Consequences of Enlightenment

by Anthony J. Cascardi

Overview

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues that postmodern culture does not reject Enlightenment beliefs and explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel and Wittgenstein. He reverses the tendency to see art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which it is situated. Aesthetic objects, he argues, are themselves capable of disclosing truth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521481496
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/04/1999
Series:	Literature, Culture, Theory , #30
Pages:	278
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.75(d)

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements; 1. The consequences of enlightenment; 2. Aesthetics as critique; 3. The difficulty of art; 4. Communication and transformation: aesthetics and politics in Habermas and Arendt; 5. The role of aesthetics in the radicalisation of democracy; 6. Infinite reflection and the shape of praxis; 7. Feeling and/as force.

Editorial Reviews

"It is difficult to convey how impressive Cascardi's book is because it is so consistently, even relentlessly learned, lucid, and intelligent...the great stregths of the book are its scope, its amazingly precise analyses of various thinkers, and its keen critical sense of the problems that emerge for these thinkers as they attempt to adapt fundamentally Kantian themes for modern situations." Studies in Romanticism

"It is difficult to convey how impressive Cascardi's book is because it is so consistently, even relentlessly learned, lucid, and intelligent. Here I can summarize the argument, which is impressive enough, but the great strengths of the book are its scope, its amazingly precise analyses of various thinkers, and its keen critical sense of the problems that emerge for these thinkers as they attempt to adapt fundamentally Kantian themes for modern situations." Studies in Romanticism

"His work offers the best account I have read of the importance of the Enlightenment-generated urgingss that the aesthetic addresses and of its strategies for doing so." McGowan Reviews Dec 2001

From the Publisher