The Sovereign Self : Aesthetic Autonomy From the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde

In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of “Man,” upon which the aesthetic itself often depends. "The Sovereign Self explores the complex history of artistic subjectivity and the principle of autonomy that it exemplifies. Grant H. Kester argues that the modern artistic self is the basis for a whole series of subsequent institutional and discursive enclosures which are understood to be uniquely free from the forms of ideological domination that constrain all other forms of cultural production. Moreover, he explores how the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend well beyond art to larger issues associated with the nature of political transformation, including the complex relations between the artistic avant-garde and the revolutionary vanguard. In order to explore these issues, Kester considers the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy throughout history, from its origins in Enlightenment aesthetic philosophy, through the initial emergence of avant-garde art movements in the nineteenth century, to its more contemporary manifestation in the neo-avant-garde of the 1970s"-- Provided by publisher CONTENTS Introduction I. FROM BEAUTY TO DISSENSUS II. NEGATION AND PERFORMATIVITY III. AUTONOMY SINCE THE 1980S Conclusion. Aesthetics beyond Semblance Notes Works Cited Index