Winter 2005

Grant Kester

Tuesday 3:30-6:20 PM

VAF Seminar Room

VIS 243 Seminar in Aesthetic Theory

Course Description

This course will outline some central problems in modern aesthetic philosophy, focusing on work in the German tradition. Rather than a encyclopedic survey we’ll be concentrating on three key figures: Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. As a result, there is much that we will overlook; the entire English tradition (Hume, Cudworth, and Shaftesbury) as well as lesser figures in German romanticism (Novalis, Schelling, etc.). What we lose in comprehension will, hopefully, be regained in depth of engagement. Taken in turn, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger are interlocutors in an unfolding conversation, defined by both rupture and continuity, that has continued to influence thinking on art and the aesthetic up to the present day. Their work has been decisive for more recent critical theory, especially the continental tradition associated with Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze. It is axiomatic that substantive engagement with poststructuralist thinkers such as these requires a firm grounding in the work of their German predecessors (introduced to them by Jean Hypolite and Alexander Kojéve). The first three quarters of the term will be devoted to an investigation of Kant (specifically the third Critique), Hegel’s lectures on the aesthetic, and two, or possibly three, Heidegger essays (“The Origins of the Work of Art” and “The Question Concerning Technology”). The final quarter will be devoted to more recent interlocutors, focusing primarily on Derrida’s The Truth of Painting, but with some additional readings from Adorno, Ranciére and others.

In this course we will explore the symbiotic relationship between modern art and aesthetic philosophy. Why, for example, does aesthetic philosophy emerge in its modern form at the same time that art is becoming increasingly detached from the praxis of daily life? Does art, in fact, require the discursive supplement of philosophy to make itself relevant to a modern public? We will also examine the complex interaction between the aesthetic and the political within modernity. On one hand, the aesthetic emerges in conjunction with modern individuality, freed from the epistemological and ontological bonds of absolutism. How do we understand the particular thoughts and sentiments of this newly liberated subject? What sort of guidance can they provide us with in defining cultural and political norms? Concepts of taste, and the particular concern of aesthetic philosophy with somatic experience, signal the working out of these questions within the very body of the modern subject. At the same time, the aesthetic is consistently defined as a bridge between individual sensibility and a larger social (or cognitive) totality. Concepts of sensus communis and the “aesthetic state” in Kant, Schiller and Hegel point to the modern tendency to endow aesthetic experience with the kind of quasi-metaphysical power formerly reserved for divine revelation (cf. Michael Fried’s concept of “grace” or Lyotard’s sublime). Through aesthetic experience we intuit the existence of a pre-discursive, quasi-anthropological human commonality. The aesthetic is seen as a unique form of experience, able to restore the divided halves of a human subject torn asunder by the de-humanizing forces of an implacable modernity. And yet, this restoration can only be evoked by the work of art indirectly: any attempt to harness the emancipatory power of the aesthetic to a process of political resistance or change instantly dissolves it’s power. The redemptive future foreshadowed in aesthetic experience is constantly deferred, only to be realized in the here and now through the virtual form of the art work. The result is an ongoing tension in the modern period around the political status of the aesthetic, and the potential relevance of aesthetic insight to other domains of social and cultural life. These are some of the issues we’ll be exploring during the coming term.

Readings

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987)

* Use the Pluhar translation.

G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T.M. Knox, volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988)

Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, edited, with an introduction by David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper San Francisco, 1977)

Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)

* Used paperback copies of the Kant, Hegel, Heidegger and Derrida books are widely available.

* Additional readings will be available on-line via E-reserves (“ER”) or other web sites, or in the form of a xerox master distributed in class.

Class Schedule

WEEK 1

Tuesday, January 4

Introduction to Class

WEEK 2

Tuesday, January 11

• David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason, “The Framework of Enlightenment Semiotics: Christian Wolff” and “Semiotics and Aesthetics in the work of Baumgarten, Meier and Mendelssohn,” (excerpt) (ER)

• Howard Caygill, Art of Judgment “Taste and Civil Society,” (Xerox)

week 3

Tuesday, January 18

• Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, (ER)

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, excerpts from “Introduction” and Book I, “Analytic of the Beautiful,” pp.9-96 (Ak. 171-Ak. 244)

week 4

Tuesday, January 25

• Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, excerpts from Book II, “Analytic of the Sublime,” pp.97-207 (Ak. 244-Ak. 336)

• Jean-Marie Schaeffer, “Kantian Prolegomena, Analytic Aesthetics” in Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger, (ER)

week 5

Tuesday, February 1

• G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art

Introduction, Section 1-8, pp.1-90

Section II. The Classical Form of Art, Introduction, pp.427-442

Section II. The Classical Form of Art, Chapter II, pp.476-485

Section II, The Classical Form of Art, Chapter III, pp.502-516

Section III. The Romantic Form of Art, Introduction, pp.517-529

Chapter III. The Formal Independence of Individual Characters, Section 3, “Dissolution of the Romantic Form of Art,” pp.602-611

WEEK 6

Tuesday, February 8

• William Desmond, “Art, Religion and Absoluteness” (chapter three) and “Art, History and the Question of an End” (chapter four) in Art and the Absolute: A Study of Hegel’s Aesthetics (Albany: SUNY Press, 1986) (ER)

• T.W. Adorno, excerpts from Aesthetic Theory, translated by C. Lenhardt, edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (London: Routledge, 1984)

Chapter 5, “The Beautiful in Art: Apparition, Spiritualization, Visuality,” pp.116-147

Chapter 7, “Enigmatic Quality, Truth Content, Metaphysics,” pp.173-196

Chapter 9, “Subject-Object,” pp.234-251

Chapter 10, “Thoughts on a Theory of the Art Work,” pp.252-284

Chapter 12, “Society,” pp.320-352 (excerpt) (ER)

• G.W.F. Hegel, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage,” Phenomenology of Mind (URL)

http://www.class.uidaho.edu/mickelsen/texts/Hegel%20Phen/hegel%20phen%20ch%204%20A.htm

WEEK 7

Tuesday, February 15

• Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings

“Origin of the Work of Art”

“Question Concerning Technology”

“Building, Dwelling, Thinking”

WEEK 8

Tuesday, February 22

• Jacques Derrida, “Parergon,” The Truth in Painting, pp.17-147

• Jean-Francois Lyotard, “Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime,” Artforum 20:8 (April 1982) (ER)

WEEK 9

Tuesday, March 1

• Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions” (excerpt), The Truth in Painting, pp.257-334

• J.M. Bernstein, “The Deconstructive Sublime: Derrida’s The Truth in Painting,” The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992) (ER)

WEEK 10

Tuesday, March 8

• Jacques Ranciére, “The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14 (March-April 2003) (ER)

• Martin Jay, “Drifting into Dangerous Waters: The Separation of Aesthetic Experience from the Work of Art” in Aesthetic Subjects, edited by Matthews and McWirther (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) (ER)

• Terry Eagleton, “From Polis to Postmodernism,” The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) (ER)

Assignments and Grading

The reading for this course will be demanding, especially for students with no background in philosophy. You’ll be expected to keep up with the readings and contribute regularly to course discussions. Grading is based on class participation (20%), a presentation on one of the weekly readings (20%) and a final paper (60%).

For the final paper you can select one of two options.

1) A close reading and analysis of a key work (an essay or a chapter/segment of a book) by Kant, Hegel, Heidegger or Derrida

2) An essay that applies the ideas of one of these thinkers to the interpretation of a specific work of art or issue related to art practice (historical or contemporary).

A précis of the final paper will be due in class on week six. Papers for MFA students must be at least 3750 words (including endnotes). Papers for Ph.D. students must be 4500-6000 words. Please double-space and use 10-12 point Helvetica (or a similar font). Format your citations using the Chicago Manual of Style. Late papers will be marked down 1/2 letter grade for each day they are overdue.