Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dali's The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Ranciere, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.
Preface Introduction: Art and Philosophy 1. Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant 2. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 3. How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error | The Will to Power as Art, by Friedrich Nietzsche 4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle | Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, by Sigmund Freud 5. The Lugubrious Game, by Georges Bataille 6. A Small History of Photography, by Walter Benjamin 7. Nietzsche's Overturning of Platonism | The Origin of the Work of Art, by Martin Heidegger 8. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I | Of the Gaze as Object Petit a, by Jacques Lacan 9. Las Meninas, by Michel Foucault 10. Society, by Theodor Adorno 11. The Work of Art and Fantasy, by Sarah Kofman 12. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, by Roland Barthes 13. Giotto's Joy | Holbein's Dead Christ, by Julia Kristeva 14. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, by Jacques Derrida 15. Hysteria, by Gilles Deleuze 16. Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?, by Jean-Francois Lyotard 17. Privation Is Like a Face, by Giorgio Agamben 18. The Vestige of Art, by Jean-Luc Nancy 19. Art and Philosophy, by Alain Badiou 20. The Janus-Face of Politicized Art, by Jacques Ranciere Notes Bibliography Index
