The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth-Century China

1998 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 206
Author(s):  
Yomi Braester ◽  
Ban Wang
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
The Sublime

scholarly journals Introduction: Know Thyself

2018 ◽  
pp. xii-20
Author(s):  
Richard G.T. Gipps ◽  
Michael Lacewing
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Free Association ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Central Concept ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
The Temple

This Handbook examines the contributions of philosophy to psychoanalysis and vice versa. It explores the most central concept of psychoanalysis—the unconscious—in relation to its defences, transference, conflict, free association, wish fulfilment, and symbolism. It also considers psychoanalysis in relation to its philosophical prehistory, the recognition and misrecognition afforded it within twentieth-century philosophy, its scientific strengths and weaknesses, its applications in aesthetics and politics, and its value and limitations with respect to ethics, religion, and social life. The book explains how psychoanalysis draws our attention to the reality of central aspects of the inner life and how philosophy assists psychoanalysis in knowing itself. This introduction elaborates on the phrase ‘know thyself’, the words inscribed at the Temple of Delphi, and illustrates the connection between matters philosophical and psychoanalytic in relation to the Delphic command by highlighting their mutual concern with truth and truthfulness.

The Critical-Linguistic Critique of the Aesthetic Ideology in the Late Writing of Paul de Man

Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Jeremy Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Ideology ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man ◽  
The Relationship

The focus of this essay is Paul de Man's provocative antipathy towards the category of the aesthetic in his late writings on philosophical aesthetics. I introduce de Man's critique of what he terms aesthetic ideology – a form of ideological communication – which he considers manifest in the aesthetics of Schiller in particular but also in more scrupulously critical philosophers. I begin the essay with Benjamin's well known observation that twentieth century fascisms aestheticized political practice as part of a defence of existing property relations. I introduce de Man's critique of aesthetic ideology as a way of developing or elaborating on what are relatively sketchy comments on the relationship aesthetics and politics in Benjamin's earlier essay.

scholarly journals The Horror of the Real: Filmic Form, The Century, and Fritz Lang's M

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-28
Author(s):  
Peter Gavaris
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Responsibility ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
German State ◽  
The Real ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The One

It is not surprising that film became the dominant art form of the twentieth century. The promise of a medium that could capture life in motion proved exciting, though soon after its conception, debates cropped up pitting the merits of realism against those of expressionism. Should a medium predicated on recording life adopt expressionistic sensibilities? Writing on the burgeoning cinema, Walter Benjamin seemed to imply that film carried with it a distinctly political responsibility to show life as it really is. In attempting to rethink this argument, I argue for the political potential of an expressionistic cinema, as understood by considering the theoretical underpinnings of Alain Badiou’s The Century (2008) when read in relation to Fritz Lang’s M (1931)—a film that embodies Badiou’s musings on the twentieth century’s aesthetic ideals and violent tendencies. Badiou writes that “the torment of contemporary art” is that it is situated at a crossroads between “romantic pathos, on the one hand, and a nihilistic iconoclasm” on the other: a knowing admission that the Real can never be truly represented, and an oppositional desire to convey it anyways. M knowingly exposes these aesthetic contradictions at the heart of the filmic medium by leaning into its own artificiality, and, in doing so, it prophetically exposes the thinking behind a growingly fascist German state in the 1930s. By the end of my paper, I arrive at the conclusion that the violence found in both twentieth century aesthetics and politics came about as the result of a similarly idealistic principle.

Can the Sublime Be Postcolonial? Aesthetics, Politics, and Environment in Amitav Ghosh’sThe Hungry Tide

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana María Giles
Keyword(s):  
Mangrove Forest ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Postcolonial State ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Sundarban Mangrove ◽  
Ethics And Politics

AbstractSet in the vast Sundarban mangrove forest of Bangladesh in the shadow of the colonial past and the 1979 Morichjhapi massacre,The Hungry Tidetraces the transformation of three metropolitan characters from disengaged spectators to invested insiders. The novel may be read as elaborating the theories of Jean-François Lyotard, whose revision of the sublime as the “differend” in both aesthetics and politics provides a compelling context for exploring the postcolonial sublime. Suggesting ecocentric ways of engaging the world that loosen the bonds of the colonial past and critiquing the failure of the postcolonial state and the new cosmopolitanism, Ghosh rewrites aesthetics as interconnected with ethics and politics. In his novel, the postcolonial sublime no longer reifies metaphysical or anthropocentric pure reason, but instead enables discovery of our interpenetration with the natural world, spurring us to witnessing and activism in partnership with those who have been rendered silent and invisible.

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