Between Ethics and Aesthetics

Crossing the Boundaries

Edited by Dorota Glowacka & Stephen Boos

Subjects: Philosophy
Series: SUNY series in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
Paperback : 9780791451960, 272 pages, January 2002
Hardcover : 9780791451953, 272 pages, January 2002

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Introduction:
Dorota Glowacka and Stephen Boos

Part I. Rethinking Ethics and Aesthetics: Between Philosophy and Art

1. Rethinking the Aesthetic: Kant, Schiller, and Hegel
Stephen Boos

2. Looking at Hegel's Antigone through Irigaray's Speculum/
Tina Chanter

3. Linking onto Disinterestedness, or the Moral Law in Kant's Critique of Judgment
Rodolphe Gasché

4. Gesture and Commentary
Jean-François Lyotard

Part II. Aesthetics and the Question of the Other

5. Levinas and the Ethics of Imagining
Richard Kearney

6. Disappearing Traces: Emmanuel Levinas, Ida Fink's Literary Testimony, and Holocaust Art
Dorota Glowacka

7. Poetry, Theology, and Ethics: A Study in Paul Célan
Martin Rumscheidt

8. Between Ethics and Anguish: Feminist Ethics, Feminist Aesthetics, and Representations of Infanticide in "The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim's Point" and Beloved
Marjorie Stone

Part III. Aesthetics and Politics

9. Feminine Writing, Metaphor, and Myth
Drucilla Cornell

10. Aesthetics and Politics
Terry Eagleton

11. An Ethics of the Name: Rethinking Globalization
Victor Li

12. The Social Figure of Art: Heidegger and Adorno on the Paradoxical Autonomy of Artworks
Krzysztof Ziarek

13. Politics, Aesthetics. and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky's Poem On the Death of Zhukov
David MacFadyen

Part IV. Toward an Ethical Art Practice?

14. Beauty and the Beast
Alex Colville

15. The Banal Profound and the Profoundly Banal: Andy Warhol
Elizabeth Edwards

16. Short Circuit: The Story of an Exhibition that Provoked Unforeseen Consequences
Susan Gibson Garvey

17. Other Tongues: Language and Hybridity in Recent Canadian Video Art
Marusya Bociurkiw

Contributors

Rethinks the existing definitions of aesthetics and ethics and the relations between them.

Description

This forum of current discussions of ethics and aesthetics addresses a cross-section of disciplines including literary theory, philosophy, women's studies, postcolonial theory, art history, Holocaust studies, theology, and others. Contributors, ranging from philosophers and literary critics to practicing artists and art curators, answer such questions as: In the age of the collapse of metaphysics, what is the relation between philosophical reflection and art? If we question the privilege accorded to the aesthetic, can ethics alone offer a solution to the crisis of representation? Is it possible and ethically viable to represent the other in speech and image? What happens at the conjunction of aesthetics and politics? Can one speak of aesthetic configurations of the space of community? Are the concepts of ethics and aesthetics gendered and repressive of sexual difference? Considering the many works that consider either ethics or aesthetics almost exclusively within the confines of particular disciplines, this collection crosses the boundaries and continues the debate outside the rigid parameters of specialized discourses.

At the University of King's College, Dorota Glowacka is Associate Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences and Stephen Boos is Assistant Professor of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Reviews

"This collection gives fresh and exciting readings of various historical figures and insights into contemporary ethical issues. The concern for the connection between aesthetics and ethics is one of the most important theoretical issues in contemporary theoretical debates. As Glowacka and Boos indicate, a pressing concern for contemporary theory and representation or artistic practice is how to represent or present the other without doing violence. The editors have put the collection together in a way that it speaks to many of the issues at the center of debates over representing otherness. " — Kelly Oliver, State University of New York at Stony Brook