美的情動批判

【ポール・ド・マンの美学イデオロギー論再考】

抄録

  Aesthetic affects or feelings in human activities are expected to function, more or less, as principles for integrating modern society, in which people have to govern themselves in the name of democracy. As Friedrich Schiller argued, the “aesthetic education of man” requires the enhancement of people’s sensitivity to beauty, so that this can contribute to their moral edification. In addition, this sensitivity is believed to enable the cultivation of the ideal personality for a citizen.

  This study attempts to fully take into consideration the historical fact that this social and political function of aesthetics turned toward an ideology of totalitarianism during the twentieth century. Nazism gave rise to the theatrical representation of people’s political realities by means of aesthetic spectacles such as the Nuremberg Rally.

  Against this backdrop, my question is concerned with whether the function of aesthetic affects should only be construed as a principle of integrating the community. Paul de Man, a Belgian literary critic, once called into question the consciousness that reduces the power of the “aesthetic” to such a totalizing principle. Insofar as the consciousness thus naturalizes the stability of this category, he calls it “aesthetic ideology.”

  This study investigates what is at stake in de Man’s critique of aesthetic ideology. By tracing out some points of his argument, I elucidate the old and new problems of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, the critique of judgment and political theory, and literary or art criticism and social thought.