John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas (eds). The New Aestheticism. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003. [Book review]

Edited by John J. Joughin and Simon Malpas, The New Aestheticism collects 13 essays, each of which attempt to situate aesthetics at the intersection of literature, philosophy and politics. The editors’ introduction sets forth the overall program of the text with great clarity. The concept of ‘new aestheticism’ covers those attempts to consider the truth content of art while refusing to reduce the specificity of the artwork, that very specificity which prevents it from being subordinated to truth understood in its classical sense. The tension between the universality and the singularity of truth characterised throughout the volume is, for the most part, distinctively deconstructive. Joughin and Malpas admit as much when they refer to the “constitutive aporia of aesthetic theory” (12). The New Aestheticism is “necessarily plural, as any work that takes the aesthetic seriously must be” (17). It also attempts to take seriously the singularity that appears equiprimordially with plurality. At the same time, The New Aestheticism assumes the imbrication of the artwork within social, political, natural, ideological and other networks while refusing to allow these determinations to exhaust the meaning of the artwork. The aesthetic attitude is developed at the site of the tension between the structural determinations of the artwork and its singularity as a work of art.