...Donna V. Jones This brief review essay focuses on the central question posed in Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism : if feminism is considered in social and biographical terms while aesthetics focuses on questions of form and abstraction, does a feminist...

...Monique Roelofs Kant’s famous Enlightenment article is a crucial but overlooked source for his aesthetics. This essay unlocks its aesthetic significance by scrutinizing the mode of address in which Kant grounds his enlightenment project. Enlightenment, for Kant, revolves around the address we...

..., Levinas, Fanon,and literary modernism. She is coeditor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity:The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis and Intermedialities:Philosophy, Art, Politics (both forthcoming). Currently she is working on a book devoted to feminist aesthetics. Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic...

...Ewa Plonowska Ziarek This essay develops further the main implications of a feminist theory of aesthetics and modernism first articulated in Feminist Aesthetics and the Politics of Modernism . By engaging critically with Theodor Adorno and Giorgio Agamben in the context of feminist theories of...

...Robin James Building on Ewa Ziarek’s account of “potentiality” and “incandescence” as feminist counter-modernisms, this essay argues that these aesthetic and political strategies have been co-opted by neoliberalism and domesticated into resilience discourse. This argument is made, in part, through...

... different types of aesthetic production and consumption that cannot obtain; and it overlooks the crucial contribution of individual labor to the accumulation and exchange of cultural capital. If we turn our attention from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe to early modern (Ming and Qing) China, the...

...Abigail Zitin Critics have identified William Hogarth’s correlation of beauty with desire as the most original idea that his 1753 treatise contributes to aesthetic discourse in the eighteenth century, an idea emblematized in the formulation that visual intricacy “leads the eye a wanton kind of...

...Eugenie Brinkema What is the relationship between a cinematic grid of color and the most visceral of the negative affects, disgust? The history of “good taste”—from the philosophical subdiscipline of aesthetics to French haute cuisine—banishes and simultaneously cultivates all things that taste bad...

... queer aesthetic of Isaac Julien. Understanding Julien's use of citation and technology allows for an aesthetic elaboration of difference that highlights the persistence of modernism in postcolonial installations. It reinvests the idea of hope in modernism through a postcolonial lens that both laments...

...Jacques Khalip This article concentrates on the substance of audition in Derek Jarman's Blue . In his last feature film, Jarman makes a decisive ethical and aesthetic break: he shifts value away from the overdetermined cultural premiums associated with the visual ``spectacle'' and onto the...

... cultural appropriation of the octopus following the novel’s publication. The French word for octopus came to denote a sexually assertive and economically ambitious woman who traded upon her erotic charms. The emergence of this social type derived its aesthetic power from channeling contemporary anxieties...

... essay identifies a new social logic that has become visible but not yet critically apprehended in the era of unchallenged globalization. The author proposes a way to read that logic as ciphered in contemporary cultural media as an emotional aesthetics of social protagonism and politics. dierdra...

...Corey McEleney This essay critiques the rhetorical and ideological strategies by which aesthetic pleasure has been devalued in both Renaissance and contemporary humanism. Through a close reading of Shakespeare's Richard II , the essay shows how the abjection of vain (both narcissistic and futile...

... middle course between the Lacanian “object voice” of Mladen Dolar and the intense focus on human singularity of Adriana Cavarero. Through discussions of the libidinal economy circulating within certain mythological tropes (Sirens, Swan Maidens, Narcissus/Echo, etc.) as well as an aesthetic genealogy of...

... rhythm to conceptualize alternatives to the reified visual world, but his work reveals the tension between metaphorical treatments of rhythm and its sonic materiality. Turning to music as an aesthetic form defined by this relationship, the author draws on the work of Jacques Attali, Rose Rosengard...

... of nonmeaning from which meaning is drawn, by contrast, near inaudibility is linked to a separate set of conceptual and aesthetic terms: formal gradations of pressure, tension, intensity, and force. Finally, each regime also contains within itself a theory of violence. For silence, the centrality of...

... political and ethical practice; during the Han and Wei (220-65 ce ) dynasties, she plays an important role in the integration of yin and yang metaphysics, social morality, expressions of individual feeling, and legal order into a harmonious and cohesive aesthetic and ideological structure. This article...

... new concepts that enable the heterogeneous actualization of feminism’s unharvested virtuality and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek’s rereading of suffragette thought as an aesthetic modernism articulating a radical right to revolt and to imagine an undefined feminist futurity, Pollock examines texts by Hannah...

...Elissa Marder This essay explores how Baudelaire’s insistence on perverse forms of nonreproductive sexuality (what is here called “bad sex”) exposes critical aspects of his poetics and his relation to the question of aesthetics. It takes up two of Baudelaire’s most famous poems (“To the Reader” and...

... (2004) as a work that explores the consequences of a Schillerian aesthetic education. It does so through an encounter with the radical unreadability that, as Bad Education suggests, spurs interpretive endeavors. In its effort to make visible nothing as such , to depict what can only be understood as a...