Gary Shapiro

In his four Unmodern Observations (Unzeitmässige Betrachtungen) of the 1870s, Nietzsche confronted early philosophical versions of positions more recentlydiscussed under such rubrics as globalization and the end of history. What he intended by marking these essays as “unmodern” or “untimely” was to designatetheir critical stance toward both the philistine self-congratulation of the era and the Hegelian philosophy with which it explained and justified itself. Basic to thisHegelian conception of history is a concept of the world-historical “great event,” a turning point that manifests itself in the world of political states. The Unmodernseries broke off with Nietzsche’s essay on Wagner, where he attempted to articulate his own non-statist version of a great event. The current essay diagnoses theinterruption of this project as a failure to fully abandon Hegelian thinking, and outlines a reading of Nietzsche’s later, more compelling (and unHegelian) conceptof the great event.

Danto's discussion of site‐related and site‐specific art opens up perspectives on both his conception of the ethics and politics of public art and on his ultimately idealistic ontology of art. Danto's analysis of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial involves an important distinction between monuments and memorials that is highly relevant to current controversies, like those about Confederate statues. His differing responses to two site‐related public art works by Richard Serra exhibit a nuanced sensibility to the taste of the public audience and the aesthetics of genius loci. Danto's enthusiastic account of several site‐specific works involving minimal interventions on the ground (some of which remained in the planning stage) disclose his inclination to reduce art to its idea, prescinding from its material presence.

ABSTRACT This article attempts to situate land art in the deserts of the US Southwest in terms of the works’ relation to and rupture with more traditional genres (seventeenth to twentieth centuries) of parks, gardens, and landscape architecture. It argues that the earlier works provide implicit answers to questions concerning Earth’s meaning and offer models of flourishing habitation. In contrast, the more recent works, all constructed in the era of the great acceleration (the Anthropocene), pose questions having to do with new challenges posed by climate change and the devastation of the Earth.

Bungay sets the tone of his study of Hegel’s aesthetics with these prefatory remarks: “Hegel is a good example of one of those Germans who dives deeper into murkier waters than the rest of us, and who not surprisingly comes up muddier. Perhaps a suitable role for an English sceptic is washing off the mud and polishing some of the nuggets he finds underneath. It is for the reader to judge whether or not the glitter is that of gold”. Hegel is different from the rest of us, Bungay suggests, because of his speculative depth and hermeneutic ambitions; that is, he belongs to a different tradition than “we” do. Bungay explicitly dissociates his own approach further from that tradition by explaining that the job of the “English sceptic” is to provide a number of crisp and limited formulations of Hegelian arguments and interpretations. Above all, these “nuggets” must be compact and isolable from one another; they must lend themselves to analytical examination. It is good to have such a forthright statement of purpose and method, especially when these differ so much from Hegel’s. But it should not be assumed that this book is nothing more than an analytical dissolution of Hegel. Originally an Oxford thesis in modern languages and literatures, it brings a wide ranging knowledge to bear on its subject; Bungay makes judicious use of his familiarity with the philosophical literature on Hegel and demonstrates an impressive knowledge of many of the specific art works that Hegel discusses in the course of his Lectures on Aesthetics. This may be the only book on Hegel’s aesthetics in English that deploys such an array of philosophical, philological, and artistic learning.

We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche’s thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche’s powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places. Shapiro explores Nietzsche’s rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche’s prescient vision of today’s massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state’s desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche’s vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the Antichrist,” by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck’s Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche’s Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history.