Category Archive: aesthetics

Paul Klee, "Insula Dulcamara" (1938); Oil on newsprint, mounted on burlap
01 Nov

Risk

I began writing this before disaster struck very close to home; and so I finish it without finishing it. A disaster never really ends; it strikes and strikes continuously —…
Thursday, November 1, 2012 at 11:51 pm By Joseph Weissman 4 Replies
World War I, Wasily Kandinsky
17 Sep

Soul

A man like Kant can explain the beautiful in terms of a pure disinterested pleasure — such a knotted definition is not in itself surprising, nor is the kind of…
Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 9:50 pm By Joseph Weissman 5 Replies
30 Dec

The Monstrosity of Dreams: Beauty after Surrealism

If narcissism could in any sense be said to be the basis for a proto-aesthetics, a necessary condition for the production of any aesthetic intervention whatsoever — if not the…
Sunday, December 30, 2007 at 10:58 pm By Joseph Weissman 6 Replies
26 Sep

Aesthetics, Asymmetry and Weakness: Nietzsche and the Beautiful

Improvisation (Kandinsky) “I owe to you the most beautiful dream of my life.” – Nietzsche, [from a letter to Lou Salome] I cannot help but admire Nietzsche when he writes…
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 9:29 pm By Joseph Weissman 1 Reply
21 Sep

Bakhtin’s Chronotopic Events: Notes on Novelistic Space-Time

Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Form of Time and Chronotope in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin: UTP, 1981. 84-258. I apologize ahead of time for the informality…
Friday, September 21, 2007 at 9:48 pm By Taylor Adkins 6 Replies
30 Aug

‘A Chain of Necessary Rings of Culture’: Nietzsche and the Ability of Science

In sections 4 and 5 of Human All Too Human, Nietzsche develops a non-linear train of thought that attempts to analyze and reconstruct the experiences and concepts of religion, art…
Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 8:51 am By Taylor Adkins Leave a Reply
19 Jan

In the end?

Perhaps the most subtle instant of artistic insight: knowing when the work is complete. Knowing a thing is done is always a decision, a superego injunction to believe, to accept;…
Friday, January 19, 2007 at 2:56 am By Joseph Weissman Leave a Reply
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