the first book to provide a detailed study of how Adorno's thinking of aesthetics developed and to show the different dimensions that came together to make it uniquely powerful. Principal among these dimensions are his intense interest in music and his historical and materialist approach. In addition, by studying how Adorno's aesthetics arose through interactions with different thinkers, particularly Kracauer, Horkheimer, and Schoenberg, it becomes clear that his thought changes in its relation to dialectics. As a result, Adorno's thinking comes to broaden the understanding of aesthetics to include the sphere of sensuality, and in doing so transforms both aesthetics and dialectics through a notion of dissonance, which in turn has substantial implications for the relation of his thinking to praxis.