The muses
By: Jean-Luc Nancy ; translated by Peggy Kamuf.
Series: Meridian, crossing aesthetics; Meridian (Stanford, Calif.)
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 118
Subjects: Aesthetics; Arts -- Philosophy
Description: This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses--to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred--and sense or meaning in general. Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel's Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit--art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel's historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy. --Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-118).