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

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