Romantic Desire in (Post) Modern Art and Philosophy

by Jos de Mul

In this erudite and wide-ranging discussion of postmodernism and romanticism in twentieth-century art and philosophy, Jos de Mul sheds a fascinating light on the ambivalent character of our present culture, which oscillates between modern enthusiasm and postmodern irony. Along the way, he engages the work of such thinkers as Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Habermas, Lacan, Barthes, and Derrida; visual artists Magritte and Stella; poets Georg and Coleridge; and composers Schonberg, Cage, and Reich, among others, providing a sort of intellectual history of Romantic, Modernist, and Postmodernist "tempers."

Genres: Philosophy, Art

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Dan Lawler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life: the Ultimate Show about Nothing

"I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous." Titanic, 1913, anonymous

Author Jos De Mul opens chapter one with the above ironic epigraph referencing the tragedy at sea that resulted in the deaths of about 1,500 people. If you can look tragedy and death in the eye and respond with witty, ironic Seinfeldian quips, then welcome to the new world of postmodernism.

Note well that one must be ironic and not merely sarcastic. Sarcasm lacks empathy and is oh-so-modernist. To be properly postmodern requires empathy, but it's an ironic self-aware type of empathy by which one can look and laugh at not only the passengers on the Titanic, but at all who embark on this journey of life with the steadfast hope of a satisfying, enjoyable end because, after all, hope is unsinkable, but oh sweet irony, it sank!

Setting all hope aside, the reality is that life's a b*tch, and then you die. So pull up a deck chair, get witty, and let's have a few ironic chuckles before descending into the abyss. That's how one copes in the postmodern era.

The "romantic desire" of the book's title is that innate, insistent and intuitive something within man that wants more than anything for life to have meaning and purpose and ultimate justice and ultimate good. It is, says the author, our "desire for encompassing meaning" and "the aspiration for absolute truth and values" and "the desire for eternity and an enthusiasm for beatitude" and "Sehnsucht."

The "postmodern art and philosophy" of the title is intended to disabuse man of his childish, irrational romantic desires and confront him with the reality that life, in Hobbes's words, is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. But all this must be done with an ironic sense of humor. Unlike those snooty heirs of Enlightenment-era rationalism and materialism who scoff at gullible religious folk and romantics for believing there is something more than what the scientists can measure, the ironically self-aware postmoderns acknowledge that the joke is on themselves as well. We're all on this doomed voyage together.

The postmodern artists and philosophers do not, and cannot, remove the innate desires of man, nor should they want to as hope is not only the source material for their craft, but man simply cannot live without hope. Without romantic desire to play with, the postmoderns would be left with nothing but the "bottomless pessimism" of unrelenting nihilism. They need to keep hope alive in order to fend off imminent darkness and endless despair. In doing so, however, they do not want to be mistaken themselves for naive bumpkins, so to the extent they recognize hope, it's always with a wink and grin to show that they are in on the cosmic jest that the universe has endowed man with an intense desire for meaning, values and truth, and yet the universe offers none of these things. The universe thus proves itself to be the ultimate irony and so, says the author, we must accept irony as the singular transcendental truth of our existence. We must become ironic like the universe that made us, and so embrace and extol this universal irony.

The irony of all this irony is that if postmodernism teaches anything it is that we are to be incredulous of all meta-narratives and that there is nothing outside the text that lends credence or authority to any particular narrative concocted by the philosophers. And yet here we have a postmodern philosophizer claiming to have identified the ultimate foundation and ultimate truth of the universe to which we all must conform in order to exist.

There is no truth but irony, said the man unironically.

[collin]

een ruim uiteengezette inleiding en een aantal hoofdstukken die de stof afwisselend aanvliegt, aanvult en bespreekt. + boeiende recensie van arnold heumakers, op het internet te vinden!