Category: theory

Immanuel Kant: Aesthetics

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Douglas Burnham elucidates Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Kant discussed aesthetic judgement, taste, beauty, claims leading to formalism, aesthetic ideas (leading to conceptualism and to formlessness), aesthetic experience, the sublime, genius and fine art. Also, Kant bridged aesthetics to ethics.

A refresher and/or necessary reading in relation to Duchamp’s Fountain. NSU Art Museum celebrates the centenary of Fountain. Fountain and the stories told about it seem to dramatize Critique of Judgment.

I would separate the valorization of Duchamp from the mythologizing of Fountain.

100.51 B61 no.2

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Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven might need to be acknowledged.

Related – Burnham answers questions via AskPhilosophers.

Julia Kristeva

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Thoughts on humanism as an ongoing project questioning the nature of god and of humans, through poetry and science.


On poetic language.


On love generated from maternal space.

More videos and text.

Via Perverts at Cell Projects.

cell project space

Walter Benjamin

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Projecting the Arcades: A Talk at the Jewish Museum Takes Up Walter Benjamin by Malaya Sadler, Artnews

Jens Hoffman talked with Boris Groys and Michael Taussig.

To Groys, The Arcades Project represents Benjamin’s effort as an inveterate flâneur to “combine vita activa and vita contemplativa in a new way. Movement and repetition become mediated and combined,” he said. The flâneur, at once dispassionate and highly sensitive, adopts a contemplative disposition and also mobilizes it.

Taussig noted that he might read The Arcades Project and its cultural criticisms as a movement toward awakening from the spell of the consumer mythos of 19th-century Paris—and maybe from the spell of history itself. Benjamin’s conception of history, said Taussig, is coupled with an awareness of technology and a resistance to using archetypes, or static concepts, to understand an ever-changing and permeable modern world.

Why Criticism Matters

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Why Criticism Matters – Essay by Elif Batuman NYTimes, 2011.

Literature viewed in this way becomes a gigantic multifarious dream produced by a historical moment. The role of the critic is then less to exhaustively explain any single work than to identify, in a group of works, a reflection of some conditioned aspect of reality.

Batuman reads “Constructed Worlds” is adapted from her forthcoming first novel, “The Idiot.”

Also, How to Be a Stoic.

It is the system

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Jacques Rancière on the representative democracy, professional politicians and the french election. Applies to much western democracies. via verso.

Édouard Louis echoes critiquing the system, of a failed Left, from which the far Right seems hopeful. via guardian.

Journalism can help with a deeper probe of the politics, numbers and language of the system. via On the Media.