Burke and the Origins of Modern Aesthetics

Fernández-Jáuregui Rojas, Carlota. “Introducción. Burke y los orígenes de la estética Moderna”. Indagación filosófica sobre el origen de nuestras ideas acerca de lo sublime y de lo bello, Edmund Burke, traducido por Carlota Fernández-Jáuregui Rojas, Madrid, Alianza Editorial, 2023, pp. 13-155

Abstract

In “Burke y los orígenes de la estética moderna”, Carlota Fernández-Jáuregui develops, following an examination of Burke and his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, a broad theoretical reflection which concerns three disciplines: rhetoric, aesthetics and politics. Placing at the center of her work the affective basis shared by all three, the researcher addresses the fundamental importance of the sublime in modern literature and thought, while also problematizing this alleged modernity by pointing to the affective foundations already present in ancient rhetoric. After a first chapter devoted to the genealogy just described, in the second chapter the author explores the concept of taste and explains the political nature that it acquires in Burke, while also relating it to Marx’s economic analysis. Finally, Fernández-Jáuregui devotes the last chapter to the “temporal rhetoric” of the sublime, noting how this intrinsic temporality of the concept, besides explaining its mutations throughout history, conditions its particular relation with language and literature.