Handbook of Inaesthetics (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) - Hardcover

Badiou, Alain

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804744084 ISBN 13: 9780804744089

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2004

Synopsis

This volume presents a new proposal for the link between philosophy and art. Badiou identifies and rejects the three schemes of didacticism, romanticism, and classicism that he sees as having governed traditional "aesthetics," and seeks a fourth mode of accounting for the educative value of works of art.

About this title

About the Author

Alain Badiou holds the Chair of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superiere in Paris. Many of his books have been translated into English, including Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, 2003), Manifesto for Philosophy (1999), and Deleuze: The Clamor of Being (1999).

From the Inside Flap

Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education.
Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art.
Among these "inaesthetic" variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Stephane Mallarme, and Samuel Beckett.

About this edition

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0804744084
• ISBN 13: 9780804744089
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 168