Abstract

In 'The Vitalisation of Aesthetic Form: Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Focillon, James Urpeth seeks to provide a corrective on behalf of the beautiful to this emphasis on the sublime. Urpeth takes art as a pre-eminent site for the dissolution of the 'human'and considers the implications for aesthetic theory of a thoroughgoing naturalisation of the aesthetic... Taking Kant's classic discussion as his starting point, Urpeth surveys the problematisation of Kant's account of aesthetic form via Nietzsche's critique of its metaphysical pressupositions and Heidegger's concept of the 'rift-design', to the recent work of Focillon which develops a non-reductive materialist account of art and a vitalisation of aesthetic form. Urpeth's argument is that by thinking through the reciprocal determination between form and matter, Focillon provides a purely naturalist account of the aesthetic and thus deconstructs the nature/art dichotomy and the proprietory claims of the human" David Owen.