Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture

Description

Forbidden Aesthetics, Ethical Justice, and Terror in Modern Western Culture explores the potential links between terror and aesthetics in modern Western society, specifically the affinity between terrorism and the possibility of an aesthetic appreciation of terrorist phenomena or events. But can we actually have an aesthetic appreciation of terror or terrorism? And if we can, is it ethical or legitimate? Emmanouil Aretoulakis proposes that Western spectators and subjects from the eighteenth century onwards have always felt, unconsciously or not, a certain kind of fascination or even exhilaration before scenes of tragedy and natural or manmade disaster. Owing to their immorality, such “forbidden” feelings go unacknowledged. It would definitely be callous as well as politically incorrect to acknowledge the existence of aesthetics in witnessing or representing human misery. Still, as Aretoulakis insists, our aesthetic faculties or even our appreciation of the beautiful are already inherent in how we view, appraise, and pass judgment upon phenomena of terrorism and disaster. Paradoxically, such a “forbidden aesthetics” is ethical despite its utter immorality. Contents Acknowledgments Introduction From the Sublime Anti-Aesthetic to the Retrieval of Beauty The Forbidden Image: Terrorism, Memory, and Disinterested Pleasure Notes Chapter One: Does Beauty Think? Ethics and the Aesthetics of Imagining Politics, Ethics, and the Beautiful The Beautiful, Not the Sublime: Toward an Aesthetics of Freedom Life is Beautiful—After All Notes Chapter Two: A Glimpse into the Forbidden Damien Hirst and the TV Image of 9/11 The Ethics and Politics of Disaster Art Stockhausen’s Romantic Vision: Authenticity and Terrorism Terrorism, Performance, and its Audience Notes Chapter Three: The Nuclear Image and the Forbidden Aesthetics of Beauty Los Alamos: Nuclear Scientists as Poets Authentic Art and the Nuclear Blast Nuclear Terrorism in New York? Zeus as A Terrorist Hiroshima and Nagasaki as Planes of Aesthetic Terror(ism) Stunning Image and the Japanese Memory of Horror The Post-Aesthetic and the Artistic in the Nuclear Reality Notes Chapter Four: The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 Imagination: Witnessing the Ineffable Delight: Representation, Terror and Edmund Burke Art, Fantasy, and Disaster Tourism in Post-Quake Lisbon Catastrophism: Revisiting the Earthquake as Show Business Notes Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index