The Dialectics Of Aesthetic Agency

Author : Ayon Maharaj
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 241 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2013-02-28
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781441140845

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The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency by Ayon Maharaj Pdf

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.

Author : Theodor W. Adorno Adorno
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 710 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2020-06-09
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781452965673

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Aesthetic Theory by Theodor W. Adorno Adorno Pdf

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.

Author : Daniel T. O'Hara,Alan Singer
Publisher : Thinking Through Art
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 48,7 Mb
Release : 1998
Category : Art
ISBN : STANFORD:36105023055119

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Thinking Through Art by Daniel T. O'Hara,Alan Singer Pdf

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

Author : Caleb J. Basnett
Publisher : University of Toronto Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 40,7 Mb
Release : 2021-07-30
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781487541460

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Adorno, Politics, and the Aesthetic Animal by Caleb J. Basnett Pdf

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.

Author : Richard A. Jones
Publisher : UPA
Page : 278 pages
File Size : 53,7 Mb
Release : 2015-12-07
Category : History
ISBN : 9780761866817

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Postmodern Racial Dialectics by Richard A. Jones Pdf

Postmodern Racial Dialectics is a collection of ten essays on African American philosophy. Addressing issues as disparate as why there are no graduate programs in philosophy at the more than one hundred traditionally black colleges and universities in the U.S.—to conceptions of Black utopianism—to the nature of postmodern revolutions, these essays are 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. The book is postmodern in that it is beyond modernity’s linear logic. Postmodern Racial Dialectics is also a political entreaty for African Americans to be wary of conventional ways of thinking, and to begin thinking transgressively beyond narrowly prescribed conceptions from both sides of the color line.

Author : Dominic McIver Lopes
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2018-09-19
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780192562128

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Being for Beauty by Dominic McIver Lopes Pdf

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.

Author : Lee Konstantinou
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 128 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2016-03-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780674969476

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Cool Characters by Lee Konstantinou Pdf

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.”

Author : William S. Allen
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 49,5 Mb
Release : 2022-10-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781501393884

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Adorno, Aesthetics, Dissonance by William S. Allen Pdf

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.

Author : Michael Feola
Publisher : Northwestern University Press
Page : 182 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2018-07-15
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780810137486

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The Powers of Sensibility by Michael Feola Pdf

The Powers of Sensibility: Aesthetic Politics through Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière explores the role aesthetic resources can play in an emancipatory politics. Michael Feola engages both critical theory and unruly political movements to challenge familiar anxieties about the intersection of politics and aesthetics. He shows how perception, sensibility, and feeling may contribute vital resources for conceptualizing citizenship, agency, and those spectacles that increasingly define global protest culture. Feola provides insightful engagements with the works of Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière as well as a survey of contemporary debates on aesthetics and politics. He uses this aesthetic framework to develop a more robust account of political agency, demonstrating that politics is not reducible to the exchange of views or the building of institutions, but rather incorporates public modes of feeling, seeing, and hearing (or not-seeing and not-hearing). These sensory modes must themselves be transformed in the work of emancipatory politics. The book explores the core question: what does the aesthetic offer that is missing from the official languages of politics, citizenship, and power? Of interest to readers in the fields of critical theory, political theory, continental philosophy, and aesthetics, The Powers of Sensibility roots itself within the classical tradition of critical theory and yet uses these resources to speak to a variety of contemporary political movements.

Author : Theodor W. Adorno,Gretel Adorno,Rolf Tiedemann
Publisher : Burns & Oates
Page : 383 pages
File Size : 44,5 Mb
Release : 2002
Category : Music
ISBN : 0826467571

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Aesthetic Theory by Theodor W. Adorno,Gretel Adorno,Rolf Tiedemann Pdf

The most important aesthetics of the century, this is a long-awaited work, the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Among the twelve major sections are Art, Society, Aesthetics; the Categories of the Ugly, the Beautiful, the Technics; Natural Beauty; Coherence and Subject-Object; Towards a Theory of the Artwork.

Author : J. M. Bernstein
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 306 pages
File Size : 54,6 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0271008393

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The Fate of Art by J. M. Bernstein Pdf

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers--Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno--and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics (its concepts of judgment, genius, and the sublime) to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies.

Author : Kamil Zeidler
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 430 pages
File Size : 40,9 Mb
Release : 2024-07-02
Category : Electronic
ISBN : 9783031555213

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Aesthetics of Law by Kamil Zeidler Pdf

Author : Michael Wayne
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
Page : 208 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2014-09-25
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781472505118

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Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique by Michael Wayne Pdf

Is Kant really the 'bourgeois' philosopher that his advocates and opponents take him to be? In this bold and original re-thinking of Kant, Michael Wayne argues that with his aesthetic turn in the Third Critique, Kant broke significantly from the problematic philosophical structure of the Critique of Pure Reason. Through his philosophy of the aesthetic Kant begins to circumnavigate the dualities in his thought. In so doing he shows us today how the aesthetic is a powerful means for imagining our way past the apparent universality of contemporary capitalism. Here is an unfamiliar Kant: his concepts of beauty and the sublime are reinterpreted as attempts to socialise the aesthetic while Wayne reconstructs the usually hidden genealogy between Kant and important Marxist concepts such as totality, dialectics, mediation and even production. In materialising Kant's philosophy, this book simultaneously offers a Marxist defence of creativity and imagination grounded in our power to think metaphorically and in Kant's concept of reflective judgment. Wayne also critiques aspects of Marxist cultural theory that have not accorded the aesthetic the relative autonomy and specificity which it is due. Discussing such thinkers as Adorno, Bourdieu, Colletti, Eagleton, Lukács, Ranciére and others, Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique presents a new reading of Kant's Third Critique that challenges Marxist and mainstream assessments of Kant alike.

Author : Jason Miller
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 125 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2021-08-31
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9780231554091

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The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change by Jason Miller Pdf

In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented groups. Modernist and postmodernist celebrations of disruption and subversion have been challenged by the view that representation is integral to social change. Despite this convergence, neither political nor aesthetic theory has given much attention to the increasingly central role of art in debates and struggles over cultural identity in the public sphere. Connecting Hegelian aesthetics with contemporary cultural politics, Jason Miller argues that both the aesthetic and political value of art are found in the reflexive self-awareness that artistic representation enables. The significance of art in modern life is that it shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. Just as Hegel asks us to acknowledge how different historical and cultural contexts produce radically different experiences of art, identity-based art calls on its audiences to situate themselves in relation to perspectives and experiences potentially quite remote—or even inaccessible—from their own. Miller offers a timely response to questions such as: How does contemporary art’s politics of perception contest liberal notions of deliberative politics? How does the cultural identity of the artist relate to the representations of cultural identity in their work? How do we understand and evaluate identity-based art aesthetically? Discussing a wide range of works of art and popular culture—from Antigone to Do the Right Thing and The Wire—this book develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the representation of cultural identity that affirms art’s capacity to effect social change.

Author : Michael J. Thompson
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 43,5 Mb
Release : 2024-08-01
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781040099780

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Descent of the Dialectic by Michael J. Thompson Pdf

This book reconstructs the concept and practice of dialectics as a means of grounding a critical theory of society. At the center of this project is the thesis of phronetic criticism or a form of reason that is able to synthesize human value with objective rationality. This book argues that defects in modern forms of social reason are the result of the powers of social structure and the norms and purposes they embody. Increasingly, modern societies are driven not by substantive values concerning human good but by the technical imperatives of economic management, leading to a cultural condition of nihilism that has eroded dialectical consciousness. The first half of the book demonstrates the various ways that social power erodes and undermines critical-rational forms of consciousness. The second part of the book constructs an alternative basis for critical reason by showing how it requires seeing human value as essentially ontological: that is, constituted by objective forms of sociality that either promote human freedom or pervert our capacities and drive toward pathological forms of life. The philosophical claim is that a critical theory of ethics must be rooted in these concrete forms of life and that this will serve as a critical vantage point for critical political judgment and transformational praxis. Descent of the Dialectic will be of interest to researchers working in philosophy, political theory, social theory, and critical theory.