The Aesthetic Subject: Exploring the Relation Between Art and Post-Kantian Philosophy

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Authors
Lederer, Thomas
Issue Date
2010-04-27
Type
Thesis
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en_US
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Abstract
The aim of my SIP was to explore the relationship between knowledge, subjectivity, and art in a way that might reconcile the Kantian notion of self-determination with more contemporary doubts concerning the ability of such “transcendental subjects” to rationally posit affirming conditions for themselves. In order to do this, I argue, we need to take into account the specific destabilizing claims made by psychoanalysis (Lacan) and critical theory (Adorno/Horkheimer). The challenge to Kant then, does not concern the consistency of his ideas, or even the suitability of his goal, but pertains to the fact that the autonomous subject he envisioned is too empty in form to account for potentially disenabling conditions of self-consciousness; conditions that are perhaps more fundamentally constitutive, more primordially generative, than those defining his own notion of transcendental subjectivity. If Kant’s challenge to the “juggling metaphysicists ” before him was to explore the conditions under which such “knowledge” was, in the first place, possible; the challenge to him now can be expressed as the follow-up question: “under what conditions is it possible to bracket the self-legislating consciousness of transcendental philosophy?”
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29 p.
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