Excerpt in lieu of an Abstract: The work of José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) is vast, varied, and now largely forgotten. The thinker who was identified by E. R. Curtius as one of "the dozen peers of the European intellect," who was invited to help launch the Aspen Institute in 1949, and who was once nominated for a Nobel prize, has been mainly overlooked by contemporary philosophers and theorists, who have nonetheless followed lines surprisingly close to those sketched out by (...) Ortega. Ortega's fall from fortune is not difficult to explain. Since his major works read more like essays on heterogeneous subjects than works of philosophy, he has been shunned by mainstream philosophers, especially those of the analytical persuasion. When treated historically, Ortega's thought has often been regarded as offering nothing more than an alternative (Spanish) version of Dilthey's historicism or Heidegger's existentialism. John Graham's work offers new reasons to attend to Ortega as a philosopher. First, Graham meticulously distinguishes the similarities and differences between various moments in Ortega's thought ("radicalism," "perspectivism," "vital reason," and "historical reason") and a series of tendencies dominant elsewhere in the early twentieth century, including phenomenology, existentialism, and historicism. Second, and potentially more important, Graham identifies the decisive influence of William James's pragmatism on Ortega. The claim that Ortega was fundamentally a pragmatist (albeit one who went significantly beyond James) is nuanced by a series of distinctions drawn between pragmatism and positivism, empiricism, and biologism. If there is unity in Ortega's vast and diverse work, it lies in what Graham identifies in his final chapter as Ortega's "general theory of life." This is a philosophy that embraces both the historicism of "historical reason" and the existentialism of la raz diverse. There are details in this study that will surprise the specialist and the nonspecialist alike. How many today recognize the importance of the philological historicism that Ortega learned from Julio Cejador, or remember that Ortega planned a final project oriented around the philosophy of language, parts of which are indicated in the chapter headings of the posthumously published Man and People ("What People Say"; "Language: Toward a New Linguistics"; "'Public Opinion,' 'Social Observances,' 'Public Power'")? At the same time, Graham devotes many pages to some of Ortega's least convincing ideas, such as the notion of the biographical ages of man (which attributes a special, but unexplained, significance to the twenty-sixth and fifty-first years of life). Methodologically, Graham fails to justify his historical approach to Ortega's thought by advancing the claim that it is called for by Ortega's own biographical method. Indeed, one wonders whether the generally positivist orientation of this book is what Ortega had in mind when stressing the relationship between biography and thought. Graham views his task in studying Ortega as both historical and analytical. But the author of this work is a historian whose philosophical instincts often lie submerged. His principal energies in the first half of this book are devoted to establishing the relationship between James and Ortega as one of influence and dependence rather than mere coincidence. Only much later does he attempt to show how Ortega might have gone beyond James in exploring the consequences of pragmatism. Since Graham's principal concern is with the various rubrics under which philosophy in the first half of this century was practiced, rather than with the philosophical issues themselves, numerous questions are left unanswered by this work: what is the relationship between Ortega's pragmatism and social and political theory (a dimension of Ortega's thought stressed by thinkers like Luciano Pellicani)? What is the relationship between pragmatism, the "general philosophy of life," and the theory of action? Throughout this study Graham gives evidence of vast reading in the primary and secondary sources in both history and philosophy. The ample bibliography and footnotes will provide future scholars with a valuable reference tool. But it will be up to others to... (shrink)

The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Our own self-styled postmodern age has seen no end to this debate, which now receives a major and wide-ranging intervention from the theorist and critic Anthony J. Cascardi. Offering an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject or self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth, he carries his argument across (...) the fields of epistemology, literature, political science, religion and psychology. The modern subject proves to be positioned within conflicting discourses, in a culture characterised by its 'detotalised totality'. Max Weber's concept of 'world disenchantment' enables Cascardi to make a searching critique of modernity's sense of its absoluteness, divorced from an archaic, 'enchanted' world. He advocates in its place a more fruitful relationship between historical analysis and theoretical speculation, offering constructive new alternatives to current orthodoxy regarding subjectivity and modernity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of PhilosophyAnthony J. CascardiGenres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy, by Andrea Wilson Nightingale; xiv & 222 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, $49.95 paper.That what we call “philosophy” may be a construct, contingent upon its social and historical circumstances and dependent upon its discursive elaboration in texts that have come to be accepted as authoritative, is a possibility (...) that seems increasingly plausible at the end of the twentieth century. To judge from recent debates over the “end of philosophy” there are few outside the discipline proper who would accept the procedures by which philosophy came to legitimize itself as an autonomous discourse. Philosophy as we know it now seems to be one discourse among many others equal to it, and its associated values (e.g., truth, authenticity, virtue) seem hard pressed to maintain their preeminence when faced with claims that there is no scale according to which all values can be ranked. In the tradition of Plato, Descartes, and Kant, however, philosophical values were bound up with the identity of philosophy as an autonomous discourse. Here, the disciplinary identity of philosophy was dependent upon the “purification” of its discourse: the separation of what is “philosophical” from what is not allowed philosophy to conduct its pursuit of wisdom above the flux of contingent events.How should we understand and evaluate twentieth-century claims about the contingency of philosophical discourse? The question may be approached in divergent ways. One, articulated from inside the discipline of philosophy, seeks to press on with the project of Plato, Descartes, and Kant in order to isolate and refine the language that is most transparent to the truth. According to this view, the claim that philosophy is constructed would be mistaken or confused, and in any case not a philosophical claim at all. Another approach, articulated from outside the discipline of philosophy proper, would be to map the discursive construction of philosophy in terms of the “ideological” interests at work in the very process of that construction, keeping in mind that what is “ideological” is always fashioned in some discursive way. While each of these approaches has something to recommend it, each is insufficient. Typically, the project of “purification” fails to reflect sufficiently upon the contingency of the discourse it aims to refine, while the project of ideology-critique typically fails to recognize its own implicit appeal to some notion of truth or authenticity—or, at the very least, of truths pursued in earnest and communicated intelligibly.Andrea Nightingale’s fine book on Plato and the “construct” of philosophy is everywhere responsive to the contingency of philosophical discourse. Nightingale deals with this contingency by inspecting Plato’s strategies through a lens that is at once social, historical, and discursive. Genres in Dialogue is likewise aware of the claims that Plato makes on behalf of the values of “truth” and “authenticity.” But Nightingale’s strategy is to deflect (philosophical?) questions about truth and authenticity in favor of an analysis that focuses on Plato’s [End Page 527] role in the inaugural configuration of what we have come to recognize and accept as philosophical discourse. Rather than concentrate on the later, ideological appropriation of philosophy in the West, Nightingale sets her sights on philosophy’s inaugural moment, when debates about truth and authenticity were first configured in relation to the question of different modes of speech, some of which attempted to assert their primacy over all others. On Nightingale’s very provocative account, philosophy is not something that became contingent with the passage of time; it was from the very start a discursive construct.Nightingale argues that procedures of this construction, evidenced principally in Plato’s dialogues, were unique. While recognizing that the Platonic dialogues were the staging ground for the rivalries between philosophy on the one hand and rhetoric and poetry on the other, her more important claim is that Plato incorporated a panoply of discursive genres into his texts, always in order to parody, subvert, or otherwise challenge their authority, the better to establish the primacy of philosophy as a discursive practice. What philosophy itself is goes largely unanswered by Plato. Instead... (shrink)

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant's failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse (...) as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated. (shrink)

Literature and philosophy have long shared an interest in questions of truth, value, and form. And yet, from ancient times to the present, they have often sharply diverged, both in their approach to these questions and in their relationship to one another. Moreover, the vast differences among individual writers, historical periods, and languages pose challenges for anyone wishing to understand the relationship between them. This Introduction provides a synthetic and original guide to this vast terrain. It uncovers the deep interests (...) that literature and philosophy share while offering a lucid account of their differences. It sheds new light on many standing debates and offers students and scholars of literary criticism, literary theory, and philosophy a chance to think freshly about questions that have preoccupied the Western tradition from its very beginnings up until the present. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments THE GENEALOGY OF PRAGMATISM by Anthony J. Cascardi At SEVERAL POINTS in Philosophy and the Minor ofNature (1979) and in.the essays collected as Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Richard Rorty mentions John Dewey as one of a group of "edifying" philosophers whose tutelary presence and audiority are invoked in the project which he elsewhere describes as die "circumvention" of Western metaphysics.1 Dewey joins the ranks of (...) his fellow American pragmatiste James and Peirce as well as those of two odier rather disparate groups: on die one hand, those philosophers like Davidson, Sellars, and Quine, who demonstrate from within diat analytical philosophy eventually transcends and cancels itself; and on the other, those "continental" philosophers like Foucault, Gadamer, and Derrida, who comfortably accept the image of philosophy as a subgenre of "literature" or "writing," a discourse with no privileged insights into the nature of rationality or claims to truth. Rorty's own project is a blend of all diree. Widi James he claims that truth is simply "what is good in die way of belief," not the proper or even fruitful object of theoretical speculation ("truth is not the sort of thing one should expect to have a philosophically interesting dieory about.... Pragmatiste think that the history of attempts to isolate the True or the Good, or to define die word 'true' or 'good,' supports their suspicion that there is no interesting work to be done in this area.... The history of attempts to do so, and of criticisms of such attempts, is roughly coextensive wim the history of that literary genre we call 'philosophy' — a genre founded by Plato," Consequences ofPragmatism, pp. xiii-xiv). Yet he shares widi Davidson, Sellars, and Quine the will to demonstrate the limits of analytical phdosophy while framing his own propositions in the language ofanalysis. 295 296Philosophy and Literature Foucault and Derrida in their turn complete the image of life in a "postphilosophical " culture, where the designation of "post" indicates a final refusal to regard pragmatism as yet another metanarrative ofthe history of philosophy. In this case, die historicist part of the Hegelian teaching, which is dieir common inheritance, the assimilation of logic to history, is accepted, while the assimilation of history to logic, which completes the Hegelian syndiesis, is rejected on account of its totalizing designs and its reliance on die notion of Absolute Spirit. So seen, the genealogy of pragmatism is of considerably broader scope than die initial intentions of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature would suggest. In diat book, Rorty claimed to be marshalling the various forces named above not so much in response to Platonism as in reply to a single episode in the history of philosophy — viz., that which begins in Descartes and receives its fullest expression in Kant, and considers truth as a matter of the accurate correspondence of ideas held inforo intemo to objects in the external world, and accordingly regards die world as a representation of the mind. Heidegger articulated a similar complaint when he spoke of the Cartesian age as that in which die world was first determined as a "picture" ("Die Zeit des Weltbildes") and noted diat from this time forward epistemology was determined as "first philosophy": "a dieory ofknowledge had to be erected before a theory of the world."2 Pragmatism is on mis more limited view primarily a response to the conditions of a technological age and to the conception ofreason as mathematical representation which sustains modern science. Thus Rorty should well be surprised at Dewey's claim to have applied a scientific and empirical method in die study of metaphysics, whose proper objects consist, in Dewey's description, of"die large and constant features of human sufferings, enjoyments, trials, failures, and successes together with the institutions of art, science, technology, politics, and religion,"3 for to have done so would have been to have countered the Cartesian division between science on the one hand and qualities and values ("experience") on die other. Instead, Rorty imputes a different claim to Experience and Nature and sees it as a way-station on the pam toward that hypothetical book called Nature and Culture, in which die idea of an empirical method... (shrink)

Contemporary aesthetic theory is embedded in a culture dominated by images, and so would seem to require a reversal of Plato's critique of image-making. In adopting this stance, aesthetic theory follows in the footsteps of Nietzsche, whose own project was conceived as a reversal of Platonism. But the critique of Plato that underpins these views is based on a tradition that has misconstrued some of Plato's fundamental ideas. For this reason, the standard critique of Platonism is ineffective as a critical (...) response to the culture of images. Aesthetic theory needs instead to produce a critique of the contemporary image-world based on the view that it emerges from a transformation in the paradigm of production. Images are no longer merely a part of the world that is produced, but themselves have a crucial role in the process of production. (shrink)

This essay traces a pattern in which Enlightenment culture is seen as a contradictory or "detotalized" whole and in which the problem of ethics is defined in terms of a series of conflicting internal demands, such that the various frameworks in terms of which obligations are established cannot be reconciled.

This essay argues that Cervantes engages and responds to the Platonic critique of mimesis through a tradition that is rooted in Aristotle's _Nicomachean Ethics. Especially in _Don Quixote, the standard by which mimesis is judged in Platonic terms is replaced by notions of the fitting, the just, and the appropriate, which draw on Aristotelian notions of practical reasoning. These had been promulgated by Renaissance rhetoricians and in proverbial discourse. Cervantes finds these traditions particularly well-suited to discourse in the novel, which (...) attempts to render the unevenness of ordinary experience. In recognizing the irreducible heterogeneity of experience and the priority of translation over analysis, the novel accomplishes important political work. (shrink)

Considering the philosophic intelligence that has set out to discredit it, intentionalism in critical interpretation has shown an uncanny resilience. Beginning perhaps most explicitly with the New Criticism, continuing through the analytic tradition in philosophy, and culminating most recently in deconstructionism, philosophers and literary theorists have kept under sustained attack the notion that authorial intention can provide a guide to interpretation, a criterion of textual meaning, or a standard for the validation of criticism. Yet intentionalist criticism still has avid theoretical (...) defenders and plenty of informal practitioners. The essay that follows, while an exercise in neither such defense nor practice, nevertheless attempts to demonstrate why intentional questions can be expected to be of permanent concern to criticism. (shrink)

Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory offers one of the most powerful and comprehensive critiques of art and of the discipline of aesthetics ever written. The work offers a deeply critical engagement with the history and philosophy of aesthetics and with the traditions of European art through the middle of the 20th century. It is coupled with ambitious claims about what aesthetic theory ought to be. But the cultural horizon of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory was the world of high modernism, and much has (...) happened since then both in theory and in practice. Adorno's powerful vision of aesthetics calls for reconsideration in this light. Must his work be defended, updated, resisted, or simply left behind? This volume gathers new essays by leading philosophers, critics, and theorists writing in the wake of Adorno in order to address these questions. They hold in common a deep respect for the power of Adorno's aesthetic critique and a concern for the future of aesthetic theory in response to recent developments in aesthetics and its contexts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:IS THERE A LANGUAGE-GAME THAT EVEN THE DECONSTRUCTIONIST CAN PLAY? by Steven Fuller After reading A. J. Cascardi's fascinating "Skepticism and Deconstruction," I am led to ask the question that "entitles" this response.1 The answer I want to give is "yes," but Cascardi has made the task more difficult than I would have liked. In brief, he has dissociated deconstruction from all philosophical pursuits, including skepticism, which (...) it superficially resembles. I shall proceed, first, by reasserting deconstruction 's skeptical credentials and, then, by showing how these credentials enable the deconstructionist to play an interesting language-game. I Cascardi's thesis is most vividly stated in the following passage: But the deconstructionist, wrongly thought of as a skeptic, has no idea of what an epistemology counter to his uncertainties and indeterminacies would look like. This is because he is out to question the very axis ofwhich skepticism and epistemology are the opposite poles. Because his questioning shows up as a denial of the principle of non-contradiction, one is likely to think that deconstruction is a form of irrationalism. (p. 7) For all its forcefulness, this statement suggests that Cascardi may have fallen prey to a Cartesian ruse involving the meaning of "skepticism." A coherent history of skepticism can be told that extends from Sextus Empiricus's Outlines ofPyrrhonism (c. 200 AD) to Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary (c. 1700) without ever mentioning Descartes. The theme 104 Steven fuller105 of this history would be that no claims to knowledge are certifiable. In a more modern vein, we would say that no proposition has a determinate truth-value. The skeptics in our history would be presented as moral philosophers instructing their readers on how to live in a world in which they can never tell the true from the false — a world in which doubt is the natural attitude. The paraphrase is crucial because virtually all philosophers — most notably Husserl — have regarded doubt as unnatural, a psychic tension that must somehow be resolved. And just as hunger motivates the drive for food, it has usually been assumed that doubt motivates the drive for method. Whereas food sustains the physical needs of the sentient being as it reduces hunger, so too method sustains the cognitive needs of the rational being as it reduces doubt. Our skeptics have perennially noted that to think of all knowledge claims as certifiably true or false would be to think that nature answers us directly upon being addressed. In less metaphorical terms, we would be speaking a language whose predicates pick out natural kinds. The "dogmatists," as Sextus and Bayle liked to call their opponents (we would now call them "foundationalists"), could then easily conceive of how nature appears to us as nature's response to our utterances. To drive home the dogmatists' intentionalist stance toward nature, instead of "how nature appears to us," we might say "how nature represents itselfto us." In the case of truths, nature represents itself transparently, while in the case of falsehoods, representation has gone awry: either we misspoke or nature deceived us. To put the blame on ourselves is to call for a revision in method; to put the blame on nature is to suspect that an evil designer, a Cartesian demon, is behind the faulty appearances. The point, of course, is that one needs to be a dogmatist in order to have Descartes's more demonic thoughts. The classical skeptic, who held the language-world link to be purely conventional, used the uncertifiability of knowledge claims as an argument for denying any design whatsoever to nature — either for good or for ill. Descartes muddled things, however, when he interpreted the skeptical stance as claiming that all knowledge claims may turn out to be false. From the First Meditation, it is never made clear why we should worry about the Cartesian demon (and hence send him into cognitive exile as quickly as possible). Presumably, the concern arises from the possibility of discovering that the appearances are indeed illusory — that is, certifiablyfalse. This concern becomes a full-fledged anxiety once the doubter realizes that he ultimately has no control over how his doubt is resolved. In other words... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish OrientalismE. C. Graf (bio)My purpose has been to place in the plaza of our republic a game table which everyone can approach to entertain themselves without fear of being harmed by the rods; by which I mean without harm to spirit or body, because honest and agreeable exercises are always more likely to do good than harm.—Miguel (...) de Cervantes Saavedra, Prologue to Novelas ejemplares [my translation]We are engaged in a technical enterprise at the species scale.—Jacques Lacan, “L’agressivité en psychanalyse” [my translation]While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself!”!—Dante Alighieri, Inferno 28.28–30 Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Sandro Botticelli, The Virgin and Child (c. 1490). Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; ©1999 President and Fellows of Harvard College. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate One Second Before Awakening (1941). Courtesy of Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; ©1999 Artists' Rights Society (ARS), New York.For much of this century, Hispanists have labored in an effort to elevate Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605, 1615) to the coveted status of the “first modern novel.” Today this kind of criticism may strike our postmodern sensibilities as a rather traditional enterprise, the kind more interested in establishing an elite hierarchy of literary tastes than in saying anything new about an author or text. For many, the study of literature is still an aesthetic beauty pageant in which “great books” like Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1767) or Marie de la Vergne de La Fayette’s La princesse de Clèves (1678) are paraded across the stage in a contest to seduce the Western intelligentsia. 1 The postmodern student of literature may not have much concern for this age-old territorial contest, but she might be interested to learn that the fallout from Hispanism’s quest for the “first modern novel” has involved so much attention to, indeed complication of, Don Quixote, that the book now resembles more a postmodern text than an early modern one. At the turn of the century, we have been left with what Jorge Luis Borges would recognize as an “aleph”: an infinite ideological labyrinth that reflects and/or cannibalizes all forms, thereby escaping all attempts [End Page 68] to describe it. 2 Whatever we currently mean by “Cervantes” (an author, a collection of texts, an ideological construction, and so forth) carries with it an impressive range of critical responses. Cervantes has been labeled converso (Castro, Canavaggio), Christian humanist (Castro, Bataillon, Forcione, Herrero, Vilanova), disillusioned secularist (Lukács, Cascardi), precapitalist (Johnson), anti-essentialist (Wilson), anti-Eusebian (Presberg), Menippean (Bakhtin), feminist (El Saffar, Rabin, Cruz), sadist (Nabokov), ethnocentric imperialist (Mariscal), medieval (Gorfkle), homophobic (Martín), non-organicist Aristotelian (Read), and either discursively or actually homosexual (Combet, Rossi, Smith, Arrabal). This list is nowhere near complete, but the reader will grasp the robust effects of the plurality of perspectives on Cervantes.Each of these interpretations is valid to varying degrees within various contexts, but at present I am interested in reading Cervantes as the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of Southern Spain. 3 Within the contexts of French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser and Palestinian postcolonial literary critic Edward Said, materialist, postcolonial, and multicultural critiques of various forms of power and their ideologies can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes’s Don Quixote. 4 Cervantes’s ultimate orientation may perhaps be inescapably Eurocentric, but his responses to the European experience of the rise and expansion of an ethnocentric militaristic nation state are relatively centrifugal when compared to the attitudes of many of his contemporaries.In surveying some of the antihegemonic details of Cervantes’s novel, I am also interested in dispelling the popular myth of Don Quixote. Especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, Don Quixote remains captive to a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.2 (2000) 25-42 [Access article in PDF] What is Political Feeling? Bernadette Meyler Anthony Cascardi. Consequences of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,1999. As disaffection with poststructuralism increases, but new paradigms have not yet emerged, theorists have begun to reconsider the ties that current thought maintains with the tradition it critiques, in particular, its affiliations with the Enlightenment. Focus has inevitably fallen on the writings of Immanuel Kant, which (...) in the act of codifying Enlightenment rationality simultaneously initiated its dissolution. Disputes tend to arise, however, over the precise nature and cause of the hairline fracture that prevents Kant's Critiques from attaining the unity to which they aspire. Even greater controversy centers on the advisability of possible responses: should we set the bones, break open the gap, or provide an entirely new limb? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi undertakes a detailed discussion of how various theoretical schools interpret the fissure, and the problems posed by their accounts. Not simply remaining content with this critique of critiques, Cascardi presents his own stance, advising that we embrace Kant's recourse to "feeling" in the Critique of Judgment as an inevitable entailment of the Kantian system. Whereas Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment argues that the opposition between Kantian reason and Nietzschean irrationalism represents the undoing of the Enlightenment, Cascardi responds that Kant's own writings encompass the duality. As an essential moment of what he terms the Enlightenment's "aesthetic critique," the resistance that feeling poses to "the unity of experience"--or to the unity of the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason--should be embraced. Cascardi further maintains that this "should" entails political consequences, although his text does not itself fully elaborate a vision of what these might be.The fact that such a rich suggestion remains relatively undeveloped is perhaps inevitable in a book of such comprehensive scope. Consequences of Enlightenment is a text that seems to call the reader to the task of continuing the multiple projects that Cascardi has initiated. I will attempt to articulate what those endeavors might be, and to propose points in his work upon which future inquiry could be focused. Because Cascardi's goals are two-pronged--to examine twentieth-century thinkers' Kantian inheritance and to engage directly with the "aesthetic critique" of Kant--it is sometimes difficult to ascertain whether Consequences of Enlightenment attributes certain positions to Kant or to his interpreters. Although this difference might not seem significant given Cascardi's claims about the persistence of Kantian aporias in the work of his inheritors, returning to Kant may allow us to ask how we should proceed in developing the political potentials of aesthetic critique. Two principal questions arise in this regard. The first inquires whether and how one can think aesthetics with politics; in other words, [End Page 25] what is political feeling? The second question provides a more limited point of entry into the same problem by focusing on the Critique of Judgment itself; what politics are entailed respectively by the beautiful and the sublime?Cascardi discusses the Kantian sublime only twice in detail during the course of Consequences of Enlightenment, once in chapter 4, "Communication and Transformation: Aesthetics and Politics in Habermas and Arendt," and for the second time, and most provocatively, in chapter 7, "Feeling and/as Force." In treating Hannah Arendt, who, in her 1970 Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, attempted to derive a Kantian account of the political from the Critique of Judgment, Cascardi explains that she tried to complete the Enlightenment by erroneously "turning from the indeterminacy of the aesthetic in Kant to a politics that designates democratic community as its field or object-domain"; he then asserts that, "Specifically, the politics that Arendt would claim to derive from Kant's aesthetics is a democratic politics of the beautiful..." [156]. Subsequently elaborating on the reasons that Arendt overemphasized the beautiful, seemingly at the expense of the sublime, Cascardi writes, "Arendt's tendency to privilege the beautiful over the sublime must be seen as part of her larger effort to construct a rational politics. For this effort, she takes... (shrink)

In the eighteenth century the category of the aesthetic sought to bridge the gap between the prevalent dualities of Cartesian thought: art and science, history and science, prejudice and truth. This special issue of _boundary 2_ addresses current debates about the status of art in the context of global modernity. The range of arguments represented here cover a broad historical scope—from Cartesianism to present-day global modernity—of cultural discourse on the aesthetic to bring a focus to contemporary discussions of the corollary (...) concepts of beauty, virtue, taste, and truth. These essays present a rich and provocative account of the place of the aesthetic in late-twentieth-century culture. Included in this volume are considerations of the relation between theories of art and the avant-garde; art’s relation to cognition; the aesthetic as history; the aesthetic as a unique access to modernity; and its impact on problems of identity formation, ideology, and resistances to the institutional powers inherent in dominant social formations. _Contributors. _Charles Altieri, Peter Burger, David Carroll, Anthony J. Cascardi, Howard Caygill, Allen Dunn, Eric Gans, Agnes Heller, Ronald A. T. Judy, Marie-Rose Logan, Daniel T. O’Hara, Donald E. Pease, Alan Singer. (shrink)

Malcolm Bull offers a detailed analysis of nihilism in Nietzsche's works. Along with accompanying commentaries by Cascardi and Clark, he explores the significance of Nietzscheís views given the fact that a wide range of readers have come to embrace his ideas as new orthodoxy. There seem to be no anti-Nietzscheans today, but Bull demonstrates that this wide embrace of Nietzsche runs counter to the very meaning of nihilism as Nietzsche understood it.