Book Discussion: The Temptation of Non-Being: Negativity in Aesthetics, by Artemy Magun

Session Submission Type: Book Discussion Roundtable

Brief Description

Artemy Magun's new book is an aesthetic treatise but also a hermeneutical study in literature and culture, with chapters on Dostoyevsky and Platonov, and a conceptual chapter on symbolism that gives a special attention to Polish theory and art. The negative in art is explained not as a simple negation or destruction, but as a multifaceted, polymorphous structure with a vast range of strategies and techniques from parody and pastiche to defamiliarization and non-resemblance. Charting the depth of these negative practices, Artemy Magun shows how they become progressively more complex and explicit, illustrating them with interdisciplinary examples from many cultures. At the heart of this layered, nested structure lies an understanding of Modernist aesthetics that helps to answer even more questions: how can the testing, probing nature of art lead to this preoccupation with the negative? Why does this negativity emerge in the first place? What can it tell us about art itself and how it functions in society? The provocative analysis enriches the ongoing evaluation of both 'high' and 'low' art.
Magun's book is also a continuation of his prior volume on "Negative revolution" and addresses the cultural memory of failed revolutions in the contemporary Russian history. More specifically, it aims at understanding the collapse of Russian short-lived liberal culture buried under an outburst of the newly fashionable Gothic sensibilities, both imported and homegrown. The discussion also pertains to the more recent debates on the demoniac tendencies in Russian literature as occasioned by the aggression against Ukraine.

Sub Unit

• Religion, Philosophy

Chair

• Jason Andrew Cieply, Hamilton College

Roundtable Speakers

• Jason Andrew Cieply, Hamilton College

• Jonathan Flatley, U of Chicago

• Artemy Magun, Inst for Global Reconstitution

• Olga Meerson, Georgetown U

• Anastasiya Osipova, U of Colorado at Boulder