Kant, the Canon, and Pleasure's Transcendental Sociability

Abstract

Abstract:For much of the late twentieth century pleasure was marginalized as an object of study in literary criticism. Recent attempts (Timothy Aubry, Robert S. Lehman et al.) at redressing this have often appealed to Kant's aesthetics with its open avowal of pleasure as the basis of judgement. Kant's universalism, however, has been largely held at arm's length out of a worry that it underwrote hegemonic canons. Yet Kant himself disputes the claims of external authorities in matters of taste and his account of the universal voice of aesthetic judgements underwrites no rules or models that would give objective form to a canon. To enjoy—in Kantian terms—a canonical work is to enjoy sociably, but without any objective marker of unity to that sociability. I follow Lyotard and de Duve in arguing for the relevance to democratic politics of the transcendental community of Kant's aesthetics. The task Kant has bequeathed literary critics is not the establishment or defence of a canon, but rather the interrogation of how the pleasure in texts is both a mode of sociability and a means of engaging with phenomena in their singularity.