Deranty, Jean-Philippe. "Existentialist Aesthetics." STANFORD ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY June 26, 2009.

Many of the philosophers commonly described as “existentialist” have made original and decisive contributions to aesthetic thinking. In most cases, a substantial involvement in artistic practice (as novelists, playwrights or musicians) nourished their thinking on aesthetic experience. This is true already of two of the major philosophers who inspired 20th century existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. For reasons of space, however, this entry is restricted to 20th century thinkers who at one point or another accepted the tag “existentialist” as an accurate characterisation of their thinking, and who have made the most significant contributions to aesthetics: Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism owes its name to its emphasis on “existence”. For all the thinkers mentioned above, regardless of their differences, existence indicates the special way in which human beings are in the world, in contrast with other beings. For the existentialists, the human being is “more” than what it is: not only does the human being know that it is but, on the basis of this fundamental knowledge, this being can choose how it will “use” its own being, and thus how it will relate to the world. “Existence” is thus closely related to freedom in the sense of an active engagement in the world. This metaphysical theory regarding human freedom leads into a distinct approach to ontology, i.e., the study of the different ways of being. This ontological aspect of existentialism ties it to aesthetic considerations. Existentialist thinkers believe that, under certain conditions, freedom grants the human being the capacity of revealing essential features of the world and of the beings in it. Since artistic practice is one of the prime examples of free human activity, it is therefore also one of the privileged modes of revealing what the world is about. However, since most of the existentialists followed Nietzsche in the conviction that “God is dead,” art's power of revelation is to a large extent devoted to expressing the absurdity of the human condition. For the existentialists, the world is no longer hospitable to our human desire for meaning and order. This ontological approach to art underpins some of the most distinctive features of existentialist aesthetics. Because it views art in terms of “revelation,” it favors representative art and is suspicious of formalist avant-gardes. And because it grounds expressive capacity on the notion of human freedom, it demands that artistic representation be strongly informed by ethical and political concerns. This is why at times existentialist aesthetics can appear out of touch with the aesthetic avant-gardes of the 20th century. Some of the existentialists wrote substantial analyses about different art forms and how they can be compared, elaborating something like a “system of the arts” similar to that of classical aesthetics. All the existentialist thinkers, with the exception of Merleau-Ponty, thought that the form that best enabled the revelatory potential of art was the theatre, followed by the novel. . . . Read the rest here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aesthetics-existentialist/.

Froman, Wayne J. Review of John Sallis' TRANSFIGUREMENTS. NDPR (April 2009).

Sallis, John. Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art by John Sallis is an exceptionally rich and rewarding text. The text comprises an introduction, titled "Prefigurements," and eight chapters. The first chapter, "The Invisibility of Painting," calls attention to the current significance of art for philosophy and signals how Sallis will address art in this volume. The import of art today pertains to the collapse of the distinction, beginning in Plato, between the sensible and the intelligible. It is this distinction that has governed philosophy of art. The distinction's collapse means that the essence of art has to be rethought "from the ground up." . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15725.

Gover, K. "Review of Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei's THE ECSTATIC QUOTIDIAN." NDPR (July 2008).

Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. The Ecstatic Quotidian: Phenomenological Sightings in Modern Art and Literature. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 2007. The quotidian is an elusive and paradoxical phenomenon. Like the anthropologist whose very presence changes the society she intends to study, everydayness is transformed as soon as we try to reflect on it, since it is by definition that which recedes into the background. It seems that the only way to gain traction on the quotidian is through a kind of dialectic, whereby the familiar and the strange are held in contradistinction, each implying the other. Hence the paradoxical title of Gosetti-Ferencei's book The Ecstatic Quotidian, which means "stepping outside of an everyday familiarity": the ordinary can only be got hold of via the phenomenon of the extraordinary, and vice-versa. The conceptual starting point of this book is the observation that modernist movements in philosophy and art all share a distinctive turn toward everydayness as a theme. Gosetti-Ferencei notes that the modernist interest in the quotidian is fundamentally ambivalent: it is an object of both fascination and denigration. In contrast to those theorists who are critical of the everyday, seeing it as fallen, alienated, and empty, Gosetti-Ferencei announces in the introduction that her book takes an affirmative approach. As its subtitle indicates, the book offers "sightings" of the ecstatic-everyday as it manifests itself in modernist art and thought. Each chapter approaches the subject either through a thematic lens, such as childhood, or through a particular medium, such as poetry or painting. As the term implies, these "sightings" are a series of scholarly, detailed discussions of the topic rather than an argument or series of arguments that build to a conclusion. The Ecstatic Quotidian is an excellent resource for those interested in the intersection between phenomenology and the visual art and poetry that both influenced and was inspired by it. Gosetti-Ferencei's insightful reflections and thorough research shows the richness of the dialogue between modernist art and thought. While the book leaves some of the larger implications of this dialogue unexplored, it is a valuable starting point for an investigation of the ways in which art and philosophy were engaged with each other in modernism to a degree perhaps unprecedented in the Western tradition. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13606.