Doing Aesthetics with Arendt

Cecilia Sjoholm is professor of aesthetics at Sodertorn University. Her research focuses on issues in phenomenology and aesthetics, with a particular emphasis on the history of aesthetics and its relation to politics. Her books include Regionality/Mondiality: Perspectives on Art, Aesthetics, and Globalization (with Charlotte Bydler); Kristeva and the Political; and The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire.

Cecilia Sjoholm provides an original and provocative reinterpretation of the difficult and controversial philosophical issues in Hannah Arendt's studies, such as embodiment, realness, appearance, judgment, and the role of sense experience. Doing Aesthetics with Arendt is written with admirable clarity, elegance, and a sense of its own unique voice. -- Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, author of Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism In addition to filling a significant hole in existing scholarship, Doing Aesthetics with Arendt performs a powerful double gesture with far-reaching consequences. The double entendre of the title means both cultivating an account of aesthetics in which there appeared to be none and, perhaps more fundamentally, transforming the aesthetic apertures that pre-conceptually determine how a body of work appears. Cecilia Sjoholm has truly done what appeared impossible by doing aesthetics with Arendt. -- Gabriel Rockhill, author of Radical History and the Politics of Art With its insistent references to the spaces of appearances and new beginnings, to judgment and narrative, and to perspectives and plurality, Hannah Arendt's philosophy is thoroughly and emphatically structured by aesthetic categories, which no reader could have failed to notice. Bringing these categories-and some new ones: the sense of 'realness' and the 'sounding' of the language of love-into orderly, pointed, and illuminating focus, Cecilia Sjoholm has compellingly and beautifully constructed for us Arendt's unwritten aesthetics. By allowing Arendt's aesthetic doctrine to so perspicuously come into view, Sjoholm has placed us all in her debt. -- J. M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research

• Introduction 1. Sensing Space: Art and the Public Sphere 2. The Work of Art 3. The Encroachment of Others 4. Tensions of Law: Tragedy and the Visibility of Lives 5. Comedy in the Dark: Arendt, Chaplin, and Anti-Semitism Notes Bibliography Index