In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy-the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society-through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of "Man," upon which the aesthetic itself often depends.

About the Author
Grant H. Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, author of Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, and coeditor of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995-2010, all also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews
"An extraordinarily knowledgeable explanation for those outside the art world, as well as those critically within it, of the philosophical traditions and social contradictions within which artists do their work. This is a book to own." -- Susan Buck-Morss, The Graduate Center, City University of New York



Book Information
ISBN 9781478020424
Author Grant H. Kester
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 390g