The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno

by J.M. Bernstein

Aesthetic alienation may be described as the paradoxical relationship whereby art and truth have come to be divorced from one another while nonetheless remaining entwined. J. M. Bernstein not only finds the separation of art and truth problematic, but also contends that we continue to experience art as sensuous and particular, thus complicating and challenging the cultural self-understanding of modernity. Bernstein focuses on the work of four key philosophers—Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno—and provides powerful new interpretations of their views. Bernstein shows how each of the three post-Kantian aesthetics (its concepts of judgment, genius, and the sublime) to construct a philosophical language that can criticize and displace the categorical assumption of modernity. He also examines in detail their responses to questions concerning the relations among art, philosophy, and politics in modern societies.

Genres: Philosophy, Art

224 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1992

About the author

J.M. Bernstein is the University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He previously taught at the University of Essex and at Vanderbilt University. He works primarily in the areas of ethics, critical theory, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and German Idealism. His books include: The Philosophy of the Novel (Minneapolis, 1984); The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Oxford, 1992); Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York, 2001); Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, 2006). He also edited and wrote the introduction for Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (New York, 2003).

Reviews

[Neda]

it was good