{"product_id":"the-sovereign-self-9781478020424","title":"The Sovereign Self","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eThe Sovereign Self\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIntroduction  1\u003cbr\u003e I. From Beauty to Dissensus\u003cbr\u003e 1. Freedom and Sovereignty  19\u003cbr\u003e 2. Communism and the Aesthetic State  48\u003cbr\u003e II. Negation and Performativity\u003cbr\u003e 3. From Vanguard to Avant-Garde  85\u003cbr\u003e 4. Activism and Autonomy in the 1960s  108\u003cbr\u003e III. Autonomy since the 1980s\u003cbr\u003e 5. The Rise of the Neo-Avant-Garde  145\u003cbr\u003e 6. The Hirschhorn Monument: Autonomy as Brand and Alibi  180\u003cbr\u003e Conclusion. Aesthetics beyond Semblance  212\u003cbr\u003e Notes  219\u003cbr\u003e Works Cited  243\u003cbr\u003e Index  259\u003cbr\u003e  ","brand":"Duke University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49409013907799,"sku":"9781478020424","price":19.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781478020424.jpg?v=1730505092","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-sovereign-self-9781478020424","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}