Postscript: ‘Art after experience’– Speculative Realism and the Sublime1

Sublime Art ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 241-264
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
The Sublime

It seems undeniable that in the last ten years or so continental philosophy has undergone a shift that could turn out to be epochal and that takes the name ‘Speculative Realism’. It would therefore seem negligent not to include some sort of account of it in a book that claims to pertain to contemporary art. Nevertheless, while the sublime is arguably a factor in the development of Speculative Realism, it is certainly tangential to its major concerns, which in large part rest upon a rejection of Kant. As a result, my discussion of Speculative Realism is brief and by no means sophisticated, but is offered here as an attempt to indicate what the sublime’s future might hold, both philosophically and in the realm of art.

Presenting the Unpresentable: Jean-François Lyotard’s Kantian Art-Sublime

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Rachel Zuckert
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The Absolute

Abstract This article reconstructs Jean-François Lyotard’s theory of the sublime in contemporary art, focusing on his claim that such art ‘presents’ the unpresentable, and tracing its origins in Kant’s account of the sublime. I propose that Lyotard identifies a difficulty concerning Kant’s account: to understand why the disparate elements in the experience of the sublime (idea of reason, sensible representation) should be synthesized to form that experience. Lyotard recasts this difficulty as a pragmatic problem for artistic practice – how to ‘testify’ to the absolute in a non-absolute, sensibly perceivable object (the artwork) – that can be understood to drive avant-garde artistic experimentation.

Neither Substance Nor Process I: Anti-Reductionism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Cogburn
Keyword(s):  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Object Oriented ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Contemporary Work ◽  
Recent Trends ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

The first chapter focuses on Garcia’s arguments against reductionism, with (i) an explanation of Garcia’s affirmation of ontological liberality, and (ii) a discussion of Garcia’s important supplementary arguments against the view that some putative entities are not things. The first few sections of the chapter contain an analysis of Garcia’s argument against what Graham Harman calls overmining and undermining. Both philosophers’ efforts are tied to contemporary work concerning reductionism in analytic philosophy. This discussion motivates (i) a brief presentation of Harman’s account of Heidegger’s “readiness-to-hand”, (ii) a discussion of capacity metaphysics, and (iii) Garcia’s differential ontology of objects. In this manner, Garcia’s central motivation and broad picture are situated with respect to recent trends in continental philosophy, particularly speculative realism and object-oriented ontology.

scholarly journals Fields of Sense and Formal Things: The Ontologies of Tristan Garcia and Markus Gabriel

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 129-142
Author(s):  
Arjen Kleinherenbrink
Keyword(s):  
Specific Problem ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
The Core ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Core Features

Abstract A striking feature of the relatively new philosophical genre of speculative realism is that it includes theories that explicitly seek to bridge or overcome the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. Two such theories are Markus Gabriel’s ontology of fields of sense and Tristan Garcia’s ontology of formal things. Both theories hold that all entities - be they physical, mental, fictional, technical, or otherwise - are equally and irreducibly real. This article first describes the core features of these ontologies. This provides insight into these theories themselves and also gives us a glimpse of what philosophy ‘beyond the divide’ might look like. In addition, both theories are shown to be examples of what I will call ‘relational’ philosophy, or philosophy that exhaustively defines entities in terms of how they appear to or feature in other entities. I argue that all such philosophies are haunted by the ‘infinite deferral of specification,’ a specific problem that I argue renders them inconsistent. Finally, I oppose such ‘relationist’ philosophies to ‘substantialist’ ones, and suggest that this distinction might one day succeed the division between analytic and continental philosophy.

scholarly journals Second Nature and the Sonic Sublime

2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 178-196
Author(s):  
Miranda Stanyon
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Human Action ◽  
Second Nature ◽  
Michel De Certeau ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Physical Environments ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Point Of Departure

Like other spaces of the Enlightenment, the sublime was what Michel de Certeau might have called “a practiced place.” Its rhetorical commonplaces, philosophical terrains, and associated physical environments were cultivated, shaped, and framed by human action and habit. But can the sublime—epiphanic, quasi-spiritual, unmasterable, extraordinary—ever really become a habit? Is it possible, even natural, to become habituated to sublimity? Taking as its point of departure the Aristotelian claim that “habit is a second nature,” this article explores the counterintuitive relationship between habit and the sublime. It focuses not on that eighteenth-century “cultivar,” the natural sublime, but on sonic sublimity, exploring on one hand overwhelming sounds, and on the other a conceptualization of sound itself as a sublime phenomenon stretching beyond audibility to fill all space. As this exploration shows, both the sublime and habit were seen as capable of creating a second nature, and prominent writers connected habit, practice, or repetition to the sublime. Equally, however, there are points of friction between the aesthetic of the sublime and philosophies of habit, especially in the idea that habit dulls or removes sensation. This is a prominent idea in Félix Ravaisson's landmark De l'habitude (1838), a text currently enjoying renewed attention, and one that apparently stems from Enlightenment attempts to explain sensation, consciousness, and freedom. Similar concerns inform the eighteenth-century sublime, yet the logic behind the sublime is at odds with the dulling of sensation. The article closes by touching on the reemergence of “second nature” in contemporary art oriented toward the sublime, and on the revisions of Enlightenment nature this involves.

scholarly journals Vital New Matters: The Speculative Turn in the Study of Religion and Gender

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Reid-Bowen
Keyword(s):  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Speculative Philosophy ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Current State ◽  
Copernican Revolution ◽  
Religion And Gender ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Critical Turn ◽  
Object Oriented Ontology

This article provides an introduction to a new trend in continental philosophy, the turn toward metaphysics, realism and speculative philosophy. This stands in sharp contrast with the antirealist and correlationist traditions that have held sway since Kant’s Copernican Revolution in 1781. It is claimed that the study of religion and gender has been shaped by the antirealist legacy of Kant, but there are good reasons for taking account of the new ‘speculative turn’. Two examples from the leading exponent of this turn, speculative realism, are introduced, and some provisional notes toward applying these to the gender-critical turn in the study of religion are considered. Research notes on the current state of the Goddess movement serve as a test case for the introduction of an object-oriented ontology into religious and gender studies.

For Those Who Disagree – Rancière and the Sublime

Sublime Art ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 202-240
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Philosophy Department ◽  
Jacques Rancière ◽  
The One ◽  
Negative Sense ◽  
The Way

The work of Jacques Rancière is concerned with the sublime, but in a negative sense. He hates it. And as well, he hates the way thinkers such as Deleuze and Lyotard (and in fact them in particular, his colleagues in the Philosophy department at Paris VIII) have constructed both an aesthetics and an ethics from it. And as well, how this sublime aesthetics draws upon a politics (which is also an ontology) of otherness. In fact, he is even going to accuse Derrida of this, although without roilling him up with the problems of the sublime. So Rancière is going to be very useful to us as a critical reflection on those who have gone before, but as well he will because he is the one who speaks most about contemporary art. But his place here is not entirely negative, despite his constant and methodological disagreements. Rancière also offers an aesthetics based upon Kant’s Third Critique, but one that begins from the beautiful rather than the sublime. This will be a useful addition to the aesthetics we have already examined that emerge from Kant’s work, and another possible way to understand its political possibilities.

Sublime Art

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Zepke
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Art History ◽  
Deleuze And Guattari ◽  
Philosophical Discourse ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Aesthetic Politics ◽  
The Future ◽  
Post War ◽  
War Art

The book analyses recent philosophical discussions of Kant’s theory of the sublime, and the artistic examples these give or provoke, in order to construct a diagram of sublime contemporary art. This diagram will have the immediate aim of producing a new genealogy of post-war art that avoids the modern/postmodern rupture, in favour of a sublime art that can utilise both traditional and new media and has the production of the future as its political goal. The book will draw on both philosophical discourse and art history and theory in making its argument. The introduction will give an account of the historical emergence of the sublime, concentrating on Kant. The following five chapters will each discuss a contemporary philosopher’s reading of Kant’s sublime (Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Rancière, Jameson), and also consider their artistic examples. From this will be drawn a diagram of sublime art that incorporates the most useful aspects of each thinker, and also outlines a new genealogy of post-war art. The sixth chapter will then use this diagram, and its artistic genealogy, to offer a theory of contemporary artistic practices as an aesthetic politics (ie., a biopolitics) that overcomes the current (postmodern) impasse between art and life. The conclusion will project this new diagram into the future.

Art and Evangelical Spiritual Aspirations

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Moral Choice ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Common School

Analyzing evangelical theological controversies in the context of contemporary art and aesthetics, it is clear that evangelicals’ spiritual aspirations concerned deep feeling. Arguments over art were parallel to theological controversies as Reynolds and Gainsborough, like Wesley and Whitefield, debated issues while “engrossed by the same pursuits” within a common “school.” Moreover, the evangelical Calvinist expressed spiritual aspirations that were a religious version of the sublime—that sense of “shrinking into the minuteness of one’s nature” felt in the presence of overwhelming vastness and power. And the evangelical Arminian expressed spiritual aspirations that appear as a religious version of the heroic—that feeling for the agony of moral choice demanded by the good that requires struggle and rests only in victory after travail. Ultimately, the Calvinist-Arminian tension among eighteenth-century evangelicals was concerned with the religious meanings of modern agency, modern moral aspiration, and the realization of good in the modern world.

“I SEE QUENTIN MEILLASSOUX AS EXACTLY LIKE STALIN”. AN INTERVIEW WITH BORIS GROYS

2018 ◽  
pp. 27-54 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Success Strategies ◽  
Special Role ◽  
Speculative Realism ◽  
Joseph Beuys ◽  
Spirit Of Capitalism ◽  
New Interpretation ◽  
The Spectator

This interview is concerned with problems that some contemporary theories such as accelerationism, the theory of a new spirit of capitalism, and speculative realism confront as they turn out to be not so far removed from the theories of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. Instead of acceleration, Groys offers a concept of a deceleration which eventually results in stagnation. This suggests the possibility of actualizing the experience of Soviet socialism, which Groys always understood as original and exotic and therefore especially valuable to those who study it with an open mind. The interview also considers the scandal resulting from the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. According to Groys, Heidegger’s position hinged on his attitude toward language, which he felt should be defended at some point by force of arms. Fascism in language may in turn be challenged by the language of visual culture that is universal and extra-national. The interview also considers art, including where something new in art is now to be found. The new is produced by a change in context, and what is new in art is always a new interpretation of its boundaries. Joseph Beuys’ slogan, “Everyone is an artist”, has become even more to the point because contemporary communication in its extremely varied modes lacks an address. Groys underlines the special role of reenactment in contemporary art as it increasingly devotes itself to exhibiting archived material and documenting earlier performances. All of this is focused on making the spectator feel that she has irrevocably missed something and will never be able to make contact with it. That manoeuvre is also relevant to the problem of authenticity in art because the authentic exists only as something elusive and impossible to attain and never as the authentic itself. It exists only as the dream of itself. The interview touches upon the success strategies for contemporary artists: to succeed locally, you must first become famous internationally.

scholarly journals Emphasis: Category of sublime in contemporary aesthetic culture

2021 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-148
Author(s):  
Divna Vuksanovic
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Modern Age ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Works Of Art ◽  
The World ◽  
Artistic Quality ◽  
Contemporary Poetics

The text has the aspiration to sketch a frame of reference for understanding the concept of the sublime today, as it is used in the context of art. The basic idea is to investigate how the category of the sublime appears in the modern age, both within aesthetic theories and with regard to certain poetics and specific works of art. The key difference in the perception of the sublime in relation to the earlier phases of capitalism and the present one consists in the connection that the sublime establishes with new technologies, which is also reflected in the world of art. The exploitation of the category of the sublime through new technologies, embedded in some of the contemporary poetics, is characteristic of our time, which is determined through the primacy of profit in relation to any aesthetic/artistic quality manifested by contemporary art.

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