Building on recent work by Robert Wellington, Chloe Hogg, and Yann Lignereux, Bjørnstad suggests that foundational studies of French absolutism such as Orest Ranum's 1979 Artisans of Glory and Peter ...Burke's 1992 The Fabrication of Louis XIV display an ambivalence toward certain texts and artifacts of the period they regard as "mere propaganda" unworthy of serious scholarly attention. ...they fail to see that absolutism resides precisely in these excessive, ostentatious, and, for us, unbearably sycophantic works. Focusing on a surprisingly little-studied reflection of Louis's face reflected in the shield of Artemis, the chapter carefully sets out a dual argument: first, that this moment of specular self-reflection—barely visible at the exact center of the Hall of Mirrors, which itself sits at the exact center of Versailles—shows Louis not as identical to himself but rather as displaying prudence; second, that the image of prudence, realized according to Le Brun's typologies of expression, figures his submission not to himself but rather to the transcendence of Glory, whose allegorical figure dominates the top right corner of the painting. ...he partly credits the central role of royal glory in his recasting of absolutism as a collective phenomenon to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work on political theology, and one could carefully scrutinize the latter's influence on Bjørnstad's study, in particular his recuperation and redeployment of political theology against and in the context of modern theories of the state from Hobbes to Rousseau, Hegel, and beyond.
Lee Friedlander Anton, Saul
2015, 2015-08-28, 2016-02-22
eBook
An illustrated examination of an early photo-essay by Lee Friedlander that shows television screens broadcasting eerily glowing images into unoccupied rooms.
This study examines the role of aesthetic experience and sensibility in the development of historical models of art and culture in the eighteenth century. It revisits the relation between a variety ...of Enlightenment discourses—cultural history, criticism, and fiction—and its attempts to conceptualize and think through the question of historicity in general. In four chapters, it explores the emergence of singular and incompatible models of culture that blur, each in their own way, the boundary between criticism and history and that are characterized by an acute consciousness of time and historicity. The first chapter considers Voltaire’s view of classical tragedy and the theatricality of court life at Versailles as an aesthetic convergence of language and sensible experience embodied by the tableau dramatique. It considers how the notion of the tableau also served, however, as the basis of his own historical method, with the result that Voltaire imagined his cultural history as both the continuation of the “great century of Louis XIV” and a neoclassical vestige that testifies to its decline. It then turns to explore the relation between aesthetic sensibility and cultural decline in Denis Diderot’s writings about the Salon exhibitions of painting and sculpture held at the Louvre. Chapter two shows how Diderot’s Salons respond to the mid-eighteenth century emergence of historicist models of art that aimed to re-establish French classical history painting and Hellenic sculpture as ideal models of taste. In contrast to these historical models, chapter three shows that Diderot envisions critical description itself as a practice that can serve as an ideal of artistic representation, and how his embrace of “decline” as the condition of art’s historicity forecloses the possibility of writing a monumental history of art. Chapter four considers how Rousseau conceives a model of lyrical and fictional rewriting and repetition that establishes a textual culture and a “civil religion” that is bounded neither in time nor space. This entirely virtual community, which can be said to exist parallel to and outside the body politic as a virtual “body” of culture, can be described as a fiction of history that is also a philosophical account of historicity.
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