Skip to product information
1 of 1

Radical History and the Politics of Art

Regular price $32.00
Sale price $32.00 Regular price $32.00
Sale Sold out
Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileg...
Read More
  • Format:
  • 15 July 2014
View Product Details

Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders.

Radical History and the Politics of Art proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.

files/i.png Icon
Price: $32.00
Pages: 288
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Series: New Directions in Critical Theory
Publication Date: 15 July 2014
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780231152013
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

PHILOSOPHY / Aesthetics, PHILOSOPHY / Political, ART / History / General, ART / Art & Politics

Direct and uncompromising in his views, Rockhill sets forward a political philosophy of aesthetics, that is at once sensuous and pragmatic. The research is based on German and French works in their original articulation, and the analyses themselves take up not what is thematic but, better, what is couched in contradiction. The book will be a strong contribution to a practical—both theoretical and historical—appreciation of aesthetics and politics.
Gabriel Rockhill is associate professor of philosophy at Villanova University, Directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, and director of the Critical Theory Workshop in Paris, France. He is the author of Logique de l'histoire: pour une analytique des pratiques philosophiques and coeditor and contributor to Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, and Technologies de contrôle dans la mondialisation: enjeux politiques, éthiques et esthétiques.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Art and Politics in the Time of Radical History
Part I. Historical Encounters Between Art and Politics
1. For a Radical Historicist Analytic of Aesthetic and Political Practices
2. Realism, Formalism, Commitment: Three Historic Positions on Art and Politics
Part II. Visions of the Avant-Garde
3. The Theoretical Destiny of the Avant-Garde
4. Toward a Reconsideration of Avant-Garde Practices
Part III. The Politics of Aesthetics
5. The Silent Revolution: Rancière's Rethinking of Aesthetics and Politics
6. Productive Contradictions: From Rancière's Politics of Aesthetics to the Social Politicity of the Arts
Part IV. The Social Politicity of Aesthetic Practices
7. The Politicity of 'Apolitical' Art: A Pragmatic Intervention Into the Art of the Cold War
8. Rethinking the Politics of Aesthetic Practices: Advancing the Critique of the Ontological Illusion and the Talisman Complex
Conclusion: Radical Art and Politics—No End in Sight
Notes
Index