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14Who or What Decides for Derrida: A Catastrophic Theory of DecisionIn Dominiek Hoens, Sigi Jottkandt & Gert Buelens (eds.), The catastrophic imperative: subjectivity, time and memory in contemporary thought, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.This chapter addresses the question: Who or what decides? How, for Derrida, does a bona fide decision take place? Decision is analyzed in many places in Derrida's work, particularly in the late work. The chapter focuses “micrologically” on what seems to be Derrida's fullest and most elaborate expression of what he means by “decision.” This is an intricate sequence in “Force of Law”. It begins with an apparently peripheral subquestion. Can a decision be a catastrophe? If so, in what sense?
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115Touching Derrida Touching Nancy: The Main Traits of Derrida's HandDerrida Today 1 (2): 145-166. 2008.Derrida has been perennially concerned with hands and touching. This interest finds its most concentrated form in On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy. This text outlines a number of concerns Derrida has in that book which might be extrapolated as exemplary of Derrida's reading strategies in general. It concludes with a consideration of what is revealed about the Derrida-Nancy relationship in this book
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139Anachronistic ReadingDerrida Today 3 (1): 75-91. 2010.A poem encrypts, though not predictably, the effects it may have when at some future moment, in another context, it happens to be read and inscribed in a new situation, in ‘an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets’, as Jacques Derrida puts it in Specters of Marx. In Wallace Stevens's ‘The Man on the Dump’ (1942), we are told: ‘The dump is full/Of images’. The poem's movement is itself a complex temporal to and fro that aims to repudiate and even annihilate these images. Thi…Read more
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82What Makes Heavy Metal ‘Heavy’?Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (1): 70-82. 2022.In this article, I raise a simple but surprisingly vexing question: What makes heavy metal heavy? We commonly describe music as “heavy,” whether as criticism or praise. But what does “heavy” mean? How is it applied as an aesthetic term? Drawing on sociological and musicological studies of heavy metal, as well as recent work on the aesthetics of rock music, I discuss the relevant musical properties of heaviness. The modest aim of this article, however, is to show the difficulty, if not impossibil…Read more
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27The Politics of Perception and the Aesthetics of Social ChangeColumbia University Press. 2021.In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented groups. Modernist and postmodernist celebrations of disruption and subversion have been challenged by the view that representation is integral to social change. Despite this convergence, neither political nor aesthetic theory has given much attenti…Read more
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6GEORG W BERTRAM. Art as Human Practice: An Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, 256 pp., £19.99 paper (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (2): 248-251. 2020.
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32Collision: The Death of Art and the Sunday of Life: Hegel on the Fate of Modern ArtEvental Aesthetics 1 (1): 39-47. 2012.Focusing specifically on Hegels analysis of Dutch genre painting in the Lectures on Aesthetics, Jason Miller argues that Hegel regards modern art not as a failure to convey the deepest interests of a culture or society, but as a welcome liberation of art in which it comes to reflect the diversity and complexity of human experience
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Review of Ayon Maharaj, The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Review. 2014.
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IdealismIn Jeffrey Di Leo (ed.), Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, Bloomsbury Academic. 2019.
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13The Arts and the Liberal Arts at Black Mountain CollegeJournal of Aesthetic Education 52 (4): 49. 2016.Shortly after John Andrew Rice, the eccentric classics professor and fire-brand advocate of progressive education, was dismissed from Rollins College for, among other things, teaching his students to “do as they please,”1 he drafted a sort of pedagogical manifesto announcing a new, and fundamentally new kind of, liberal arts school. The “Preliminary Announcement of Black Mountain College” describes this radical educational paradigm in largely contrarian terms, as the antithesis to traditional hi…Read more
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Posthumanist Public Art: An Interview with Mel ChinText and Performance Quarterly 36 (4): 212-228. 2016.
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1Activism vs Antagonism: Socially Engaged Art From Bourriaud to Bishop and BeyondField A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 1 (3): 165-183. 2016.
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25Beyond the Middle Finger: Plato, Schiller and the Political Aesthetics of Ai WeiweiCritical Horizons 17 (3-4): 304-323. 2016.The photograph of Ai Weiwei’s middle finger set against the backdrop of Tiananmen Square has become an icon of politically subversive art. But can we see beyond the middle finger? Here I argue that current theories of political aesthetics operate on an oversimplified dichotomy between two competing paradigms of political art, and that this threatens a more nuanced engagement with contemporary artistic practices. In the first part, I re-examine both the antagonistic relation between art and polit…Read more
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13Kelly, Michael. A Hunger for Aesthetics: Enacting the Demands of Art. Columbia University Press, 2012, xxii + 242 pp., 15 b&w illus., $50.00 cloth (review)Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 71 (4): 385-387. 2013.
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Warren Wilson CollegeRegular Faculty
Swannanoa, North Carolina, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
19th Century Philosophy |
Aesthetics |
Social and Political Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |