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Art makes its mark upon our flesh. It ravishes our eyes, invades our ears, and stirs our viscera; it commandeers our powers of attention and unsettles our body with its strangenesses. The event of art is thus an encounter both with a sensuous object and with ourselves, exposing us as subjects strangely susceptible to being moved.
The twenty-first-century European thinkers elucidated here describe a theory of the aesthetic subject: Irigaray articulates the basic outlines of a subject ill at ease with itself. Badiou, Nancy, and Perniola theorize art as an event of deformation that befalls an aesthetic subject fundamentally invested in form. Rancière and Sloterdijk explore the figuration of the body (and its limits) in contexts closer to everyday experience and our life within modern history and politics. This study brings together feminist, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological inheritances to describe the operations of the real in art and aesthetic life.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Butler on the body not given, Lyotard on body-thought and the aesthetic subject
1. Irigaray on the limits of the homely figuration of the unhomely subject
2. Badiou on the aesthetic subject's intimations of the void
3. Nancy on sense and the disidentification of the aesthetic subject
4. Perniola on visuality as a mode of sense: Between an ideal of being and formless nonbeing
5. Sloterdijk on the body's indifference to the supposed mastery of consciousness
6. Rancière on the body as a political figure of order in the shared life of the aesthetic subject
Index
About the author
Robert Hughes is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is author of
Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language (2010) and has published a number of essays on figures in contemporary continental thought. He is also a translator of contemporary French and German philosophy, most recently Peter Sloterdijk's
Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry (2023), and he is co-editor of
After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (2002).
Summary
This book elucidates the work of 21st-century European thinkers to describe the event of art as an intuited correspondence between (a) a sensuous object grasped at its limit of form and deformation and (b) an aesthetic subject unsettlingly exposed at its own limits of form and the real.
