How aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse. Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor

How aesthetics—understood as a more encompassing framework for human activity—might become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. These essays make the case for a reignited understanding of aesthetics—one that casts aesthetics not as illusory, subjective, or superficial, but as a more encompassing framework for human activity. Such an aesthetics, the contributors suggest, could become the primary discourse for political and social engagement. Departing from the “critical” stance of twentieth-century artists and theorists who embraced a counter-aesthetic framework for political engagement, this book documents how a broader understanding of aesthetics can offer insights into our relationships not only with objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and the political structures in which we are all enmeshed. The contributors—philosophers, media theorists, artists, curators, writers and architects including such notable figures as Jacques Rancière, Graham Harman, and Elaine Scarry—build a compelling framework for a new aesthetic discourse. The book opens with a conversation in which Rancière tells the volume's editor, Mark Foster Gage, that the aesthetic is “about the experience of a common world.” The essays following discuss such topics as the perception of reality; abstraction in ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics as the “first philosophy”; Afrofuturism; Xenofeminism; philosophical realism; the productive force of alienation; and the unbearable lightness of current creative discourse. Contributors Mark Foster Gage, Jacques Rancière, Elaine Scarry, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Ferda Kolatan, Adam Fure, Michael Young, Nettrice R. Gaskins, Roger Rothman, Diann Bauer, Matt Shaw, Albena Yaneva, Brett Mommersteeg, Lydia Kallipoliti, Ariane Lourie Harrison, Rhett Russo, Peggy Deamer, Caroline Picard Matt Shaw, Managing Editor

The Aesthetics of Autonomy: Ricoeur and Sartre on Emancipation, Authenticity, and Selfhood argues that, despite their differences, Sartre and Ricoeur have a similar goal. While they are both anti-essentialists, they nevertheless advocate for the notions of selfhood and autonomy. Autonomy, for them, is the end result of an aesthetic path. An identity, at the individual or collective level, is created by weaving together contingent threads of the given. In other words, identity is a narrative construct. The first two chapters focus on the respective methods of Sartre and Ricoeur. Despite their different emphases, Farhang Erfani argues that they have a similar dialectical method, between the situation and our ability to surpass it for Sartre, and between sedimentation and innovation for Ricoeur. The third chapter brings them together and shows how they can complement each other in building a narrative identity at the individual level; Ricoeur is helpful in appreciating Sartrean notions of bad faith and authenticity. The fourth and final chapter turns to collective identity; Erfani argues that Ricoeur's notions of ideology and utopia are better complemented with Sartrean political ethics. Erfani advocates for a Sartrean model of "Dark Utopianism" that overcomes the limits of Ricoeur's political philosophy. Reading Sartre and Ricoeur together provides for a balanced approach to the question of autonomy that at once pays due attention to the weight of the situation and the past, while opening up the space for change, innovation, and progress. The conclusion, accordingly, applies this thesis to the question of globalization. Both Sartre and Ricoeur scholars will be eager to explore and debate the original synthesis presented in The Aesthetics of Autonomy. It also makes contributions to hermeneutics, post-War French philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Finally, given its emphases on politics and aesthetics, the book also places itself within arguments of political theory and literary theory.

Fichte, and Matthew Arnold, and arguing that uneasy acts of aestheticization (of media technology) and abjection (of the maternal body) undergird the production of the national body as "imagined community." Subsequent chapters on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, and Percy Shelley explore further the career of the gendered body in the aesthetic tradition and the relationship among aesthetics, technics, politics, and figurative language.

"In Indigena, Native Canadians address historical injustice with passion and clarity, while offering hope for the future. Eight writers and nineteen visual artists respond to the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's landfall to the Americas, offering sharp counterpoint to the overused and inaccurate theme of "discovery" and celebrating both diversity and cultural tenacity."--Book jacket.