Social & Political Thought
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Browsing Social & Political Thought by Subject "Aesthetics"
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Item Open Access At the Intersection of Ethics and Aesthetics: Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor Adorno on the Work of Art(2015-01-26) Belmer, Stephanie Lynn; Horowitz, AsherThis dissertation undertakes a comparative study of the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno and the ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. I argue that Levinas’s resistance to aesthetics and Adorno’s to ethics have led interpreters to miss an essential overlap in their writings. My first concern is to demonstrate that Adorno’s theory of aesthetics, when placed side by side with Levinas's philosophy, serves to expand Levinas’s conception of the ethical encounter. While Levinas provides a rich account of the ethical, he does not commit himself in any serious way to the study of aesthetics. The expression unique to ethics, for Levinas, occurs as a face-to-face encounter, and Levinas is quite emphatic that the ethical encounter is not produced by any work, including and especially the work of art. Nonetheless, Levinas finds in certain artists evidence of ethical expression. When read alongside Adorno's aesthetic theory, it becomes possible to argue that Levinas’s ethics of responsibility need not be limited to the relation between two human beings. The experience of ethics described by Levinas can then be extended to include the experience of works of art. My second concern is to demonstrate how Levinas’s notion of ethical transcendence challenges Adorno's perceived confinement within a system of immanent critique. Adorno, like Levinas, criticizes a form of rationality that would elevate the subject to an absolute; and Adorno, again like Levinas, seeks ways to interrupt this subject’s totalizing stance. However, Adorno refuses to outline an ethics and there is much to his writing, particularly his reliance on a negative dialectics, which makes it very difficult to imagine ethics in the way that Levinas describes. Nonetheless, I argue that the two thinkers are not as far apart as they at first seem. There are striking similarities between Adorno's account of the artwork’s disorienting effect on subjectivity and Levinas’s description of the effect of alterity on the subject. By exposing these similarities, it becomes possible to attribute a Levinasian ethical dimension to Adornian aesthetic experience. In other words, Levinas helps us to push Adorno beyond his reliance on a privative description of ethics and thus allows for a productive rereading of Adorno's theory of art as critique.Item Open Access Contemporary Ruins: Politics and Aesthetics Beyond the Melancholy Imagination(2014-07-09) Henderson, Christine Rose; Forsyth, James ScottThis thesis attempts to elucidate the specificities of contemporary ruins using critical theory and cultural studies applied to various sites of analysis ranging from art and film to abandoned factories and disaster zones. It is motivated not only by the question of whether thinking about the contemporary world through the conceptual paradigm of the ruin might offer insight into the crises that afflict our everyday lives, but by the political desire to seek, amidst the ruins, an opportunity to re-imagine the possible.The ruinous processes of creative destruction, dispossession, commodification, forced obsolescence, deindustrialization and disaster are examined in their relation to the workings of capitalism. Capitalism is seen to systematically manufacture ruins, producing physical, ecological and affective geographies of ruination. These ruins are the starting point to ask the question: What does it mean for the political imagination to be confronted with social reality as a mounting pile of wreckage? I suggest that it has a profound impact upon our sense of historical agency, upon our capacity to dream, to imagine, and to act. Ruins are bound up with losses of all kinds, and, as such, with larger cultural practices of memory and mourning. While ruins in capitalist modernity still embodied a dialectic tension between old and new, loss and invention, nostalgia and optimism, ruins in postmodernity lack the same productive tension: they seem to signal unqualified loss and the foreclosure of all possibilities for the future. I argue that moving beyond this depressive melancholy imagination, one of the many 'ruins of modernity', requires that we confront and work through these losses in order to be better able to seize the opportunities for resistance and social change that exist in the present. The representation of ruins, the relation of form to content, is considered from the standpoint of its ability to restore perceptibility and responsiveness or, inversely, to anaesthetize and make us numb. Radical, self-reflexive aesthetic practices, concerned with symbolizing loss and deepening historical awareness, are presented as a creative and promising approach to re-appropriating the ruins.