The Ideology of the Aesthetic Quotes

“With the birth of the aesthetic, then, the sphere of art itself begins to suffer something of the abstraction and formalization characteristic of modern theory in general; yet the aesthetic is nevertheless thought to retain a charge of irreducible particularity, providing us with a kind of paradigm of what a non-alienated mode of cognition might look like. Aesthetics is thus always a contradictory, self-undoing sort of project, which in promoting the theoretical value of its object risks emptying it of exactly that specificity or ineffability which was thought to rank among its most precious features. The very language which elevates art offers perpetually to undermine it.”
― Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic

“To relate a Beethoven sonata to the testicles is hardly in the style of traditional aesthetics.”
― Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic