Aesthetics and Modernity

John Rundell is associate professor of social theory at the University of Melbourne.Agnes Heller is an influential and internationally recognized philosopher who frequently writes on such diverse topics as ethics, modernity, and political theory. In 2005 she was awarded the Sonning Prize. She is currently the Hannah Arendt Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at The New School in New York City.

Agnes Heller is peerless as a philosopher of the modern condition. Long acclaimed for her acuity and extraordinary compass, here Heller presents a vivid cross-section of her thinking, convening analyses of emotions and needs, forms of rationality and social association, and questions about the crux of value and human communion around a sustained consideration of artworks and of the beleaguered concept of the beautiful. As John Rundell expounds in his instructive introduction to the collection, Heller approaches postmodern critique as a way of sharpening the best insights of modern thought, while concurrently refusing its metaphysical biases. She resuscitates the notion of a vibrant subjectivity, takes up the ipseity of artworks, and enters into dialogue with an array of thinkers, demonstrating how the urge for sure guarantors of value may be tackled with an understanding of contingency and historical truth. And Heller writes with utter disregard for jargon or cant, confessing her concerns directly and never allowing the reader to forget that this is a discussion of our shared modernity, and of the open possibility of coming to be at home within it.

• Chapter 1 Chapter One. Agnes Heller: Modernity, Aesthetics and the Human Condition—An Interpretative EssayChapter 2 Chapter Two. What Went Wrong with the Concept of the Beautiful?Chapter 3 Chapter Three. Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of the ArtworkChapter 4 Chapter Four. The Role of Emotions in the Reception of ArtworksChapter 5 Chapter Five. Joke culture and transformations of the public sphere.Chapter 6 Chapter Six. The Contemporary Historical NovelChapter 7 Chapter Seven. The Metaphysics of Embodiment in the Western TraditionChapter 8 Chapter Eight. European master-narratives about freedom.Chapter 9 Chapter Nine. The Three Logics of Modernity and the Double Bind of the Modern ImaginationChapter 10 Chapter Ten. The Absolute Stranger: Shakespeare and the Drama of Failed AssimilationChapter 11 Chapter Eleven. The Gods of Greece: Germans and GreeksChapter 12 Chapter Twelve. Self representation and the representation of the other.Chapter 13 Chapter Thirteen. Where are we at Home?