Unspeakable Events

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Gikandi
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Standing ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment

This chapter presents two instances of how slave money shaped the moment of taste in both pragmatic and conceptual terms. It provides a substantive exploration of the cultural traffic between Britain and its colonial outposts in order to show how the experience of slavery was turned into an aesthetic object that was woven into the fabric of everyday life. It then seeks to connect slave money and the power and prestige of art by focusing on the aesthetic lives of William Beckford and Christopher Codrington, famous heirs to slave fortunes, who sought to remake their social standing through the patronage of art and the mastery of taste.

Between Ethics and Aesthetics – Reception of Genetic Information and Narrative Experience

2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 144-144
Author(s):  
Raphaël Pfeiffer ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Genetic Information ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Suicide Attempts ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Ethical Reasoning ◽  
Daily Lives ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Negative Feelings

"In a clinical context, the communication of genetic information is an event that can give rise to unexpected situations for health professionals. Several empirical studies have shown that, despite being presented with “good” presymptomatic test results, some patients develop negative feelings, depression, which can in extreme cases lead to suicide attempts. Here, genetic information takes full meaning when considered in a personal narrative. In this presentation, we would like to look at the specificities of this narrative experience in the light of works on the aesthetics of everyday life, with a particular focus on the works of John Dewey. For Dewey, the aesthetic experience is possible in all aspects of people’s daily lives, including clinical experience. In this case, “aesthetics” appears in the sensitive character of an experience rather than in a specific type of object. Through the examination of this thought, we will ask to what extent we can speak of an aesthetic experience when thinking of the communication of genetic information, and how this consideration can help ethical reasoning. We will begin by examining how the moment of the communication of genetic information to patients by the clinician can constitute a process of defamiliarization of everyday life. This will lead us to look at patients’ accounts of genetic information reception and to analyse how these appear to be more than mere testimonies about the experience of pathologies, but a means by which the patient is confronted with difficult experiences in order to reformulate them. "

George Eliot’s Promise of More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Edmund Burke ◽  
Literary Realism ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Adam Bede ◽  
Mill On The Floss ◽  
Literary Description ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter recovers the aesthetic significance of a reader’s mediated relation to the objects and experiences represented in realist fiction. When George Eliot’s intrusive narrators in Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, and Middlemarch cue readers to form impressions that are as distinct as possible, they expose the indeterminacy that persists in the most concrete passages of literary description, alerting us to the limits of how much we can ever know about a fictional world. By drawing on the aesthetics of indeterminacy advanced by Edmund Burke, this chapter reveals that Eliot’s commitment to narratives of disillusionment exists in tension with a surprisingly Romantic aversion to finitude, and that literary realism enchants ordinary things by freeing them from the solidity and determinacy they possess in everyday life.

Schopenhauer and the Paradox of the Sublime

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-255
Author(s):  
Bart Vandenabeele
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Human Reason ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
The Aesthetic

Schopenhauer explores the paradoxical nature of the aesthetic experience of the sublime in a richer way than his predecessors did by rightfully emphasizing the prominent role of the aesthetic object and the ultimately affirmative character of the pleasurable experience it offers. Unlike Kant, Schopenhauer’s doctrine of the sublime does not appeal to the superiority of human reason over nature but affirms the ultimately “superhuman” unity of the world, of which the human being is merely a puny fragment. The author focuses on Schopenhauer’s treatment of the experience of the sublime in nature and argues that Schopenhauer makes two distinct attempts to resolve the paradox of the sublime and that Schopenhauer’s second attempt, which has been neglected in the literature, establishes the sublime as a viable aesthetic concept with profound significance.

The Unbearable Lightness of the Image

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 109-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donatella Della Ratta
Keyword(s):  
Web 2.0 ◽  
Real Time ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Political Commitment ◽  
Life Activity ◽  
Bearing Witness ◽  
Ethical Discourse ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Web

In this essay, I reflect on the aesthetic, political and material implications of filming as a continuous life activity since the beginning of the 2011 uprising in Syria. I argue that the blurry, shaky and pixelated aesthetics of Syrian user-generated videos serve to construct an ethical discourse (Ranciére 2009a; 2013) to address the genesis and the goal of the images produced, and to shape a political commitment to the evidence-image (Didi-Huberman 2008). However, while the unstable visuals of the handheld camera powerfully reconnect, both at a symbolic and aesthetic level, to the truthfulness of the moment of crisis in which they are generated, they fail to produce a clearer understanding of the situation and a counter-hegemonic narrative. In this article, I explore how new technologies have impacted this process of bearing witness and documenting events in real time, and how they have shaped a new understanding of the image as a networked, multiple object connected with the living archive of history, in a permanent dialogue with the seemingly endless flow of data nurtured by the web 2.0.

The Virtual Infernal: Philippe de Loutherbourg, William Beckford and the Spectacle of the Sublime

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iain McCalman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Special Significance ◽  
Virtual Reality Technology ◽  
Gothic Novel ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
William Beckford ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Drury Lane

Abstract In the autumn of 1781, shortly after being elected to the British Academy of Art as a landscape painter, Alsatian-born artist Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg was hired by the wealthy young aesthete William Beckford to prepare a private birthday spectacle at his mansion in Wiltshire. De Loutherbourg, who was also chief scenographer at Drury Lane theatre and the inventor of a recent commercial “moving picture” entertainment called the Eidophusikon, promised to produce “a mysterious something that the eye has not seen nor the heart conceived.” Beckford wanted an Oriental spectacle that would completely ravish the senses of his guests, not least so that he could enjoy a sexual tryst with a thirteen year old boy, William Courtenay, and Louisa Beckford, his own cousin’s wife. The resulting three day party and spectacle staged over Christmas 1781 became one of the scandals of the day, and ultimately forced William Beckford into decades of exile in Europe to escape accusations of sodomy. However, this Oriental spectacle also had a special significance for the history of Romantic aesthetics and modern-day cinema. Loutherbourg and Beckford’s collaboration provided the inspiration for William to write his scintillating Gothic novel, Vathek, and impelled Philippe himself into revising his moving-picture program in dramatically new ways. Ultimately this saturnalian party of Christmas 1781 constituted a pioneering experiment in applying the aesthetic of the sublime to virtual reality technology. It also led Loutherbourg to anticipate the famous nineteenth-century “Phantasmagoria” of French showman, Gaspard Robertson, by producing in 1782 a miniature Gothic movie scene based on the Pandemonium episode in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Introduction: Sensing Justice

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Mónica López Lerma
Keyword(s):  
A Priori ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment

The meaning of justice and the meaning of the aesthetic may both be sensed, but they can never be codified or entirely understood. They lack an essence, or a definition; they exist in specific performances rather than as general propositions. The aesthetic and the just alike deny the application of a priori models or abstract understandings and instead focus on the tangible and unrepeatable experience of singular events. The artwork and the moment of judgment come each time differently. Reproduction is forgery....

Impressions Received in The Ambassadors

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-197
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Relationship ◽  
Moral Judgements ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Moment

Chapter 5 looks at The Ambassadors, arguing that its protagonist Lambert Strether’s impression is at different times empiricist (a means for him to discover the truth) and aesthetic (a means for him to appreciate beauty for its own sake). In its empiricist guise, Strether’s impression helps him to glimpse what is taking place behind the deceptive surfaces of Paris, behind the performative impressions engineered by Chad Newsome and Madame de Vionnet to disguise their sexual relationship: it helps him to discover facts and make moral judgements. By contrast, aesthetic impressions, including those confected for him by the lovers, help him to ‘live’, to make the most of life by imaginatively augmenting it, by offering him a fuller appreciation of the moment or a beautiful memento of it. The impression, then, lies at the fraught intersection of the aesthetic freedom of the imagination and the empiricist exigencies of experience.

Gender Mainstreaming in Development

2021 ◽  
pp. 870-886
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Kurebwa
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Gender Mainstreaming ◽  
Decision Making Process ◽  
Life Situation ◽  
Gender Perspective ◽  
Specific Policy ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Policies And Practices

Gender mainstreaming means the consistent use of a gender perspective at all stages of the development and implementation of policies, plans, programmes, and projects. Mainstreaming gender differs from previous efforts to integrate women's concerns into government activities in that, rather than ‘adding on' a women's component to existing policies, plans, programmes, and projects, a gender perspective informs these at all stages and in every aspect of the decision-making process. Gender mainstreaming starts by analyzing the everyday life situation of women and men. It makes their differing needs and problems visible and examines what this means for specific policy areas. In this way, it ensures policies and practices are not based on incorrect assumptions and stereotypes. It recognizes that gender is one of the most fundamental organizing features in society and affects our lives from the moment we are born.

Socrates and the objet ambigu

2020 ◽  
pp. 400-440
Author(s):  
Hans Blumenberg
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
The Aesthetic

This chapter examines Hans Blumenberg's “Socrates and the objet ambigu: Paul Valéry's Discussion of the Ontology of the Aesthetic Object and Its Tradition” (1964). It discusses the origin story of Paul Valéry's dialogue Eupalinos. More than ten years after his letter to Paul Souday, Valéry returns to this prehistory and confirms that he had chosen the form of the dialogue for its elasticity and malleability. And there can be no doubt that it is this form that led to Socrates carrying the dialogue. All this, including the choice of the name “Eupalinos” — an ancient architect Valéry found in an encyclopedia — is of paramount facticity, which, if not labored, was certainly perceived as adequate. But this facticity, which befell the poet, was at the same time provoked by the needs of his poetic self-understanding — and was, of course, stylized in retrospect.

Aesthetic Judgments and Their Cultural Grounding

2019 ◽  
Vol 2018 (3) ◽  
pp. 269-281
Author(s):  
Stefan Majetschak
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Aesthetic Object ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Complex Approach ◽  
Cultural Grounding ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Judgments

Abstract At present, the theoretical approaches of Baumgarten and Kant continue to constitute the framework for discussing the nature of aesthetic judgments about art, including the question of what such judgments are really articulating. In distinction to those two eighteenth-century theorists, today we would largely avoid an assumption that aesthetic judgments necessarily attribute beauty to the objects being judged; we would as a rule take a far more complex approach to the topic. But whatever we say about art, even today many theorists wish to ground aesthetic judgments in particularities of the aesthetic object, like Baumgarten, or in specific moments of the aesthetic experience, like Kant.

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