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Zusatztext An original and meticulously crafted account of aesthetic agency in its conceptual evolution from Kant to Adorno . . . What sets this work apart from comparable works exploring the art-agency relation from Kant onward is that it deftly plays between antithetical attitudes toward the notion of aesthetic agency. . . The work presents a historically grounded analysis of how these competing tendencies of art -- enchantment and disenchantment -- stand in various stages of dialectical interdependence with one another. . . One has to commend this work as a powerful and timely defense of aesthetic agency. It is a welcome line of argument for those of us who can neither naively ascribe to art the power of spiritual redemption nor cynically reduce art to the purpose of entertainment, pleasure, or emotional catharsis. Informationen zum Autor Ayon Maharaj (Swami Medhananda) is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Vedanta Society of Southern California in Hollywood, USA. Vorwort An evaluation of the value of art based on the aesthetic speculations of the major German thinkers from Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno. Theodor Adorno. Zusammenfassung This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition — Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno — attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of “aesthetic agency”— art’s capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian’s attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics. Inhaltsverzeichnis PrefaceAcknowledgementsAbbreviations of Primary TextsIntroduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity1. Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’2. The "Great Gulf" of the Third Critique : Kant's Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Lif3. Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism 4. Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony5. Art’s ‘After’ and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics 6. The Idealist Legacy: Adorno’s Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic Theory Epilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical ImmanenceNotesBibliographyIndex...
