Gert Mattenklott

Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand (The Object of Aesthetics and Art History)
Essays zu Literatur, Kunst und Kultur
VOLUME 189

Contributions to an Anthropologically Grounded Aesthetics

The aesthetic is an improbable event. For most people, it occurs despite the conditions that make it improbable because there is no room in them for purposeless activity. The comparative literature scholar Gert Mattenklott’s influential essays explore aesthetic action as an event that plays out amid the tension between the aesthetic and the political. They harness metaphorical figures to navigate the space between politics and art and stage a form of understanding beyond scholarly concepts. By reconstructing the process of aesthetic experience, Mattenklott dramatizes this experience as what it is: an interminable reflection shuttling between the objects and a subject of experience.

Gert Mattenklott (b. Oranienburg, 1942; d. Berlin, 2009) was a scholar of comparative literature, philosopher of art, critic, and essayist. He taught comparative literature, holding professorships first at Philipps-Universität, Marburg, and later at Freie Universität Berlin. Essays and reviews in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Neue Rundschau, and Merkur introduced him to broad readerships outside the academy.

Dirck Linck (b. 1961) was a research associate at the Research Cluster on Homosexuality and Literature at Universität-GH Siegen and then at the Collaborative Research Center on Aesthetic Experience and the Dissolution of Artistic Limits at Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. A co-publisher and editor of the journal FORUM Homosexualität und Literature from 1996 until 2007, he published widely on queer art, aesthetics, pop literature, literary history, and other fields.