Böcker av Joseph Acquisto

"An innovative reading of Baudelaire's poetry and criticism in dialogue with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno"--

Examines how postwar French writers constitute the thinking subject and reshape its relation to the external social world.Joseph Acquisto analyzes the writings of three thinkers during and shortly after the Second World War who address the question of what it means to think, and what it means to constitute oneself as a thinking subject - at a time that seems to come "after everything"; with the ruins of attacked cities echoing the remains of a philosophical tradition that was confident in its establishment of human beings as rational, of reason leading to progress, and of both the self and the world as knowable. What Georges Bataille calls "inner experience" and Emil Cioran labels "thinking against oneself" is something akin to a drama; not a mere representation of the self in relation to the world, but a process of remapping the relation of subject to object of thought dialectically. Acquisto argues that both writers adopt an anti-systematic approach to thinking that implicates fragmentary writing as a way of turning answers about subject-object relations into questions. Acquisto contends that this stands in contrast to the approach of Clément Rosset, whose affirmation of the inaccessibility of the real leads to an anti-intellectual, grace-filled affirmation of life as it is given, under the guise of what he calls the "tragic."Bringing together thinkers that have seldom been discussed in a comparative light, Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset examines the affective dimensions of thought as experience and considers the political stakes of postwar thought as "out of order" with the world from which it springs.

Reading Baudelaire with Adorno examines Charles Baudelaire's oeuvre - including verse poems, prose poems, and critical writings - in dialogue with the aesthetic theory of Theodor Adorno, for whom the autonomy of the artwork critically resists any attempt to view it merely as a product of its socio-historic context. Joseph Acquisto analyzes Baudelairean duality through the lens of dissonance, arguing that the figure of the subject as a "dissonant chord" provides a gateway to Baudelaire's reconfiguration of subjectivity and objectivity in both esthetic and epistemological terms. He argues that Baudelaire's dissonance depends on older models of subjectivity in order to define itself via the negation of romantic conceptions of a unified lyric subject in favor of one constituted simultaneously as subject and object.This new understanding of subjectivity reconfigures our relationship to the work of art, which will always surpass conceptual attempts to know it fully. Acquisto offers a fresh take on some familiar themes in Baudelaire's work. Dissonant subjectivity in Baudelaire, rather than cancelling esthetic transcendence, points to a different way forward that depends on a new and dialectical relation of subject and object.

This book is about reading Proust's novel via philosophical and musicological approaches to "modern" listening.

Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature: Solitary Adventures by Joseph Acquisto examines the many ways in which the castaway, particularly in the form of engagement with Robinson Crusoe, has been reinterpreted and appropriated in nineteenth through twenty-first century French literature. The book is not merely a literary history of the robinsonnade in France; rather, Acquisto demonstrates how what he calls the genre of ';solitary adventure' becomes a vehicle for exploration of much larger questions about the reception of texts, modes of reading, and the relationship between popular and serious literary traditions. The heart of Crusoes and Other Castaways in Modern French Literature examines a crucial moment in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the history of cultural perspectives on reading and solitude intersect, catalyzing a reconsideration of Defoe's tale. Acquisto's philosophically inflected readings of works by writers from Rousseau to Balzac, Verne to Gide, Valery to Tournier enhance intertextual and cultural approaches to the castaway myth and broaden our appreciation of the dynamic relation it has to modern French literature writ large.

Offers a study of the ways in which Baudelaire, Mallarme, Ghil, and Royere question the nature and function of the lyric through a set of intertextual and cultural contexts. This book addresses the consequences of choosing music as a site of dialogue with poetry.