Dialectics of Aesthetic Agency

Ayon Maharaj is Assistant Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and English at Ramakrishna Mission Vivekananda University in West Bengal, India.

• PrefaceAcknowledgementsAbbreviations of Primary TextsIntroduction: The Crisis of Art in Modernity1. Aporias of Aesthetic Pleasure in Kant’s ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’2. The "Great Gulf" of the Third Critique: Kant's Ambivalence about the Role of Aesthetic Pleasure in Moral Lif3. Kant Romanticized: Aesthetic Intuition as Redemption in Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism 4. Hegel contra Schlegel: On the Aporetic Epistemology of Romantic Irony5. Art’s ‘After’ and the Dialectical Possibilities of Irony in Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics6. The Idealist Legacy: Adorno’s Dialectical Retrieval of Aesthetic Agency in Aesthetic TheoryEpilogue: Art as Force: From Critical Suspicion to Dialectical ImmanenceNotesBibliographyIndex

How can we both be enraptured and shaken by the experience of art and yet also continuously suspicious of art’s promises, seductions, and potentially dangerous uses? Is this complex attitude even coherent, let alone fruitful? By tracing and evaluating the stances on art of Kant, Schelling, Schlegel, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Altieri, Ayon Maharaj arrives at a compelling account of the work of art as a haunting force that eludes both reduction to any definite message and dismissal as an empty entertainment. In this way, Maharaj brings the tradition of German aesthetic theory strikingly to life in relation to current plights and possibilities of human life in culture.