Real Presences

Real Presences by George Steiner, 232 pages

In Real Presences, philosopher George Steiner considers the causes and effects of the unprecedented postmodern divorce between the word and the world, and seeks for a path of reconciliation.  This path begins with his analysis of the aesthetic experience as not irrational but irreducible to reason - and therefore beyond both positivism and deconstruction - and proceeds with a recovery of the social, ethical, and above all metaphysical dimensions of art.

Steiner's book is neither jeremiad nor screed, but a careful attempt to find a way past the abyss of meaning opened by the deconstructionists.  He neither dismisses nor denounces his opponents, but engages with them.  In this, he models his own understanding of the connection between artist and audience, in which the freedom of creation encounters the freedom of interpretation, the self meets the other, and both are transformed.