Deconstruction as Critique of Ideology: Paul de Man’s Reading of The Critique of Judgment

1970 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Arribas
Keyword(s):  
Transcendental Philosophy ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Separate Spheres ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man ◽  
Critique Of Ideology

ResumenEn este artículo se lleva a cabo una reconstrucción de la deconstrucción que realiza Paul de Man de la célebre distinción kantiana entre la filosofía transcendental y la metafísica, tal y como ésta es expuesta en la Crítica del Juicio. En lugar de considerar que pertenecen a dos esferas separadas, en el artículo se muestra cómo, según de Man, se da una transición entre ellas que sólo se puede explicar bajo la forma de un cortocircuito tropológico o lingüístico que Kant mismo realiza, pero de manera inconsciente. También se pone de relieve que la noción kantiana de lo sublime, escondida bajo la categoría de lo esct Ttético, cumple la función ideológica de reprimir la constitución inherentemente lingüística de todo conocimiento.Palabras clave Crítica, deconstrucción, estética, ideologÍaAbstractThis article carefully reconstructs Paul de Man’s deconstruction of Kant’s distinction between transcendental philosophy and metaphysics, as the latter appears in The Critique of Judgment. Instead of posing these two as belonging to two separate spheres, the paper shows how, according to de Man, there is a transition between them that can only be accounted for in terms of a tropological or linguistic trick that Kant himself realizes, yet unaware of it. The paper also discusses that Kant’s notion of the sublime has an ideological function disguised under the category of the aesthetic, and which amounts to a denial of the inherently linguistic constitution of all knowledge.Key wordsCritique, deconstruction, aesthetics, ideology

The Critical-Linguistic Critique of the Aesthetic Ideology in the Late Writing of Paul de Man

Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Jeremy Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Ideology ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man ◽  
The Relationship

The focus of this essay is Paul de Man's provocative antipathy towards the category of the aesthetic in his late writings on philosophical aesthetics. I introduce de Man's critique of what he terms aesthetic ideology – a form of ideological communication – which he considers manifest in the aesthetics of Schiller in particular but also in more scrupulously critical philosophers. I begin the essay with Benjamin's well known observation that twentieth century fascisms aestheticized political practice as part of a defence of existing property relations. I introduce de Man's critique of aesthetic ideology as a way of developing or elaborating on what are relatively sketchy comments on the relationship aesthetics and politics in Benjamin's earlier essay.

scholarly journals Critique of ideology and skepticism

2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84
Author(s):  
Branko Romcevic
Keyword(s):  
Paul De Man ◽  
De Man ◽  
Critique Of Ideology

This text is concerned with possibility of critique of ideology. Since ideology is usually explained as omnipresent, its critique should be taken as ideological too. In order to examin the possibility of avoiding such consequence, we are analysing few powerful solutions to that problem (Marx, Althusser, Zizek, Paul de Man). At some point, we are proposing Levinas? discourse on skepticisim and its refutation as a model for understanding the relations of ideology and its critique.

Varia: Beauty and/(n)or Truth: A (Hermeneutic) Rhetoric of the Aesthetic

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Divine Encounters ◽  
De Man ◽  
Hans Georg Gadamer

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –,” a line of poetry by the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson can be used as a signpost for this article, which attempts a hermeneutic regress from the postmodern to the archaic, in search of a rhetoric for the aesthetic. In this textual tour, some of the master narratives of our culture examining various versions of the story of beauty and truth are visited, and more specifically (always in backward motion), the work of the postmodern theorists Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, the German philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the English Romantic poet John Keats, the Greek philosophers Plato and Parmenides, and, last but not least, the Greek poet Sappho. Paul de Man, the “sad” patriarch of postmodernism, who engaged deeply with the cardinal problem of the truth of poetry and its relation to reality, contests that all language is figurative and rhetorical, and hence unable to represent the real. De Man demystifies aesthetics exploding a whole tradition of aesthetic theory based on the ontology of language, that is, the relation between “word” and “thing.” Along the same lines, the deconstructive critique of Jacques Derrida supports that linguistic figurality contaminates not only literature but philosophy as well, playing mimetic games of seduction that limit reality to a textual frame. On the far side of deconstruction, the hermeneutic theory of Hans- Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger give figurality an overwhelming power by establishing a rhetoric of ontology and presence. Heidegger’s radical reformulation of truth as aletheia and its conjunction with beauty, not only reflects the romantic identification of “beauty is truth,” as best expressed by the poet John Keats, but also points back to Plato who “aporetically” devoted a lifetime to a search for the beautiful and the true, coming up with multiple and contradictory views. As we move into archaic times, the whispering voice of Parmenides unexpectedly recommends the rhetoric of persuasion as the way to truth, while Sappho, celebrating presence and union, employs an erotic rhetoric that names not only human, but natural and divine encounters of beauty and truth.

Kant’s Account of the Sublime as Critique

Kant Yearbook ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Rachel Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Abilities ◽  
Mystical Experience ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
Extensive Discussion ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Cognitive Access ◽  
Artistic Representation ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract Kant’s account of the sublime in the Critique of Judgment has been extremely influential, prompting extensive discussion of the psychology, affect, moral significance, and relevance to artistic representation of the sublime on his provocative view. I focus instead on Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime in connection to his theoretical critical project, namely his attempt to characterize human cognitive powers and to limit human pretensions to knowledge of the supersensible. I argue, first, that his account of the psychology of the sublime is designed to explain not just its affective character (its displeasure-pleasure), but also to address challenges concerning the coherence of an experience of something as transcending one’s cognitive abilities. Thereby, I argue moreover, Kant provides an alternative, demystifying account of mystical experiences, in which humans might take themselves to intuit that which is beyond human understanding or reason, and thus to claim that they have special cognitive access to the supersensible, transcending the limits Kant claims to establish for human cognition. Kant’s account of the mathematical sublime is not merely so reductive of mystical experience, however; it also, I suggest, describes the aesthetic of Kantian critique itself.

Introduction: Exiled from Oneself– Art and Other Strange Migrations …

Sublime Art ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
Philosophical Concept ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Material Reality ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Is Development ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Antonio Negri

The sublime is a philosophical concept for an experience or sensation that exceeds its subjective conditions, and as such is unrepresentable. The introduction will sketch its development from Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) where it is distinguished from the beautiful and associated with terror, to Kant’s extension of it in his Critique of Judgment (1790). As Kant remains the source of all the contemporary versions of the sublime we will be concerned with, it will be important to have an understanding of his work. In particular, Kant’s affirmation of the autonomy of the aesthetic realm of sensation, and is development of the sublime as an experience that goes beyond its human conditions of possibility will be central to the book. The sublime experience itself can appear within a variety of different affects, but its dominant mode, beginning with Burke, is one of overwhelming terror and pain. Although this affect is important to its aesthetic trajectory, we shall understand the sublime in the somewhat altered sense in which Nietzsche claimed overcoming the human involved the pain of childbirth. In other words the experience of the sublime, and the emergence in Kant’s account of the transcendental realm of the Ideas that reconstitutes human subjectivity, will be rethought as a generative and aesthetic event that takes us beyond our bio-political conditions of possible experience, and expresses the vital force of the future as the transcendental dimension of our material reality. As Antonio Negri has put it, sublime art is the embodiment of an event in action, and as such ‘Art is simultaneously the creation and reproduction of the absolute singular’ (Art and Multitude (Polity press, 2011)).

Kants »Kritik der Urteilskraft« und die Philosophie der Aufklärung

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-23
Author(s):  
Joachim Küpper
Keyword(s):  
18Th Century ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Critique Of Judgment ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideas

Der Aufsatz diskutiert die Frage nach der Relation von Kants ästhetischer Theorie zur Philosophie der Aufklärung anhand zweier zentraler Komplexe der Kritik der Urteilskraft: Zur Analytik des Erhabenen wird vertreten, daß sich aus Kants Argumenten heraus die Auffassung entwickeln konnte, die Erfahrung des (spezifisch modernen) Kunstschönen sei ein Vehikel, den Menschen mit einem Bewußtsein seiner selbst als rationalem Wesen auszustatten. Zum Komplex der ›ästhetischen Ideen‹ wird argumentiert, daß sich bei Kant der Gedanke von der Erfahrung des Kunstschönen als einer Kompensation des Rationalitätsdrucks der im 18. Jahrhundert einsetzenden Moderne entwickelt. This paper seeks to examine the relation between Kant’s aesthetic theory and the philosophy of Enlightenment. My study will focus on two central aspects from the Critique of Judgment: In connection with the Analytic of the Sublime, I will argue that Kant’s discussion of the concept enabled the development of the opinion that experiencing the specifically modern artistic beauty works as a means to equip us with an awareness of ourselves as beings equipped with reason. The second aspect I want to discuss is that of the aesthetic ideas. I will show that in the Third Critique, the idea of experiencing artistic beauty functions as a compensation for the pressure of rationality that sets in together with modernity in the 18th century.

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

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.

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