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Baroque Reason
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Baroque Reason
The Aesthetics of Modernity



March 1994 | 192 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
In this fascinating book, Christine Buci-Glucksmann explores the condition of modernity-alienation, melancholy, and nostalgia-through the writing of a number of philosophers, including the social and aesthetic writings of Walter Benjamin. In her rich discussion, she focuses on the ways in which social realities can be represented, and in particular with how modernity might be represented. Moreover, she examines how the great 20th-century thinkers like Nietzsche, Adorno, Musil, Barthes, and Lacan--in spite of their many differences-are seen to constitute a baroque paradigm. Finally, her extraordinary exposition of a baroque reason for modernity sheds new light on a number of themes central to modern social theory-the critique of instrumental rationality, the political crisis of socialism, the loss of community and of innocence with the development of industrialization, and the impact of relativism on realist theories of knowledge This powerful book is essential reading for all those interested in cultural, social, feminist, and literary theory.

Bryan S Turner
Introduction
 
PART ONE: AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF MODERNITY: ANGELUS NOVUS
 
Angelic Space
Angelus Novus, an Overwhelming Picture

 
 
Baroque Space
Trauerspiel: Allegory as Origin

 
 
Baudelairean Space
A Modern Baroque

 
 
The Space of Writing
The Angel and the 'Scene' of Writing: In the `Primeval Forest' (Urwald)

 
 
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

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ISBN: 9780803989757
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