The Muses [Hardcover]

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 sensesto which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referredand sense or meaning in general.Throughout the five essays, Nancys argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegels Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spiritart as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegels 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. A truly exhilarating set of philosophical reflections on art and aesthetics. From the caves of Lascaux to Caravaggio's Death of the Virgin to the postmodern question of the marketplace and the 'end' of art, Nancy masterfully explicates the threshold role art plays in the philosophical distinctions between the sensory and the sensible, life and death, presentation and representation. Art is also compellingly shown to be the foundational category for any concept of religion, technology, or even 'humanity.' Georges Van Den Abbeele, University of California, DavisThis 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 sensesto which the plurality of the arts halCÎ