Description
This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses-to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred-and sense or meaning in general.
Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel's Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit-art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel's historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy.
About the Author
Jean-Luc Nancy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg. Stanford has published two of his many books in English translation: The Birth to Presence and The Experience of Freedom (both 1993).
Reviews
"A truly exhilarating set of philosophical reflections on art and aesthetics. . . . Nancy masterfully explicates the threshold role art plays in the philosophical distinctions between the sensory and the sensible, life and death."-Georges Van Den Abbeele, University of California, Davis
Book Information
ISBN 9780804727815
Author Jean-Luc Nancy
Format Paperback
Page Count 136
Imprint Stanford University Press
Publisher Stanford University Press
Weight(grams) 204g
