American Book Review

While the precise object of his discontent is never explicitly stated, Leonhard Emmerling's antipathy toward a pervasive "overburdening of art as the great redeemer"—one that has produced "an almost relentless spate of exposures and revelations, interventions and calls to participation" in the contemporary art world—seems to have in mind a growing belief in the merits of social justice art and, perhaps more damningly, those who naively assume a stable relation between intention and embodiment, conception and reception. Although he never pitches it as a dilemma, The Art of Diremption certainly reads as a response to one. As Emmerling sees it, the "assumption that art has a unique ability to bring truth to light" is born out of, among other things, a fundamental misunderstanding of "the dialectic of appearance and elusion" in art, and a lost sense of how this "reveals [the] truth about its dual composition as reality and appearance." In other words, by forsaking a nuanced understanding of a crucial differentiation between appearance and reality—"the key differentiation in aesthetics," as he sees it—and laboring under a misplaced burden of uncomplicated mimesis, we fail to see that art relinquishes its ontological status as art at the very moment it insists on having a clear intent and impact. When art is "semantically overdetermined," when "the modernist paradigm of the opposition between art and society that is coming apart at the seams is looked upon as no longer appropriate yet indispensable," the "discourse on art has to be pumped full with the force of the radical as a compensatory surrogate." In this way, art is "inflated by … moral fervour," and "the sweeping proclamations about art not only reek of arbitrariness" but ultimately "fail its object." Such beliefs are also, above all else, counterproductive in bolstering arguments for the value of aesthetic judgment as a means [End Page 35] of moral good because any insistence upon the moral worth of a work of art, and any attempt to measure and justify the range of its influence, is bound to produce the wrong kind of diremption: not the generative and unifying force of internal doubt and uncertainty at the heart of aesthetic engagement, but pronounced critical hostility and division.

Emmerling sees this current overinvestment in the notion of art as a reconciler of social disparity and a deliverer of moral good to be the product of an "ethical turn," a "paradigm shift" that occurred in "the last observable phase of a specific history of art since Nietzsche, in which all hope lies in liberation through art." By taking Nietzsche's belief in "Art and nothing but art" as "life's great enabler, seducer, stimulant" at face value, critics and artists erroneously insist that, "Not only should art hold a particular morality, but also judge and comment on political events from an artistic-moral perspective, and through the respective constellations and situations it creates, … must propose solutions to overcome social ills." Emmerling's thesis rests on the assertion that while many have been at pains to claim for art a special power to reconcile contradictions, it is its capacity for diremption, the "uncoupling of beauty and truth" and the "self-perpetuating process of diversification, in which it divides itself and splits up," that art demonstrates its greatest value. When art makes no conspicuous or extravagant assertions about being a site of radical freedom, when art relinquishes its desire to be a powerful medium of social transformation and insists instead on its autonomy and the autonomy of subjective judgment, it establishes its consideration as "the political praxis of freedom." "Art," Emmerling posits, "requires an ethics of powerlessness, which rejects the discourse of impact and power, in order to enable a politics of art, at the heart of which lies the permanence of reflection, unfoundability of thought and the emergence of form as the event of the new."

To arrive at this...