Download or read book The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency written by Ayon Maharaj and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency written by Ayon Maharaj and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Dialectical Passions written by Gail Day and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-22 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Adorno s Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth written by Owen Hulatt and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-09-27 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Adorno's Theory of Philosophical and Aesthetic Truth, Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adorno's epistemology and its material underpinnings, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the nonidentical. Hulatt's novel interpretation casts Adorno's theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth as substantially unified, supporting the thinker's claim that both philosophy and art are capable of being true. For Adorno, truth is produced when rhetorical "texture" combines with cognitive "performance," leading to the breakdown of concepts that mediate the experience of the consciousness. Both philosophy and art manifest these features, although philosophy enacts these conceptual issues directly, while art does so obliquely. Hulatt builds a robust argument for Adorno's claim that concepts ineluctably misconstrue their objects. He also puts the still influential thinker into conversation with Hegel, Husserl, Frazer, Sohn-Rethel, Benjamin, Strawson, Dahlhaus, Habermas, and Caillois, among many others.
Download or read book Adorno Politics and the Aesthetic Animal written by Caleb J. Basnett and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2021-07-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Postmodern Racial Dialectics written by Richard A. Jones and published by UPA. This book was released on 2015-12-07 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Cool Characters written by Lee Konstantinou and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-07 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.”
Download or read book Adorno Aesthetics Dissonance written by William S. Allen and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory written by Beverley Best and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2018-06-04 with total page 2702 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory expounds the development of critical theory from its founding thinkers to its contemporary formulations in an interdisciplinary setting. It maps the terrain of a critical social theory, expounding its distinctive character vis-a-vis alternative theoretical perspectives, exploring its theoretical foundations and developments, conceptualising its subject matters both past and present, and signalling its possible future in a time of great uncertainty. Taking a distinctively theoretical, interdisciplinary, international and contemporary perspective on the topic, this wide-ranging collection of chapters is arranged thematically over three volumes: Volume I: Key Texts and Contributions to a Critical Theory of Society Volume II: Themes Volume III: Contexts This Handbook is essential reading for scholars and students in the field, showcasing the scholarly rigor, intellectual acuteness and negative force of critical social theory, past and present.
Download or read book Red Kant Aesthetics Marxism and the Third Critique written by Michael Wayne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social Change written by Jason Miller and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Aesthetics of Law written by Kamil Zeidler and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Descent of the Dialectic written by Michael J. Thompson and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-01 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The After of Art written by Ayon Kumar Roy and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Adorno s Modernism written by Espen Hammer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book is a study of Adorno's aesthetics, its philosophical background, and its account of aesthetic modernism.
Download or read book The Future of Aesthetic Experience written by Peter Baofu and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-03-26 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contrary to the conventional wisdom held by many, Dr. Peter Baofu argues that the current popularity of postmodernism in the humanities (especially though not exclusively in relation to the arts) will not last, as it constitutes an aesthetic fad in this day and age of postmodernity. This thesis has important implications for understanding beauty, ugliness, and other aesthetic categories, be the era in the past, present, or future, to the extent that the current theoretical debate on aesthetic experience is as much misleading as obsolete. The current debate also obscures something more tremendous in the long run, in relation to the emergence of what Dr. Baofu originally proposes as the great transformations of aesthetic experience in the coming future that humans have never known, both here on Earth and later in deep space, in accordance to the five theses of his “transformative theory of aesthetic experience.” To understand this, the book is organized into four major parts (i.e., in relation to nature, the mind, culture, and society).
Download or read book Feminist Interpretations of Theodor Adorno written by Renée Heberle and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Addresses several questions, ranging from dilemmas in feminist aesthetic theory to the politics of suffering and democratic theory. This volume introduces feminists to Adorno's work and Adorno scholars to modes of feminist critique. It is useful for senior undergraduate and graduate courses in contemporary political, social, and cultural theory.
