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objects considered apart from their relations, which cuts against the grain of today’s relational fashion in philosophy, the arts, and nearly everywhere else. By “relational” I mean the notion that an artwork (or any object) is intrinsically defined by some sort of relation with its context. In philosophy these are called “internal relations,” and OOO upholds the counter-tradition that takes relations to be external to their terms: so that, in all but exceptional cases, an apple remains the same apple no matter the context in which it occurs. Now, to consider an object apart from its relations obviously sounds like the well-known “formalism” in art and literary criticism, which downplays the biographical, cultural, environmental, or socio-political surroundings of artworks in favor of treating such works as self-contained aesthetic wholes. In this connection, I have written some admiring things about the long unfashionable Greenberg, who deserves the title “formalist” despite his own resistance to the term.⁶ We will see that the same holds for Fried, who is also a formalist in my sense despite his ongoing displeasure with that word. Robert Pippin’s complaint that “there persists a myth that Fried’s work is ‘formalist,’ indifferent to ‘content’” certainly hits the mark, but only if we accept Fried and Pippin’s definition of formalism as denoting indifference to content.⁷ It is true that no one should accuse Fried of suppressing the content of paintings in the way that Greenberg usually does, but I will claim that there exists a more basic sense of formalism than this.

Given OOO’s emphasis on the non-relational autonomy or closure of objects from their contexts, it is no surprise that there has been some wariness toward object-oriented thought in those aesthetic quarters where formalism is in low repute, even among those who feel sympathy for us on other grounds. Claire Colebrook, the prominent Deleuzean, worries aloud that OOO literary criticism will merely amount to a continuation of formalist business as usual.⁸ My friend Melissa Ragona at Carnegie-Mellon University reacted as follows when I first posted the cover of this book on social media: “Excellent move from the old days of discussing Clement Greenberg to Joseph Beuys!”⁹ Some months earlier, the Munich-based artist Hasan Veseli had interrupted an otherwise positive email to express the following reservation about my past writings on art:

      My art friends and I can’t understand why you go on and on about Greenberg, although we do get your point (background, flatness). In retrospect it feels that his writings were already assigned an expiration date at the time that he wrote that stuff (probably because of his problems with subject matter, making art just a formalist exercise). Notable critics, from today’s perspective, are the likes of Rosalind Krauss, David Joselit, Hal Foster, Arthur Danto …¹⁰

      In my continuing fondness for Greenberg, I am outnumbered in the art world by his detractors. Nonetheless, I would respond by saying that there are perfectly good reasons to “go on and on” about him, even if his theories seem linked with a kind of art that lost its cutting-edge prestige a half century ago, and even if some of his theories can be shown to be wrong. The issue, as I see it, is that formalism was at some point simply denounced and abandoned rather than assimilated and overcome, as some literary critics have also argued in their own field.¹¹ A similar thing happened in philosophy to another theory that stressed the isolation of autonomous things: the unloved doctrine of the thing-in-itself beyond all human access. Here we have crossed into the long shadow of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose three great Critiques sounded the formalist keynote in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, respectively. We will see that Kantian formalism, conveniently centered in his recurring term “autonomy,” consists of an intriguing combination of breakthroughs and deficiencies. Until the deficiencies are addressed and assimilated rather than circumvented by makeshift means, such as the vacuous claim that autonomy is inherently “bourgeois” or “fetishistic,” there is a risk that philosophy and the arts – their fates more closely linked than is commonly believed – will continue to amount to little more than an ironic contempt for formalist claims.¹² I hold that this is exactly what happened in the first post-formalist philosophy (better known as German Idealism) and a century and a half later in post-formalist art. In both cases, important new possibilities were gained that had been foreclosed to formalism, but an even more crucial breakthrough was lost. One of the broadest claims of this book is that there will be no further progress in philosophy or the arts without an explicit embrace of the autonomous thing-in-itself. Moreover, we need to draw the surprising theatrical consequences of this point, despite Fried’s understandable wish to banish theatricality from art. David Wellbery restates Fried’s position with wonderfully flamboyant rhetoric:

The (essentially ‘theatrical’) instigation of a frustrated yearning, a vertiginous sense of transport toward the never-to-be-achieved completion of an additive series, elicits a form of consciousness that is essentially non-artistic. Thought, work-internal differentiation, lucidity, and selfstanding achievement are sacrificed for the sake of the frisson of a mysteriously agitated, portentous emptiness.¹³

      Let us all stand united against “mysteriously agitated, portentous emptiness” – though I still find much of aesthetic value in Richard Wagner’s operas, which Wellbery seems to detest. The idea of theatricality defended in this book is not that of histrionic melodrama.

      I took up these themes in 2016 in Dante’s Broken Hammer, a book whose first part is devoted to the Divina Commedia of Dante Alighieri, and whose second part challenges the thought of that most un-Dantean figure, Kant.¹⁴ As mentioned, autonomy is perhaps the most central of Kant’s terms, unifying as it does the chief insights of all three of his Critiques. His metaphysics features the unknowable thing-in-itself, unreachable in any direct fashion; opposed to this noumenal thing is human thought, structured according to our pure intuitions of space and time and the twelve categories of the understanding.¹⁵ Each of these realms is autonomous, even if Kant speaks in contradictory fashion of the thing-in-itself as cause of the world of appearance, an inconsistency on which the master was hammered by his first wave of converts.¹⁶ In ethics, Kant’s commitment to formalism is openly declared.¹⁷ An action is not ethical if it is motivated by any sort of external reward or punishment: whether it be fear of Hell, the desire for a good reputation, or the wish to avoid a bad conscience. An act is ethical only if performed for its own sake, in accordance with a duty binding on all rational beings. Stated in technical terms, ethics must be “autonomous” rather than “heteronomous.” Contextual subtleties play no role in Kant’s ethics: in his most famous example, lying cannot be justified even when done with the best of intentions and yielding the most admirable results. Indeed, context is what must be rigorously excluded for an act to count as ethical at all.

This leads us to Kant’s philosophy of art, another triumph of formalism, even if he does not use that exact word in this portion of his philosophy.¹⁸ Beauty must be self-contained in the same manner as ethical actions, unrelated to any personal agreeableness. Here as in his ethics, what is at stake for Kant is not the art object, which cannot be grasped directly any more than the thing-in-itself, and cannot be explained at all in terms of criteria or literal prose descriptions. Instead, beauty concerns the transcendental faculty of judgment shared by all humans, which serves as the guarantor that anyone of sufficiently developed taste ought to agree on what is beautiful. The same holds for our experience of the sublime, whether it comes in the “mathematical” version of something infinitely large (the nighttime sky, the vastness of the sea) or the “dynamical” version of something infinitely powerful (a crushing tsunami, the discharge of a nuclear weapon). Here once more, Kant holds that the sublime is really about us rather than the apparently sublime entity, since the crucial feature of the sublime is that it overpowers our finite selves with an experience of infinite magnitude.

      Nonetheless, Kant mixes two very different senses of formalism in a way that is fateful, in the negative sense, for modern philosophy and art theory. The important kernel of truth in his ethics should be clear enough: an action whose purpose is to gain rewards or avoid punishment is not really an ethical act, though we can never be entirely sure that any given act is free of ulterior motives. From here it is a small step toward recognizing the substantial truth of his aesthetics: an artwork is not beautiful just because it happens to please or flatter us in the manner of, say, Augustus Caesar

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