Henry Sussman. The Aesthetic Contract: Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity.

Publication: Studies in Romanticism

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Pp. 319. $47.50 cloth/$17.50 paper.

This most recent book by Henry Sussman is the fruit of a sustained, career-long reflection on the forces at play within our historical and critical modernity. Through previous books (six in all) Sussman has established himself as a pre-eminent interpreter of the period we know historically as modernism. In this book, Sussman's scope is much larger, and not only from an historical point of view. What Sussman has undertaken in this book is nothing less than a reevaluation of how art and literature were configured at the end of the 18th century, specifically in the wake of the Protestant Reformation and its relation to the Renaissance. Considered by itself, the historical sweep of this work commands attention at a time when such expansive critical undertakings are no longer considered credible sources of knowledge for our modernity. But, over and above a history of art and the artist, Sussman has written an account of the essential relation of our modernity (and all its competing claims both theoretical and historical, linguistic and social) to an aesthetic project that emerges during the romantic period. In this regard, Sussman's The Aesthetic Contract book is a rare achievement in an age when critical endeavor is still being consumed by theoretically and historically driven polemics.

Sussman, well aware of the force of these polemics, makes no attempt to evade their powerful intrusion into the critical activity of the last two decades. Indeed, the fact of their intrusion, the fact that they can and have intruded is the issue at the core of this book. Sussman's goal is to understand the formation of the conditions that allow such polemics to become acceptable as the sign of our modernity. At the same time, Sussman remains astutely aware that the demand for intellectual work to belong to one side or another of this critical divide can only produce a failure to recognize the precise relation of theoretical and historical issues that mark the advent of what this book calls the "aesthetic contract." It is, of course, in such failure that the efficacity of...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.