Aesthetics and Its DiscontentsISBN: 978-0-7456-4630-5
Hardcover
176 pages
August 2009, Polity
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"Riveting. In short compass, Rancière provides a razor-sharp
critique of the anti-aesthetics of postmodernism. His ear for the
substitution of political substance by empty moralism ? call it:
the sublime, the unpresentable, the other, the Shoah ? is unerring.
His dissections of Badiou, Lyotard, von Trier's Dogville,
and a Christian Boltanski installation are pitch-perfect. For a
pointed defense of the role of aesthetics for a radical politics:
begin here."
Jay Bernstein, New School for Social Research
Jay Bernstein, New School for Social Research
"Jacques Rancière's Aesthetics and its Discontents
mounts a subtle and spirited defense of modern aesthetic thought,
from Schiller to Adorno. Aesthetics is not philosophy seeking to
dominate art, as its modish detractors claim. Rather, it is the
attempt to think through the artwork's paradoxes and
contradictions. In a forceful critique of rival thinkers such as
Lyotard and Badiou, Rancière shows that abandoning aesthetic
discourse does not mean respecting the integrity of art. Instead,
art ends up being reduced to the vehicle of a remorseless ethical
demand, or to the cipher of a transcendent truth."
Peter Dews, University of Essex