Reason Aesthetics And Solidarity

Focusing on Latine theological aesthetics and Catholic social thought, Nichole M. Flores builds a framework for interpreting religious symbols in our contemporary democratic life and shows how we can create a community where members stand in solidarity with those from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds.

Solidarity and responsibility may certainly be recognized as the central ideas of the year 2020. The basic reason for such a statement, in central- and east-European perspective, was the 40th anniversary of the signing of the August Agreements in Poland and the resulting development of the Solidarity trade union and social movement constituting the key catalyst of pro-democratic changes in the part of Europe. That anniversary was overshadowed, how ever, by another event - a global one, i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic, which turned upside down the former order of things and in a way forced us to thoroughly revise our attitude to the surrounding world. Solidarity, embraced by responsibility, becomes a positive counterpoint, both in the real and the symbolic dimension, for social integration, for building mutual trust and understanding, sensitivity, and a culture of cooperation in the light of which the Other is a being that is equal to us. The articles in this volume offer critical thought, in both a diachronic and a synchronic perspective, on the role, meaning and place of narrative, discourses, experiences and representations in the sphere of ethics, esthetics and culture (broadly understood) in the spirit of the new humanities and in particular its leading phrases: performative, affective and ethical (which is part of the aspect of affirmation) which place a strong emphasis on the causative interactive dimension of an entity acting towards both sentient beings and inanimate objects.

Revolutionary Subjects explores the literary and cultural significance of Cold War solidarities and offers insight into a substantial and under-analyzed body of German literature concerned with Latin American thought and action. It shows how literary interest in Latin America was vital for understanding oppositional agency and engaged literature in East and West Germany, where authors developed aesthetic solidarities that anticipated conceptual reorganizations of the world connoted by the transnational or the global. Through a combination of close readings, contextual analysis, and careful theoretical work, Revolutionary Subjects traces the historicity and contingency of aesthetic practices, as well as the geocultural grounds against which they unfolded, in case studies of Volker Braun, F.C. Delius, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Heiner Müller. The book’s cultural and comparative approach offers an antidote to imprecise engagements with the transnational, historicizing critical impulses that accompany the production of disciplinary boundaries. It paves the way for more reflexive debate on the content and method of German Studies as part of a broader landscape of world literature, comparative literature and Latin American Studies.

Along these lines, he shows that the aesthetic has affinities with the logic of reversal/recognition in Greek tragedy and with theories of subject formation based on intersubjective recognition. The marking of these affinities sets up a discussion of how the aesthetic can serve protocols of rational choice-making. Within this perspective, aesthetic practice is revealed to be a meaningful social enterprise rather than an effete refuge from the conflicts of social existence.

A brand new collection of Jacques Rancière's writings on art and politics.

Explores how white supremacist groups use popular music and culture to teach hate and promote violence. Popular music plays a major role in mobilizing citizens, especially youth, to fight for political causes. Yet the presence of music in politics receives relatively little attention from scholars, politicians, and citizens. White power music is no exception, despite its role in recent high-profile hate crimes. Trendy Fascism is the first book to explore how contemporary white supremacists use popular music to teach hate and promote violence. Nancy S. Love focuses on how white power music supports “trendy fascism,” a neo-fascist aesthetic politics. Unlike classical fascism, trendy fascism involves a hyper-modern cultural politics that exploits social media to create a global white supremacist community. Three case studies examine different facets of the white power music scene: racist skinhead, neo-Nazi folk, and goth/metal. Together these cases illustrate how music has replaced traditional forms of public discourse to become the primary medium for conveying white supremacist ideology today. Written from the interdisciplinary perspective on culture, economics, and politics best described as critical theory, this book is crucial reading for everyone concerned about the future of democracy. “Trendy Fascism has the potential to unsettle how theorists of democracy frame their most basic assumptions in the study of politics. The case studies of white power music are indeed unsettling, and at times they will bring chills to the reader. But, as Love argues, we must confront the realities of and rationalizations for the often-disavowed transnational white supremacist communities and networks in our political present if we are serious about overturning the racial contract pervading late modern states.” — Neil Roberts, Williams College

In this unprecedented book, Hamid Dabashi provides a provocative account of Iran in its current resurrection as a mighty regional power. Through a careful study of contemporary Iranian history in its political, literary, and artistic dimensions, Dabashi decouples the idea of Iran from its colonial linkage to the cliché notion of “the nation-state,” and then demonstrates how an “aesthetic intuition of transcendence” has enabled it to be re-conceived as a powerful nation. This rebirth has allowed for repressed political and cultural forces to surface, redefining the nation’s future beyond its fictive postcolonial borders and autonomous from the state apparatus that wishes but fails to rule it. Iran’s sovereignty, Dabashi argues, is inaugurated through an active and open-ended self-awareness of the nation’s history and recent political and aesthetic instantiations, as it has been sustained by successive waves of revolutionary prose, poetry, and visual and performing arts performed categorically against the censorial will of the state.

At the base of Whitehead's philosophy of organism is a vision of the solidarity of all final actualities. Each actuality is a discrete individual enjoying autonomous self-determination, yet each also requires all other actualities as essential components and partial determinants of its own nature. This vision of universal solidarity, Nobo demonstrates, is the fundamental metaphysical thesis whose truth the categories and principles of Whitehead's philosophy were expressly designed to elucidate. The received interpretations of Whitehead's thought, Nobo shows, have ignored the mutual relevance of the solidarity thesis and the organic categoreal scheme and, for that reason, have grossly misrepresented many of Whitehead's most important metaphysical doctrines. Contending that the difficult tasks of interpreting and developing Whitehead's metaphysics presuppose an understanding of the solidarity thesis, Nobo explores that thesis and the metaphysical categories and principles most relevant to its elucidation. In the process, he not only corrects many misinterpretations but also develops important metaphysical doctrines that Whitehead neglected to make sufficiently explicit in his published writings. It is precisely in terms of the neglected doctrine of eternal extensive continuity, Nobo demonstrates, that the more puzzling aspects of the solidarity thesis are satisfactorily explained. He then shows that the extensional solidarity of all final actualities is an essential ingredient of the generalized conception of experience on which Whitehead builds his ontology, cosmology, and epistemology.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Social and Aesthetic Philosophy examines attempts to revise representations of women to give them a more active role in public life. Combining history of ideas with close textual reading to position her in relation to other eighteenth century writers this book demonstrates how she is directly engaged in re-thinking key concepts in moral aesthetic and social philosophy, particularly where women are concerned. Bahar insists that Wollstonecraft's political claims cannot be separated from her desire to develop more convincing aesthetic representations of women.