Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture

Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture explores the potential links between terror and aesthetics in modern Western society, specifically the affinity between terrorism and the possibility of an aesthetic appreciation of terrorist phenomena or events. But can we actually have an aesthetic appreciation of terror or terrorism? And if we can, is it ethical or legitimate? Emmanouil Aretoulakis proposes that Western spectators and subjects from the eighteenth century onwards have always felt, unconsciously or not, a certain kind of fascination or even exhilaration before scenes of tragedy and natural or manmade disaster. Owing to their immorality, such “forbidden” feelings go unacknowledged. It would definitely be callous as well as politically incorrect to acknowledge the existence of aesthetics in witnessing or representing human misery. Still, as Aretoulakis insists, our aesthetic faculties or even our appreciation of the beautiful are already inherent in how we view, appraise, and pass judgment upon phenomena of terrorism and disaster. Paradoxically, such a “forbidden aesthetics” is ethical despite its utter immorality. Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture explores the subjective experience of the beautiful in the face of terror and human tragedy. Emmanouil Aretoulakis proposes that behind the horror, repulsion, and outrage felt by humanity before images of natural or man-made catastrophes/acts of terror(ism) throughout the centuries lurks a kind of inexplicable individual fascination which is closely connected to the Kantian idea of the disinterested judgement of the beautiful as well as the Burkean concept of delight before real catastrophe. At stake is an aesthetic experience of the beautiful, that most of us, eye witnesses or other, would not be willing to acknowledge due to the immorality of such a concession. That feeling which goes unacknowledged because improper is a forbidden feeling and the aesthetics connected with it is a forbidden aesthetics. The forbidden aesthetics Aretoulakis proposes is naturally dominant in representations of the par excellence terrorist event of the twenty-first century, 11 September 2001, but shows itself also in other catastrophic landmarks in history. For instance, the Hiroshima/Nagasaki nuclear bombing in 1945, or the 1755 Lisbon tsunami, both of which could be characterized, radically, as terrorist manifestations too, regardless of whether the former event took place in the context of a generalized war while the latter emerged as a symptom of natural terrorism, the terrorism of nature. This book will be of interest to philosophers who work on aesthetics and ethics and students in literary studies and psychology. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction From the Sublime Anti-Aesthetic to the Retrieval of Beauty The Forbidden Image: Terrorism, Memory, and Disinterested Pleasure Notes Chapter One: Does Beauty Think? Ethics and the Aesthetics of Imagining Politics, Ethics, and the Beautiful The Beautiful, Not the Sublime: Toward an Aesthetics of Freedom Life is Beautiful—After All Notes Chapter Two: A Glimpse into the Forbidden Damien Hirst and the TV Image of 9/11 The Ethics and Politics of Disaster Art Stockhausen’s Romantic Vision: Authenticity and Terrorism Terrorism, Performance, and its Audience Notes Chapter Three: The Nuclear Image and the Forbidden Aesthetics of Beauty Los Alamos: Nuclear Scientists as Poets Authentic Art and the Nuclear Blast Nuclear Terrorism in New York? Zeus as A Terrorist Hiroshima and Nagasaki as Planes of Aesthetic Terror(ism) Stunning Image and the Japanese Memory of Horror The Post-Aesthetic and the Artistic in the Nuclear Reality Notes Chapter Four: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Imagination: Witnessing the Ineffable Delight: Representation, Terror and Edmund Burke Art, Fantasy, and Disaster Tourism in Post-Quake Lisbon Catastrophism: Revisiting the Earthquake as Show Business Notes Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index