STOSS THE UGLY DWARF AND THE SPLENDOR OF ANTIGONE: SCHILLER’S PROGRAM OF THE AESTHETIC REVOLUTION AND PARADOXES OF ITS EMBODIMENT

Abstract

The paper analyzes the confrontation of aesthetics and anti-aesthetics which characterizes the current state of philosophy in general, and philosophy of art in particular. It offers an approach to the conceptualization of this confrontation on the basis of comparative studies of two aesthetic projects of “liberation of the soul” (A. Gorsky and Ya. Golosovker), considering them in the context of two anti-aesthetic projects of this kind (J. Lacan and J.-F. Lyotard). The explication of the concept of the form in art, on the basis of which each one of these four projects formulates a program of aesthetic liberation, is used as the main methodological tool of the analysis. The article shows that the merging of two Kantian forms (form of beauty and form of the work of art) into a single one, which is carried out by Schiller, played a constitutive role not only for Schiller’s program of politicization of aesthetics, but also for all subsequent aesthetics, as well as antiaesthetics. The article also demonstrates the way in which contemporary anti-aesthetics transforms the classical relationship between the form of beauty and the form of the work of art and builds on this basis “aesthetics without aesthesis”. I conclude that the articulation of the relationship between aesthetics and anti-aesthetics is quite feasible in terms of Schiller’s understanding of the form in art, and formulate the need to overcome this understanding by both aesthetics and anti-aesthetics.