This panel is designed as a countermeasure to banality of the treatment of "aesthetics" in literary criticism. “Aesthetics” is usually just one more item on a list (as in the reminder to "consider the aesthetic dimensions of") or it is merely the situation for asking what are in the end become moral, political, and historical concerns. If we stare into a real aesthetic problem, the result is not just endless debate about what's beautiful or ugly or endless assessment of a form. Instead, we can gain better insight into what a "problem" can be and find ways to express its wonders and agonies to the world.
Stephen Best's essay, "Acts of Critical Complicity," is about what happens to your mind and your acts of perception when you encounter something that really shouldn't have a twin, but does. His objects are stones displayed in Vija Celmins' exhibition at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. Best recounts the intensification of perception, how one is enticed to begin to discern patterns. At the very moment when that pattern falls into place, the viewer feels an uncanny jolt. The stones are identical. How is that possible? Twinning is an aspect of the biological, not the geological world and so this has to be a case of an original and a copy. Best then revisits Walter Benjamin's theory concerning the withering of aura seems another teleological account of art that would aid in our understanding of the problem of the multiple.
Eleanor Kaufman's contribution, "Beauty, Inertia, and Being: Antigone and Igitur in Modern French Thought" considers the spatio-temporality of being stopped in one’s tracks in the setting of modern French thought, specifically in its commentaries on literary characters like Sophocles’s Antigone and Mallarmé’s Igitur. Igitur is stopped in his tracks at Midnight, which leads thinkers such as Maurice Blanchot to extract from that an impossible temporality (midnight is not quite past, present, or future). It is Antigone’s “strange beauty,” according to Jacques Lacan—something linked with destruction, blindness, transgression and especially death—that stops not only the observer but also the infinite in its tracks, what Lacan terms a “space between two deaths.” In this fashion, Kaufman argues, the literary work enacts an extreme subsumption of time into space that is not only a stoppage of tracks but an encounter with being.
Bradley J. Fest's contribution, "Light’s Speech: Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris," asks: What does light sound like? How would it speak? What would it say? How might one bring its presence into language? How might language be luminous? For Fest, these fundamentally aesthetic questions appear to motivate many of the poems in Louise Glück’sThe Wild Iris (1992), written at a moment when light speaking via optical pulses along fiberoptic communication cables was about to reconfigure global communication and archival memory, solidifying the formation of what Fest has elsewhere called the optical society. Fest argues that Glück inaugurates something like a luminous poetics or a luminous literary aesthetics that many other contemporary poets across traditions have taken up in The Wild Iris’s wake.
Matt Johnson's contribution, "Kafka’s Aesthetics, or the Aesthetic Questions of the Yiddish Theater," uses Adorno to consider the “real aesthetic questions” that can be found throughout Kafka’s work.
Johnson foreground two zones of representation in which the aesthetic
arguably takes priority: the musical and the gestural, which recur in crucial moments in texts such
as “The Metamorphosis,” The Trial, Amerika, “Researches of a Dog,” and “Josephine the Singer, or
the Mouse Folk.” These are relayed back to Kafka's early encounter with the Yiddish theater, proposing that Kafka’s aesthetics was shaped by the movement from the immersive, if also agitated and
confrontational, experience of the theater to the writing of prose that makes an (impossible) demand
on the reader to interpret what they are reading.