John J. JOUGHIN & Simon MALPAS (eds.) The New Aestheticism Manchester University Press, 2003 272 pages. ISBN 0719061393. £15.99

Joanny Moulin (University of Provence)

This collective work aims at offering a new approach to the critical gap once pointed out by Friedrich Schlegel in the fragmentary formula: "What is called the philosophy of art usually lacks one of two things: either the philosophy or the art." It may and shall be considered by some as one "reactionary" crystallisation of the general "post-theoretical" moment which literary studies have been going through for some time already, for indeed it means to counteract the anti-aestheticism that literary theory has often implied. There is an obvious attempt to mark a milestone in the contemporary history of literary criticism, by giving book status to "the New Aestheticism," a concept, perhaps a movement, which first appeared in the mid-1990s, when the New Left Review hosted a controversy between at least two of the "new aesthetes" contributing to this collection, J. Bernstein and A. Bowie, and some "new philistines", as the former would call them (D. Beech and J. Roberts). The New Aestheticsm intends to start anew from Kant's third critique, The Critique of Judgment, considered as an effort to bridge the gap previously opened by Kant himself between epistemology and ethics. The widely acknowledged failure of the Third Critique to achieve such a reconciliation between "truth and justice" can be said to mark the beginning of modernity—the New Aesthetes follow Habermas and Gadamer up to that point. But they furthermore insist that "Kant's failure" also "opens a space for aesthetics within modernity," as art (and literature in particular) comes to have a transformative potential of its own, which pertains neither to pure nor of practical reason, but is governed by aesthetic judgment. The New Aestheticism also claims some parts of the intellectual heritage of the Frankfurt School on the one hand, and, on the other hand, of "post-phenomenological" thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, from whom they mean to distinguish themselves, however, by further reasserting the "self-validating entity" of art and the "transformative cognitive potential of the aesthetic." Therefore, to give a concrete example of this desirable return to aesthetics, Thomas Docherty argues in favour of the aesthetic experience in education, to palliate the dangerous philistinism of the too strictly instrumental view of education prevailing, he says, among European and American governments, to conclude rather bluntly that "All art is good; if it is not good, it is not art." As if in response to this, Jonathan Dollimore goes on by saying that "Those who love art the most also censor it the most," meaning that to reify art is also a way not to engage with it. And he raises the interestingly controversial issue of whether, as he would tend to argue, the various strands of so-called "theory" in the late twentieth century have a share of responsibility in "the decline of humanist faith" and the subsequent "culture wars." Thus summed up, the argument may sound like gross over-simplification, and it is precisely with such reductive partiality that Dollimore blames those philosophers who put down Europe's barbaric humanity to Enlightenment humanism, from Adorno to Baudrillard. Repeating a central argument in another way, Andrew Bowie expresses concern for what Adorno called the "primacy of the objective" and pleads instead in favour of what Novalis termed the "aesthetic imperative" of seeking to transcend one's limits by doing justice to major works of art. Almost explicitly recognising the close intellectual relationship that New Aestheticism entertains with Romanticism, and following Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe's sympathetic revisiting of the Iena Romantics' fragmentary aesthetics as an "art that exists on the threshold of modernity," Simon Maplas turns away from Hegel's "gigantic war machine directed against aesthetics in general" and favours Heidegger's belief in the capacity of art to disclose the world. The second part of the book offers a series of "Readings" which are, as it were, so many instances of New Aestheticism applied to particular texts as a method of analysis. Thus, for instance, Mark Robson examines the New Historicism of Stephen Greenblatt et alia, a school of criticism that New Aestheticism seems to some extent desirous to emulate in Doppelgänger style, with a remark that would be even more apposite as self-criticism, namely that it is amply grounded on German idealism and post-Kantian ideology. For example, John Joughin reads Hamlet again, in the light of Kant's definition of genius in the Third Critique as (1) "a talent for producing that for which no definite rule can be given" and which (2) is "exemplary." Shakespeare's genius is proved by the capacity of his work to resist definitive interpretation or conceptual control and its "dislocatory" power that keeps our relation to it open-ended and creative. And Robert Eaglestone, playing the part of a devil's advocate, asks the question of what knowledge it is that New Aestheticism can have, since it is not a doctrine, but since it radically refutes the claim that criticism should have the character of scientific knowledge. Eaglestone's answer amounts to a confirmation of Maplas' argument, and centres on Heidegger's concept of "aletheia, unconcealement thought as opening" which "first grants the possibility of truth." In other terms, New Aestheticism like God may tentatively be defined by negatives: it is neither not Marxism, not Psychoanalysis, not (Post-)Structuralism, not (New) Historicism, for all those are forms of "scientific positivism." In a third section entitled "Reflections," Gary Banham comes once again to the multiple senses of "aesthetics" in Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgement, and goes on to apply his findings to practical examples taken from Wyndham Lewis and Robert Mapplethorpe, which amounts to much the same sort of anachronism that the New Historicist school of criticism was earlier mildly reproached with. Then Andrew Benjamin goes on by asking for a return to the work of art, after having defined art as that which escapes the hold of fashion. Finally Joanna Hodge comes back once again to Heidegger, this time compared, but rather clearly preferred, to Adorno for whom aesthetics had become merely "the necrology of art," whereas for the author of Sein und Zeit as for the New Aesthetes, the human being is and must remain "neighbour of being" and "shepherd of being." And it becomes more and more apparent that the New Aesthetes may in fact be merely engaged in renovating the old-fashioned mansion of New Criticism, which still stands complete with its romantic ideology made of confirmed genius worship and a sincere faith in the transcendence of art. At times, however, it is possible to hear something like ever so light a strain of self-conscious doubt in the voice of these New Aesthetes, as for instance when Eaglestone picks up the argument of their "new philistine" contradictors, saying that "Of course, much of the 'new aesthetics' could be seen, as Beech and Roberts argue, as conservative and backward looking. However, this is not necessarily the case." Indeed, the New Aestheticism is reactionary, and it is at least doubly so, for it defines itself firstly against "post- structuralist" theory, and secondly against New Historicism which is itself a reaction against the first. Of course, being "reactionary" is not always, or in itself, a badge of infamy: there may be, indeed there have been salutary reactions. Still, one may wonder why the tentative applications of New Aestheticism to particular literary texts are not very convincing, and do not to give any sustained impression of critical novelty, but rather the contrary. One reason for this may well be that the "theories" that New Aestheticism means to refute—Structuralism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, etc.—are never really confronted on their own home grounds, but rather merely eschewed, and so they still have all the weapons. Adorno and the Frankfurt School are skirmished with indeed, but those are perhaps not the larger dragons in the pack. "Theory" is a page that will have to be turned, but it should not be skipped, lest it might return.