The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde

The Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Enlightenment to the Avant-Garde

In The Sovereign Self , Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of “Man,” upon which the aesthetic itself often depends. “An extraordinarily knowledgeable explanation for those outside the art world, as well as those critically within it, of the philosophical traditions and social contradictions within which artists do their work. This is a book to own.”― Susan Buck-Morss, The Graduate Center, City University of New York "Kester’s book is a highly valuable examination of the intertwined trajectories of aesthetic experience and autonomy." ― Matthew Bowman , Art Monthly "An ambitious critical genealogy of the notion of aesthetic autonomy from the eighteenth century through to the present. . . . an insightful, well-documented and often convincing critique of a certain idea of aesthetic autonomy; Kester’s is a ‘strong’ theory, the strength of which lies in its reading and re-evaluation of key philosophical and art theoretical texts, more so than in the heuristic purchase it demonstrates on artistic—and political—practice, past or present."― Steyn Bergs , Radical Philosophy " The Sovereign Self is remarkable in its analytical scope. Kester deftly traces a highly influential conceptual and axiological pattern across a wide array of aesthetic and political phenomena. . . . The Sovereign Self offers a new roadmap for understanding autonomy as an aesthetic, ethical, and political ideal, while inviting further dialogue between academics and art practitioners."― Victoria Zurita , Modernism/modernity “The leading critic, theorist, and historian of ‘socially engaged art,’ Grant H. Kester offers a thorough, brilliantly synthetic, and convincing argument through the complex subject of aesthetic autonomy. The Sovereign Self is a major statement based on a lifetime of reflection, boldly and powerfully done.” -- Terry Smith, Andrew W. Mellon Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory, University of Pittsburgh Grant H. Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, author of Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context , and coeditor of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010 , all also published by Duke University Press.