The Politics of Aesthetics

About this book

"In its first part, The Politics of Aesthetics examines aesthetic nationalism and the figure of the body in aesthetic discourse, focusing on writings by Benedict Anderson, J. G. Fichte, and Matthew Arnold, and arguing that uneasy acts of aestheticization (of media technology) and abjection (of the maternal body) undergird the production of the national body as "imagined community." Subsequent chapters on Paul de Man, Friedrich Schlegel, and Percy Shelley explore further the career of the gendered body in the aesthetic tradition and the relationship among aesthetics, technics, politics, and figurative language. The book accounts for the hysteria that has characterized media representations of theory, explains why romanticism has remained a locus of extravagant political hopes and anxieties, and, over the course of a sequence of close readings, uncovers the "anaesthetic" condition of possibility of the politics of aesthetics."--BOOK JACKET.