Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics: Freedom and the Beautiful

Description

We face a crisis of public reason. Our quest for a politics that is free, moral and rational has, somehow, made it hard for us to move, to change our positions, to visit places and perspectives that are not our own, and to embrace reality. This book addresses this crisis with a model of public reason based in a new aesthetic reading of Hannah Arendt’s political theory. It begins by telling the story of Arendt’s engagement with the Augenblicke of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kafka and Benjamin, in order to identify her own aesthetic Moment. Josefson then explicates this Moment, what he calls the freedom of the beautiful, as a third face of freedom on par with Arendt’s familiar freedoms of action and the life of the mind. He shows how this freedom, rooted in Jaspers’s phenomenology and a non-metaphysical reading of Kant, serves to redress the world-alienation that was a uniting theme across Arendt’s works. Ultimately, this volume aims to challenge orthodox accounts of Arendtian politics, presenting Arendt’s aesthetic politics as a radically new model of republicanism and as an alternative to political liberal, deliberative and agonistic models of public reason. Front Matter ....Pages i-ix Introduction (Jim Josefson)....Pages 1-17 The Moment (Jim Josefson)....Pages 19-69 The Beautiful (Jim Josefson)....Pages 71-124 Judgment (Jim Josefson)....Pages 125-158 Spirit (Jim Josefson)....Pages 159-187 Res publica (Jim Josefson)....Pages 189-245 Conversations (Jim Josefson)....Pages 247-282 Back Matter ....Pages 283-307