THE AESTHETICS OF THE TRAUERSPIEL

The aesthetic space of Timon of Athens – depicting an emptied world ruled over by commodification and devoid of other values – is in many ways sui generis. While the play fascinates us with its prescient conceptualization and instantiation of an idea of the aesthetic, it displays other important qualities besides meta-aesthetic ones: impure aesthetics such as I am advocating is not exhausted in recognizing meta-aesthetic moments. It is a means as well of exploring works of art displaying other complex dynamics, notably including the four motifs I highlighted in the Introduction: aesthetic forms expressive of their originating historical eras but projecting non-existing utopian possibilities; subtexts of repressed human desires and concerns; art as human labor at work on given forms, traditions, and contents; and art as a means of representing humanity's relation to the natural world. All of these qualities were apparent in the analyses of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Timon of Athens, but they were necessarily subordinated to a probing of those works for implied aesthetic ideas.

In this book's second half, however, I will be shifting the focus from the meta-aesthetic and onto other aesthetic qualities.