Article ID: CBB188022223

Spinoza's Counter-Aesthetics (2020)

unapi

Spinoza says very little about art or literature in his work; a fact which partly explains the absence of references to him by the German initiators of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, including Baumgarten, Kant and Hegel. Spinoza's resolute opposition to teleology, however, provides an even more compelling reason for his absence, given the teleological conception of literary and artistic form common to the notion of aesthetics at the time of its emergence. Is it possible to fashion a counter-aesthetics from the materials provided by Spinoza's philosophy? I argue that his reading of the great Spanish Baroque writers, especially Luis de Góngora and Baltasar Gracián (whose works were found in his library), provided him with an alternative conception of literary form based on a rejection of formal coherence and closure in favor of constitutive incompleteness and an opening to the infinite.

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Authors & Contributors
Sangiacomo, Andrea
Pérez Lasserre, Diego
Daniel Pérez Zapico
Carmen Schmechel
Landreth, Sara
Vega, Jesusa
Concepts
Poetry and poetics
Aesthetics
Science and literature
Romanticism
Medicine
Teleology
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
17th century
Renaissance
Medieval
16th century
Places
Spain
Germany
Madrid (Spain)
England
Italy
Europe
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