The Muses
by Jean-luc Nancy
2021-01-01 08:44:37
This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maxi...
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This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses-to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred-and sense or meaning in general.Throughout the five essays, Nancy''s argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel''s Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit-art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel''s historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy.
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