Aesthetics and politics

Summary

Dominique Pagani treats the relation between aesthetics and politics as ambivalent, and not as two fields to be set side by side. He first contrasts two conceptions of the poet: the singer of the community, such as the griot or Hugo in "Stella", and the Baudelaire of the "heresy of teaching". He then blurs this opposition with Hölderlin: inwardness can serve as a mediation toward the collective1. In Hegel, he shows that each field is thought through the other and that their hierarchy is reversed between the Oldest Systematic Programme, which places the aesthetic act at the summit, and the Hegel of Berlin2. With Rousseau, he presents beauty as an image of freedom. He contrasts the Festival of the Supreme Being with Nuremberg and notes that taste is not the privilege of the left. He gives the political point to the French Romantics and the aesthetic point to the German Romantics, then argues that aesthetic commitment must be decoupled from political commitment3. With the Alt går bra collective, he links popular art to internationalism4.

1. 1#10 Return to the logics of the subject11 Jun 2020
2. 2#10.2 Dialectics of identity and difference6 Oct 2021
3. 3Who is hiding beneath the surfaces? Aesthetics and politics20 May 2022
4. 4#14 Return to the logics of the subject17 Jul 2020

Introduction produced automatically from the 6 sessions on this theme, to be reviewed; the numbers link to the sessions.