Aesthetics and Modernity

Aesthetics and Modernity brings together Agnes Heller's most recent essays around the topics of aesthetic genres such as painting, music, literature and comedy, aesthetic reception, and embodiment. The essays draw on Heller's deep appreciation of aesthetics in all its forms from the classical to the Renaissance and the contemporary periods. Heller's recent work on aesthetics explores the complex and fraught status of artworks within the context of the history of modernity. For Heller, not only does the relation between aesthetics and modernity have to be looked at anew, but also the way in which these terms are conceptualized, and this is the two-fold task that she sets for herself in these essays. She engages this task with a critical recognition of modernity's pitfalls. This collection highlights these pitfalls in the context of continuing possibilities for aesthetics and our relationship with works of art, and throws light on Heller's theory of emotions and feelings, and her theory of modernity. Aesthetics and Modernity collects the essential essays of Agnes Heller, and is a must-read for anyone interested in Heller's major contributions to philosophy.

Agnes Heller is peerless as a philosopher of the modern condition. Long acclaimed for her acuity and extraordinary compass, here Heller presents a vivid cross-section of her thinking, convening analyses of emotions and needs, forms of rationality and social association, and questions about the crux of value and human communion around a sustained consideration of artworks and of the beleaguered concept of the beautiful. As John Rundell expounds in his instructive introduction to the collection, Heller approaches postmodern critique as a way of sharpening the best insights of modern thought, while concurrently refusing its metaphysical biases. She resuscitates the notion of a vibrant subjectivity and enters into dialogue with an array of thinkers, demonstrating how the urge for sure guarantors of value may be tackled with an understanding of contingency and historical truth. And Heller writes with utter disregard for jargon or cant, confessing her concerns directly and never allowing the reader to forget that this is a discussion of our shared modernity, and of the open possibility of coming to be at home within it., Agnes Heller is one of the sublime philosophical voices of our time. Aesthetics and Modernity is a beguiling and profound collection of essays from 1995 to 2008 reflecting Heller’s late turn to an intensive reflection on the nature of art and the arts. Here she engages with Shakespeare, the Greek gods, jokes, the dignity of artworks and much more besides, casting an astonishing eye over the fate of freedom, beauty and the imagination across the vast terrain that separates Homer from the modern historical novel. The work ripples with intelligence and insight. This exquisite selection draws together threads from one of the most compelling and rewarding inquiries into the aesthetic condition of humankind ever undertaken by a philosopher.

John Rundell is associate professor of social theory at the University of Melbourne. Agnes Heller is an influential and internationally recognized philosopher who frequently writes on such diverse topics as ethics, modernity, and political theory. In 2005 she was awarded the Sonning Prize. She is currently the Hannah Arendt Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Political Science at The New School in New York City.