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- Title
Ästhetisches ethos Praxeologie, Foucaults ethische Praktiken und die Literaturwissenschaften.
- Authors
Rocks, Carolin
- Abstract
The essay explores the significance of ›practice theory‹ for the humanities, especially for literary studies. In recent German studies, the focus on practices has initiated a new sociology of literature, lacking an elaborated praxeological justification. The ›origins‹ of practice theory lie in sociology, whose current approaches seek to link the analysis of practices with poststructuralist theorems. In doing so, cultural sociology integrates Michel Foucault’s discourse analysis and his studies on ancient practices of the self into its agenda (Reckwitz). The article argues that this runs contrary to Foucault’s own understanding of practices. Unlike sociological theories, Foucault does not conceptualize practices as a field of action mediating between ›agency‹ and ›structure‹. His twofold concept of practices points out that practices arise from an ineluctable interplay of disciplinary power and aesthetic formation, of norm and freedom, thus arguing for a genuinely ethical substance of practices. However, Foucault’s remarks on the aesthetic form of practices remain unspecific. At this point, literary studies can step in by revising the dynamics of ethics and aesthetics from the ›late‹ Foucault’s perspective. In so doing, the arts are not understood as discourses negotiating or distributing moral knowledge but as practical fields where moral takes form by both acting according to ›the‹ norm and acting ›freely‹. Thus, the article aims to conceptualize the nexus of ethics and aesthetics in a new manner. Rethinking ethics as practical morality shaped by aesthetic processes allows for examining the ›ethos‹ or: the concrete exercises of virtue in literature.
- Subjects
FOUCAULT, Michel, 1926-1984; CONDUCT of life; APPLIED ethics; CULTURE; LITERARY criticism; DISCOURSE analysis; CODES of ethics; EXERCISE
- Publication
Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (ZÄK), 2021, Vol 66, Issue 1, p69
- ISSN
0044-2186
- Publication type
Article