In the “Letter to His Father,” Kafka writes, “My writing is all about you.” But what does it mean when he adds, “Yet it did take its course in the direction determined by me”? A story by Wallace Stevens confirms that the aesthetic contitutively involves this greedy warp in the path of desiring attention. In “The Revelation” a young man takes a photograph of his sweetheart to be framed. A few days later collects the package, and opening it finds instead a framed photograph of himself. The history of reflection upon the aesthetic is that of the conditions of this reflexivity, the interaction between a dependency, a disappointment and a self-satisfaction, that of the agencies of the sequence that result in the movement from one position to the other. The feature that dominates the period from Kant to the present is the elimination of an intimidating violence from the shifting process, the becoming indistinguishable of the one moment from the other, the denarrativization of reasons for desirability and dismissability.

Readings from:

Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert on Spectacles
Kant, The Critique of Judgment
Schiller, “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”
Hegel, excerpts from the Aesthetics
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
Eichenbaum Schlovsky, and Bakhtine--exerpts
Tolstoy, What is Art?
Freud, “On Transience”
Freud, On Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory