Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation.

The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh''s shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí''s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud''s postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant''s powerful legacy.

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation.

The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy.

Preface
Introduction: Art and Philosophy
1. Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant
2. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
3. How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable: The History of an Error | The Will to Power as Art, by Friedrich Nietzsche
4. Beyond the Pleasure Principle | Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, by Sigmund Freud
5. The Lugubrious Game, by Georges Bataille
6. A Small History of Photography, by Walter Benjamin
7. Nietzsche's Overturning of Platonism | The Origin of the Work of Art, by Martin Heidegger
8. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I | Of the Gaze as Object Petit a, by Jacques Lacan
9. Las Meninas, by Michel Foucault
10. Society, by Theodor Adorno
11. The Work of Art and Fantasy, by Sarah Kofman
12. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, by Roland Barthes
13. Giotto's Joy | Holbein's Dead Christ, by Julia Kristeva
14. Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles, by Jacques Derrida
15. Hysteria, by Gilles Deleuze
16. Answering the Question: What Is Postmodernism?, by Jean-François Lyotard
17. Privation Is Like a Face, by Giorgio Agamben
18. The Vestige of Art, by Jean-Luc Nancy
19. Art and Philosophy, by Alain Badiou
20. The Janus-Face of Politicized Art, by Jacques Rancière
Notes
Bibliography
Index