The Virtue of the Impersonal

"Beauty itself must die," Schiller said. Brought forward here is the role of negativity at the core of the experience of the aesthetic, its basis in the displacement of ill-intentioned love. Hegel famously seconded the position, but he was not alone in doing so. Progressively unacceptable to the literature attached to our market ideal became the social implications of an aesthetic that was no more than an admonitorily spectacular display of the action of resentment. And thus there emerged a project of the modern period-the definition of the aesthetic as the product of a double action that made for a double bind, that of the preservation of negativity and the selective mitigation of the role of invidious response in its constitution. The resulting miracle: the protection of the bracing features of negativity that at once gave the slip to its socially inadmissible blowback.

The necessary attenuation was made possible through systematic and progressive distraction of attention away from the agencies and temporalities of negativity, away from that angry look at the hero and the time of his disgrace that had been the exclusive focus of Aristotle's "Poetics." In a reading of Kant's "Critique of Judgment" that will begin the course, we will notice how a displacement of the beautiful and the sublime from culture to nature causes the near unknowing of the interpersonal agon. The reader-indemnifying "impersonal" here makes its appearance, but its virtue would not suffice. The time of the death of Kant's flowers and mountains remained poisoned by a channeling of Aristotle's aesthetics of envy resolution. It would remain to those who followed-by eliminating from art the experience of the temporality of the action of readerly resentment--to finish the work that had been begun in the Third Critique.

The period between the end of the eighteenth century and the 1950s will be seen in the light of this struggle between the ghosts of an unembarrassed Aristotle and the nervous Kant. To be studied in this context will be representative texts by Schlegel, Schiller, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelly, Ruskin, Arnold, Mallarmé, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Hulme, the Russian Formalists, Bahktin, Adorno, Frye and Burke.

Readings:Adams, Critical Theory Since Plato (new edition); Rousseau, Letter to D'Alembert on Spectacles; Kant, The Critique of Judgment; Hirshman, The Passions and the Interests.

*This course meets the requirements for the Ph.D. Program in Theory and Criticism