Doing Aesthetics with Arendt

Cecilia Sjöholm

Published by Columbia University Press 2015

Doing Aesthetics with Arendt

How to See Things

Cecilia Sjöholm

In the series Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

https://doi.org/10.7312/sjoh17342

Overview
Contents

About this book

Cecilia Sjöholm reads Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of the senses, grappling with questions of vision, hearing, and touch even in her political work. Constructing an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher's fragmentary writings on art and perception, Sjöholm begins a vibrant new chapter in Arendt scholarship that expands her relevance for contemporary philosophers.

Constructs an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher’s fragmentary writings on art and perception.

Author information

Cecilia Sjöholm is professor of aesthetics at Södertörn University. Her research focuses on issues in phenomenology and aesthetics, with a particular emphasis on the history of aesthetics and its relation to politics. Her books include Regionality/Mondiality: Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics, and Globalization (with Charlotte Bydler); Kristeva and the Political; and The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire.

Reviews

J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research:
With its insistent references to the spaces of appearances and new beginnings, to judgment and narrative, and to perspectives and plurality, Hannah Arendt's philosophy is thoroughly and emphatically structured by aesthetic categories, which no reader could have failed to notice. Bringing these categories—and some new ones: the sense of 'realness' and the 'sounding' of the language of love—into orderly, pointed, and illuminating focus, Cecilia Sjöholm has compellingly and beautifully constructed for us Arendt's unwritten aesthetics. By allowing Arendt's aesthetic doctrine to so perspicuously come into view, Sjöholm has placed us all in her debt.

Gabriel Rockhill, author of Radical History and the Politics of Art:
In addition to filling a significant hole in existing scholarship, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt performs a powerful double gesture with far-reaching consequences. The double entendre of the title means both cultivating an account of aesthetics in which there appeared to be none and, perhaps more fundamentally, transforming the aesthetic apertures that pre-conceptually determine how a body of work appears. Cecilia Sjöholm has truly done what appeared impossible by doing aesthetics with Arendt.

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism:
Cecilia Sjöholm provides an original and provocative reinterpretation of the difficult and controversial philosophical issues in Hannah Arendt's studies, such as embodiment, realness, appearance, judgment, and the role of sense experience. Doing Aesthetics with Arendt is written with admirable clarity, elegance, and a sense of its own unique voice.

Topics

Frontmatter Accessible Download PDF	i
Contents Accessible Download PDF	vii
Introduction Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	ix
1. Sensing Space: Art and the Public Sphere Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	1
2. The Work of Art Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	31
3. The Encroachment of Others Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	68
4. Tensions of Law: Tragedy and the Visibility Of Lives Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	105
5. Comedy in the Dark: Arendt, Chaplin, and Anti-Semitism Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	133
Notes Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	155
Bibliography Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	199
Index Requires Authentication Accessible Download PDF	211

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 240

eBook

Published: August 18, 2015
ISBN: 9780231539906