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By contextualizing Walter Pater's aestheticism alongside Alexandre
Kojeve's and Georges Bataille's readings of Hegelianism, this book
shows that Pater's aestheticism constitutes both a philosophy of
death and at the same time a philosophy of the impossibility of
death.
Walter Pater, best known as the author of The Renaissance (1873)
and as Oscar Wilde s tutor and friend, was a leading figure in
European aestheticism and British fin-de-siecle culture. Despite
this, he has received only limited critical attention, and has
tended to be read conservatively. Drawing on Pater s unpublished
manuscripts, Giles Whiteley challenges this view of Pater as a
closeted don who spent the remainder of his life regretting the
excesses of his Renaissance. Focusing on Pater s reading of the
German idealist philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, Whiteley argues that
Pater s response to both the philosophical and the ideological
legacies of idealism was significantly more advanced than has been
hitherto thought. Presenting a persuasive new reading of the genre
of the imaginary portrait Pater s most elusive form of writing the
book paints a picture of Walter Pater as a truly revolutionary
thinker. Pater, like Nietzsche during the same period, breaks with
the dialectic as a method. Anticipating the radical critiques of
ideology of post-Hegelians such as Derrida and Deleuze, Pater
becomes a radical and transgressive thinker in his own right.
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