Beistegui - Aesthetics after Metaphysics

Aesthetics After Metaphysics

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy

1 Email and Ethics

Style and Ethical Relations in Computer-Mediated Communication

Emma Rooksby

2 Causation and Laws of Nature

Max Kistler

3 Internalism and Epistemology

The Architecture of Reason

Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew

4 Einstein, Relativity and Absolute Simultaneity

Edited by William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith

5 Epistemology Modalized

Kelly Becker

6 Truth and Speech Acts

Studies in the Philosophy of Language

Dirk Greimann and Geo Siegwart

7 A Sense of the World

Essays on Fiction, Narrative, and Knowledge

Edited by John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer, and Luca Pocci

8 A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy

Robert B. Talisse

9 Aesthetics and Material Beauty

Aesthetics Naturalized

Jennifer A. McMahon

10 Aesthetic Experience

Edited by Richard Shusterman and Adele Tomlin

11 Real Essentialism

David S. Oderberg

12 Practical Identity and Narrative Agency

Edited by Catriona Mackenzie and Kim Atkins

13 Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy

Heather Dyke

14 Narrative Identity and Moral Identity

A Practical Perspective

Kim Atkins

15 Intergenerational Justice

Rights and Responsibilities in an Intergenerational Polity

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16 Hillel Steiner and the Anatomy of Justice

Themes and Challenges

Edited by Stephen de Wijze, Matthew H. Kramer, and Ian Carter

17 Philosophy of Personal Identity and Multiple Personality

Logi Gunnarsson

18 The Force of Argument

Essays in Honor of Timothy Smiley

Jonathan Lear and Alex Oliver

19 Autonomy and Liberalism

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20 Habermas and Literary Rationality

David L. Colclasure

21 Rawls, Citizenship, and Education

M. Victoria Costa

22 Objectivity and the Language-Dependence of Thought

A Transcendental Defence of Universal Lingualism

Christian Barth

23 Habermas and Rawls

Disputing the Political

Edited by James Gordon Finlayson and Fabian Freyenhagen

24 Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy

Outline of a Philosophical Revolution

Eugen Fischer

25 Epistemology and the Regress Problem

Scott F. Aikin

26 Civil Society in Liberal Democracy

Mark Jensen

27 The Politics of Logic

Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism

Paul M. Livingston

28 Pluralism and Liberal Politics

Robert B. Talisse

29 Kant and Education

Interpretations and Commentary

Edited by Klas Roth and Chris W. Surprenant

30 Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and Maternal Subjectivity

Alison Stone

31 Civility in Politics and Education

Edited by Deborah S. Mower, Wade L. Robison

32 Philosophical Inquiry into Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Mothering

Maternal Subjects

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33 Authenticity as an Ethical Ideal

Somogy Varga

34 The Philosophy of Curiosity

Ilhan Inan

35 Self-Realization and Justice

A Liberal-Perfectionist Defense of the Right to Freedom from Employment

Julia Maskivker

36 Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Mortality

From Frankfurt and MacIntyre to Kierkegaard

John J. Davenport

37 Contemporary Feminist Pragmatism

Edited by Maurice Hamington and Celia Bardwell-Jones

38 Morality, Self Knowledge, and Human Suffering

An Essay on The Loss of Confidence in the World

Josep Corb

39 Contrastivism in Philosophy

Edited by Martijn Blaauw

40 Aesthetics After Metaphysics

From Mimesis to Metaphor

Miguel de Beistegui

Aesthetics After Metaphysics

From Mimesis to Metaphor

Miguel de Beistegui

First published 2012

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the UK

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2012 Taylor & Francis

The right of Miguel de Beistegui to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beistegui, Miguel de, 1966

Aesthetics after metaphysics : from mimesis to metaphor / by Miguel de Beistegui.

p. cm. (Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 40)

Includes bibliographical references (p. 175) and index.

1. Aesthetics. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Metaphor. I. Title.

BH39.B38285 2012

111'.85dc23

2012006184

ISBN13: 978-0-415-53962-3 (hbk)

ISBN13: 978-0-203-10272-5 (ebk)

For John Sallis

Contents

Figures

All figures reproduced with the kind permission of the Chillida Foundation and family.

Introduction

Therefore, with respect to beauty and badness [ ], the imitator [ ] will neither know nor opine rightly about what he imitates... the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates; imitation is a kind of play and not serious; and those who take up tragic poetry in iambics and epics are all imitators in the highest possible degree

Plato, The Republic

Sometimes I am delighted by things being as they are, sometimes by their resemblance to something else. Sometimes understanding how things work weakens my desire for metaphor, sometimes the desire is sharpened by understanding how things work.

Edward St Aubyn, A Clue to the Exit

This book is about the possibility of extricating the question of art from its Platonic schema, and about the possibility of thinking the event of art outside the metaphysical concept of truth. It is also about the possibility, and indeed the challenge, of thinking metaphor in place of mimesis. Where does the desire for metaphor come from? Is metaphor a trope amongst others, or perhaps the trope that encompasses all tropes? Or is it something altogether differentnot a mere rhetorical figure, but a clue to how things work? Those questions already animated a previous work, devoted to Proust. In the same way that, in that earlier book, I argue that key developments in the natural sciences have pushed classical, Aristotelian metaphysics, and its consummation in Hegelian dialectics, out of its dogmatic sleep, I argue here that artnot, again, art as such, but a certain conception and practice of artforces aesthetics out of its dominant paradigm, referred to here as