Hink (2010) - Acker’s "Empire" as Deleuzian Assemblage

Journal article by Renee C. Hoogland; Mosaic ( …, 2003

For Critical theorists, it sounds strange that Habermas should refuse aesthetics as a way to diagnose social relationships. Either in the architecture of public space or in the pragmatism of inter-subjective communication, aesthetics appears as a shadow that haunts the intended transparence between interlocutors. So, as Arnold Farr remembers, Habermas privileges the argumentative mode of discourse while qualifying various ways of narrative and rhetoric as pathological forms of communication. In my perspective, this refusal occurs because the normativity of communicative action -ultimately, Habermas's critical basis -is distorted by what he calls the subjective expression of aesthetic discourses. That is something that we can observe when Habermas considers Marcuse and Foucault (in different ways) as representatives of this "self-expressive attempt" effected by aesthetics.

RADAR - MUSAC's Journal of Art and Thought (Issue 1, 2012)

Christoph Brunner, Roberto nigro, and Gerald Raunig begin their reflections aimed “Towards a New Aesthetic Paradigm” by using the later books of Foucault and Guattari as a point of departure for their argument that the production of subjectivity turns into an existential territory in which social, ethical, and aesthetic transformations must be negotiated. The relationship, in Foucault and Guattari, between aesthetics and existence is not exclusively linked to art, nor does it imply art as an institutionalised practice. On the contrary, aesthetics itself conforms to a model of existence that makes very clear the transversal relationships between subjects and objects, and between the corporeal and incorporeal forces that, together, constitute the real. The function of the arts is one of “rupturing with strategies in the face of the Real forms and significations circulating trivially in the social field.” For the authors, what is important is not to place these modes of creative production within autonomous domain of art, but rather to consider them in terms of their potential for transformation, disruption, and reinvention of banal affects and percepts.

2022

Free Associations: Psychoanalysis and Culture, Media, Groups, Politics, 2019

Combining academic critical theoretical approaches with contemporary clinical psychoanalysts, all of the articles in this special issue pursue a dynamic historicity of subjectivity through psychoanalytic aesthetics. Although each article grapples with the often-complex entanglement of psychoanalysis with different forms of modern aesthetic representation, each moves beyond this to innovatively use psychoanalysis to envision a subjectivity that engages with a future not yet decided, with a historicity which is not yet. For each author, aesthetic representation produces a generative opening toward new horizons of possibility— individually, culturally, or politically conceived. In this way, the articles collected in “Aesthetic Subjects” undertake a larger theoretical agenda by implicitly rethinking the anachronistic bifurcation of “art/politics” that has characterized much Frankfurt School work and, consequently, much critical theory. As each author differently explores, the question of “representation” is key to this enterprise since representation is importantly both a political and an aesthetic concept; it names both how art mediates life and how governments stand in for people. Put differently, representation is both substitution and extension, both a degree of remove and a point of connection. Therefore, throughout the articles in this issue, “aesthetics” is understood not just as a symptomatic consequence of subjectivity, but rather as the very social, political, and historical grounding necessary for the emergence of subjectivity and political sociality itself. Each essay in “Aesthetic Subjects” formulates an alternative approach to the aesthetic life of psychoanalysis, proposing not simply that different psychologies of mind are represented in aesthetic form, but more radically that psychologies of mind are produced and often exceeded by the aesthetic form.

Deleuze Studies, 2007