The Aesthetic Subject in Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Literature

This book elucidates the work of 21st-century European thinkers to describe the event of art as an intuited correspondence between (a) a sensuous object grasped at its limit of form and deformation and (b) an aesthetic subject unsettlingly exposed at its own limits of form and the real.

Art makes its mark upon our flesh. It ravishes our eyes, invades our ears, and stirs our viscera; it commandeers our powers of attention and unsettles our body with its strangenesses. The event of art is thus an encounter both with a sensuous object and with ourselves, exposing us as subjects strangely susceptible to being moved.

The twenty-first-century European thinkers elucidated here describe a theory of the aesthetic subject: Irigaray articulates the basic outlines of a subject ill at ease with itself. Badiou, Nancy, and Perniola theorize art as an event of deformation that befalls an aesthetic subject fundamentally invested in form. Rancière and Sloterdijk explore the figuration of the body (and its limits) in contexts closer to everyday experience and our life within modern history and politics. This study brings together feminist, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological inheritances to describe the operations of the real in art and aesthetic life.

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