Moral Images of Freedom: A Future for Critical Theory

Description

Moral Images of Freedom resurrects the Kantian project of affirmative political philosophy and traces its oft-forgotten influences found in thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Ernst Cassirer, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Benjamin. Drucilla Cornell responds to nihilistic claims about the empty purpose of critical theory in a world so utterly captured by violence in all of its worst forms: economic, social, political, and cultural. Cornell instead draws together a sweeping thread of hope in the varied symbolic forms of freedom persistent throughout the work of a broader range of critical theorists and addresses the burning challenge for such work to respond seriously to the need for a decolonization of critical theory itself and a sustained commitment to the possible future of socialism. Title Page......Page 6 Copyright Page......Page 8 Table of Contents......Page 10 Preface......Page 11 INTRODUCTION - The Struggle for Redemptive Imagination......Page 15 CHAPTER ONE - Kantian Beginnings to the Legacy of Critical Theory: The Harmonious Play of Freedom......Page 24 Schiller’s Insight into Aesthetic Play......Page 29 Kant on the Beautiful......Page 31 Kant on the Sublime......Page 39 The Hypothetical Imagination......Page 42 Kant’s Ambivalence on the Imagination......Page 45 Notes......Page 51 CHAPTER TWO - Dignity in Dasein: Between Thrownness and Hospitality......Page 55 Shepherding Being against Our Thrownness......Page 63 Heeding the Call of Hospitality......Page 83 Notes......Page 93 CHAPTER THREE - Symbolic Form as Other: Ethical Humanism and the Vivifying Power of Language......Page 97 Human Beings as Symbolic Creatures......Page 99 Applicability, Versatility, and Vivification......Page 102 Cassirerian Critique of the Kantian Schema......Page 105 Inevitable Plurality of Symbolic Forms......Page 109 Imaginative Projective and Symbolic Form......Page 110 The “I” Standpoint......Page 114 How Is Objectivity Possible?......Page 115 Cassirer and Progress......Page 116 The Davos Debate......Page 118 Levinas’s Engagement with Cassirer......Page 124 Notes......Page 126 CHAPTER FOUR - Decolonizing Critical Theory: The Challenge of Black Existentialism......Page 129 Black Skin, White Masks......Page 133 Notes......Page 160 CHAPTER FIVE - Redemption in the Midst of Phantasmagoria: Dispelling the Fate of Socialism......Page 164 Notes......Page 177 CONCLUSION - Heeding Piedade’s Song: Toward a Transnational Feminist Solidarity......Page 178 Bibliography......Page 193 Index......Page 198 About the Author......Page 204