Oscar Wilde's artificiality and the logic of genuine pluralism
Titel:
Oscar Wilde's artificiality and the logic of genuine pluralism
Auteur:
Barris, Jeremy
Verschenen in:
Contemporary justice review
Paginering:
Jaargang 8 (2005) nr. 2 pagina's 193-209
Jaar:
2005-06
Inhoud:
Oscar Wilde's artificial, nonsensical aesthetic is really a magnificently rigorous and just pluralism. His artificiality of style and wit presents the serious and un-artificial possibility of things' being essentially otherwise than they are understood to be in any given standpoint. His aesthetic impact itself consists in a fresh opening of essential or constitutive or ontological spaces or standpoints. But this opening of spaces is thoroughly self-canceling, and so is also a validation of essential spaces exactly as they are. This validation, then, involves self-canceling recognition of mutually exclusive “spaces.” The principle at work is that constitutive difference between standpoints involves the meaninglessness of the organizing categories of each position to the others. A position that aims to understand and communicate with incompatible positions must therefore recognize the genuine meaninglessness of its own claims to them, and vice-versa. In this way, paradoxically, mutually exclusive positions can be related without obscuring their mutual exclusivity. Wilde's nonsensical aesthetic, as expressed in both his fictional and critical works, is exactly this kind of paradoxical coordination.
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