The Metaphysics of Modernism and the Aesthetics of Reason in Wittgenstein, Deleuze, and Others
Abstract
This work makes a contribution to a theory of the general conditions by which—via language and sign use—the intelligible structure of the content of thought comes about and changes, which in turn affects our collective practices, affordances, and causal powers— in short, our doings. It is argued that this latter point is the reality of the intelligible and the only possible test of metaphysical realism. Through this it develops a ‘metaphysics of modernism’ by constructing a concept of sense derived from the philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilles Deleuze, among others. After elaborating the framework of sense, it looks to its emergence out of social embeddedness through a concept of common sense, understood aesthetically in terms of the construction of forms of life. There it investigates the relation between sense and value-form in Marx, aesthetic judgment in the work of Kant, the relationship between aesthetics and language-use in the late Wittgenstein, and the political aesthetics of contemporary art and media. Finally, this work indicates the limit of common sense in a concept of nonsense, taken as the intercession of the absolute within language and thought, which in turn points to the conditions for the contingent, ampliative capacity of thinking as the essential activity of reasoning, i.e. the organon of the new. In this final part, it focuses on the writings of Samuel Beckett, whose work is incessantly concerned with the liminal space of thought and language encountering its own transcendental humiliation as the indicative affect of the subject of modernity