Philosophers on Art

Resumen del libro

Philosophers approach art from a wholly unique perspective, and by incorporating their thought into an analysis of art, both our notion of what art can embody and our understanding of what criticism can achieve expand. Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five primary philosophical texts on art written by twenty different philosophers. Stretching from the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays represent Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and the practice of psychoanalysis, each introduced by an overview and interpreted by the author.
In these essays Martin Heidegger discusses the meaning of the Greek temple and Van Gogh's painting of shoes; Georges Bataille elucidates Salvador Dalí's The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno questions capitalism through an analysis of collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes address the uncanny effects of photography; Sigmund Freud muses on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva look closely at paintings by Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze, considers the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben, taking his cue from Kant and Aristotle, explores the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want intersperses these texts with essays on aesthetics (from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière) that prove philosophy adopted an entirely new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. Preface
Introduction: Art and Philosophy
1. Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant
2. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3. How the True World Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error The Will to Power as Art, by Friedrich Nietzsche
4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, by Sigmund Freud
5. The Lugubrious Game, by Georges Bataille
6. A Small History of Photography, by Walter Benjamin
7. Nietzsche's Overturning of Platonism The Origin of the Work of Art, by Martin Heidegger
8. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I Of the Gaze as Object Petit a, by Jacques Lacan
9. Las Meninas, by Michel Foucault
10. Society, by Theodor Adorno
11. The Work of Art and Fantasy, by Sarah Kofman
12. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, by Roland Barthes
13. Giotto's Joy Holbein's Dead Christ, by Julia Kristeva
14. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, by Jacques Derrida
15. Hysteria, by Gilles Deleuze
16. Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?, by Jean-François Lyotard
17. Privation Is Like a Face, by Giorgio Agamben
18. The Vestige of Art, by Jean-Luc Nancy
19. Art and Philosophy, by Alain Badiou
20. The Janus-Face of Politicized Art, by Jacques Rancière
Notes
Bibliography
Index