The Abject Life of Things

This paper attempts a philosophically rigorous interpretation of H.C. Andersen’s tales. Through a radically conceived sentimentality – the unmediated juxtaposition of the abjection of things, conceived as a paradoxical “desire for desire” having no place in the world, with a cruel, apathetic gaze – Andersen challenges the existence of the soul or subjectivity as what, by combining the theoretical gaze with contemplative pleasure, grants coherence to experience. Thus undermining not only Romantic self-reflection, and its suturing of philosophy to criticism, but Plato’s erotic psychology, Andersen inaugurates a new philosophical literature: a writing for children cultivating an openness

Aesthetics · Antinomy · Art · Contemplation · Criticism · Epistemology · Gaze · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Pleasure · Psychoanalysis · Sentimentality · Sociology · Soul · Subjectivity · Contemporary Cultural and Social Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Postmodernism in Literature and Education · Psychology · Philosophy