Baroque Reason The Aesthetics of Modernity

by Christine Buci-Glucksmann

• ISBN13: 9780803989764
• ISBN10: 0803989768
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1994-03-31
• Publisher: Sage Publications

Summary

In this fascinating book, Christine Buci-Glucksmann explores the condition of modernity - alienation, melancholy, nostalgia - through the works of a number of writers and philosophers, including the social and aesthetic philosophy of Walter Benjamin.The author examines Baudelaire's haunting image of the city and its profound effect on conceptions of modernity. She goes on to consider how such influential figures as Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes and Lacan constitute a baroque paradigm, united by their allegorical style, their conflation of aesthetics with ethics and their subject matter - death, catastrophe, sexuality, myth, the female. In her exegesis of these fundamental themes Buci-Glucksmann proposes an epistemology beyond postmodernism.This extraordinary exposition of a baroque reason for modernity sheds new light on a number of themes central to modern social theory.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Bryan S Turner

PART ONE: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MODERNITY: ANGELUS NOVUS

Angelic Space

/f003Angelus Novus/f001, an Overwhelming Picture

Baroque Space

/f003Trauerspiel:/f001 Allegory as Origin

Baudelairean Space

A Modern Baroque

The Space of Writing

The Angel and the `Scene' of Writing: In the `Primeval Forest' (U/f003rwald/f001)

PART TWO: THE UTOPIA OF THE FEMININE: BENJAMIN'S TRAJECTORY 2

Catastrophist Utopia

The Feminine as Allegory of Modernity

Anthropological Utopia, or The `Heroines' of Modernity

Transgressive Utopia

`Image Frontiers' of Writing and History

Appendix

Viennese Figures of Otherness: Femininity and Jewishness

PART THREE: BAROQUE REASON

An Aesthetics of Otherness

Salome or, The Baroque Scenography of Desire

The Stage of the Modern and the Look of Medusa