The declaration of equal rights arguably created the modern political community. But this act of empowering individuals caused the disempowering of the political community. Exposing this, Menke opens up a new way of understanding rights that no longer involves the disempowering of the political community--
A interlocution containing a stimulating lead essay on the relationship between law and violence by one of the key third-generation Frankfurt School philosophers, Christoph Menke, and engaged responses by a variety of influential critics. -- .
This book reconceives modern aesthetics by reconstructing its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten's Aesthetics and Kant's Critique of Judgment. Force demonstrates that aesthetics, and hence modern philosophy, began twice. On the one hand, Baumgarten's Aesthetics is organized around the new concept of the "subject": as a totality of faculties; an agent defined by capabilities; one who is able. Yet an aesthetics in the Baumgartian manner, as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of force. The latter conceives the aesthetic not as sensible cognition but as a play of expression--propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised like a faculty, does not recognize or represent anything because it is obscure and unconscious: the force of what in humanity is distinct from the subject. The aesthetics of force is thus a thinking of the nature of man: of aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture acquired by practice. It founds an anthropology of difference: between force and faculty, human and subject.
"In his essay, Christoph Menke (b.1958), Professor of Philosophy at the Goethe-University, Frankfurt am Main, focuses on the question of how and where there is equality between human beings. The author examines different notions throughout the history of philosophy, as well as varying political concepts, such as the contrarian interpretations of fascism and communism, and the differing reflections on the connection between equality and reason by Aristotle and Descartes. Responding to our current debate about the question of equality, Menke proposes a continuation through an "aesthetics of equality", which radicalizes enlightenment's assumption according to which all people have the same ability to reason. Here, equality consists of a force, an agency to imagine, given to all people -- the equality of the possibility for an exercised and exercising formation of reason, which is not a given but a socially acquired capacity."--Publisher's website.
In this book Christoph Menke attempts to explain art's sovereign power to subvert reason without falling into an error common to Adorno's negative dialectics and Derrida's deconstruction.