This paper examines the relationship of Jean-François Lyotard’s aesthetics to phenomenology, especially the works of Mikel Dufrenne and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It argues that this comparison allows a greater understanding of Lyotard’s late aesthetic writings, which can appear gnomic and which have received relatively little critical attention. Lyotard credits Merleau-Ponty with opening the theme of difference in the aesthetic field, yet believes that the phenomenological approach can never adequately account for it. After outlining Lyotard’s early critiques of Dufrenne and Merleau-Ponty, the (...) paper will demonstrate how his late aesthetics can be understood as returning to phenomenological themes but in the form of a reversal. Lyotard’s “lesson of darkness” is that the secret power of art can never be brought into the light of phenomenal appearance, and that artworks do not testify to the birth of perception, but to its death and resurrection. (shrink)

Shows the relevance of Schiller’s thought for contemporary philosophy, particularly aesthetics, ethics, and politics. This book seeks to draw attention to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) as a philosophical thinker in his own right. For too long, his philosophical contribution has been neglected in favor of his much-deserved reputation as a political playwright. The essays in this collection make two arguments. First, Schiller presents a robust philosophical program that can be favorably compared to those of his age, including Rousseau, Kant, Schelling, and (...) Hegel, and he proves to be their equal in his thinking on morality, aesthetics, and politics. Second, Schiller can also guide us in our more contemporary philosophical concerns and approaches, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and politics. Here, Schiller instructs us in our engagement with figures such as Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Roberto Esposito, and others. María del Rosario Acosta López is Associate Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. She has published several books, including La tragedia como conjuro: el problema de lo sublime en Friedrich Schiller. Jeffrey L. Powell is Professor of Philosophy at Marshall University and the editor of Heidegger and Language. (shrink)

In this article the importance of the representational character of politics is illustrated on the basis of the philosophy of Kant. The vanishing of the noumenal in post-modern thinking seems to imply fundamental changes in the sensitive response – aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime – to politics. In the Kantian paradigm the meaning of our affective response to the violence of (human) nature is ruled by a moral perspective of practical reason. Although the representation of practical reason in (...) the empirical is only possible in an indirect way by means of a schematism of analogy, the corresponding – subjectively teleological – aesthetic feelings both of harmony in the beautiful and of resistance in the sublime do symbolize in a reflective judgement the morally determined character and the objectively conceived teleology of nature in the system of rights of a single state as well as of the cosmopolitan world order. (shrink)