Consequences of Enlightenment

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment it claims to reject? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno’s seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues against the view that postmodern culture has rejected Enlightenment beliefs and explores instead the continuities contemporary theory shares with Kant’s failed ambition to bring the project of Enlightenment to completion. He explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel, and Wittgenstein in order to reverse the tendency to see works of art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which they are situated.

• Major critic addresses relationship between philosophy, aesthetics and politics in Enlightenment and contemporary culture • Looks at wide range of thinkers and philosophers • Author’s first on similar topic book in same series performed exceptionally well

Acknowledgements; 1. The consequences of enlightenment; 2. Aesthetics as critique; 3. The difficulty of art; 4. Communication and transformation: aesthetics and politics in Habermas and Arendt; 5. The role of aesthetics in the radicalisation of democracy; 6. Infinite reflection and the shape of praxis; 7. Feeling and/as force.