Aestheticism And Deconstruction

Considered an exemplar of "Art-for-Art's Sake" in Victorian art and literature, Walter Pater (1839-1894) was co-opted as a standard bearer for the cult of hedonism by Oscar Wilde, and this version of aestheticism has since been used to attack deconstruction. Here Jonathan Loesberg boldly uses Pater's important work on society and culture, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), to argue that the habitual dismissal of deconstruction as "aestheticist" fails to recognize the genuine philosophic point and political engagement within aestheticism. Reading Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in light of Pater's Renaissance, Loesberg begins by accepting the charge that deconstruction is "aestheticist." He goes on to show, however, that aestheticism and modern deconstruction both produce philosophical knowledge and political effect through persistent self-questioning or "self-resistance" and in the internal critique and destabilization of hegemonic truths. Throughout Loesberg reinterprets Pater and reexamines the contributions of deconstruction in relation to the apparent theoretical shift away from deconstruction and toward new historicism. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The contemporary idea of the “work of art” is paradoxically both widely used and often unexamined. Therefore, we must re-evaluate the concept before we can understand what the deconstruction of aesthetics means for thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. By examining their analyses of works of visual art and contextualizing their thinking on the matter, Martta Heikkilä asserts that the implications of the “work of art,” “art,” and “the aesthetic” apply not only to philosophical questions but also to a broader area. Instead of the totality represented by the historical concept of Art, poststructuralist thinkers introduce the idea of the radical multiplicity of art and its works. From this notion arises the fundamental issue in Derrida and the poststructuralist tradition: how can we speak philosophically of art, which always exists as singular instances, as works? In Deconstruction and the Work of Art: Visual Arts and Their Critique in Contemporary French Thought, Heikkilä shows that the deconstructionist notions of art are still influential in the discourses of contemporary art, in which artworks proliferate and the concept of “work” is open-ended and expanding. This book offers an introduction to the deconstructionist theory of art and brings new perspectives to the complex, undecidable relation between philosophy and art.

Paul de Man - literary critic, literary philosopher, "American deconstructionist" - changed the landscape of criticism through his rigorous theories and writings. Upon its original publication in 1988, Christopher Norris' book was the first full-length introduction to de Man, a reading that offers a much-needed corrective to the pattern of extreme antithetical response which marked the initial reception to de Man's writings. Norris addresses de Man's relationship to philosophical thinking in the post-Kantian tradition, his concern with "aesthetic ideology" as a potent force of mystification within and beyond that tradition, and the vexed issue of de Man's politics. Norris brings out the marked shift of allegiance in de Man's thinking, from the thinly veiled conservative implications of the early essays to the engagement with Marx and Foucault on matters of language and politics in the late, posthumous writing. At each stage, Norris raises these questions through a detailed close reading of individual texts which will be welcomed by those who lack any specialised knowledge of de Man's work.

In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling into an error common to Adorno's negative dialectics and Derrida's deconstruction.

A Return to Aesthetics confronts postmodernism's rejection of aesthetics by showing that this critique rests on central concepts of classical aesthetic theory, namely autonomous form, disinterest, and symbolic discourse. The author argues for the value of these concepts by recovering them through a historical reinterpretation of their meaning prior to their distortion by twentieth-century formalism. Loesberg then applies these concepts to a discussion of two of the most significant critics of the ideology of Enlightenment, Foucault and Bourdieu. He argues that understanding the role of aesthetics in the postmodern critique of Enlightenment will get us out of the intellectual impasse wherein numbingly repeated attacks upon postmodernism as self-contradictory match numbingly repeated defenses. Construing postmodern critiques as examples of aesthetic reseeing gives us a new understanding of the postmodern critique of the Enlightenment.

Proximate Difference in Aesthetics explores the interconnections of the philosophy of Jacques Derrida and the artistic practices comprising Institutional Critique as a means of both providing a framework for this heterodox approach to art and examining Derrida's contributions to contemporary aesthetics.

This book addresses a perennial challenge for product planners and designers alike: how to objectively specify and quantify the aesthetics of products. It provides automotive product planners with a framework for the grammar of aesthetics and a tool for quantifying the aesthetics of an intended product. Further, it equips styling designers with a tool for connecting engineering and aesthetics. Given the author’s extensive experience in motorcycle design, the motorcycle has been chosen as the frame of reference for automobiles. Specifically in the field of automobile design, where engineering and aesthetics go hand in hand, it also becomes important to clearly and objectively define the relationship between engineering design and aesthetics. Accordingly, this book (1) clearly establishes the objective parameters of aesthetics, (2) puts forward a method for quantifying aesthetics, (3) identifies the engineering design parameters affecting aesthetics, and (4) determines the relationship between parameters of aesthetics and engineering design. As such, it offers a useful guide not only for design professionals, but also for students and researchers of design.