Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Blasphemers and Others
- 1 ‘Good? But what is good?’ Ethics after Ikonnikov
- 2 Our Brothers’ Keeper: Moral Witness
- 3 Angelus Novus: The Angel of History
- 4 Infidels and Miscreants: Love and War in Afghanistan
- 5 Trouble Makers: Laura Poitras and the Problem of Dissent
- 6 The Silage of History: Anselm Kiefer and the Kieferworld
- 7 Footfall: The Moral Economy of Reinhard Mucha
- 8 Tony Blair's Vietnam: The Iraq War and the Special Relationship
- 9 Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror
- 10 Mending the World: Artists’ Manifestos
- 11 The Hallowed Mentor: Cézanne by Numbers
- 12 The Vacuity of Evil: Rumsfeld in Washington
- Index
Introduction: Blasphemers and Others
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Introduction: Blasphemers and Others
- 1 ‘Good? But what is good?’ Ethics after Ikonnikov
- 2 Our Brothers’ Keeper: Moral Witness
- 3 Angelus Novus: The Angel of History
- 4 Infidels and Miscreants: Love and War in Afghanistan
- 5 Trouble Makers: Laura Poitras and the Problem of Dissent
- 6 The Silage of History: Anselm Kiefer and the Kieferworld
- 7 Footfall: The Moral Economy of Reinhard Mucha
- 8 Tony Blair's Vietnam: The Iraq War and the Special Relationship
- 9 Accomplicity: Britain, Torture and Terror
- 10 Mending the World: Artists’ Manifestos
- 11 The Hallowed Mentor: Cézanne by Numbers
- 12 The Vacuity of Evil: Rumsfeld in Washington
- Index
Summary
In ways that I do not pretend to understand fully, painting deals with the only issues that seem to me to count in our benighted time – freedom, autonomy, fairness, love.
Andrew ForgeSo we have to revise Adorno's famous phrase, according to which art is impossible after Auschwitz. The reverse is true: after Auschwitz, to show Auschwitz, art is the only thing possible, because art always entails the presence of an absence; because it is the very job of art to reveal something that is invisible, through the controlled power of words and images, connected or unconnected; because art alone thereby makes the inhuman perceptible, felt.
Jacques RancièreThe time has come to realize that we are also capable of inventing emotions, perhaps even basic emotions comparable in power to love or hate.
Paul NougéThis book is conceived as a sequel or successor to an earlier collection, On Art and War and Terror, not merely in the scansion of the title, but in its nature and purpose and mode of address. It seeks to engage important ethical and political questions in the modern world through the medium of works of the imagination – works of art – painting and writing, photography and film. At the same time it tries to fathom what artists of various stripes are up to, in order to come to some assessment of their endeavours, and the consequences of their actions. To do that – not an easy task – it pays close attention to what the artists themselves have to say. In other words, it takes painters and others seriously as thinkers – philosophers, even – not to mention public intellectuals. It also treats them as moral agents. More particularly, it treats the art, and the artist, as a witness of our current discontents; indeed, the essential moral witness of the terrible twentieth century, as Winston Churchill called it, and the torturous twenty-first.
It may be objected that this is to place excessive faith in a broken reed, or at any rate an unthinking one.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone , pp. 1 - 6Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015