숭고의 미학사에서 헤겔은 핵심 인물로 평가되지 않은 것은 물론, 현대로 올수록 그 반 대편 인물로 더 많이 언급된다. 그러나 헤겔 미학에서 숭고 개념은 의미와 표현의 불일치를 특징으로 하는 상징적 예술 형식의 주요 범주이고, 근년 들어 부정성이나 무 개념과 함께 재조명되고 있다. 숭고는 고대 그리스의 ‘탈아’나 ‘망아’ 등에서 기원하여 로고스적 합리성이나 고전주의의 한계를 보완하는 균형추 역할을 해왔다. 롱기누스의 수사학적 숭고를 거쳐 버크에 이르면, 숭고는 무질서하고 무형식적인 대상에서 촉발되는, 고통과 쾌락이 결합된 강렬한 감정으로 체계화되고, 칸트의 수학적․역학적 숭고로 이어진다. 칸트의 숭고는 ‘현시할 수 (...) 없는 것의 현시’로서, 오성의 범주를 벗어나는 대상을 상상력이 이성 개념과 연관시켜 일어나는 무규정적 이성 개념의 현시이다. 헤겔 미학에서 숭고는 상징적 예술 형식의 주요 범주를 이룬다. 헤겔은 예술을 이념의 구현으로서 가상으로 규정하고, 예술 형식 또한 이념(내용)과 형태(형식)의 통일(구현)인 가상의 정도에 따라 구분한다. 상징적 예술 형식은 내용과 형식이 일치를 이루지 못하는, ‘불완전’하고 ‘불충분’한 가상으로서 예술, 예컨대 이집트나 동방의 종교적 예술과 문학, 알레고리나 비유적 표현들이 전형을 이루며, 장르로는 재료적 특성이 정신성의 구현에 한계로 작용하는 건축이 대표적이다. 헤겔의 숭고개념은 상징적 예술 형식이 갖는 내용과 형식, 구현 이념과 질료적 형태의 불일치를 의미하므로, 예술 작품의 의미 내용과 표현 사이의 불일치를 주로 표현하는 현대예술 일반과 연관된다. 리오타르는 칸트의 숭고에 주목하여 묘사할 수 없는 것, 즉 인식 능력 밖에 있는 것을 묘사하고자 하는 모순적 시도의 가능성을 숭고에서 찾는 반면, 지젝은 헤겔의 부정성과 무 개념을 소환하여, 물자체가 실은 근본적인 부정성이라는 것, 즉 표상 너머에 존재하는 것은 물자체가 아니라 순수 무이므로, 주관과 대상의 불일치를 통한 물자체의 경험이라는 칸트적 숭고는 ‘무의 구현물’에 다름아닌 것이라 진단함으로써, 헤겔의 숭고를 재해석할 통로를 만든다. (shrink)

Paul Crowther, in his book, The Kantian Sublime (1989), works to reconstruct Kant's aesthetics in order to make its continued relevance to contemporary aesthetic concerns more visible. The present article remains within the area of Crowther's "cognitive" sublime, to show that there is much space for expanding upon Kantian varieties of the sublime, particularly in art.

In the history of aesthetics, few concepts have been as powerful and as elusive as the idea of the sublime, the "enthusiastic terror" that can possess us when we behold a mountain or a miracle. In his new book, James Kirwan traces the history of the sublime from its emergence in the eighteenth century to its resurgence in contemporary aesthetics. Sublimity addresses the nature of the sublime experience itself, and the function that experience has played, and continues to play, within (...) aesthetic discourse. The book both updates and revises existing treatments of the sublime in the eighteenth century, examines its neglected role in the nineteenth century aesthetics, and analyzes the significance of the modifications the concept has undergone in order to serve the interests of contemporary aesthetics. The book thus offers the most comprehensive coverage of the history of the sublime available. With its appeal for readers in aesthetics, art history, religion, and literary theory, Sublimity will beof wide use to students and scholars. (shrink)

Numerous contemporary artworks are found repellent, even by genuine art lovers, either because they deliberately derange our perception and imagination by an abundance of incoherent representations and stimuli or because they demand that we value seemingly nonsensical objects or all kinds of disgusting materials. Installations, collages, and so-called unassisted ready-mades especially cannot count on too much appreciation, unless the artists in question are sufficiently supported by clever managers who reduce their work to commodities, which then serve merely as illustrations of (...) complicated art theories. “Postmodern” and conceptual art suffer especially from this: the value of such work as art is.. (shrink)

Science is continually faced with describing that which is beyond. This book, through contributions from nine prominent scholars, tackles that challenge.

In this paper, I address the relationship between Lyotard’s account of the sublime in art and Kant’s own attempt at considering sublime art as a possible counterpart to fine art. Lyotard recognises the roots of modern art - and avant-garde particularly -in Kant’s account of the sublime. This is interesting, forit is generally assumed that Kant didn’t devise the notion to be applied to art as such. In the lack of any explicit consideration of artistic sublime in Kant’s text, what (...) could be the background for Lyotard’s analysis? My contention is that this reading of the Third Critique is only partially correct. Unlike what is commonly believed, much room is left in Kant’s text for consideration of the sublime in art. Kant himself envisages the possibility that the sublime be found in art and considers artistic representations of the sublime possible for art-forms. How can twentieth-century art be sublime in a Kantian way? And what role does Kant’s notion of aesthetic ideas play in Lyotard’s own account? (shrink)

In this paper, I aim at explaining the difference Kant makes between emotion, the beautiful and the sublime. I begin by explaining what an emotion is, showing that it refers to feelings that are related to desire. In contrast, I show that the feeling of beautiful and the sublime give us an inactive delight, that is not related to an interest in the object. The feeling of beautiful is related to the judgment of taste, and it has a universal validity (...) for everyone. I ask then if we can judge art without any emotion at all. According to Kant, not only one can, but one should, since pure judgment of taste is independent from charm and commotion. At the end, I ask if it is possible to enjoy music without emotion. For a lover of music, perhaps the emotion it provokes is the main reason to like it. I show that this is probably the reason why music is considered to have the last place in the beautiful arts for Kant. (shrink)

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment represents a turn toward experience, that is, toward the experiencing subject. Still the Enlightenment involves an aspiration toward objective truth in the ideals of the newly emerging sciences and in the experiments in democracy that were beginning to transform the political landscape of Europe and America. Immanuel Kant's towering philosophical achievement in his critical works helps to reformulate a meaning of objectivity that is congenial to the climate of inquiry and freedom in that remarkable century, a meaning (...) that is unburdened of the metaphysical commitments of many of his predecessors. Kant's revolution in philosophical thought gives us an objectivity that is crucially related to epistemic conditions rooted in subjectivity, a correlation between subjectivity and objectivity that carries over as well into his critical treatises concerned with ethics and aesthetics. This book of essays explores the tension between subjectivity and objectivity as it develops in the Enlightenment in Winkelmann, Hume, and Kant. The focus is upon aesthetic theories concerning the beautiful, the sublime, and the grotesque. The question by two of the authors as to whether aesthetic enjoyment of the blues is morally justified underscores an interest in these essays in the connection between aesthetics and ethics. This concern of the relation of aesthetics to judgments in cognition and in morality underlies an area of peculiar interest to Kant, and therefore to many of these essays. Finally the authors examine a turn toward the subjective in the Postmodern world of art and aesthetic theory, a turn that represents a relaxation of the original Enlightenment tension between subjectivity and objectivity. It also represents perhaps a grotesque turn toward the extreme of subjectivity in the realm of Postmodern theory, an extreme toward which at least one of the authors casts a critical eye. (shrink)

To what extent does the construction of any curriculum framework have to contain axiological assumptions? Educators have been made aware of tacit epistemological assumptions underlying existing curricular frameworks by the continual demands for their revision. Eisner suggested that curriculum policy should be centred around imagination; economic rationalists have suggested that it be made more functional and accountable than traditional university disciplines allow for. Is it possible, as Efland suggests, to combine competing traditional ideologies of education in a complex postmodern pastiche (...) which can nonetheless provide standards of assessment and evaluation without presuming a grand narrative? Brown suggests not. This paper examines the challenge of maintaining principled standards and recognising postmodern relativities, making particular reference to the notion of the sublime and the arts curriculum. (shrink)

Tracks the sublime art movement from Kant to the 21st century and onwards to a new future Stephen Zepke tracks the sublime art movement from its beginnings in Kant to its flowering in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He shows that the idea of sublime art waxes and wanes in the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Ranciere and the recent Speculative Realism movement. With it, a visionary politics of art seeks to (...) give it the most creative power possible: the power to overcome our conditions and embrace the unknown. (shrink)

Immanuel Kant’s Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime is examined in the context of the emergence of the epistemological practice of scientific observation. By focusing on the genre-stylistic and semantic-structural features of the text the authors demonstrate the mechanisms of observation as well as the methods of describing the results characteristic of mid-eighteenth century science. The authors consider Kant’s treatise to be a hybrid text: on the one hand, it attests to the importance of the natural (...) science paradigm and the degree of its influence on the humanities in the modern period; and, on the other hand, it bears witness to the multi-genre character of philosophical treatises, combining as they do the considered and serious wisdom of philosophy, the precision of scientific terminology and the figurativeness of a work of fiction. Kant is perceived not only as a researcher and philosopher capable of bringing out the essence of the particular and changeable captured in observation, but as a writer with a consummate command of the apparatus for keeping the reader’s attention through linguistic devices and practices of image-creating. The authors demonstrate how the categories of the “beautiful” and “sublime” become a general framework for the description of the moral and mental properties of human nature. The authors show that Kant’s use of “aesthetic” wording in the title of his treatise does not announce that his aim is analysis of artistic perception and practices, but mainly refers to the form of his anthropological study and conceptualisation of scientific knowledge. Kant has transferred the technique of visualisation from natural sciences to the objects of philosophical inquiry, thus contributing to the development in the humanities of representative practices, the scientific method of observation as well as the corresponding epistemic and literary genre. (shrink)

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy, nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to (...) other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world. (shrink)

In White Noise by Don DeLillo, two characters visit a famous barn, described as the “most photographed barn in America” alongside hordes of picture-taking tourists. One of them complains the barn has become a simulacrum, so that “no one sees” the actual barn anymore. This implies that there was once a real barn, which has been lost in the “virtual” image. This is in line with Plato’s concept of the simulacrum as a false or “corrupt” copy, which has lost all (...) connection with the “original.” Plotinus, however, offered a different definition: the simulacrum distorts reality in order to reveal the invisible, the Ideal. There is a real building which has been called “the most photographed barn in America”: the Thomas Moulton Barn in the Grand Teton National Park. The location—barn in the foreground, mountain range towering over it—forms a striking visual composition. But the site is not only famous because it is photogenic. Images of the barn in part evoke the heroic struggles of pioneers living on the frontier. They also draw on the tradition of the “American sublime.” Ralph Waldo Emerson defined the sublime as “the influx of the Divine mind into our mind.” He followed Plotinus in valuing art as a means of “revelation”—with the artist as a kind of prophet or “seer.” The photographers who collect at the Moulton Barn are themselves consciously working within this tradition, and turning themselves into do-it-yourself “artist-seers.” They are the creators, not the slaves of the simulacrum. (shrink)

To what extent does the construction of any curriculum framework have to contain axiological assumptions? Educators have been made aware of tacit epistemological assumptions underlying existing curricular frameworks by the continual demands for their revision., ) suggested that curriculum policy should be centred around imagination; economic rationalists have suggested that it be made more functional and accountable than traditional university disciplines allow for. Is it possible, as ) suggests, to combine competing traditional ideologies of education in a complex postmodern pastiche (...) which can nonetheless provide standards of assessment and evaluation without presuming a grand narrative? ) suggests not. This paper examines the challenge of maintaining principled standards and recognising postmodern relativities, making particular reference to the notion of the sublime and the arts curriculum. (shrink)

This paper studies the language of contractility in Burke's Enquiry, showing it to be closely related to types of heterodox medicine including the work of his father-in-law Christopher Nugent. Extensive connections are located between these medical ideas and questions of social and professional identity, including their visual aspects in contemporary portraiture. This essay finally examines the crucial significance of contractility as the discursive template upon which Burke's aesthetic ideas were modelled, and, accordingly, offers a new genealogy and a new definition (...) of the concept of the sublime as a radical ideal of extreme oppositions with important literary, epistemological and political implications. (shrink)

Qu’est-ce qui fait qu’un discours atteint son effet? Comment évaluer celui-ci? Au premier siècle, Pseudo-Longin compose le traité Du Sublime et y étudie ce qui mène l’expression linguistique à son plus haut degré d’efficacité. Pour l’atteindre, un rôle fondamental est attribué à la phantasia, assimilée par la plupart des auteurs anciens à ce qui, dans le discours, produit des « images ». Le texte qui suit s’arrête à démontrer, d’une part, la place occupée par Pseudo-Longin dans le long débat philosophique (...) et rhétorique sur la phantasia et, d’autre part, sa contribution à la compréhension de celle-ci. Associée par métonymie à la vision, la phantasia s’adresse à l’ensemble des sensations et correspond à l’art de faire sentir le discours en chair propre. Réussie, elle permet la communication des sensations entre le discours, l’orateur et le public. (shrink)

This edited collection had its origins in a two-day conference held at the Tate Britain, organised collaboratively by research staff and students at Middlesex University and the London Consortium in order to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the publication of Edmund Burke's famous book on the sublime. The conference was funded by Middlesex University, the London Consortium and the Tate Britain's AHRC-funded "Sublime Object: Nature, Art and Language" research project. The conference set out to critically examine the legacy of the (...) sublime in contemporary art, culture and society and to assess the value and the dangers of this concept as it is articulated in current thought and practice. The book selected from and expanded on the papers delivered at the conference in order to pursue this goal further. It was broken into themed sections (each of which had an introduction), each exploring an different issue around contemporary uses of the sublime. The sections were: 1. Nature, Ecology and the Sublime; 2. The Sublime After Kant; 3. Capitalism, Terror, Art and the Sublime; 4. Baroque and Beyond: Art, Sex and the Sublime; 5. The Cinematic Sublime. The volume reflects the interdisiplinarity of the concept of the sublime today, and includes essays whose appraoches come from aesthetics and ethics, ecological and political thought, psychoanalysis, feminism, film studies, literary studies, art history and popular culture. It includes papers by internationally renowned authors from the UK, America and Europe alongside the new voices of younger academics. The contributors were: Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University), Mark Bould (University of the West of England), Eu Jin Chua (London Consortium), Gudrun Filipska (Middlesex University), Cornelia Klinger (Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna / University of Tübingen, Germany), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck), William McDonald (Middlesex Univeristy), Laura Mulvey (Birkbeck), Claire Pajaczkowska (Royal College of Art), Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Gene Ray (Geneva University of Art and Design), Bettina Reiber (Central St. Martins), Jan Rosiek (University of Copenhagen), Sherryl Vint (Brock University, Canada), and Luke White (Middlesex University). (shrink)

This collection of texts on the Sublime provides the historical context for the foundation and discussion of one of the most important aesthetic debates of the Enlightenment. The significance of the Sublime in the eighteenth century ranged across a number of fields - literary criticism, empirical psychology, political economy, connoisseurship, landscape design and aesthetics, painting and the fine arts, and moral philosophy - and has continued to animate aesthetic and theoretical debates to this day. However, the unavailability of many of (...) the crucial texts of the founding tradition has resulted in a conception of the Sublime often limited to the definitions of its most famous theorist Edmund Burke. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla's anthology, which includes an introduction and notes to each entry, offers students and scholars ready access to a much deeper and more complex tradition of writings on the Sublime, many of them never before printed in modern editions. (shrink)

We explore themes in Nobel Prize–winning economist James M. Buchanan’s work and apply his Ethics and Economic Progress to problems facing individuals and firms. We focus on Buchanan’s analysis of the individual work ethic, his exhortations to “pay the preacher” of the “institutions of moral-ethical communication,” and his notion of law as “public capital.” We highlight several ways people with other-regarding preferences can contribute to social flourishing and some of the ways those who have “affected to trade for the public (...) good” might want to redirect their efforts. We show how Buchanan’s work has considerable implications for business ethics. Just as his economic analysis of politics changed how we understand government, we think his economic analysis of ethics can (and should) change how we understand business. (shrink)

Negrete brings together women writers and artists known for their formal experimentation to show that "the aesthetic experiences afforded by their work are underwritten by a tenacious and uniquely feminine ethics of desire."-- taken from back cover.

These essays recover the lively discussions on the topics of "magnificence" and "the sublime" in the art and literature of antiquity, the Renaissance, and the ages following, and apply them to the Middle Ages to draw exciting new conlusions"--Provided by publisher.

The range of the aesthetic has expanded to cover not only a wider range of objects and situations of daily life but also to encompass the negative. This includes terrorism, whose aesthetic impact is central to its use as a political tactic. The complex of positive and negative aesthetic values in terrorism are explored, introducing the concept of the sublime as a negative category to illuminate the analysis and the distinctive aesthetic of terrorism.

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to explain the distinction between Kant’s notions of the sublime and ugliness, and to answer an important question that has been left unnoticed in contemporary studies, namely why it is the case that even though both sublime and ugliness are contrapurposive for the power of judgment, occasioning the feeling of displeasure, yet that after all we should feel pleasure in the former, while not in the latter. Second, to apply my interpretation of (...) the sublime and ugliness to contemporary art, and to resolve certain issues that have been raised in accounting for the possibility of artistic sublimity. I argue that an experience of a genuine artistic sublimity is an uncommon occurrence. I propose that the value of contemporary art can be best explained by referring to Kant’s notion of ugliness and his theory of aesthetic ideas. (shrink)

"The premise of this collection is that despite this perceptual sharing, "sublime economy" has yet to be investigated in a purely cross-disciplinary way.

James Elkins argues that art historians should largely abandon the concept of the sublime as a way to understand art. In making this argument, he ignores the conception of the sublime in Hegel’s Aesthetics. This essay challenges Elkins’ argument and indicates how Hegel’s conception might be relevant. After summarizing Hegel’s conception of the sublime, the essay examines its potential significance today, both for interpreting contemporary artworks and for understanding the relations among art, religion, and philosophy. Contemporary art of the sublime (...) provides an important reason why we need to reconceive these relations and reappropriate Hegel’s conception of the sublime. (shrink)

In recent years, democratic theorists have inquired into the aesthetic dimension of contemporary politics. Influenced by Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, these scholars claim that there is an analogy between democratic politics and aesthetic experiences, since both involve the confrontation of an indeterminacy that cannot be overcome by means of rational argumentation. Contributing to this perspective, but challenging some of Rancière’s insights, this article shows the importance of Jean-François Lyotard’s writings on aesthetics for understanding what I call ‘democratic aesthetics’. This (...) aesthetics, I argue, consists in works of art that bring representation to its limits, thus arousing an experience of the unpresentable. Influenced by Immanuel Kant’s analysis of the sublime, Lyotard claims that avant-garde art, by disrupting the rules of representational art, put representation as such into question. This experience of the unpresentable contributes to cultivating a readiness to listening to voices that are not yet heard, because they lack a discourse by which to express themselves. Given that politics in postmodernity, following Lyotard, consists in shifting the dividing line between the sayable and the unsayable, avant-garde art is conductive to a postmodern politics – which, I argue, is analogous to democratic politics. (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

Business ethics courses have been launched with professors from business pulling on one oar, and professors of philosophy pulling on the other, but they lack a sense of direction. Let's begin with the basics: What is an ehtical decision? More fundamentally, why the interest in professional ethics in the first place?There are over 300 centers for the study of appIied ethics in this country-why? The events which face our society today are outside the business-oriented collection of shared beIiefs that set (...) our pubIic policy agenda. Cur beIiefs are too narrow, thus we see, understand, and control small slices of life.Business ethics should be the study of the structure and impact on us of what we call "business science," e.g., accounting, marketing, economics, law, etc., and the corresponding study of the process of what Carl Jung called individuation: learning to become one's own uniqueself in the face of these bodies of professional knowledge which have structured our lives and charted the direction for our sensibilities for too long. (shrink)

Abstract…observations of skylfull pylotts is the onlye waye to bring it in rule; for it passeth the reach of naturall philosophy. – Michael Gabriel, 1576 (Collinson, 1867, p. 30)Abstract The tension between empirical data and formal theory pervades the entire history of geomagnetism, from the Middle Ages up to the present day. This paper explores its early-modern history (1500–1800), using a hybrid approach: it applies a methodological framework used in modern geophysics to interpret early-modern developments, exploring to what extent formal (...) conjectures shaped observation and vice versa. A range of pertinent case studies supports classification of this entire period as proto-scientific, characterised by the initial formation of theories being largely disconnected from observational constraints, and their subsequent evolution being advanced primarily by their empirical falsification, and not necessarily associated with the introduction of an alternative. The few exceptional instances of purely data-driven discovery were essentially due to an improved signal-to-noise ratio. (shrink)

The Sublime Today considers contemporary applications of aesthetic philosophy and earlier theories of the sublime from Longinus, Boileau, Burke, Kant, and Hegel to current literary and cultural contexts. Today, aesthetic experience itself seems to be changing, given the rise of new media and new conditions for the viewing and the reception of works of art. How might the rhetoric of the sublime be used to both describe our current situation and help formulate constructive responses to it? The Sublime Today collects (...) the work of scholars in literature, film, art, and media studies and provides a forum for investigating the contemporary relevance of the sublime, both as it has been understood historically and as it has been formulated by more recent theorists such as Jameson, Lyotard, Kristeva, and others. The volume includes essays on literary readings of the sublime in Coetze, Eggers, Lahiri, and Auster; essays on film and the visual arts in the work of François Ozon and in recent participatory art; and essays on how new technologies and media, as in media representations of 9/11, re-frame our relationship to the aesthetics of the sublime, especially as they intersect with questions of gender, the postcolonial, and the uneasy politics of terror. (shrink)

Helps individual readers to overcome procrastination and build self-esteem Reveals how to create a culture of accountability, and how to hold someone accountable Gives leaders a step-by-step process for helping team members become more self-responsible Explains commitment reluctance and how to encourage self-responsibility among team members Uncovers why we blame others and shows how to defeat a blame culture Provides an easy read with no consultant-speak In recent years, HORN Training and Consulting was awarded the distinguished Gold Medal by the (...) Canadian Society for Training and Development for its leadership development program designed for one of the world’s largest international banks; and HORN is currently executing leadership development projects on a global scale for companies in the consumer packaged goods and pharmaceutical industries. (shrink)

In ‘Reality and Its Shadow’, Levinas dismisses knowledge as a whole from art. This has deep implications for the ethical. The aesthetic event has nothing to do with the ethical event – art does not seem to hold a place for ethical knowledge. This situation is problematic with respect to the conflicting phenomenological evidence as well as with respect to Levinas himself, who occasionally relies on works of art in his ethical phenomenological analyses. My article aims to fill in the (...) blank spaces by finding a place for the ethical in Levinas’s model of ethical signification in art. To start with, I elaborate on the notion of ethical experience by way of László Tengelyi’s work on time-art and his conversation with Levinas. Next, I turn to Levinas’s portrayal of the insomnia of art, where the traces of such an experience can be located in the ebb and flow of consciousness, in the vicinity of the anonymous event, and on the way to the critical articulation of this event. In the second part of the article, I try to capitalize on this genetic model of ethical knowledge with reference to the faces of art. I attempt to show how in the in-depth experience provided by film faces come alive and signify. Rather than tying them in with the sublime, I argue for a limited yet undeniable presence of exteriority in the faces of the movie. (shrink)

_An exploration of the uncomfortable connections among performances in life, art, and politics_ “All the world’s a stage,” declares the melancholy Jacques in Shakespeare’s_ As You Like It._ Today that’s an unhappy thought. A cluster of demagogues has recently dominated the public realm through their powers as actors; they are brilliant performers. More unsettling, the demagogue, the dancer, and the musician all share the same nonverbal realm of bodily gestures, lighting and blocking, costuming, and stage architecture. So, too, the roles (...) and rituals of everyday life and everyday acting can be malign or sublime, repressive or liberating. Performing constitutes one art—an ambiguous art. In this book, the acclaimed sociologist Richard Sennett explores uncomfortable connections among performances in life, art, and politics. He draws on his own early career as a professional cellist as well as histories both Western and non-Western. He is not a pessimist; at the end of his study, he shows how this ambiguous art might become more ethical. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art Education and the Emergence of Radical Art Movements in Egypt: The Surrealists and the Contemporary Arts Group, 1938–1951Patrick Kane (bio)So it wasn’t the aim of the artist to just toss out a work of art. A tradition of the exhibition of the natural, and its meaning was not that it fled from life, but that it had penetrated and plunged into reality. Its meaning was not a prescription (...) or plain exercise in the taste of the sublime, or harmony of forms and charming scenes; and its meaning was not as a decoration of life; it was in its expression of what life inspires in us to give back.—Henry Moore, as quoted by Ramses Yunan, in “The Aim of the Contemporary Artist”1In these crucial days of difficulty, the artists in this country live in tall aristocratic towers.... For this peasant has an art of his own that sustains him, and it is not that art of the educated class.—Kamil Al-Tilmisani (c. 1941–1942)By 1938, as the agrarian crisis in Egypt deepened, the Depression, food shortages, low wages, expropriations of crops, and forced rents opened a polemic among Egyptian intellectuals over the role of the state and the looming threat of fascism. With the dismissal of the government of Mustafa Al-Nahas at the end of 1937, the political turbulence underscored the weakening of the Wafd Party. Opponents of the old Wafdists and supporters of the monarchy resorted to openly fascist tactics, including the establishment of youth organizations and the Blue Shirts, the fascist front of the young Wafdists who modeled themselves on Mussolini’s Black Shirts. The serial crises of agrarian struggles and parliamentary stalemates between [End Page 95] nationalists and monarchists led to increasingly militant stances by the paramilitary fascist organization Misr Al-Fattah (Young Egypt) as a counter to the Muslim Brothers. When Mahmud Khalil resigned from the Wafd and assumed the presidency of the Senate in 1938, his ascension opened a new phase of struggle in politics through culture and the arts.2 In this context, caricatures and satirical sculptures of Khalil appeared in 1939 that parodied him as the icon of a “dictatorship of art.”3 Leading intellectuals from all political stances addressed these issues directly. The cultural journals were peppered with articles on the problems of everyday life and the material crises with such representative titles as ‘Abbas al-Aqqad’s “Food for the Rich,” in which he raised the problem of food shortages and inequity as an issue for reform.4 Within the year, articles in Al-Risala and Al-Thaqafa drew comparisons with French and Italian nineteenth-century landscapes as a model for the recognition of the countryside as a subject. In journalism and the arts, suffering became a part of the recognition of the everyday, as articles appeared on Millet’s nineteenth-century paintings of French peasants.As the war in Europe encroached into the cover pages of Egypt’s cultural journals, Zaki Muhammad Hasan wrote an essay for Al-Thaqafa entitled “The Angelus,” with a reproduction of the 1859 painting by Jean Francois Millet (1814–1874).5 Hasan wrote about Millet’s interest in the “the daily labors of the peasant” as a depiction of the conditions of French peasants. Hasan’s mention of Millet’s own peasant origins, and his listing of paintings of social conditions, including Les Glaneuses (The Gleaners), reflected a broadening interest in the artistic subject of the peasant and the rise of the peasant as artist. Although in Millet’s painting there is a prayer scene of a man and a woman in the fields that is generally regarded as the evening prayer with the sun setting, an Egyptian reader could link the prayer with the issue of workers taking breaks in the fields at a time when the issue of compensation of peasant farm workers was paramount.6 Hasan introduced “The Angelus” to his readers as a Catholic prayer in southern Europe offered at dawn, noon, and sunset and compared the origins of the prayer’s stanzas from the Gospel of Luke 1:28–31 with passages from the chapter on Maryam in the Quran... (shrink)

This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a (...) non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation. (shrink)

In the first half of the twentieth century there was a remarkable convergence of art and design in De Stijl, Constructivism and the Bauhaus. But in the second half of the twentieth century fine art relinquished its liaison with design due to the influence of Dada and Surrealism's postromantic antagonism to practical-functionalism. Dada and Surrealism and postmodern fine art are characterized by a critique of the dominant social discourse of functionalism and the demand for a sublime poetics to be brought (...) into everyday life. This article argues that the apparent antipathy between postmodern fine art and design can be ameliorated if we critically analyse interpretations of evolutionary theory by postromantic philosophers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze and Guattari. When Bergson notes that practical-functional reasoning was created by evolution he reveals a flaw in the pursuit of an aesthetics that is totally opposed to commonsense and practical-functionalism. And when we turn to Deleuze and Guattari we find another valuable concept in the form of their notion of the machinic, which assists further in reconciling the postromantic emphasis on the sublime with the practicality of mechanism. Moreover, Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the machinic is informed by chaos theory, which allows further elaboration in terms of complexity theory. Complexity theory can be understood as a process philosophy that has no need to figure the sublime in terms of a mysterious force of nature because the mystery is located within complex interactions among a manifold of components, what one might refer to as a cosmic, machinic, combinatoire that arises out of what Christopher Langton has called the edge of chaos. This makes it possible to replace the emphasis on desire as the fundamental force of nature evident in Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze and Guattari with a complexity-theoretical concept of a cosmicmachinic combinatoire. It is then possible to formulate a machinic, evolutionary aesthetics that can reconcile the postromantic demand for sublimity with the demand for practical-functionalism that lies at the heart of the discipline of design. In place of the modernist machine aesthetic that informed De Stijl, Constructivism and the Bauhaus we would have a postmodernist machinic aesthetic. (shrink)

This volume offers readers a unique and comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives on "the sublime," the singular aesthetic response elicited by phenomena that move viewers by transcending and overwhelming them. The book consists of an editor's introduction and fifteen chapters written from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Part One examines philosophical approaches advanced historically to account for the phenomenon, beginning with Longinus, moving through eighteenth and nineteenth century writers in Britain, France, and Germany, and concluding with developments in contemporary continental (...) philosophy. Part Two explores the sublime with respect to particular disciplines and areas of study, including Dutch literature, early modern America, the environment, religion, British Romanticism, the fine arts, and architecture. Each chapter is both accessible for nonspecialists and offers an original contribution to its respective field of inquiry. (shrink)

Deleuze's relationship to Kant is intricate and fundamental, given that Deleuze develops his transcendental philosophy of difference in large part out of Kant's work. In doing so he utilises the moment of the sublime from the third Critique as the genetic model for the irruption of the faculties beyond their capture within common sense. In this sense, the sublime offers the model not only for transcendental genesis but also for aesthetic experience unleashed from any conditions of possibility. As a result, (...) sensation in both its wider and more specifically artistic senses (senses that become increasingly entwined in Deleuze's work) will explode the clichéés of human perception, and continually reinvent the history of art without recourse to representation. In tracing Deleuze's ‘‘aesthetics’’ from Kant we are therefore returned to the viciously anti-human (and Nietzschean) trajectory of Deleuze's work, while simultaneously being forced to address the extent of its remaining Idealism. Both of these elements play an important part in relation to Deleuze's ‘‘modernism’’, and to the discussion of his possible relevance to contemporary artistic practices. (shrink)

We humans are a curious species. Of all the life forms that inhabit the earth, we alone strive to make sense of the world in which we find ourselves. For thousands of years we understood the world through stories. Our ancestors told stories of how the world began, how our people originated and came to be at this place, and how those people across the river or beyond the mountains came to be where they are. Some stories were of animals (...) and plants in our neighborhood, and their powers to help us, feed us, or cure our ailments. But in the last few centuries, starting in Europe and spreading throughout the world, a new way of understanding began competing with storytelling as a means of comprehending our world. Science supplanted storytelling largely because it empowered us to transform the world in ways that were unimaginable to our ancestors. We understand the world scientifically by describing the world instead of by telling stories about it. The stories our ancestors told no longer explain the world, but are data within the world, part of the world that science describes. Our stories have become myths, cultural artifacts that may be interesting and a subject of study, but cannot possibly be true. Yet even in societies that have thoroughly embraced science as a means of understanding the world, myths remain a powerful force. Myth and science exist side by side, often creating confusion and conflict. (shrink)