Sustaining Loss: Art and Mournful LifeStanford University Press, 2001 - 239 páginas Sustaining Loss explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art. He locates the most potent expressions of this philosophical compulsion in Hegel's thesis that art is a thing of the past, and in Freud's view that the work of art is the haunting of the present by the endless suffering of what is dead but still has claims over the living. The book asserts that modern aesthetics holds the key to unlocking the tortured relation of modernity to the past it is perpetually leaving behind. As the capacity to withstand the inescapable force of a past that is dead for us becomes the supreme test for a fully modern, fully secular philosophy, aesthetics moves to the center of philosophical reflection. But, the author argues, this secular philosophical orientation can be sustained only if aesthetic theory remains oriented by intimate contact with modernist works of art. Sustaining Loss examines not only Kant, Hegel, and Freud, but also the contemporary artists Gerhard Richter and Ilya Kabakov, whose art turns fruitfully against art's own past. To live as a modern, the author asserts, is to live with the dead past that modernist art ceaselessly disgorges. Overall, the book aims to articulate an aesthetic theory suitable to the task of living in a time when, in Flannery O'Connor's words, "The blind don't see and the lame don't walk, and what's dead stays that way." |
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aesthetic theory afterlife appears argument art's artifact artistic modernism beauty becomes claims concept concrete confronts connoisseur connoisseurship consciousness Critique of Judgment culture dead nature death defense demands disavowal dream end of art exile experience external failure force freedom Freud future G. W. F. Hegel garbage genius Gerhard Richter historical reflection human idea Ilya Kabakov insofar interpretation inwardness ironist irony joke judgment of taste Kabakov Kant and Hegel Kant's knowledge Leon Battista Alberti lifeboat living look matter means mechanism memory Michelangelo mind modernist art Moses mourning movement nature's neurosis neurotic nonetheless normativity object October 18 painting past phantasy philosophical aesthetics philosophy of art photograph Plato pleasure pleasure principle possible practice present preserve proper psychical psychoanalysis question reality relation remains sense social specific spirit suffering systematic technique thereby thing thinking thought tion traditional trans transcendence transmission traumatic ture turn uncanny University
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Página 227 - If now we apply ourselves to considering mental life from a biological point of view, an 'instinct' appears to us as a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic, as the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body
Página 223 - Perhaps we have adopted the belief because there is some comfort in it. If we are to die ourselves, and first to lose in death those who are dearest to us, it is easier to submit to a remorseless law of nature, to the sublime Ananke (Necessity), than to a chance which might perhaps have been escaped.