Abstract

Abstract:

This essay describes and proposes a solution to the problems that result from the contemporary tendency to knot together novelty, non-conceptuality, and aesthetic experience. It does so principally through a reading of the relationship between discursive and non-discursive experience in Kant's Third Critique, as well as through a reading of a few examples of the Kantian legacy in contemporary art (e.g., the work of the post-conceptual artist Bruce Nauman) and art theory (e.g., the affect-theoretical work of Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro). It concludes by identifying the resources for an alternative notion of aesthetic experience in Kant's writings, one for which the irreducibility of aesthetic representations to discursive thought does not depend on the former's being temporally or epistemically prior to the latter but on the manner in which aesthetic representations are themselves discursively constructed.

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