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Speculations V: Aesthetics in the 21st Century

  • Edited by Ridvan Askin, Paul J. Ennis, Andreas Hägler, Philipp Schweighauser

Published on May 15, 2014 by punctum books

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Pages
474 pages
Languages
English
Dimensions
5.83⤫8.27 in.
ISBN (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-0-692-20316-3 (Paperback)
DOI
DOI: 10.21983/P3.0068.1.00(opens in new tab)
BISAC subject codes
BISAC: PHI013000
Thema subject codes
THEMA: QDHR7, QDTJ

Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the traditional focus on epistemology and theorize aesthetics in its ontological connotations. It is according to this shift that speculative realists have proclaimed aesthetics as “first philosophy” and as speculative in nature. With speculative realism aesthetics no longer necessarily implies human agents. This is in alignment with the general speculative realist framework for thinking all kinds of processes, entities, and objects as free from our all-pervasive anthropocentrism, which states, always, that everything is “for us.”

This special volume of Speculations explores the ramifications of what could be termed the new speculative aesthetics. In doing so, it stages a three-fold encounter: between aesthetics and speculation, between speculative realism and its (possible) precursors, and between speculative realism and art and literature.

Contents

  1. Frontmatter (1–5)

    Ridvan Askin, Andreas Hägler, Philipp Schweighauser

  2. Introduction: Aesthetics after the Speculative Turn (6–38)

    Ridvan Askin, Andreas Hägler, Philipp Schweighauser

  3. Non-Phenomenological Thought (40–56)

    Steven Shaviro

  4. Beauty, the Will to Power, and Life as Artwork: Aesthetico-Speculative Realism in Nietzsche and Whitehead (57–91)

    Theodor Leiber, Kirsten Voigt

  5. Sellars Contra Deleuze on Intuitive Knowledge (92–126)

  6. Not Kant, Not Now: Another Sublime (127–157)

    Claire Colebrook

  7. Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry (OOI) (158–179)

    N. Katherine Hayles

  8. Actual Qualities of Imaginative Things: Notes towards an Object-Oriented Literary Theory (180–224)

    Jon Cogburn, Mark Allan Ohm

  9. Speculative Experiments: What if Simondon and Harman Individuate Together? (225–247)

    Miguel Penas López

  10. Greenberg, Duchamp, and the Next Avant-Garde (251–274)

    Graham Harman

  11. Not Objects so Much As Images: A Response to Graham Harman’s ‘Greenberg, Duchamp, and the Next Avant-Garde’ (275–286)

  12. Strategic Invisibility: The Zero Point of Modernism and the Avant-Garde (287–310)

    Thomas Gokey

  13. The Anxiousness of Objects and Artworks 2: (Iso)Morphism, Anti-Literalism and Presentness (311–358)

  14. The Alien Aesthetic of Speculative Realism, or, How Interpretation Lost the Battle to Materiality and How Comfortable this Is to Humans (359–381)

    Roberto Simanowski

  15. Art and Guerrilla Metaphysics: Graham Harman and Aesthetics as First Philosophy (382–410)

    Francis Halsall

  16. Images I Cannot See (411–433)

    Magdalena Wisniowska

  17. Disegno: A Speculative Constructivist Interpretation (434–473)

    Sjoerd van Tuinen

Biographies

  • Ridvan Askin

    (Editor) (opens in new tab)

    University of Basel

  • Paul J. Ennis

    (Editor) (opens in new tab)

    University College Dublin

  • Andreas Hägler

    (Editor)

    University of Basel

  • Philipp Schweighauser

    (Editor)

    University of Basel

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Genres

  • Art+Aesthetics
  • Philosophy

Keywords

  • aesthetics
  • art
  • metaphysics
  • philosophy
  • speculative realism