Aesthetic states: The political investments of aesthetic autonomy

In its efforts to rethink the relationships between literature and its historical context, contemporary critical discourse has tended to frame the political as the unconscious of the aesthetic, as that other which the autonomous work of art must displace or repress in order to establish itself as such. Attempting to introduce a more historically reflexive dimension to this mode of conceptualizing the relationships between aesthetics and politics, the dissertation explores and critiques what is typically obscured in this scenario of repression and displacement: namely the extent to which, in its inception, the very concept of aesthetic autonomy is politically invested. Turning back towards the origin of the theory of aesthetic autonomy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the dissertation illuminates the extent to which art establishes itself as an autonomous domain not in an effort to withdraw from the political realm, but rather in the attempt to establish a mutually constitutive interaction between the emergent realm of the aesthetic and the sphere of the political. It is Friedrich Schiller\u27s concept of the aesthetic state that provides the model for this mutually constitutive relation. The dissertation attempts to write an alternative history of aesthetics that reconstructs the paradigmatic status of Schiller\u27s model and, in doing so, negotiates a space for a contemporary critique of the concept of aesthetic autonomy. Discussing literary and aesthetic texts by Schiller, Karl Philipp Moritz, Kant, and Wordsworth in conjunction with political-theoretical texts by Moritz, Kant, Locke, and Rousseau, the dissertation traces the relationship between the rise of philosophical aesthetics and issues of political agency, between the construction of the concept of art and models of the political state. The objective of reconstructing the extent to which late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourse constructs the autonomous work of art as an instance of political agency is not to recuperate aesthetic autonomy as an emancipatory political force, but rather to explore why the political investments of aesthetic autonomy have not yielded, and ultimately could not yield, their promised returns