Doing Aesthetics with Arendt

Doing Aesthetics with Arendt
Author: Cecilia Sjöholm
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2015-08-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231539908

Cecilia Sjöholm reads Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of the senses, grappling with questions of vision, hearing, and touch even in her political work. Constructing an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher's fragmentary writings on art and perception, Sjöholm begins a vibrant new chapter in Arendt scholarship that expands her relevance for contemporary philosophers. Arendt wrote thoughtfully about the role of sensibility and aesthetic judgment in political life and on the power of art to enrich human experience. Sjöholm draws a clear line from Arendt's consideration of these subjects to her reflections on aesthetic encounters and works of art mentioned in her published writings and stored among her memorabilia. This delicate effort allows Sjöholm to revisit Arendt's political concepts of freedom, plurality, and judgment from an aesthetic point of view and incorporate Arendt's insight into current discussions of literature, music, theater, and visual art. Though Arendt did not explicitly outline an aesthetics, Sjöholm's work substantively incorporates her perspective into contemporary reckonings with radical politics and their relationship to art.

Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics

Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics
Author: Jim Josefson
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2019-05-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 303018692X

We face a crisis of public reason. Our quest for a politics that is free, moral and rational has, somehow, made it hard for us to move, to change our positions, to visit places and perspectives that are not our own, and to embrace reality. This book addresses this crisis with a model of public reason based in a new aesthetic reading of Hannah Arendt’s political theory. It begins by telling the story of Arendt’s engagement with the Augenblicke of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kafka and Benjamin, in order to identify her own aesthetic Moment. Josefson then explicates this Moment, what he calls the freedom of the beautiful, as a third face of freedom on par with Arendt’s familiar freedoms of action and the life of the mind. He shows how this freedom, rooted in Jaspers’s phenomenology and a non-metaphysical reading of Kant, serves to redress the world-alienation that was a uniting theme across Arendt’s works. Ultimately, this volume aims to challenge orthodox accounts of Arendtian politics, presenting Arendt’s aesthetic politics as a radically new model of republicanism and as an alternative to political liberal, deliberative and agonistic models of public reason.

Our Sense of the Real

Our Sense of the Real
Author: Kimberley Curtis
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 226
Release: 1999
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780801486401

This bold and persuasive study rereads the works of Hannah Arendt to recuperate her relevance to contemporary politics and to show that her deepest concerns are oriented by her ontology. Kimberley Curtis interprets Arendt's earlier work through the lenses of The Life of the Mind, elucidating what Curtis calls an "aesthetic sensibility of tragic pleasure" as a way out of the enclave politics of late modernity.Arguing that oblivion and radical forgetfulness of others are among the most ethically troubling features of our political landscape, Curtis shows that Arendt's aesthetic account of politics offers us an idiom in which to name and resist the depravations and dangers of our political condition. Curtis also elucidates Arendt's debt to phenomenology and argues that our sense of reality is born through highly charged sensuous provocation and mutual responsiveness. Arendt's innovation is to recognize that this countenancing of others is an aesthetic experience that creates the political world.Curtis plumbs the relevance of this work in current issues such as gated communities for the privileged and prisons for the disenfranchised, and in the extraordinary relationship between a black civil rights leader and a Ku Klux Klan officer. Our Sense of the Real is a poetic invocation of Arendt's politics, at once lively, passionate, and crucial.

Reflections on Literature and Culture

Reflections on Literature and Culture
Author: Hannah Arendt
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2007
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780804744997

This is the first volume in any language that collects Hannah Arendt's remarkable series of essays and notes on literary figures and cultural questions.

Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Schiller on Kant's Aesthetics

Hannah Arendt and Friedrich Schiller on Kant's Aesthetics
Author: Mihály Szilágyi-Gál
Publisher: Peter Lang Gmbh, Internationaler Verlag Der Wissenschaften
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2017
Genre: Aesthetics
ISBN: 9783631720202

This book analyzes how the public character of judgments of taste makes implicit statements in moral and political philosophy. The author regards Friedrich Schiller's and Hannah Arendt's approaches on the normative resources of Kant's aesthetics for moral and political thought.

Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Action

Hannah Arendt's Theory of Political Action
Author: Trevor Tchir
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2017-05-20
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 3319534386

This book presents an account of Hannah Arendt’s performative and non-sovereign theory of freedom and political action, with special focus on action’s disclosure of the unique ‘who’ of each agent. It aims to illuminate Arendt’s critique of sovereign rule, totalitarianism, and world-alienation, her defense of a distinct political sphere for engaged citizen action and judgment, her conception of the ‘right to have rights,’ and her rejection of teleological philosophies of history. Arendt proposes that in modern, pluralistic, secular public spheres, no one metaphysical or religious idea can authoritatively validate political actions or opinions absolutely. At the same time, she sees action and thinking as revealing an inescapable existential illusion of a divine element in human beings, a notion represented well by the ‘daimon’ metaphor that appears in Arendt’s own work and in key works by Plato, Heidegger, Jaspers, and Kant, with which she engages. While providing a post-metaphysical theory of action and judgment, Arendt performs the fact that many of the legitimating concepts of contemporary secular politics retain a residual vocabulary of transcendence. This book will be of interest not only to Arendt scholars, but also to students of identity politics, the critique of sovereignty, international political theory, political theology, and the philosophy of history.

Space, Politics and Aesthetics

Space, Politics and Aesthetics
Author: Mustafa Dikec
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2015-06-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748685995

Mustafa Dikec reveals the aesthetic premises that underlie Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Ranciere's political thinking, and demonstrates how their politics depend on the construction and apprehension of worlds through spatial forms and distributions. Exploring these dimensions of the political, he argues that politics is about how perceive and relate to the world. Space is a form of appearance and a mode of actuality, and the disruption of such forms and modes is the sublime element in politics.

Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics

Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics
Author: Davide Panagia
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 72
Release: 2016-09-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1452953821

Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics is an invitation to culture makers, political thinkers of all kinds, and everyday spectators to reconsider their love of the world of appearances. Inspired by Jacques Rancière’s Ten Theses on Politics and work by Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, and Roland Barthes, Davide Panagia offers conceptual provocations that emphasize the sense of conviction one has when facing the frictions of aesthetic experience. Rooted in varied and variable experiences of border crossings, Panagia invites readers to reflect on the relational practices that appearances engender. Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

An Education in Judgment

An Education in Judgment
Author: D. N. Rodowick
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2021-08-10
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 022678021X

The Art of Thinking -- Judgment and Culture -- Culture and Curation -- The World-Observer -- Politics and Philosophy, or Restoring a Common World -- An as Yet Undetermined Animal.