ABSTRACT
This chapter studies Andy Warhol, whose writing reveals a complex, if playful, commitment to dialogue, intersubjectivity, and aesthetic collaboration. Specifically, this chapter focuses on Warhol’s 1975 book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) and the tape recordings transcribed within it. Warhol’s “philosophy” introduces what I call post-ironic sincerity, an affect of vulnerability that confounds readers, mimetically reproducing the very crisis of communicability this study investigates. By inviting readers to engage with and test his validity claims of truthfulness and sincerity, Warhol’s Philosophy initiates the conditions needed for communicative action to commence. This chapter read Warhol alongside Habermas, Roland Barthes, and Lionel Trilling to show how he radicalizes sincerity by suggesting that all we’ve ever had when it comes to communication is avowal. Thus, Warhol’s Philosophy stages a kind of debate about the fate of meaningful dialogue in postwar life, juxtaposing transcribed tape recordings of merely superficial chatter with a direct, seemingly sincere address to the reader in which he critiques the conditions of postmodernity that have led to such impoverished speech.
