The Muses (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) [Hardcover]

Jean-Luc Nancy (Author), Peggy Kamuf (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0804727805 | ISBN-13: 978-0804727808 | Publication Date: March 1, 1997 | Edition: 1

This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses—to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred—and sense or meaning in general.

Throughout the five essays, Nancy’s argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel’s Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit—art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel’s historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“A truly exhilarating set of philosophical reflections on art and aesthetics. . . . Nancy masterfully explicates the threshold role art plays in the philosophical distinctions between the sensory and the sensible, life and death.”—Georges Van Den Abbeele, University of California, Davis

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 136 pages
• Publisher: Stanford University Press; 1 edition (March 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0804727805
• ISBN-13: 978-0804727808
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,772,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Looking for Art, January 16, 2010

By 

Michael H. Shenkman "Mentoring the Creative S... (Albuquerque, NM United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Muses (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) (Hardcover)

This compact book, this intense salient, must not pass out of circulation if we are to find our way to "art." Is this book difficult, yes; does it demand constant attention and activity that is capable of changing one's orientation to art, yes. And is this made doubly challenging because the notion of "art" itself is in such turmoil? Most definitely.
These four essays do not "help" us. They affect us, as a passing through us as we pass through our notions of art, and so relocate our work on art, as we choose to do this work.
The first essay sets the tone: there are multiple arts because the act of "ars" -- articulating - arises prior to anything being rendered sensate; arts take up the ineluctable multiplicity of our estrangement (once we have experienced ourselves in strangeness), right at that estrangement itself. From here there is no going back.
And the fifth essay speaks to the "work" itself as what, thus rendered, it can only be: the gens, the generativity of what comes forth, leaves its trace, its footprint, and has gone onward. Smoke without fire.
The fourth essay takes us to the impetus toward art at its (speculated) inception: in the cave (in Cosquer and in the "Republic") an opening up of a human space that occurs out of the flux of perception, out of sight of activity, and takes up its forming act, what I call "imagating," not the making of an image, but the rendering of appearance in its passing as we pass through, the slightly glimpsed trace always already passed by (that from Plato through the agonies of Christianity to Hegel are held fast in ontotheological splendor as the Idea, eidos) . The image is left below, covered over, furtively among us, but the artist has already moved on. A vestige has been left, but we too pass it by (it is, after all, art, not law).
The second and third essays speak to us about our personal relationship to art. First as an intimacy of its giving of a picked and arranged fruit, borne to us by a longing for innocence in which we ourselves consent to living amid what has been thusly offered; and the third, the experience of being on the threshold of letting go of our habituation to deadened sight that forms. Beyond the threshold, "not touching, touched."
There are others who explore this, "another task," (p. 93), Blanchot comes to mind (see my review of "The Infinite Conversation"), but no one makes this "invisible passage of a living soul" (p. 98) more alive than Nancy.