Consequences of Enlightenment

Leading critic explores the link between politics, philosophy and aesthetics in a range of important thinkers.

Anthony J. Cascardi (Author)

9780521481496, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 February 1999

278 pages
21.6 x 14 x 1.9 cm, 0.5 kg

"His work offers the best account I have read of the importance of the Enlightenment-generated urgingss that the aesthetic addresses and of its strategies for doing so." McGowan Reviews Dec 2001

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated.

Acknowledgements
1. The consequences of enlightenment
2. Aesthetics as critique
3. The difficulty of art
4. Communication and transformation: aesthetics and politics in Habermas and Arendt
5. The role of aesthetics in the radicalisation of democracy
6. Infinite reflection and the shape of praxis
7. Feeling and/as force.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]