Arthur Danto's celebrated declaration of “the end of art” might seem to accommodate well the apparently open-ended aesthetic diversity of contemporary art. However, in his philosophy of art history, Danto treats the pursuit of autonomy as a misdirected philosophical concern, and denigrates the aesthetic pluralism of contemporary art as a matter of empty indifference. As a result, Danto not only fails to do justice to the explosion of artistic forms in recent decades, he contributes to their misconstrual. Accordingly, this paper revisits the opposition between autonomy and pluralism on which Danto's philosophy of art history rests, arguing that artistic self-definition ought to be conceived, not as a misplaced conceptual problem, but rather as a distinctly aesthetic concern, integral to art practice and criticism. So understood, autonomy and pluralism do not stand opposed but rather mutually implicate one another, and the historical responsibility for artists to define the terms of their own work, rather than having been exhausted, persists amidst the broad field of formal possibilities presented by contemporary art's complication with everyday life
While originally Lacan seconds Heidegger's contention that 'anxiety has no object', in the early 1960s, he dismisses his own earlier position as a childish reassurance and argues, to the contrary, that 'anxiety is not without an object'. With particular attention to his use of the double negative, 'not without', this essay examines this turning point in Lacan's thinking in order to explain the opposition between his psychoanalytic critical theory and Derrida's deconstruction. The arguments that Lacan brings to bear on his work of the 1950s closely approximate those that Derrida levels against Heidegger in the formulation of his own concept of 'the aporia of the impossible'. Indeed, as commentators often emphasise, the formal logic of Lacan's later thinking is strictly isomorphic with Derrida's philosophy; and their respective concepts of anxiety and aporia are frequently misconstrued, accordingly, as simply identical. However, insofar as Lacan discerns a content in this formal negativity, contesting the idealism of his earlier theory and reasserting the materialist objectivity of the Freudian 'lost object,' as intractably Real, the two do not coincide. On the contrary, Lacan's repudiation of Heidegger's concept of anxiety extends equally to Derrida's aporia, as if, for Derrida, Heidegger's existential phenomenology were not reassuring enough.
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