Aesthetics After Metaphysics From Mimesis to Metaphor [Hardcover]

This book focuses on a dimension of art which the philosophical tradition (from Plato to Hegel and even Adorno) has consistently overlooked, such was its commitment  explicit or implicit  to mimesis and the metaphysics of truth it presupposes. De Beistegui refers to this dimension, which unfolds outside the space that stretches between the sensible and the supersensible  the space of metaphysics itself  as the hypersensibleand show how the operationof art to which it corresponds is best described as metaphorical. The movement of the book, then, is from the classical or metaphysical aesthetics of mimesis (Part One) to the aesthetics of the hypersensible and metaphor (Part Two). Against much of the history of aesthetics and the metaphysical discourse on art, he argues that the philosophical value of art doesnt consist in its ability to bridge the space between the sensible and the supersensible, or the image and the Idea, and reveal the sensible as proto-conceptual, but to open up a different sense of the sensible. His aim, then, is to shift the placeand rolethat philosophy attributes to art.

I. Towards the Hypersensible  1. Aesthetics and Metaphysics I: The Mimetic Schema  2. Aesthetics and Metaphysics II: From Kant to Adorno  3. Aesthetics at the Limit of Metaphysics: Intimations of the Hypersensible  II. The Aesthetics of Metaphor  4. Metaphor Beyond Metaphysics?  5. Literature: Proust, H?lderlin  6. Sculpture: Chillida

This is a rich, thoughtful, and provocative book. It is at once learned and philosophically ambitious, presenting and defending a post-metaphysical aesthetic that aims to refigure our relation to the earth. A great deal is at stake in these discussions, much more than what we might term a contril£Š