Christoph Menke: The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic Negativity in Adorno and Derrida (1988–)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, art, deconstruction, literary criticism, literary theory, metaphysics, mimesis, philosophy
“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.”
First published in German as Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida, Athenäum, Frankfurt am Main, 1988.
Translated by Neil Solomon
Publisher MIT Press, 1998
Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought series
ISBN 0262631954, 9780262631952
310 pages
PDF (updated on 2021-7-12)
Comments (2)Jacques Rancière: The Emancipated Spectator (2008/2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, audience, life, philosophy, political art, spectatorship
The foremost philosopher of art argues for a new politics of looking.
The theorists of art and film commonly depict the modern audience as aesthetically and politically passive. In response, both artists and thinkers have sought to transform the spectator into an active agent and the spectacle into a communal performance.
In this follow-up to the acclaimed The Future of the Image, Rancière takes a radically different approach to this attempted emancipation. First asking exactly what we mean by political art or the politics of art, he goes on to look at what the tradition of critical art, and the desire to insert art into life, has achieved. Has the militant critique of the consumption of images and commodities become, ironically, a sad affirmation of its omnipotence?
First published as Le spectateur emancipe, Editions La Fabrique, 2008
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso, 2009
ISBN 184467343X, 9781844673438
134 pages
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-14)
PDF (no OCR; essay published in Artforum magazine, March 2007; updated on 2012-7-14)
Alain Badiou: The Century (2005–)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avant-garde, cinema, fascism, france, history, ideology, nazism, nihilism, philosophy, politics, reality, religion, united states, violence
“Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction.
It is not Badiou’s wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre’s Prisoners of Altona, ‘I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have said: I will answer for it!’ The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou’s proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century – not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself.”
First published as Le Siècle, 2005.
Translated, with a Commentary and Notes by Alberto Toscano
Publisher Polity, 2007
ISBN 0745636314, 9780745636313
233 pages
PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)
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