Audio-Visual Metaphors in Operatic Shakespeare

Frank Castorf at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz Alienation Techniques and the Use of Mediated Material on the Live Stage Steve Earnest Throughout the latter years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, the use of film, video, and mediated settings became an increasingly important aspect of scenography at Germany’s largest state theatres. Key developments in stage technology— such as the use of high-powered projectors, the use of glass slides instead of those made of plastic or acetate, and the increasing use of digital video technologies—permitted greater experimentation with live and mediated action and comprised a permanent part of the German theatre landscape . Given the immense technical capabilities of the German state theatres in addition to their high levels of national funding, multimedia advances have been arguably more profound in Germany than in any place in the world. Perhaps no stage director was more influential in this arena than Frank Castorf, noted Intendant of Berlin’s Volksbühne am Rosa Luxembourg Platz. From the mid-1980s until the first decade of the twenty-first century Castorf integrated the arts of theatre and cinema in a manner that both heightened the art of stage direction in Germany as well as modified and advanced numerous theatrical concepts, such as the Brechtian concept of verfremdungseffekt, or alienation. Other ideas associated with Brechtian epic theatre, such as montage and the use of music, as well as more radical techniques of deconstruction and postmodern structure as advanced by Heiner Müller, were also employed by Castorf. Unique in his combination of the dual aesthetic of theatre and film, Castorf’s use of cameras on the live stage has challenged theatre aesthetics by contrasting the live stage figure with the full or partial human face in close-up, by utilizing multiple cameras on different 42 S T E v E E A R N E S T areas of the theatrical space and by incorporating the act of filming and camera work into the action of his works. Three of Castorf’s productions , Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Erniedrigte Und Beleidigte (The Insulted and the Injured), Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Bertolt Brecht’s Der Jasager/Der Neinsager (He Who Says Yes/He Who Says No),1 serve to illustrate Castorf’s varied directorial approaches and his unique film/theatre aesthetic. Founded in 1914, the Volksbühne has historically been a regular site for live productions that experimented with multimedia and film. The early period of the Volksbühne included multimedia work by Erwin Piscator and the young Brecht; its middle period as a state theatre of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) featured radical experimentation involving Soviet-influenced film and video techniques under the leadership of Benno Besson. Throughout the later years of the GDR and into the post-reunification period, Castorf emerged into the Berlin scene as an enfant terrible, a radical young director who mounted numerous shockingly provocative productions that challenged GDR politics while pushing artistic mores to their breaking point and that subsequently advanced postmodern techniques such as collage structure and deconstruction. An important element of Castorf’s dramaturgy and theatre aesthetic at the Volksbühne was the commingling of live and mediated material as well as the inclusion of rock music (the Rolling Stones and other iconic rock groups have always been prevalent in his work) and numerous references to popular culture. Having served as Intendant since 1992, Castorf steadily developed a reputation as one of the most provocative, innovative , yet notorious directors on the German stage. As a student of Theaterwissenschaft (or Theatre Science) at Humbolt Universität in Berlin in the 1970s, Castorf had studied the theories of Brecht but favored the more radical structure of Müller in practice. Because the strict stance regarding socialist realism had become more relaxed in the GDR in the 1970s, Müller’s synthetic fragments and collage works (such as Hamletmaschine, published in 1971) had become extremely influential among academics. After staging a number of television projects for the East German Television system (DEFA) Castorf began to incorporate ideas of collage structure, including video and other mediated material , into his directorial vision. Alternatively praised...

On the basis of critical analysis of sources the author reveals the role of doctors in opera productions, ballet and art in general. Looking through opera librettos and director's productions the author makes conclusions about characteristic human health problems, treatment methods used and the social status of doctors. About 10 percent of the four hundred opera and ballet productions performed today include doctor characters. These characters differ significantly from each other, depending on the time of creation of the work or the era reflected in the plot.

On ne meurt pas chacun pour soi, mais les uns pour les autres, ou meme les uns a la place des autres, qui sait? One doesn't die only for oneself but for each other, or even in place of each other. Who knows? SR. CONSTANCE, ACT TWO, DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES DIALOGUES OF THE CARMELITES by Francis Poulenc and Georges Bernanos is considered by many to be the greatest opera of the second half of the twentieth century. It is also a work of deeply Catholic Christian spirituality. (1) As the women in the Carmelite community struggle with understanding their individual and collective vocations, and move toward the ultimate gift of self against the backdrop of the Reign of Terror, they evoke many of the classic themes and paradoxes in Christian martyrdom. Based on the actual events that befell the Carmelite sisters of Compiegne in the early 1790s, the story focuses on Blanche, an unstable young aristocratic woman who romanticizes the cloistered life of prayer and service as an escape from the world. Her fantasies are sharply corrected by the prioress, Madame de Croissy. When the prioress becomes ill and undergoes a horrific death, the sisters of the monastery are baffled and awestruck, though Sr. Blanche's girlish companion, Sr. Constance speculates that her death has a significance yet to be revealed in their lives. As a new prioress arrives to lead the community, the upheavals of the revolution disrupt not only the social and political order outside the cloister walls, but invade the monastery and ultimately force the women to choose between melting into the godless new revolutionary society or giving up their lives in witness to their vows. At first, Sr. Blanche runs away from this conflict, hoping to retreat to the world of her youth, though it, too, has been turned upside down with the death of her father and the usurpation of his house where she is now marginalized as a drudge. Mother Marie, a senior nun of the monastery, seeks her out and lets her know that her sisters have made the choice to die under the guillotine. Blanche is now faced with the terrifying opportunity to make authentic her commitments. The chilling, slicing drop of the guillotine at the end of Dialogues of the Carmelites, and the way the last few notes drop off into silence rather than swell into an ecstatic crescendo--these indicate the true spiritual grandeur of this work. The fact that the opera presents Blanche as uncertain, even neurotic, that Madame de Croissy dismisses Blanche's yearning for a heroic religious life, and that Mother Marie, who galvanized the sisters into taking the martyr's vow, is not herself a martyr--all these mark this work with a kind of austere modernity and suggest that Bernanos and Poulenc wanted to challenge any sentimental notions of martyrdom we may bring to the opera. The women are all certainly martyrs, for they make a deliberate decision to take the name of Lord Christ and accept public martyrdom rather than renounce their vocations in Christ. In doing so they follow in a tradition absolutely essential to the Christian faith, a tradition whose patterns go back to the beginning of the Church. In order to deepen our apprehension of this opera as spiritual art, this article offers a broad overview of Christian martyrdom as religious witness and aesthetic representation. It first examines the fundamental modalities of Christian and non-Christian martyrdom, beginning with Biblical passages that view Jesus as witness or martyr in his death, and those that provide the basis for his followers to present themselves for martyrdom in imitation of Christ and as witness to Christ's saving power. In particular, the article looks at the scriptural themes of atonement and substitution as they unfold in the opera's libretto and musical expression. The article also considers the role that stories of early Christian martyrs have played in constructing identities, exemplary strategies, and theological understandings for later Christians who accept the path of the martyr. …

Poe and the Idea of Music: Failure, Transcendence, and Dark Romanticism

The subject of the study is the fundamental philosophical and aesthetic problems in the romantic aesthetics of one of its leaders in France - Victor Hugo. The evolution of his aesthetic views is traced - from adherence to the aesthetics of classicism and royalist views to the established theory and artistic practice of romanticism, colored with democratic pathos. The core of Hugo's aesthetics is revealed - the original concept of the grotesque, which has found a convincing embodiment in his poetry, drama, historical novels. Such main themes as the correlation of the tragic and the comic, the beautiful and the ugly, the sublime and the base, content and form, freedom and order, historical truth and fiction in art, romantic symbolization in the context of the formation of the concept of the artistic essence of romanticism by Hugo are considered. The features of his artistic and aesthetic concept related to the national specifics of art, local color, the problems of artistic taste, inspiration, imagination, aesthetic pleasure, artistic style, genius, talent are analyzed. The main conclusion of the study is the conclusion that all these topics form the basis of Hugo's judgments about the nature of romantic drama as the pinnacle of 19th century poetry and its differences from classic tragedy. The multidimensional nature of this study predetermined the use of a number of methodological approaches: philosophical and aesthetic approach, art history analysis, comparative, interdisciplinary methods. The author's special contribution lies in the fact that the study of Hugo's aesthetic theory and artistic practice is based on original material. The article provides a comparative analysis of the embodiment of Hugo's aesthetic views in various types and genres of art. Such a study was undertaken for the first time in domestic science.

DON'T ACT, JUST DANCE: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. By Catherine Gunther Kodat. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 2015.Coinciding with 1990 Goodwill Games, Seattle and Tacoma, Washington hosted Goodwill Arts Festival. This international presentation was planned as Soviet Union's policies of glasnost and perestroika melted Cold War hostilities between United States and Soviet Union. The festival included Seattle Opera's production of Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace (1942), Seattle Symphony and Seattle Chorale's staging of Prokofiev's score for Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky (1938), and Bolshoi Ballet's performances of Yuri Grigorovich's choreography for Prokofiev's Ivan Terrible (1975). This was opening stop of Bolshoi's American tour, announcing Gosconcert's interest in cultural diplomacy played out on a literal public stage.Heightened ideological stakes of such performances motivates Catherine Gunther Kodat's Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture. Kodat sets out create a fuller accounting (11) of a Cold War canon, including modern dance and ballet alongside studies of visual arts, literature, and film. Her study identifies how United States, Soviet Union, and China created nationally distinct modernist dance vocabularies while choreographers, composers, and librettists interrogated compromised social and political liberties at home and abroad. She reinterprets principal interests that often dominate studies of art of this period: institutionalized limits placed on modernist aesthetic innovation and growth of government promotion of arts nationally and internationally.Kodat's title comes from George Balanchine's directive Don't act, just dance, liberating dancer from emotive role-playing. Kodat takes up Balanchine's dual imperative explore modernist dance's non-narrative formal properties, in which dance signifies as dance and bodies as bodies rather than exclusively mimetic storytelling. The subtitle comes from Jacques Ranciere's formulation of art's metapolitics: its capacity reveal falseness of surface politics and identify truth located elsewhere. Kodat's metapolitics of interpretation (66) exposes the forms and effects of a certain cool, quintessentially modernist aesthetic distance (13) as constituting an overlooked cultural practice. Informed by sources in art history, literary history, dance history, performance studies, cultural studies, aesthetic theory, feminist theory, and queer theory, Kodat argues, to speak with body is perforce speak of sexed, raced, gendered and/or aging body; of its abilities and its limitations; its mutability and its facticity; its social position and its accompanying political power or lack thereof (64). Her analysis moves beyond anxieties of Western and Communist influences and attends intra-national hostilities (e.g. conservative reactions federally-funded dance) bristling with misogyny and homophobia. Modernist dance performs a pursuit of freedom: bodies propelled forward at historical moments in which marginalized populations asserted themselves.Kodat's study is divided into two major sections. The first serves as a review of literature, with Serge Guilbaut's How New York Stole Idea of Modern Art (1983) and Lawrence H. …

Հայ երաժշտության դասական, խմբավար, կոմպոզիտոր եւ երաժշտական-հասարակական գործիչ, երաժշտական քննադատ Քրիստափոր Կարա-Մուրզայի (1853-1902) երաժշտական բազմաբնույթ ու բազմաբեւեռ գործունեության կարեւոր մասն է երաժշտական քննադատությունը: Կանգնած լինելով հայ երգի բազմաձայն մշակման ու տարածման գործի ակունքներում` Կարա-Մուրզան իր բազմաթիվ հոդվածներում բարձրացնում է արդի երաժշտական խնդիրներ, ուսումնասիրում ժողովրդական եւ դասական երաժշտության մեջ նկատվող միտումները, լուսաբանում երաժշտական կյանքի կարեւոր իրադարձությունները: Կյանքի վերջին տարիներն անց կացնելով Թիֆլիսում, որտեղ էլ հրաժեշտ տվեց կյանքին ուժերի ծաղկման շրջանում՝ 1902 թ. մարտի 27-ին, Ք. Կարա-Մուրզան, թղթակցելով թիֆլիսյան «Մշակին», վարում է «Օպերային ներկայացումներ» էջը՝ անդրադառնալով թիֆլիսյան օպերային վերջին բեմադրություններին, արտիստների ելույթներին, գնահատելով արժեքավոր կողմերն ու մատնանշելով թերություններն ու բացթողումները: Միեւնույն ժամանակ՝ «Մշակի» էջերում (1892-1902) Կարա-Մուրզան անդրադարձել է Թիֆլիսում (եւ ոչ միայն) տեղի ունեցած տարաբնույթ համերգներին, գրական-երաժշտական եւ սիմֆոնիկ ցերեկույթներին եւ երեկույթներին, ժամանակակից երաժիշտների գործունեությանը՝ իր երաժշտական-քննադատական հոդվածներում եւ երաժշտագիտական ռեցենզիաներում ներկայացրել թիֆլիսյան երաժշտական կյանքի զարկերակը: Իր հոդվածներում Կարա-Մուրզան շոշափել է նաեւ ժամանակի երաժշտական-գեղագիտական հարցերը: Важную часть разнообразной и многосторонней деятельности классика армянской музыки, хормейстера, композитора и музыкально-общественного деятеля, музыкального критика Христофора Кара-Мурзы (1853-1902) составляла музыкальная критика. Находясь у истоков многоголосной аранжировки и популяризации армянской песни, Кара-Мурза в своих многочисленных статьях поднимал проблемы современной музыки, обращался к тенденциям, обнаруживающимся в народной и классической музыке, освещал заметные события в музыкальной жизни. Последние годы жизни Кара-Мурза провел в Тифлисе. В тифлисской газете «Мшак» он вел рубрику «Оперные спектакли». Касаясь новых представлений оперного театра, выступлений артистов, он положительно отзывался об успешных сторонах и отмечал недостатки и упущения конкретной постановки. Кара-Мурза скончался в расцвете сил в Тифлисе 27 марта 1902 года. В своих музыкально-критических статьях и музыкальных рецензиях на страницах «Мшака» (1892-1902) Кара-Мурза обращался к разножанровым музыкальным событиям, к литературно-музыкальным представлениям, к дневным и вечерним симфоническим концертам, к деятельности современных музыкантов, держа таким образом читателей в курсе музыкальной жизни Тифлиса и не только. 1. Печатавшиеся на страницах «Мшака» многочисленные музыкально-критические статьи и рецензии Х. Кара-Мурзы в значительной мере способствовали формированию и развитию музыкальной критики в армянском музыковедении. 2. Рецензии Кара-Мурзы содержат большое количество фактов и информации о музыкальной жизни Тифлиса, с одной стороны, и выявляют отношение автора к обсуждаемому событию, обнаруживают его эстетические взгляды, с другой, давая тем самым возможность составить представление о нем, как о разностороннем музыканте-профессионале. The classic of Armenian music, choirmaster, composer, musical and public figure and music critic Kristapor Kara-Murza (1853-1902) engaged in diverse and multifarious activities, of which music criticism made an important part. Standing at the very origins of polyphonic arrangement and popularization of the Armenian song, Kara-Murza raised in his articles the problems of contemporary music, examined the trends emerging in both folk and classical music, shed light on the conspicuous events in the world of music. Kara-Murza lived his last years in Tiflis. In the local newspaper “Mshak” he kept a regular column “Opera Performances” (1892-1902), where he presented the new opera productions in Tiflis, discussed the performance of the artists, speaking highly about the best achievements and pointing out the weaknesses and omissions in the work in question. He passed away in the prime of his life in Tiflis on March 27, 1902. In his critical articles and music reviews on the pages of “Mshak”, Kara-Murza wrote about diverse types of music concerts, presentations of literary-musical compositions, matinee and evening performances of symphonic music, about the activities of contemporary musicians, thereby keeping his readers abreast of the music life in Tiflis and beyond. 1. With his numerous critical articles and reviews, printed on the pages of “Mshak”, Kara-Murza contributed substantially to the formation and advancement of music criticism in Armenian musicology. 2. Kara-Murza’s reviews contain a great number of facts and information about the music life in Tiflis, on the one hand, and, on the other, reveal the author’s own attitude to the event or subject at issue, bespeak his aesthetic views, thereby shaping an image of a many-sided professional.

Can Stage Directors Make Opera and Popular Culture ‘Equal’?

Summary. The article gives an overview of the emergence of postmodern aesthetics in the Estonian theatre and the response it received in the theatre discourse during the transitional period. The postmodernisation of different arts occurred at various speeds and in a different scope. In the Estonian theatre, postmodernism was less pronounced than in other arts, being limited to individual directors and theatre groups. Postmodern aesthetics and the worldview that carried them permeated the Estonian theatre mainly through non-state theatre groups operating outside the state theatre system. The article first examines the short-lived theatre groups created in the late 1980s, such as Gregor and Ruto Killakund. It then focuses on the Von Krahl Theatre, founded in 1992 as the first Estonian private theatre, led by Peeter Jalakas. The article also analyses the postmodernist features of the productions of Mati Unt and Evald Hermaküla, directors who worked in state theatres. In general, postmodernism emerged in the Estonian theatre in the 1990s (although it did not become mainstream) and began to influence theatre aesthetics more strongly in the early 21st century. However, the theories of postmodernism did not take root in the theatre discourse. This developmental inertia is usually explained by the theatre’s institutionalism and the resulting dependence on audiences. The individual Estonian leading directors’ choices contributed to this, as well as a very weak conceptualisation of postmodernism in the theatre criticism of the time. The styles that were alternative to the mainstream were accepted in post-Soviet theatre discourse but were described as peripheral, largely because the private theatres of the 1990s were placed in the context of amateur theatre. The synchronic criticism constructed the theatrical canon based on state theatres, and therefore, postmodernist features in the Estonian transitional theatre have remained in the background. Keywords: postmodernism, Estonian contemporary theatre, Estonian theatre discourse, Von Krahl Theatre, Peeter Jalakas, Evald Hermaküla, Mati Unt

The article explores the course of formation of the positions of Asja Lācis’s theatre aesthetics in the early period of her activity, mainly in Riga during the 1920s. The article takes a chronological look at the first theatre impressions of German and Latvian theatres in Riga. Special attention is paid to Asja Lācis’s change of aesthetic views under the influence of the Russian avant-garde. In contrast to the exuberance of Hedda Gabler and the existential loneliness in Ibsen’s psychological theatre, the new Russian avant-garde theatrical search stressed the biomechanical conception and the role of the actor as a player in a theatre company. The key position in Asja Lācis’s personal work of directing in Riga amateur theatre of the leftist trade unions was the aesthetic requirements of the proletarian cult and the theatre of October. She tried to create a radical avant-garde theatre and expressed her aesthetic views in a number of articles in the Latvian leftist press. Anna Lācis’s experiments in Oryol and the Riga theatres, which were based on her acquired experience of the Russian avant-garde, served as a catalyst for her further cooperation with Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht; it also influenced the development of different contemporary theatre trends.

The focus of this paper is on the intersection of Jean-Paul Sartre's existential philosophy concept of human being, his aesthetic theory and consequent art production. After a short outline of his conception of human existence the first part introduces Sartre's aesthetic views on art considered in two different and to a great extent antithetical forms: as an existential appeal to a situated freedom of man and on the other hand as a temporary escape from the real situation to the world of imagination. The purpose of the first part is to prove that this differentiation of arts, contrasting commited literature with poetry and all other kinds of imaginary art, is well-founded in the very principles of Sartre's existentialism and that the aesthetics becomes functional connection between his philosophy and art. The second part offers an interpretation of French thinker's concrete art work - short story The Wall - in the light of his own aesthetic conception. This work of art is shown as truly fulfilling and in certain aspects even getting over philosophical and aesthetic project of his author.

Carl Einstein's unique gifts were also his very burden: he was lyrical poet and writer of experimental prose, as such participant in the movements of Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism, as well as an uncompromising critic and theorist of avant-garde productions, including his own. As theorist he focused more radically than earlier thinkers (Friedrich Nietzsche, Fritz Mauthner, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal) on the limits of symbolic language, the written word with its elevated status in literature, and, ultimately, on the limitations of Western conceptual culture. This particular strand of his thought comes to the fore in the Berlin of the mid-twenties with his writings on modern art, and expands in his contributions to the Parisian avant-garde journal Documents (Paris, 1929-30). Moreover, as the first theorist to view African sculpture within the discourse of Cubism, he had already turned in Negerplastik (1915) against the abstraction of perspective and narrative in the visual arts. At an extreme, Einstein (the little his friend the critic and editor Franz Blei, once called him) was to argue against literature-belles lettres-as the culture of subjectivity, of metaphor and interiority, and attempt to theorize an immediacy of visual experience. As always is the case with Einstein, his aesthetic views were also reflective of cultural and political conditions, such as the dominance and national identity claims of interiority in the German tradition. These conditions by and large contributed to his permanently leaving Berlin for the eminently congenial cultural climate of Paris in 1928, year before Walter Benjamin's temporary move to the French capital. (After 1933, it became the place of political exile for both.) Although they had no dealings with one another, they both had contact with major French intellectuals who were at the core of Documents and later the College de Sociologie. At the center of Einstein's aesthetic theory, as fully developed in the context of his work for Documents in Paris, was the notion of contemporary painting (specifically that of Pablo Picasso and Andre Masson) as a language. Thus he was far from any return to the primordial image, mythical vision embraced by Gottfried Benn, his longtime friend, intellectual counterpart, and the foremost representative of German high-modernist Expressionism (with its inherent probl lematics that were to surface with the rise of Nazism). Like no other art theorist,

This essay contends that W.B. Yeats’s quest for beauty in art has far more in common with Walter Pater’s aesthetic views than is generally acknowledged. This article particularly focuses on Greek art, which provided both writers with paradigms with which to articulate their aesthetic theories. Yeats made ample use of Pater’s distinction between Ionian and Dorian art, and this opposition may in fact lie at the root of Yeats’s esoteric system set down in A Vision and based upon two contrary types of individuals, civilizations, and religions. The iconic power of art as a magical transformer of reality is asserted by both Pater and Yeats, and it is perhaps only in the question of the finality of art for Yeats, in the eschatological and magical dimension he attributed to it, that his path diverged from Pater.

On the Way to Ethical CultureThe Meaning of Art as Oscillating between the Other, Il y a, and the Third Rossitsa Varadinova Borkowski (bio) Who can suppose that a poet capable of effectively introducing into his scenes rhetoricians, generals and various other characters, each displaying some peculiar excellence, was nothing more than a droll or juggler, capable only of cheating or flattering his hearer, and not of instructing him? Are we all agreed that the chief merit of a poet consists in his accurate representation of the affairs of life? Can this be done by a mere driveller, unacquainted with the world? The excellence of a poet is not to be measured by the same standard as that of a mechanic or a blacksmith, where honor and virtue have nothing to do with our estimate. But the poet and the individual are connected, and he only can become a good poet who is in the first instance a worthy man. — Strabo, The Geography of Strabo After Emmanuel Levinas showed the need for radically positing the Ethical as the original structure of human inwardness and as art is a fundamental aspect of being human, a reexamination of the meaning of the Artistic and its relation with the Ethical is necessary.1 Throughout [End Page 195] the history of Western thought and culture, the meaning of art has been regarded either as imitation of the world and nature (Plato and Aristotle), objective self-expression of the Absolute Spirit (Hegel) or Being (Heidegger), a subjective “free play of imagination” and judgment (Kant and the Romanticists), or as inevitable engagement with social issues and political position (the Marxists and Sartre). In spite of the variety of theories and views about the essence and value of art, it is unquestionable that the Artistic has transformational power over humans, which points to art’s connection with ethics. Therefore, following Levinas, instead of asking the general ontological questions about the gist of art “What is art?” or “Why is there art instead of something else?” we should seek an answer to the ethical question about the meaning of art: “How can the existence of art be justified?” The answers could be sought in two directions. The first already quite well beaten path explores Levinas’s own vision on art, which most critics find hesitant or even ambiguous.2 The impression of this hesitation is significant on the background of Levinas’s rigorous clarity about the Ethical. Overlooking this impression would lead to conclusions that would deviate our attention from the main question about how the existence of art can be justified. A possible explanation would be that Levinas’s seemingly fragmentary thoughts about art are woven into the fabric of his ultimate meta-ethical project — that is, his approach to art is instrumental, subjected to the Ethical. For example, commentators agree that Levinas’s early article “Reality and Its Shadow” (1948) is the only one exclusively focused on art and use it as a starting point to assemble the fragments of his aesthetic views into an aesthetic theory. Although this move might be justified methodologically, Levinas is clear that the discussion of art in this article is subordinated to the more general (and more serious) question about the nontruth of being (LR 132). Positing art as mythological and mystical, thus incapable of transmitting a meaningful message if separated from philosophical criticism (142), Levinas puts “in brackets” the discussion about the artistic and focuses on the reason qua knowledge (philosophy) and its relation with the Other. The impression of his hesitation about art’s [End Page 196] independent capability to dephase the instant, to breach the ontological gravity, and to expose the human spirit to the Ethical comes from those texts where Levinas applies his own vision about the integrative role of philosophical criticism — i.e., texts that work as philosophical criticism of art: “Transcendence through poetry — is this serious?”3 (PN 175n12), “if poetry can contain teachings” (165; emphasis added). Therefore, on one hand, Levinas exhaustively scrutinizes all possibilities of ethics of philosophy and comes to the clear position that in order for reason to function humanly it should be dethroned by the Other. He is...

The article explores the reasons behind the inconsistency of Kant's perspective on the art of music. Kant’s aesthetics is a strict and harmonious system underpinning the analysis of aesthetic consciousness. His views produced a huge impact on the subsequent development of aesthetic thought. Despite certain contradictions, the Kantian philosophical system and, in particular, his aesthetic views are of timeless value. In this respect, it is paramount to explore these contradictions and understand their role in the Kantian philosophy. Kant was repeatedly reproached for his formal approach to aesthetics that disregards artistic practice. However, it was not criticism but, rather, direct apologetics of Kant's philosophical vision promoted among his followers that led to aesthetic formalism. In other words, the rationality of thinking was transferred on the very object of exploration—the art. Kant's comments on music, as an integral part of his aesthetic theory, are formal and sparing. They contrast with a growing role of music in the cultural landscape at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries and the scope of Kant’s commentary given to other arts. Nonetheless, the aesthetic value of music was still recognised as music was listed in Kant's classification of arts. Our research has concluded that the reasons behind Kant’s inconsistencies are not limited to the well-known gap between the aesthetic object and the judgment about it. Another reason is his conscious detachment from contemporary musical practice, and, more broadly, from the irrational essence of music which he implicitly felt. Kant's rejection of sensory and emotional perception of music in favor of its rational interpretation identified one of the key issues for the future research agenda in aesthetics. The question of whether it is possible to perceive music as a non-conceptual art with the help of rational thinking alone emerged from the contradictions of Kant's aesthetic. This issue has not lost its relevance. In fact, it has created the basis for modern transformations of musical art towards pronounced intellectualism. The identification of the essence and grounds for Kant’s contradictions will allow to fend off accusations of formalism put forward by his followers and critics.