Continental Philosophy

Aesthetics and Race: New Philosophical Perspectives

Contemporary Aesthetics, Special Volume 2 (2009)
Edited with an introduction by Monique Roelofs

Bringing together postcolonial, feminist, and critical race theorists, aestheticians, political philosophers, and artists, this special volume explores the connections between aesthetics and race.  Eleven essays on “looks and images,” “framing encounters,” “the global and the cosmopolitan,” “taste,” and “ethics and politics” address philosophical questions in this multidisciplinary field.

Contributors include Nalini Bhushan, Namita Goswami, Robin James, Mariana Ortega, Mickaella Perina, Monique Roelofs, Crispin Sartwell, Falguni A. Sheth, Mariángeles Soto-Díaz, Ronald Sundstrom, and Paul C. Taylor.

Freely available at http://www.contempaesthetics.org/

Many of the philosophers commonly described as “existentialist” have made original and decisive contributions to aesthetic thinking. In most cases, a substantial involvement in artistic practice (as novelists, playwrights or musicians) nourished their thinking on aesthetic experience. This is true already of two of the major philosophers who inspired 20^th century existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. For reasons of space, however, this entry is restricted to 20^th century thinkers who at one point or another accepted the tag “existentialist” as an accurate characterisation of their thinking, and who have made the most significant contributions to aesthetics: Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The rest

Volume 13, Issue No. 1, 2009

Articles

’Occupy without Counting’: Furtive Urbanism in the Films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (1-15)
R.D. Crano

Hegel and the Impossibility of the Future in Science Fiction Cinema (16-37)
Todd McGowan

Godfathers and Sons: Tripping Over the Unconscious (38-52)
Timothy O’Leary

Consumer Ethics in Thank You For Smoking (53-67)
Stacy Thompson

Meanings and authorships in Dune (68-89)
Tony Todd

A review of Kenneth Rogerson’s The Problem of Free Harmony in Kant’s Aesthetics

Kant claims that the experience of beauty rests on what he calls a “harmony,” or a “free play” of the faculties of imagination and understanding, punctuated by pleasure. Famously, this free play is supposed to be “without concept” (§9, 5:217-9; 102-4).[1] In his new book, Kenneth Rogerson argues that “only the doctrine of beauty as the expression of ideas gives Kant a plausible explanation of how we can see objects of beauty as free harmonies” (p. 3).[2] The novelty of Rogerson’s approach is twofold. First, he argues that aesthetic ideas can explain not only artistic, but also natural beauty. Second, he stresses the importance of expression: both nature and art talk to us, as it were, and thereby bring about the free play of our faculties. Rogerson bases his solution to the problem of the concept-less harmony on a sharp distinction between concepts and ideas. Since his solution involves ideas rather than concepts, it meets Kant’s “no-concept” requirement head on: “an artwork (or natural object) that can be interpreted as expressing an aesthetic idea will accomplish this expression via a mental state that is free of concepts and yet orderly due to the fact that it expresses an idea” (p. 3).

The rest of the review

Michael Tweed has translated and posted five Michel Henry texts over on his site. Great contribution.

Link

Link to articles

Derek Attridge and Henry Staten – Reading for the Obvious: A Conversation

Scott Durham – “The Center of the World Everywhere”: Bamako and the Scene of the Political

Rosalind Galt – The Obviousness of Cinema

Sandra Gibson + Luis Recoder – Cinema/Film

Christian Keathley – Otto Preminger and the Surface of Cinema

David Farrell Krell – The School for Stupefaction

Scott Krzych – Kino Ex Nihilo

Ernesto Laclau in conversation with Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland – Not a Ground but a Horizon

Sam Lipsyte – A Pimple on the Ass of Drew Barrymore Speaks

Karen Pinkus – Nothing from Nothing: Alchemy and the Economic Crisis

Angelo Restivo – The Obvious: Three Reminiscences

Stephen G. Rhodes – Interregnum Reanimated: The Living Cemetery

Jeffrey Sconce – Circuit City Unplugged

New entry of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Heidegger is not interested in works of art as expressions of the vision of a creator, nor is he interested in them as the source of aesthetic experiences in a viewer. He holds that “Modern subjectivism … immediately misinterprets creation, taking it as the self-sovereign subject’s performance of genius” and he also insists that “aesthetic experience is the element in which art dies.” Rather, for Heidegger, an artwork is a thing that, when it works, performs at least one of three ontological functions. It either manifests, articulates or reconfigures the style of a culture from within the world of that culture. It follows that, for Heidegger, most of what hangs in museums, what is admired as great works of architecture, and what is published by poets, were never works of art, a few were once artworks but are no longer working, and none are working now. To understand this counter-intuitive account of art, we have to begin by reviewing what Heidegger means by world and being. . . .

Download the paper here: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/189_f08/pdf/Heidegger%20OWA%20sept13_08.pdf.

Via Philosophy’s Other

via Philosophy’s Other

A special issue of Art and Research on Ranciere

And an article, “Zizek for Jews“

Review of Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant’s Response to Hume

Paul Guyer’s stated aims in this collection of previously published essays are to show that “the philosophical approach Kant developed for showing that our concept of and beliefs about causation have a foundation that Hume denied they have also provides Kant with an approach for addressing the concerns Hume raised about external objects and the self”, and that, beyond the domain of metaphysics proper, “important elements of Kant’s moral philosophy, his aesthetics, and his teleology can be fruitfully read as responses to Hume” (p. 7). These are fairly bland claims, but in the course of establishing them, Guyer presents in short compass his own systematic and comprehensive interpretations of these two thinkers in the areas in which their themes overlap. Here I summarize the basic positions Guyer stakes out for himself in the book’s five chapters, and express a few worries along the way.

Link to the review

We are glad to annouce the nummer 0 of the new magazine “INAESTHETICS” published by Tobias Huber and Marcus Steinweg.

The idea of the journal INAESTHETICS lies in insisting in an alliance or friendship between two independent ways of touching truth: Art and philosophy belong together insofar as each maintains its autonomy. The friendship between art and philosophy can only be thought as an alliance between autonomous contacts with truth. The journal INAESTETHICS is dedicated above all to this ideal of autonomous collaboration and friendship. Our aim is, instead of pursuing a single direction in thinking, to give room to the contradictoriness which keeps the thinking of art and the thinking of philosophy, as well as the thinking of the friendship between art and philosophy, in a state of permanent restless, which helps to create new categories and terms. We want to establish INAESTHETICS as a place of encounter between art and philosophy. And, as we all know, an encounter can only take place when its outcome and consequences remain uncertain.

The magazine contains texts in english, french and german language.

Content:

Editorial
Alain Badiou: Thèses sur l art contemporain / Fifteen theses on contemporary art / 15 Thesen zur zeitgenössischen Kunst
Bruno Bosteels im Gespräch mit Alain Badiou: Kann man das Neue denken?
Bruno Bosteels: Art, Politics, History: Notes on Badiou and Rancière / Kunst, Politik, Geschichte: Bemerkungen zu Badiou und Rancière
Alexandre Costanzo: L Odyssée du réel
Jacques Rancière: Penser entre les disciplines: une esthétique de la connaissance / Zwischen den Disziplinen denken: eine Ästhetik der Erkenntnis
Zur Aktualität ästhetischer Autonomie: Juliane Rebentisch im Gespräch
Marcus Steinweg: Definition der Kunst / Definition of Art
Sebastian Egenhofer: Zur Topik des Werkbegriffs in der Moderne
Alexander García Düttmann: Der Schein

see: http://www.inaesthetik.net/ / order “INAESTHETICS” here: http://www.diaphanes.de/scripts/buch.php?ID=132

Tobias Huber, Marcus Steinweg (eds.)
INAESTHETIK NR. 0
Theses on Contemporary Art
160 pages
ISBN 978-3-03734-034-9
2008, diaphanes, Zurich-Berlin

American Society for Aesthetics
Eastern Division Meeting
April 3-4, 2009
Independence Park Hotel, Philadelphia

Plenary Lecture: Carolyn Korsmeyer, University at Buffalo (SUNY)

Monroe Beardsley Lecture, Temple University: TBA

Papers on any topic in Aesthetics are invited, as well as proposals for panels, author-meets-critics, or other special sessions. We welcome volunteers to serve as session chairs and commentators. All participants must register for the conference.Papers should not exceed 3000 words, and should be accompanied by a 100-word abstract.

Please send submissions in PDF, Word, or RTF format to David Clowney at Clowney@rowan.edu

Please feel free to direct questions to the Program Co-Chairs: Bill Seeley (BatesCollege) at wseeley@bates.edu or David Clowney (Rowan University) at Clowney@rowan.edu

Deadline for submissions:  January 15, 2009

New Left Review

Paris, 23 March 1940

Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,

It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.

Via Ready Steady Book

Russian Aesthetics under Capitalism

Russian Aesthetics under Capitalism: An Introduction — Yulia Tikhonova

Why I Am a Marxist — Vladislav Sofronov

The Theory of Marxism: Questions and Answers — Vladislav Sofronov; Fredric Jameson; Jack Amariglio; Yahya M. Madra

The Karl Marx School of the English Language — David Riff

You Can’t Anticipate Explosions: Jacques Rancière in Conversation with Chto Delat — Jacques Rancière; Artemy Magun; Dmitry Vilensky; Alexandr Skidan

Profanation of the Profane, or, Giorgio Agamben on the Moscow Biennale — Alexei Penzin

The Story of Angry Sandwich People, or, In Praise of Dialectics — David Riff; Dmitry Vilensky

Legally Soviet: A Conversation — Yevgeniy Fiks; Olga Kopenkina

Foucault, Marxism, and the Cuban Revolution: Historical and Contemporary Reflections — Sam Binkley; Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Foucault and the “New Man”: Conversations on Foucault in Cuba — Sam Binkley; Jorge Capetillo-Ponce

Massive Change: The Exhibit as Apology for “New Capitalism” — Lauren Langman

From Principle to Context: Marx versus Nozick and Rawls on Distributive Justice — Xiaoping Wei

Development, Capitalism, and Socialism: A Marxian Encounter with Rabindranath Tagore’s Ideas on the Cooperative Principle — Anjan Chakrabarti; Anup Kumar Dhar

Articles are available here

Frederic Will — Can We Get Inside the Aesthetic Sensibility of the Archaic Past?
Maryvonne Saison — “The People Are Missing”
Thomas Leddy — The Aesthetics of Junkyards and Roadside Clutter
Emmanouil Aretoulakis — Aesthetic Appreciation, Ethics, and 9/11
Dan Disney — Toward a Poeticognosis: Re-reading Plato’s The Republic via Wallace Stevens’ “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
Jonathan Davis — Questioning “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: A Stroll around the Louvre after Reading Benjamin
Grant Tavinor — Definition of Videogames
SYMPOSIUM: Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Twenty-Five Years Later
Ivan Gaskell — The Riddle of a Riddle
Thomas E. Wartenberg — Not Just Mere Things
Cynthia Freeland — Danto and Art Criticism
Arthur C. Danto — Ontology, Criticism, and the Riddle of Art Versus Non-Art in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace

A new blog on Agamben.

“Philosophical insults” through the history of philosophy: a comic strip

“Plato’s Aesthetics“: new in SEP

Ranciere and Nancy on Vendredi de la philosophie

And finally on the “Viroid Life“

TOC

Literary Theory in an Age of Globalization — Ihab Hassan

The Dramatic Sources of Philosophy — Amelie Oksenberg Rorty

Art and Evolution: Spiegelman’s The Narrative Corpse — Brian Boyd

Did God Deprive Pharaoh of Free Will? — Don Levi

The Worst Case of Knowing the Other?: Stanley Cavell and Troilus and Cressida — David Hillman

Literature, Politics, and Character — Oliver Conolly and Bashshar Haydar

Plot Taxonomies and Intentionality — Jon Adams

How Few Words Can the Shortest Story Have? — Amihud Gilead

“A little throat cutting in the meantime”: Seneca’s Violent Imagery — Amy Olberding

Of Literary Universals: Ninety-Five Theses — Patrick Colm Hogan

And more

TOC

The Narration of Collective Trauma: The “True Story” of Jasper, Texas — Kalina Brabeck and Ricardo Ainslie

“Two Brotherless Peoples”: On the Constitutive Traumas of Class Struggle — Akis Gavriilidis

Psychotherapy and Political Activism: Examining The Israeli–palestinian Case — Nissim Avissar

Other Pasts: Family Romances of Pan’s Labyrinth — Janet Thormann

The Notion of the Work of Culture in Freud’s Writings — Eric Smadja

“A Small History of Photography” by Walter Benjamin

Small History of Photography.pdf

“The Author as Producer” by Walter Benjamin

The Author as Producer.pdf

Link

(via wood’s lot)

The new issue of Bookforum is out and it includes an essay on Adorno by Richard Wolin

Link