Aesthetics After Metaphysics

<p>This book focuses on a dimension of art which the philosophical tradition (from Plato to Hegel and even Adorno) has consistently overlooked such was its commitment – explicit or implicit – to mimesis and the metaphysics of truth it presupposes. De Beistegui refers to this dimension which unfolds outside the space that stretches between the sensible and the supersensible – the space of metaphysics itself – as the <em>hypersensible</em> and show how the <em>operation</em> of art to which it corresponds is best described as <em>metaphorical</em>. The movement of the book then is from the classical or metaphysical aesthetics of mimesis (Part One) to the aesthetics of the hypersensible and metaphor (Part Two). Against much of the history of aesthetics and the metaphysical discourse on art he argues that the philosophical value of art doesn’t consist in its ability to bridge the space between the sensible and the supersensible or the image and the Idea and reveal the sensible as proto-conceptual but to open up a different sense of the sensible. His aim then is to shift the <em>place</em> and <em>role</em> that philosophy attributes to art. </p>