Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy

Ön Kapak
Wayne State University Press, 1999 - 286 sayfa
The concept that art must have no instrumental function is a doctrine traditionally traced back to Kant's Critique of Judgment. In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Jonathan Hess proposes that this concept of autonomous art marks not a withdrawal from the political realm but the ultimate embodiment of Enlightenment political culture, a response to a crisis in the institution idealized by Jurgen Habermas as the bourgeois public sphere.

In Reconstituting the Body Politic, Hess explores the moment in late eighteenth-century Germany that witnessed the emergence of two concepts that marked the modern era: the political concept of the public sphere and the doctrine of aesthetic autonomy. By considering the extent to which, at its very inception, the concept of aesthetic autonomy is inextricably intertwined with the emergence of the concept of the public sphere, he offers both a historical study of the political conditions that produced this concept and a contribution to contemporary literary and political theory.

Reading texts by Kant alongside the writings of contemporaries like Karl Philipp Moritz, Hess examines a wide variety of eighteenth-century texts, discourses, and institutions. He then enters into a critical dialogue with Walter Benjamin, Reinhart Koselleck, and Jurgen Habermas to articulate a political critique of this aesthetic. The aesthetic theory of Kant's Critique emerges not as a mere defense of the "disinterestedness" of aesthetic pleasure but as an engaged response to the political limitations of public culture during the Enlightenment.

Hess argues for an understanding of these concepts as functionally interdependent, and he reflects on what this interdependence mightmean for the practice of literary and cultural criticism today. His work will interest not only Germanists and critical theorists but also art historians and historians of philosophy and political thought.

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İçindekiler

Abbreviations
11
From Benjamin to Schiller
59
The Body Politic and the Politics of the Nonpolitical
81
Popular Philosophy and the Invention
119
Overcoming Utility or the Politics of Pleasure
155
Critical Philosophy Public Culture
181
Reconstituting the Body Politic
211
Concluding Remarks
243
Bibliography
271

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Yazar hakkında (1999)

Jonathan M. Hess is an assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Languages at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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