760 The CI Review

Stewart’s interest is fixed on new conditions of cinematic intelligibility but his account
inevitably touches on the implications of mutual intelligibility itself implicit in the
throwaway but prophetic line by the nurse Stella in Rear Window : “We’ve become a
race of Peeping Toms.”

R o be r t B . P i pp i n is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in

the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College
at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on modern Ger­
man philosophy, including Kant’s Theory of Form; Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions
of Self-Consciousness; and Modernism as a Philosophical Problem, a book on
philosophy and literature, Henry James and Modern Moral Life; and two books on
film. His last two books are After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial
Modernism, and Interanimations: Receiving Modern German Philosophy. He is a
past winner of the Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award in the Humanities
and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American
Philosophical Society.

Jean-Marie Schaeffer. Beyond Speculation: Art and Aesthetics without Myth. Trans.
Daffyd Roberts. Chicago: Seagull Books, 2015. 372 pp.

Andrei Pop
Jean-Marie Schaeffer is a French analytic philosopher of art. But the label is bound to
mislead. Schaeffer is as critical of American aestheticians, from Monroe Beardsley to
Arthur Danto, as he is of French poststructuralists. In his view, art theory took a fate-
ful turn with Immanuel Kant, whose (correct) emphasis on aesthetic experience, cou-
pled with his (calamitous) view of a disinterested, conceptless cognition of aesthetic
objects goaded G. W. F. Hegel and the romantics into wresting art from the aridity of
modern aesthetics. The art theory they invented celebrates art as a vehicle of meaning
but severs it from everyday life, pleasure, and natural beauty—aesthetics writ large.
It sounds like a tall order to overturn two centuries of aesthetic thought, but Schaef-
fer is both modest and methodical; after introducing the trouble with Kant, he treats
the overrated concepts of artwork (chapter 1) and aesthetic judgment (chapter 3), in-
terleaving positive accounts of aesthetic behavior (chapter 2) and aesthetic objects and
the attention they receive or at least deserve (chapter 4). His style is not exegetical but
direct and commonsensical. For instance, Schaeffer plausibly argues that even “pure”
pleasures, being pleasures, will be sought out and cannot remain more than trivially
disinterested (a point already made by Bernard Bolzano in 1843) (see pp. 96– 97). And
against Danto’s comparison of two basket-weaving cultures—whose objects are iden-
tical but in one case imbued with deep meaning—Schaeffer points out that Danto
has described a religion rather than an art practice (see pp. 52–53). Other dogmas are
punctured with pithy testimony from Stendhal, a cherry blossom connoisseur, or a
turnip taster. The positive thesis Schaeffer builds on this varied evidence is that taste is
fully one’s own and subjective, while aesthetic attention (whether confronting sonata
or turnip) has to follow definite structures of light, sound, taste, and others and thus
constitutes knowledge, to count as experience of an object.
The book thus mirrors the division between Kantian aesthetics and Hegelian art
theory as a division between incorrigible aesthetic pleasure and the shared world of
reception and criticism. So Schaeffer, though down to earth, is hardly antimetaphysi-
cal. But he might reply that he has located the dualism where it belongs: between the
perceiving subject and an object shot through with derived human intentionality. If
this is true, the author has still some ways to go toward proving it. Instead of relying

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 Critical Inquiry / Spring 2017 761
on the authority of Gérard Genette, Schaeffer should have provided his own account
of how subjective taste is consistent with the structures we jointly find in artworks. The
possibility of experience, and thus knowledge, accessible only to one observer threat-
ens the whole edifice. And while he sets up no ringing aesthetic antinomies only to let
them solve themselves (an amusing boast of the Critique of Judgment), in his cavalier
overconfidence Schaeffer is just like Kant.

A n d r e i P o p  joined the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago

in 2015. His books include Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli (2015),
an edited volume on ugliness in art history with Mechtild Widrich (2014), and a
cotranslation of Karl Rosenkranz’s Aesthetics of Ugliness (2015). His current work
focuses on symbolism as a common concern of logic, psychology, and art at the end
of the nineteenth century.

Rosalind E. Krauss. Willem de Kooning Nonstop: Cherchez la femme. Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 2015. 176 pp.

Christa Noel Robbins

In the early 2000s Rosalind Krauss issued a missive directed at those scholars who
continued to insist that Jackson Pollock’s paintings should be understood either as a
celebration of their materiality or in the context of his personality—twin reductions
that she understood to be egregious misunderstandings of the paintings’ significance.
She begins the missive with a recollection of Lee Krasner’s exasperation over the latest
attempt to explain away Pollock’s painting through some biographical kernel. Krauss
excuses Krasner’s anger, and her own, by relating that for “artists and intellectuals”
of Krasner’s generation modernism was “a creed, a belief, a deepest form of com-
mitment.” “It was,” she continues, “both a politics and a religion.” 1 Krauss herself has
played the role of a kind of intercessor within the church of modernism for the last
five decades. In that role she has provided a voice, not for the individuals occupying
the modernist field, but for the paintings that seek entry there. It goes without saying
that along with this role comes a requisite amount of faith or—to use the language
that Stanley Cavell was generating around the time Krauss first started writing art crit-
icism—conviction. The conviction that Krauss espouses is not a faith in the absolute
and unwavering value of art in itself but something more like the conviction in visual
art’s ability to obtain meaning and to do so through highly reflective, analytical, and
historically conscious means. That meaning is obtained via carefully cultivated rela-
tionships—with the past, with technical structures, with affective expectations. The
list goes on. For each meaning-generating relationship is determined by a contingent
set of factors. Krauss’s term for this ever-changing set of factors out of which meaning
might be generated is medium—a concept that is defined by Krauss in terms of its
requisite variability and its utter necessity.
The relationship that Krauss pursues in her latest book, De Kooning Nonstop: Cher­
chez la femme, is between Willem de Kooning the abstract expressionist and the subject
matter, woman. Krauss’s primary aim is to unseat the reading of de Kooning’s re-
cursive return to the female figure in his Woman paintings as concerned solely with
the sexual drama that series evokes—the Woman paintings are notoriously violent
depictions of grotesque, Gorgonesque women, which are easily read as rising out of

1. Rosalind Krauss, “The Crisis of the Easel Picture,” in Jackson Pollock: New Approaches, ed.
Kirk Varnedoe and Pepe Karmel (New York, 2000), p. 155.

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