Throughout the preceding chapters, I have emphasized the need to dissociate the issues raised by Kant's theory of aesthetic reflection from what we have come to recognize as autonomous works of art. That dissociation is necessary in view of the fact that what lies at stake in Kant's third Critique is not just the fate of artworks as a class but a particular mode of judgment and its responsiveness to sensuous particulars – to feelings of pleasure and pain – that cannot be reduced to any underlying cause or conceptual scheme. When Nietzsche railed against the logic of causality and similar modes of deep-structure thinking in the sketches that comprise The Will to Power (see, e.g., sec. 545 ff.), he was extending a theme from Kant's Critique of Judgment, albeit within the context of an attack on the philosophical culture of which Kant was believed to be a part: “cause is a capacity to produce effects that has been super-added to the events,” Nietzsche wrote; “interpretation by causality a deception.” The process of aesthetic reflection as I have described it so far does not require us to track the causes of aesthetic effects; indeed, it banks on the hope that the very indeterminacy of pleasure and pain with respect to the fact-world of cognition and the value-world of morality may deflect our fascination with the notion of cause and that this, in turn, may help reveal something that the apportionment of the world into “facts” and “values” fails to grasp – the force of the feelings that accompany our representations of values and facts.

The present volume represents an attempt to reassess the relationship between certain issues in contemporary critical theory and the question of Enlightenment. I take my bearings by reference to claims about the self-canceling nature of Enlightenment rationality as formulated in the opening essay of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (“The Concept of Enlightenment”), and move conceptually from there to address the ways in which their concerns can be reevaluated in light of an aesthetic critique modeled along lines sketched out in Kant's Critique of Judgment. More broadly, I hope to account for the predominantly “aesthetic” forms in which a critical self-consciousness carried forward from the Enlightenment has survived the critique of enlightened reason that seemed to have reached an impasse in Horkheimer and Adorno's essay.

Žižek's Lacanian analysis of pleasure (“enjoyment”) as a political factor represents one of the most ingenious attempts to rethink some of the practical questions that originate in the theory of aesthetic reflective judgment associated with Kant's third Critique. Beginning from the familiar deconstructive notion that structures are shaped by a constitutive absence or lack, and then specifying the ways in which the object-substitutes for that lack tend to produce an irrevocable distortion of desire, Žižek transforms the question of reflective judgment into a theory of ideology that bears striking resemblances to a symptomatology of cultural forms. Given the particular “difficulty” associated with aesthetic judgment and its dissociation in Kant from any determinate object-sphere, the linkage between the aporetic “object” of aesthetic reflection and Žižek's Lacanian notion of the symptom is not altogether surprising. Since nothing positive, no substantive “beauty,” can be found underlying the passions of pleasure and pain, the aesthetic domain may well appear to be like a realm of symptoms: both are effects ungroundable in any determinate cause. In Kant's language, beauty may be the symbol of morality (CJ, sec. 59), but it is in no sense the cause of pleasure. Likewise, Žižek's analysis of ideology is consistent with Kant's account of the peculiar “purposelessness” of art. As Kant explains in his discussion of finality in the Critique of Judgment (sec. 10), we find ourselves in the realm of the aesthetic when the representation of an effect precedes, “takes the lead,” over its cause (p. 61).

To summarize a central claim of the preceding chapter, it is my contention that the contemporary critique of the Enlightenment originates from within the Enlightenment itself and must be understood as a consequence or continuation of the Enlightenment, and not as a rejection of its critical program. More specifically, recent critiques of the Enlightenment – many of which profess to have “overcome” the Enlightenment model of reason – represent protracted developments of the problem that Kant broached in the theory of reflective aesthetic judgment, in which the separation of fact and value deemed necessary for the Enlightenment program fails to account for the “free particulars” of pleasure and pain, which escape the control of cognition and morality. Not at all surprisingly, then, post-Enlightenment thought as manifested in an impressively wide range of figures, from Nietzsche to Barthes and Žižek, has found substantial energy in the power of pleasure to trouble our existing frameworks and routines. When faced with the problem of the non-closure of the system of critical philosophy, Kant reasoned that there must be a form of knowledge, modeled in the judgments we make about the beautiful and the sublime, that remain rational while refusing to subsume particulars under pre-existing categories or rules.

Of all the riddles of aesthetic theory, none is as puzzling as the fact that what is arguably the pivotal work in the field – Kant's third Critique – contains no sustained or systematic theory of art. As Adorno bluntly remarked, “pre-Hegelian, including Kantian, aesthetics had no emphatic conception of the work of art, relegating it to the status of some kind of sublimated means of enjoyment.”

Although Kant does offer some remarks on the subjects of “art” and “fine art” in sections 43–47 of the Critique of Judgment, he largely eschews a discussion of art as a mode of productive praxis and refuses to treat the aesthetic field as comprised of objects to be understood in terms of the circumstances of their social conditioning or material making. Although the feelings of pleasure and pain that Kant associates with the beautiful and the sublime may be incited by nature or by art, what Kant is willing to count as “art” excludes any form of handicraft or “industrial art” (section 43).

The work of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt is representative of some of the ways in which political theory in the aftermath of the Enlightenment remains linked to an “orthodox” interpretation of Kant's notion of reflective judgment. As far as Habermas is concerned, the theory of communicative action is meant to complete the Enlightenment project that Kant left unfinished, in part by invoking the ideal of a consensus or a convergence of opinions as the foundation of a peaceable state. In arguments that are meant to align this theoretical stance with a social and political progressivism, Habermas suggests in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that the possibility of “progress” was closed when the leading opponents of foundationalist metaphysics – Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, and Derrida – chose to avoid the problem of reflective judgment in favor of a critique of subject-centered reason. Arendt's notion of judgment can be traced even more directly than Habermas's to Kant's aesthetic theory; the notion of “enlarged thinking” reflects her interpretation of the universality that is central to Kant's attempted resolution of the antinomy of taste. In both instances, appeal to notions said to be implicit in the theory of reflective judgment offers a source of hope in the face of the conditions diagnosed by Horkheimer and Adorno as fundamentally destructive of the modern Enlightenment and, indeed, of all forms of rationality in the West.

In an essay first published along with The Contest of the Faculties in 1798, Kant took up the “old question” that has widely been recognized as central to the historical self-understanding of the Enlightenment: “Is the Human Race Constantly Progressing?” Kant's response to this question, and the subsequent engagement of that response (whether explicitly or implicitly) by a range of thinkers including Habermas and Arendt, is particularly important for understanding the relationship between the political ambitions of contemporary critical theory and the theory of aesthetic reflection. Kant's essay is crucial, first, because it offers a complex and decisive stance on questions that are central to the Enlightenment's vision of morality as the existence of humanity in a true “kingdom of ends,” and second, because it trades the stringent requirement of obedience to the moral law as the price of entry into that kingdom for what would seem to be the more malleable demands of reflective judgment, by asking not how we must act in order to behave in accordance with the moral law but where (and with whom) we should stand in order to move from our engagement in particular actions and events to a comprehension of the shape of history as a whole. When faced with the events of history, which do not in and of themselves demonstrate any apparent order, Kant was led to ground the progressive moral vision of the Enlightenment on principles that could most accurately be called “aesthetic.”