The Limits of Art ─ Two Essays

Tzvetan Todorov explores the complex relations between art, politics and ethics in the two essays that make up The Limits of Art. In the first essay, `Artists and Dictators', he traces the intimate relationship between avant-garde art and radical politics in pre-revolutionary Russia, pre-fascist Italy and pre-Nazi Germany and sets forth the radical idea that the project of totalitarian dictators and avant-garde artists actually `emerged from the same womb': both artists and dictators set out to make it new---be it art or society.

In `Art and Ethics', the second essay, he reexamines the age-old question of what can be expected from art and whether or not it should be emancipated from ethics. Must art be morally instructive, or should it be self-sufficient and concept-free? The answer is not an either/or for Todorov, who believes, like Baudelaire, that art has both cognitive and ethical aspects to it---even if it is presented as `art for art's sake'.

Tzvetan Todorov's many writings include The Conquest of America (1984), On Human Diversity (1993), Facing the Extreme (2000), Imperfect Garden (2002), Hope and Memory (2003) and The New World Disorder (2005). He is Director of Research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris and has taught widely in the English-speaking world, notably in Harvard, Yale, Columbia and University of California.
Gila Walker is the translator of more than a hundred works in French, including texts by Jacques Derrida, Francois Jullien, Herbert Damisch, Thierry de Duve, Georges Didi-Huberman and Alain Flescher. She divides her time between her homes in New York and the Southwest of France.