Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.20 (568 Votes) |
| Asin | : | B071SDF4SF |
| Format Type | : | |
| Number of Pages | : | 328 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-12-29 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
This aesthetics proposes a major shift in our understanding of art, which is less about representation than existence. Although we live in a time of social, political, and environmental emergencies, Zabala makes the convincing case that we tend to repress the emergencies we live in. The art world, as well as the philosophical community, will benefit from Zabala's best book so far. The first task of the critique of ideology today is thus to dispel this myth of emergencysomething that Zabala does brilliantly, combining theoretical stringency with immense readability. (Christine Ross, author of The Past Is the Present; It’s the Future Too: The Temporal Turn in Contemporary Art and The Aesthe
He is the author of The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat (Columbia, 2008); The Remains of Being: Hermeneutic Ontology After Metaphysics (Columbia, 2009); and (with Gianni Vattimo) Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx (Columbia, 2011), and the editor of several of Vattimo's books, including Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics, and Law (2004); The Future of Religion (2005, with Richard Rorty); an
The state of emergency, thinkers such as Carl Schmidt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben have argued, is at the heart of any theory of politics. Zabala draws on Martin Heidegger's distinction between works of art that rescue us from emergency and those that are rescuers into emergency. Radical artists create works that disclose and demand active intervention into ongoing crises. We need a way of disrupting the existing order that can energize radical democratic action rather than reinforcing the status quo. Interpreting works of art that aim to propel us into absent emergencies, Zabala shows how art's ability to create new realities is fundamental to the politics of radical democracy in the state of emergency that is the present.. Building on Arthur Danto, Jacques Rancière, and Gianni Vattimo, who made aesthetics more responsive to contemporary art, Zabala argues that works of art are not simply for an elevated consumerism or the contemplation of beauty but are points of departure to change the world. But today the problem is not the crises we do confront, which are often how governments legitimize themselves, but the o