Beyond Aesthetics: Confrontations With Postructuralism and Postmodernism

by Stuart Sim

Jacques Derria, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard and Geoffrey Hartman all claim to have found a way to transcend Value Judgement. This book confronts these assertions and argues that thinkers such as these have, by thier rejection of conventional methods of constructing value judgements, succeeded in problematizing the entire area of aesthetics. Stuart Sims treats postculturalism and postmodernism as forms of anti-aesthetics and contextualises the movements within a longer-running tradition of anti-foundationalism and radical scepticism in Western philosophy. Arguing from a broadly socialist, historical materialist position he demands that discourses be made to declare their ideological commitments. While the radical scepticism of Derrida,m Lyotard, Baudrillard, and their followers is shown to be ultimately philosophically unsustainable and ideologically suspect from a left-wing point of view, Sims concludes that these critics nevertheless point to a need for reassessment of methods and objectives among critical theorists on the left

Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Eszter · Rating 3 out of 5]

"let us wage a war on totality"?? okay, lyotard! count me in!

i cannot say anything stupid because i am not trying to prove anything to you.

while stuart sim may prefer that i take time to ponder the negative implications of such a line of thinking, i have, for the duration of the next academic year, instated a moratorium on doing so. post-drivel or bust 'til may 09!

in any case, this is a useful place to start if you'd like to build or strengthen your personal position regarding the limits of philosophy. a useful walk through the post-highlight reel: lyotard, derrida, baudrillard.