The Aesthetic Contract. Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity by Henry Sussman

Sussman, Henry. The Aesthetic Contract. Statutes of Art and Intellectual Work in Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 319. 6 illustr. $49.50 (cloth).

In his new book, Henry Sussman carries on his wide-ranging inquiry into the condition of the modern subject as both cultural agent and symptom, producer and offspring of post-Reformation mentalities and languages. With the intellectual stamina and stylistic zest his readers have come to expect from his remarkably precise yet refined writing, The Aesthetic Contract continues the explorations begun in The Hegelian Aftermath. Readings in Hegel, Kierkegaard, Freud, Proust, and James (1982) and resumed, in more markedly psychoanalytical terms, in Afterimages of Modernity. Structure and Indifference in Twentieth-Century Literature (1990) and Psyche and Text. The Sublime and the Grandiose in Literature, Psychopathology, and Culture (1993). These are, I would argue, the main steps of one of the most provocative and erudite, post-Foucauldian “archaeologies” of modernity and modern subjectivity.