Productive Digression

Proceeding from the state of affairs in 20th-century criticism and aesthetics (Benjamin, Adorno, Blumenberg, Merleau-Ponty), the epistemology of representation (Whitehead, Canguilhem, Bachelard, Rheinberger) is revised with respect to critical consequences (Derrida, Marin, de Man, Agamben). The essays collected here redirect the logic of research towards the epistemological grounds of an aesthetics underneath the hermeneutics of everyday life.?