This book explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art.
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsNote on Abbreviations1Introduction12Culture, Necessity, and Art: Kant's Discovery of Artistic Modernism253Art as the Tomb of the Past: The Afterlife of Normativity in Hegel564Pompeii Beyond the Pleasure Principle: Death and Form in Freud915The Tomb of Art and the Organon of Life: What Gerhard Richter Saw1336Art and Lamentation: Aboard Ilya Kabakov's Lifeboat1707Conclusion194Notes201Index233