Consequences of Enlightenment (Literature, Culture, Theory, Series Number 30)

What is the relationship between contemporary intellectual culture and the European Enlightenment? In Consequences of Enlightenment, Anthony Cascardi revisits the arguments advanced in Horkheimer and Adorno's seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment. Cascardi argues that postmodern culture does not reject Enlightenment beliefs and explores the link between aesthetics and politics in thinkers as diverse as Habermas, Derrida, Arendt, Nietzsche, Hegel and Wittgenstein. He reverses the tendency to see art simply in terms of the worldly practices among which it is situated. Aesthetic objects, he argues, are themselves capable of disclosing truth.