The Aesthetic Dimension
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
In one of the twentieth century's most provocative interventions at the intersection of Marxism and aesthetics, Herbert Marcuse mounts a passionate defence of art's autonomous power against the reductive demands of orthodox political theory. The Aesthetic Dimension, first published in 1978, argues that genuine art — regardless of its social origin — contains an irreducible subversive potential, a capacity to negate the existing order simply by presenting a vision of human experience that transcends it. Marcuse challenges the dogma that art must serve an explicitly political or class-conscious agenda, insisting instead that beauty, sensuousness, and form are themselves revolutionary forces capable of awakening the imagination where ideology has failed. Rooted in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, this slim but formidable work illustrates how literature and art illuminate the contradictions of bourgeois society more faithfully than any propaganda ever could, drawing on figures such as Brecht, Beckett, and Proust to substantiate its claims. Marcuse's prose is characteristically rigorous yet urgent, fusing philosophical precision with a genuine passion for the liberating possibilities of human creativity. For anyone seeking to understand the deep relationship between art, freedom, and radical thought, this text remains an essential and unsettling provocation — one that asks whether beauty itself might be the last, best act of resistance.
Author: Herbert Marcuse
Format: Paperback
Genre: Philosophy
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: N/A
Pages: Good
In one of the twentieth century's most provocative interventions at the intersection of Marxism and aesthetics, Herbert Marcuse mounts a passionate defence of art's autonomous power against the reductive demands of orthodox political theory. The Aesthetic Dimension, first published in 1978, argues that genuine art — regardless of its social origin — contains an irreducible subversive potential, a capacity to negate the existing order simply by presenting a vision of human experience that transcends it. Marcuse challenges the dogma that art must serve an explicitly political or class-conscious agenda, insisting instead that beauty, sensuousness, and form are themselves revolutionary forces capable of awakening the imagination where ideology has failed. Rooted in the Frankfurt School tradition of critical theory, this slim but formidable work illustrates how literature and art illuminate the contradictions of bourgeois society more faithfully than any propaganda ever could, drawing on figures such as Brecht, Beckett, and Proust to substantiate its claims. Marcuse's prose is characteristically rigorous yet urgent, fusing philosophical precision with a genuine passion for the liberating possibilities of human creativity. For anyone seeking to understand the deep relationship between art, freedom, and radical thought, this text remains an essential and unsettling provocation — one that asks whether beauty itself might be the last, best act of resistance.