The Aesthetic Regime of Representation

Abstract

“The Aesthetic Regime of Representation” focuses on the work of German idealist aesthetic thought in the political context of the bourgeois revolutions of America and France. Analyzing Kant’s Critique of Judgment, it considers the “turn to the aesthetic” as a means of forestalling the immediacy of revolution and installing an implicitly pedagogical and developmental system of representation that defines the human and the political subject as universal and disinterested. That system relies on a notion of common sense that separates the civil subject from the Savage, who remains fixed at the threshold of humanity. The foundations of aesthetic philosophy are at the same time the foundations of a “regime of representation” that offers not a means to inclusion, but a mode of regulating access to recognition as a fully human and politically capable subject.