Description
Book SynopsisIn
The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has
Trade Review“An extraordinarily knowledgeable explanation for those outside the art world, as well as those critically within it, of the philosophical traditions and social contradictions within which artists do their work. This is a book to own.” -- Susan Buck-Morss, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Table of ContentsIntroduction 1
I. From Beauty to Dissensus
1. Freedom and Sovereignty 19
2. Communism and the Aesthetic State 48
II. Negation and Performativity
3. From Vanguard to Avant-Garde 85
4. Activism and Autonomy in the 1960s 108
III. Autonomy since the 1980s
5. The Rise of the Neo-Avant-Garde 145
6. The Hirschhorn Monument: Autonomy as Brand and Alibi 180
Conclusion. Aesthetics beyond Semblance 212
Notes 219
Works Cited 243
Index 259
