Jos de Mul is Full Professor in Philosophy of Man and Culture at Erasmus University, The Netherlands.

"Jos de Mul does a beautiful job of summarizing in compressed form some of the most vexed texts and ideas in contemporary theory; as a writer, he is a fine teacher. He is also an effective critic of the arts, especially painting and music. I learned and re-learned a great deal in reading this book. If a student were to ask 'What book can I read that not only explains what these people whose names I hear all the time actually say, but also demonstrates the significance of their ideas in practice?' I would be tempted to refer him or her to this book." — Jean-Pierre Mileur, University of California, Riverside"A fine, efficient introduction to a wealth of texts and demanding theoretical issues that few critics seem to know as well as de Mul." — Thomas Pfau, author of Idealism and the Endgame of Theory: Three Essays by F. W. J. Schelling

• List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Preface Acknowledgments Introduction 0.1 The Kantian origins of modern aesthetics0.2 The unfulfillable Romantic desire0.3 Romantic irony0.4 The (post)modernism debate0.5 The foundations of modernism0.6 The postmodern Verwindung of modernism0.7 The topicality of Romantic desire0.8 The Romantic image of man0.9 Survey of the book's contents 1. Frozen Metaphors 1.1 A metaphot of winter: the winter of metaphor1.2 Gudmundsson's Great Poem1.3 Nietzsche and metaphor1.4 Fossilization and freezing1.5 The transcendental metaphor1.6 Tragic wisdom1.7 Socratic truth and nihilism1.8 The ambivalence of Romantic desire1.9 The music-making Socrates as übermensch1.10 It's so cold in Alaska 2. The Path of Autonomy 2.1 Piaget's studies of intellectual development and rationalization2.2 Rationalization and progress in art2.3 Stella and the completion of modern art2.4 The other side of rationalization: the dadaist and surrealist revolt2.5 Rationalization and modernism in Frankfurt2.6 Stella as postmodernist2.7 From avant-garde to postmodernism: the pyrrhic victory of modern art? 3. The Art of Forgetting 3.1 Metaphysics and aesthetics3.2 Schopenhauer's aesthetics of music3.3 Contradictions in Schopenhauer's aesthetics3.4 Nietzsche's Fragment an sich3.5 Repetition and forgetting: the music of Steve Reich3.6 Death through repetition3.7 Beyond the reality principle?3.8 The moment of the Eternal Recurrence 4. The First and the Last Word 4.1 The rhetoric of the unconcious4.2 Speaking language4.3 The speechless poet4.4 Heidegger's genealogy of the subject4.5 Unveiling and concealing Being4.6 The eternal lack4.7 The poet on the couch4.8 Poeticizing and thinking4.9 From metaphysics to metaphorics: the pyrrhic victory of postmodern philosophy? 5. Disavowal and Representation 5.1 Magritte's pipe: Yes, I know, but still...5.2 Sexual and aesthetic disavowal5.3 The perversion of aestheticism5.4 The phallus as transcendental signifier5.5 Postmodern schizophrenia5.6 Superficiality from depth 6. The Oldest Nobility in the World 6.1 Barthes' battle against chance6.2 The semiology of music and the boundaries of verbal language6.3 The archaeology of the eighteenth-century semiology of music6.4 The sonata form and the episteme of man6.5 The music dominion of the subject6.6 Barthes' second semiology and the death of the composer6.7 Cage's total aleatoric6.8 Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the world of chance6.9 The Aeolian harp Afterword: Virtual Romantics 7.1 From Romantic to digital desire7.2 (Post)modern Romantics7.3 The (post)modern computer7.4 Digital dreams Notes Bibliography Name Index Subject Index