The visual arts offer refreshing and novel resources through which to understand the representation, power, ideology and critique of law. This vibrantly interdisciplinary book brings the burgeoning field to a new maturity through extended close readings of major works by artists from Pieter Bruegel and Gustav Klimt to Gordon Bennett and Rafael Cauduro. At each point, the author puts these works of art into a complex dance with legal and social history, and with recent developments in legal and art theory. Manderson uses the idea of time and temporality as a focal point through which to explore how the work of art engages with and constitutes law and human lives. In the symmetries and asymmetries caused by the vibrating harmonic resonances of these triple forces - time, law, art - lies a way of not only understanding the world, but also transforming it.

Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts

In this book Jane Kneller focuses on the role of imagination as a creative power in Kant's aesthetics and in his overall philosophical enterprise. She analyzes Kant's account of imaginative freedom and the relation between imaginative free play and human social and moral development, showing various ways in which his aesthetics of disinterested reflection produce moral interests. She situates these aspects of his aesthetic theory within the context of German aesthetics of the eighteenth century, arguing that Kant's contribution is a bridge between early theories of aesthetic moral education and the early Romanticism of the last decade of that century. In so doing, her book brings the two most important German philosophers of Enlightenment and Romanticism, Kant and Novalis, into dialogue. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers in both Kant studies and German philosophy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

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Kant and the power of imagination

What does it take to be subjectively free in an objectively rational social order? In this book Andreja Novakovic offers a fresh interpretation of Hegel's account of ethical life by focusing on his concept of habit or 'second nature'. Novakovic addresses two central and difficult issues facing any interpretation of his Philosophy of Right: why Hegel thinks that it is is better to relate unreflectively to the laws of ethical life, and which forms of reflection, especially critical reflection, remain available within ethical life. Her interpretation draws on numerous parts of Hegel's system, particularly on his 'Anthropology' and his Phenomenology of Spirit, and also explores connections between his account and those of other philosophers. Her aim is to argue that Hegel has a compelling conception of the ordinary ethical standpoint which takes seriously both the virtues and the perils of reflection.

Hegel on Second Nature in Ethical Life

As he begins the story of Oscar de Leon’s “brief and wondrous life,” the Dominican-American writer Junot Diaz turns to the forms of the Global South’s outernational poetics of planetary coloniality and wonder, discovery and conquest. The hero’s experiences of diaspora, structures of underdevelopment, and exuberant raciology, the burden of his intellectual Creole double consciousness from inhabiting two incommensurable worlds (Santo Domingo and Paterson, New Jersey), the recurring decolonial motifs of the Great “American doom” or “curse” and of the world of the damnes which structures Oscar and Yunior’s lives are described by Diaz as the fuku americanus. In my essay, I examine Diaz’s theory of the fuku americanus and how it originated in colonial modernity with Admiral Colon and how it was then carried into the present by homegrown figures like Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina and Ronald Reagan. To chart accurately the full dimensions of Diaz’s narratological compass in the Global South, I will begin by analyzing the historical sociologists Immanuel Wallenstein and Anibal Quijano’s attempt to recover the complexity of what they call “Americanity.” I will then illustrate the complexity of Americanity’s history and afterlife by analyzing it in relation to Diaz’s decolonial theory of the fuku americanus. My aim in this essay is to introduce the vocabulary of “Americanity” to bring about a shift in the framework and the perspective as well as the object of analysis of world-system literature and of the US Latino novel.

Conjectures on "Americanity" and Junot Díaz's "Fukú Americanus" in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The structuralist and social-psychological perspectives on alienation are described, with attention to Seeman’s contention that the experience of alienation is based more on sentiment than on reason. The passions in early modernity are described, and the eighteenth-century moral sentimentalists Hume, Smith, and Kant are discussed. Romanticism is described as the first self-critique of modernity, as it opposed Enlightenment science, rationalism, and uniformitarianism; it is linked to interiorized emotionality and to diversitarianism. Romantic concepts of alienation include inhibition of natural sexuality, oppressive condition of work, and the loss of an imagined Golden Age before human alienation. Hegel’s Phenomenology outlines a four-stage mode of the undoing of social domination which has a narrative structure consistent with romantic story-telling, but was grounded not in romanticism but in Gnosticism and Lutheran dialectics. Hegel’s critique of sentimentalism and romantism is explored, with Hegel emerging as a dedicated anti-romantic who condemned the sophistry of Schlegel and Novalis’s ‘beautiful soul’, arguing that the self, to be viable, cannot remain encapsulated in inner subjectivity but must rather engage in emotion-laden confrontation with self-willed others in the social world; this requires a positive kind of alienation of the self from itself. Romantic effort to keep the self in itself as protection from the corrupted and corrupting social world was misguided. Hegel was right in asserting that the self is necessarily both subjective and objective, both inner and outer, but wrong in his contention that the self can progress by resolving inner contradictions, for the self, as the core of our personality, rather progresses through incorporating and elaborating contradictions, ambiguities, and polysemantic meanings.

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P. H. Butter

Papers

Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature