Theory and art must depart from context rather than dissolve into immediacy

Evidence

Endorsing mediacy against immediacy is a proscribed move—but the wager of this chapter and of this book has been that theory and aesthetic production must be impelled by their own essential and definitive promise of departure: theory moves away from mere context, speculatively moving beyond reflexive cognition, propulsively moving against the merely extant; art and literature generate more than what is already given, speculatively proposing other worlds, other words, propulsively suspending ordinary ratiocination. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 325

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Kornbluh’s core normative defense of mediation — that theory/art’s essential promise is departure, moving ‘against the merely extant’ — is the book’s culminating wager and the key to the reader’s own defense of mediation.
• XREF: connects to: Changed historical conditions forced critical theory from immanent to transcendent critique — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 190; Marginality from the world undercuts the rootedness art and thought require — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 290; Philosophy and art can dissolve only jointly in a liberated society