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Was Heisst Schauen? On the Vital Signs of Modernist Painting
Author(s) -
Santner Eric L.
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
german life and letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 12
eISSN - 1468-0483
pISSN - 0016-8777
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0483.2009.01464.x
Subject(s) - subjectivity , biopower , psychic , modernity , normative , aesthetics , disenchantment , psychoanalytic theory , vitalism , sociology , epistemology , embodied cognition , painting , vitality , philosophy , art , psychoanalysis , politics , art history , psychology , law , political science , medicine , alternative medicine , theology , pathology
This paper argues that a great deal of modernist artistic production is best viewed as a struggle with the psychic and biopolitical dimensions of what has been characterised as the ‘disenchantment’ of the world. The paper proceeds by way of a critical engagement with the work of the philosopher J. M. Bernstein who has tried to measure the achievements of modernist works of art on the basis of their capacity to sustain the ‘normative claims’ of embodied subjectivity under conditions of modernity (scientific formalisation, commodity exchange, bureaucratic organisation). The pleasures afforded by such works must be linked, in Bernstein's view, to the claims they make on behalf of lost forms of human vitality and animation. This paper argues that only a concept of human ‘life’ that brings together what Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben characterise as biopolitics with the psychoanalytic understanding of the drives can capture the full complexity of the aesthetic claims in question.