About this item
Highlights
- Why, and in what manner, did artist Paul Klee have such a significant impact on twentieth-century thinkers?
- About the Author: Stephen H. Watson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
- 256 Pages
- Philosophy, Aesthetics
Description
About the Book
Watson investigates the responses of of key twentieth-century philosophers to the work of artist Paul Klee and reveals how the art and philosophy mutually illuminate each other through these encounters.Book Synopsis
Why, and in what manner, did artist Paul Klee have such a significant impact on twentieth-century thinkers? His art and his writing inspired leading philosophers to produce key texts in twentieth-century aesthetics, texts that influenced subsequent art history and criticism.
Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Sartre, Foucault, Blanchot, Derrida, and Marion are among the philosophers who have engaged with Klee's art and writings. Their views are often thought to be distant from each other, but Watson puts them in conversation. His point is not to vindicate any final interpretation of Klee but to allow his interpreters' different accounts to interact, to shed light on their and on Klee's work, and, in turn, to delineate both a history and a theoretical problematic in their midst. Crescent Moon over the Rational reveals an evolving theoretical constellation of interpretations and their questions (theoretical, artistic, and political) that address and continually renew Klee's rich legacies.
Review Quotes
"This is a great book. It provides a new understanding of familiar, but not really well known, material by showing not only how Klee's influence on many figures is 'philosophically significant, ' but also how the philosophical interpretations of Klee have laid out an intertwined history or tradition. Each page of this book demonstrates Watson's long engagement with phenomenology, the Frankfurt School, and art theory. He is trying to transform the very concept of phenomenology, and he does this quite successfully."--Leonard Lawlor "Penn State University"
"Watson's "Crescent Moon Over the Rational" is an impressive book, contributing a great deal to the discussion of art and aesthetics in the 20th century. It presents the work of Paul Klee in an innovative and persuasive configuration: each chapter develops a tapestry of quotations and situates Klee and his interlocutors in the context of a broader philosophical and aesthetic reflection on art, rationality, and the sensuous in modernity."--Krzysztof Ziarek "SUNY Buffalo"
About the Author
Stephen H. Watson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. His most recent book is Tradition(s) II: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good (2001).