The sovereignty of art : aesthetic negativity in Adorno and Derrida
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Bibliographic Information
The sovereignty of art : aesthetic negativity in Adorno and Derrida
（Studies in contemporary German social thought）
MIT Press, c1998
- Other Title
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Souveränität der Kunst : ästhethische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida
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Note
translation of: Souveränität der Kunst : ästhethische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida. Frankfurt : Athenäum Verlag, 1988
Includes bibliographical references(p. [281]-297) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Recent discussions of aesthetics, whether in the hermeneutic or the analytic tradition, understand the place of art and aesthetic experience according to a model of "autonomy"--as just one among the many modes of experience that make up the realm of reason, situated beside the other "spheres of value." In contrast, Theodor Adorno and Jacques Derrida view art and aesthetic experience as a medium for the dissolution of nonaesthetic reason, an experientially enacted critique of reason. Art is not only autonomous, following its own law, different from nonaesthetic reason, but sovereign: it subverts the rule of reason.In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling into an error common to Adorno's negative dialectics and Derrida's deconstruction. The error, which already appeared in romanticism, is to conceive of the sovereignty of art as reflecting the superiority of its knowledge. For art entails no knowledge and its negativity toward reason cannot be articulated as an insight into the nature of reason: art is sovereign not despite, but because of, its autonomy. Menke brings to his arguments a firm grounding in both philosophy and literary studies, as well as familiarity with German, French, and American sources.
Table of Contents
- Introduction - autonomy and sovereignty. Part 1 On the negative logic of aesthetic negativity
- aesthetic deferral
- the aesthetics of negativity and hermeneutics
- on the concept of beauty. Part 2 An aesthetic critique of reason: aesthetic sovereignty
- problems in grounding the critique of reason
- the aesthetic experience of crisis
- romantic and modern aesthetics - the place of art in the "Philosophical Discourse of Modernity".
by "Nielsen BookData"