The Muses

By Jean-Luc Nancy

Book Overview

This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses--to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred--and sense or meaning in general.

Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel's Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit--art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel's historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804727813
• ISBN13: 9780804727815
• Release Date: March 1996
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Length: 136 Pages
• Weight: 0.45 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.4" x 8.3"