The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency: Revaluating German Aesthetics from Kant to Adorno

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This study examines how key figures in the German aesthetic tradition – Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno – attempted to think through the powers and limits of art in post-Enlightenment modernity. Ayon Maharaj argues that the aesthetic speculations of these thinkers provide the conceptual resources for a timely dialectical defense of ‘aesthetic agency’ art’s capacity to make available uniquely valuable modes of experience that escape the purview of Enlightenment scientific rationality. Blending careful philosophical analysis with an intellectual historian’s attention to the broader cultural resonance of philosophical arguments, Maharaj has two interrelated aims. He provides challenging new interpretations of the aesthetic philosophies of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, and Adorno by focusing on aspects of their thought that have been neglected or misunderstood in Anglo-American and German scholarship. He demonstrates that their subtle investigations into the nature and scope of aesthetic agency have far-reaching implications for contemporary discourse on the arts. The Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency is an important and original contribution to scholarship on the German aesthetic tradition and to the broader field of aesthetics. Title page Copyright page Dedication page Contents Preface Acknowledgments Abbreviations of Primary Texts Introduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity Chapter 1 Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful” I Interpreting the third Critique: A reconstructive or a structural approach? II Against the reconstructive bias III The phenomenology of aesthetic pleasure: Interpretive possibilities IV Valences of aesthetic disinterestedness V The problem of the universal voice VI Sensus communis: Regulative or constitutive? VII On the centrality of Kant’s “lesser question” Chapter 2 The “Great Gulf ” of the Third Critique: Kant’s Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Life I Kant’s aesthetics in the broader context of the third Critique II The fact of reason in the second Critique III The aporia of nature’s purposiveness in the third Critique IV Can aesthetic pleasure bridge the “great gulf” between nature and freedom? V Kant’s legacy in Schiller’s Letters, the “System-Program,” and beyond Chapter 3 Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism I The Kantian foundations of Schelling’s Romantic aesthetics II Intellectual intuition in Kant and Fichte III The Ichschrift: Early Schelling’s speculative critique of Kant IV The aesthetics of Schelling’s System: Art as the “organ” of philosophy V Anxieties of Romanticism Chapter 4 Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony I Permanent parabasis: Schlegel’s call for a radicalized skepticism II Schlegel’s epistemology of irony III The origins of Schlegel’s theory of irony in Kant and Fichte IV Recuperating Hegel’s metacritique of Schlegelian irony V Irony and/as dialectics VI Schlegel’s vision of a “new mythology” Chapter 5 Art’s “After” and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics I From the end of art to the “after of art” II The synchronic and diachronic dimensions of Hegel’s aesthetics III Hegel’s three-stage “Historical Deduction of the True Concept of Art” IV Stage one: Kantian aporias and the crisis of modernity V Stage two: The quest for aesthetic unity in Schiller and Schelling VI Stage three: The dynamics of irony in Schlegel, Novalis, and Solger VII From Hegel to Kierkegaard: Toward a dialectics of objective humor Chapter 6 The Idealist Legacy: Adorno’s Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic Theory I Adorno between Kant and Hegel II The “aporia of aesthetic objectivity” in Kant’s aesthetics III Artwork as force-field: Adorno’s Kierkegaardian reading of Hegel IV Erschütterung: Adorno’s negative dialectics of aesthetic experience V Rethinking aesthetic praxis Epilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical Immanence Notes Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Epilogue Bibliography Index