| Author/Contributor(s): | Nancy, Jean-Luc ; Kamuf, Peggy |
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Date: | 03/01/1997 |
| Binding: | Hardcover |
| Condition: | NEW |
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.