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The Continental Aesthetics Reader, 2nd edition

This anthology is the first up-to-the-decade survey of continental aesthetics. It is a substantially revised and expanded version of The Continental Aesthetics Reader, first published in 2000. As well as charting the development of ideas from the ‘long’ nineteenth century and the defining texts of twentieth-century aesthetics, this edition also includes recently emergent philosophers, such as Agamben, Badiou, Deleuze, Guattari, Nancy, Rancière, and Žižek. The majority of these return to theories of existence, with the consequence that each thinker posits a view of the world that is often systematic, complex and distinct from the theories of his or her contemporaries. This means that there are a number of difficult, individual theories to be explained. The four novel elements to be considered in the 2011 edition are: (1) 25,000 words of fresh commentary have been written, introducing and critiquing the new themes and authors. (2) The ‘Aesthetic Ontologies’ section plots the departures from poststructuralism and postmodernism of the last ten years, and outlines the various ontologies that are offered in response. (3) Two new sections are introduced setting out themes in aesthetics from the start of the twentieth century to the present: ‘Excess and Affect’ and ‘Embodiment and Technology’. (4) In addition to the seven philosophers named above, Bakhtin, Butler, Ricoeur, and Virilio also appear for the first time. This means there are eleven new introductions. There are new chapters representing Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Irigaray in accordance with the new section titles, and expanded extracts are included for Kant and Heidegger. The introductions for these eight thinkers have been revised and expanded. Through a combination of primary texts and accessible, critical commentary, readers have in one book an overview of the leading schools, themes and arguments in the continental philosophy of art from 1790 to the present.