Abstract

Due to reason’s instrumentalization, the Enlightenment project turned into a myth of domination instead of freeing humanity from barbarism. This dialectic of Enlightenment, as the critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkkeimer put it, destroyed our mimetic relation with nature and privileged the language of modern science and logical positivism over art, among other maladies, philosophical or otherwise. This predicament intensified upon the culture industry’s supremacy in the contemporary period that converted the artwork into a commodified product, and numbed the people’s critical acumen. Contra these marginalizations, I elucidate in this paper art’s material configurations and liberating potentials. In connection to this, I expound art’s critico-dialectical import, with a specific thrust to Mideo Cruz’s controversial installations at the Cultural Center of the Philippines last 2012. Significantly, upon art’s disclosure of the damaged life, Adorno claims, it can confront identity and immanently critique advanced capitalism for the fashioning of emancipatory possibilities. After constructing the building-blocks of a new aesthetic theory, I explain in the last part the lessons that philosophy can learn from art.