Philosophy and Art ?

"Few things could be more anathema to Continental philosophy than realism and
materialism."

This line, plucked at random from a POST  on Larval Subjects,  set off such a stream questions and ideas that I'm quite unable to put them in order, and too impatient to set them aside for fear the central association will
be lost.

Levi is here referring primarily to philosophical systems, but my mind
translated this (again) to literature. Realism.

My complaint with Wood--that he won't acknowledge his unexamined assumptions
about the "real," the possibility of mimesis--or representation without  difference, as though whatever the difference might be, it remains aesthetically insignificant; it makes no difference.

There is no imaginative writing without ideas. Which is not to say that  literature is reducible to philosophy, rather, the closer literature approximates (or accommodates itself) to such a reduction, it suffers aesthetic loss.

A novelist does not write philosophy. But a writer confronts ideas... whether  systematically formulated, or elements fragmented through the culture--still  unarticulated--along with whatever else he or she encounters, and shapes... and is in turn,  shaped by.

We make no effect on others that does not affect us in equal measure.

Missing that: the primary error of Neocon Realpolitics. Don't tell me aethetics has no real world significance!

"ELF" is more than the product of market pressures (another hegemonic fallacy)... the market, English writing, many writers... are responding to and engaging with a constellation of ideas about "reality," narrative, representation--that have not yet been subjected to a broad enough analysis and critique--a non reductive, anti-reductive critique.

We need an aesthetics that can address the unexamined assumptions, Without reduction. Without replacing one Hegemonic Fallacy with another. Without privileging one system (symbolic, materialist, idealist... no matter) over another, but ... like what you actually find in imaginative writing, a working out of constellations, networks of interactive meaning--a new hermeneutics.