Abstract
The revival of interest in both Kant and aesthetics in recent years has been striking.1 The fact that after the demise of Marxism a return to the legacy of Kant should have occurred is perhaps less surprising than the manner in which this return has been staged. What is now suggested by many different kinds of writers is that the questions raised in the Critique of Judgment will be decisive for how we are to think about the nature of politics. This claim is, on first sight, more than a little surprising. What do questions about the distinction between kinds of judgments about the beautiful have to do with how we will think politically?
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Notes
Amongst the many important contemporary works on Kant, see in particular, Jean-François Lyotard (1991) Lessons on The Analytic of the Sublime (1994 trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford University Press: Stanford, CA)
Jacques Derrida (1978) The Truth in Painting (1987 trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London)
Howard Caygill (1989) The Art of Judgment (Blackwell: Oxford)
Rudolf A. Makkreel (1990) Imagination and Interpretation in Kant: The Hermeneutical Import of The Critique of Judgment (University of Chicago Press: Chicago)
Susan Meld Shell (1996) The Embodiment of Reason: Kant on Spirit, Generation, and Community (University of Chicago Press: Chicago).
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe (1991) Musica Ficta (Figures of Wagner) (1994 trans. Felicia McCarren, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA)
Thierry De Duve (1996) Kant after Duchamp (MIT Press: Cambridge, MA. and London)
Jacques Derrida (1990) Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins (1993 trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, University of Chicago Press: Chicago)
Theodor Adorno (1970) Aesthetic Theory (1984 trans. C. Lenhardt, Routledge and Kegan Paul: London)
Terry Eagleton (1990) The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Blackwell: Oxford)
Andrew Bowie (1997) From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (Routledge: London and New York)
Jay Bernstein (1992) The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation From Kant to Adorno (Polity Press: Cambridge).
Works on Kant’s politics are now appearing. See: Ronald Reiner and William James Booth (eds.) (1993) Kant Sr Political Philosophy: The Contemporary Legacy (Yale University Press: New Haven and London)
Hannah Arendt (1982) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (ed. Ronald Beiner, University of Chicago Press: Chicago)
Hans Saner (1973) Kant’s Political Thought: Its Origins and Development (trans. E. B. Ashton: Chicago University Press: Chicago)
William James Booth (1986) Interpreting The World: Kant’s Philosophy of History and Politics (University of Toronto Press: Toronto)
Susan Meld Shell (1980) The Rights of Reason: A Study of Kant’s Philosophy and Politics (University of Toronto Press: Toronto)
Howard Williams (1983) Kant’s Political Philosophy (Blackwell: Oxford)
Jean-François Lyotard (1983) The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (1988 trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele, Manchester University Press: Manchester).
Hans Reiss (ed.) (1991) Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge University Press)
Kant (1793) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1934 trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, Open Court Publishing Company: Chicago and London); Conflict of Faculties (1796) (1979 trans. Mary J. Gregor, Arabis Books: New York); The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) (1996 trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge University Press: Cambridge).
See footnote of §65 of The Critique o fJudgment. Werner Pluhar on p. 254 of his translation of the work interprets this as a reference to the American Revolution. Werner S. Pluhar (1987) Kant: Critique of Judgment (Hackett Publishing Company: Indianopolis and Cambridge).
However, Howard Caygill (1995) A Kant Dictionary (Blackwell: Oxford), entry on ‘political writings’, takes this as a reference to the French Revolution.
James Schmitt (ed.) (1996) What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles and London) reprints a number of essays on Kant’s contribution to the controversy over Enlightenment, including those of Habermas and Foucault. He situates this essay historically by reprinting here a number of other essays on the topic which are contemporaneous to that of Kant.
Kant (1764) Observations on The Feeling of The Beautiful and The Sublime (1973 trans. John T. Goldthwaite, University of California Press: Berkeley).
Kant (1766) Dreams of a Spirit-Seer Elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics, included in D. Watford and R. Makkreel (eds. and trans.) (1992) Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770 (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge).
Peter Fenves (ed.) (1993) Raising the Tone of Philosophy (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London)
Jacques Derrida (1981) ‘On A Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone In Philosophy’ (1993 trans. John Leavey Jr.).
White Beck (ed.) (1980) Kant: On History (Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing: Indianapolis).
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© 2000 Gary Banham
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Banham, G. (2000). Introduction. In: Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230287600_1
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