On Ecstatic-Aesthetic Universality-In Zong
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 5103606 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel Benjamin (0009-0004-4187-9899), D M Benjamin (0000-0002-0333-5581, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 23 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 17-34 |
| Publication date | 2019-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Small Axe A Caribbean Journal of Criticism (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1534-6714 • E-ISSN: 0799-0537 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/07990537-7374418 |
| OpenAlex | W2933467690 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 11 |
This essay argues that M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 book-length poem Zong! offers aesthetic experience as an undetermined exposure toward communality. As readers, we are not merely consuming the poem, which emerges from Philip’s reading of a 1781 court decision regarding a slave massacre; instead, the poem dislocates us and redirects us toward others. In Zong! this means a relation with the dead that does not require their representation but instead puts readers into community with them; we do not ventriloquize their voices but put our voices alongside theirs. The essay’s argument moves through Immanuel Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment to contend that aesthetic experience as such requires this kind of ecstatic movement. The sociality assembled by aesthetic judgment is an ecstatic, de-structured collectivity. Zong!’s sensus communis is not an a priori universality but a radically undetermined collectivity posited nevertheless
Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Relation (database · Representation (politics · Sociality · Universality (dynamical systems · Law · Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism
Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy
The Truth in Painting
Ghostly Matters
Toward a Global Idea of Race
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice
The Racial Grammar of Kantian Time
The Politics of Friendship
Slavery and the Culture of Taste
Defending the Dead, Confronting the Archive
Specters of Marx
Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third 'Critique' in Adorno and Jameson
| Citations per year | 0.08 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |