Publisher's Synopsis
Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Hartman all claimed to have found a way to transcend value judgement. This book confronts these assertions and argues that thinkers such as these have, by their rejection of conventional methods of constructing value judgements, succeeded in problematizing the whole area of aesthetics.;Stuart Sim treats post-structuralism and postmodernism as forms of anti-aesthetics and contextualizes the movements within a longer running tradition of anti-foundationalism and radical scepticism in Western philosophy. Arguing from a broadly socialist, historical materialist position he demands that discourses be made to declare their ideological commitments. While the radical scepticism of Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard, and their followers, is shown to be ultimately philosophically unsustainable and ideologically suspect from a leftwing point of view, Sim concludes that these critics nevertheless point to a need for reassessment of methods and objectives among critical theorists on the left.
