Aesthetic Subject in Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Literature

Robert Hughes is Associate Professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is author of Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language (2010) and has published a number of essays on figures in contemporary continental thought. He is also a translator of contemporary French and German philosophy, most recently Peter Sloterdijk’s Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry (2023), and he is co-editor of After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (2002).

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Butler on the body not given, Lyotard on body-thought and the aesthetic subject1. Irigaray on the limits of the homely figuration of the unhomely subject2. Badiou on the aesthetic subject’s intimations of the void3. Nancy on sense and the disidentification of the aesthetic subject4. Perniola on visuality as a mode of sense: Between an ideal of being and formless nonbeing5. Sloterdijk on the body’s indifference to the supposed mastery of consciousness6. Rancière on the body as a political figure of order in the shared life of the aesthetic subjectIndex