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Aesthetics
and Politics I |
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This paper examines Havelock Ellis' criminological survey, The Criminal (1890) and Max Nordau's Degeneration (1892) for the ways they identify perverse aestheticism as the cause of criminality and degeneration respectively. While Ellis describes a criminal alienated from normal human pursuits and morality by a physical insensibility to aesthetic stimulation, Nordau describes an artistic degenerate who is aesthetically oversensitive. These seemingly contradictory figures point to a shared fin-de-siecle perspective on the importance of the Aesthetic in determining not only how one knows the world, but also, how one functions as a subject. In criminology and degeneration theory, then, I find not an aesthetics of the beautiful or the sublime, but a careful account of the way aesthetic stimulation affects, and in Nordau and Ellis comes to compose the subject. Both imagine a subject marked by such a dependence on outer stimuli that serves to addict the subject to the aesthetic stimulations of vice and crime. Using
Derrida's and Sedgwick's conceptions of addictive subjectivity,
and Eagleton's account of the Aesthetic object which comes to act
as a subject, I argue that the aesthetic itself was imagined as
a dangerous addictive drug in the fin-de-siecle. In Derrida's terms,
such an addiction to external stimuli points to the ways that the
subject is not only dependent on the other, but also composed of
its dependencies on drugs and the myriad incarnations that take
on the addictive quality of drugs in consumer culture, including
the aesthetic. This paper thus points to an alternative history
of the modern subject from that, most familiar in Freudian psychoanalysis,
which imagines that the subject is composed of deeply hidden desires
and drives, in favor of an account of the subject that finds those
drives coming from the Other. |
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