Notes
1 Beauty, as
an aesthetic category, has also had the same role.
Like beauty before it, violence has now become one of our
self-evident truths serving as both the means and the
purpose of criticism. This indicates, at the very
least, that violence and beauty both fulfill a critical
function quite apart from what they may designate, a
function that may be fulfilled by yet another legitimating
term.
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2 On this
complicity in de Man , see Warminski, 9-10.
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3 Although the
following passage will not be cited in the ensuing
discussion of Schiller, it reflects the extent to which the
founding gesture of the aesthetic state recalls from the
perspective of that state an event of originary
differentiation: "As long as man, in that first physical
state , is merely a passive recipient of the world of
sense, i.e., does no more than feel, he is still completely
One with that world; and just because he is himself nothing
but world, there exists for him as yet no world. Only
when, at the aesthetic stage, he puts it outside himself,
or contemplates it, does his personality
differentiate itself from it, and a world becomes manifest
to him because he has has ceased to be one with it."
(Letter 25; p.183).
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4 De Man also
emphasizes this relation of Trieb and the
aesthetic when he begins his discussion of Schiller's
Letters on Aesthetic Education by referring to
kinds of Trieb in Schiller (sinnlicher
Trieb and Formtrieb). See, "Kant and
Schiller," in Aesthetic Ideology,
147-48. On the complicity of ideological
criticism with the object of its critique, the aesthetic,
see Ferris, 58-59.
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5 See,
Benjamin, "Work of Art", 269-270.
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6 "We are
ourselves the authors of a tragedy, the finest and the best
that we know how to make. In fact, our whole state
has been constructed as the imitation of a noble and
perfect life; that is what we hold in truth to be the most
real of tragedies." (Plato, Laws,
817b1-5)
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7 Kant is
absolutely clear on the intractability of this difficulty
when he writes: "We can accomplish no more than to annul
the conflict between the claims and counterclaims of
taste"(Critique of Judgment, 213; translation
modified.)
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8 In this
respect, Schiller is not simply a misreader of
Kant. Schiller may lack the higher degree of
conceptual consistency exhibited by Kant but this in no way
prevents him from developing the political, aesthetic and
critical consequences of Kant’s own critical
undertaking.
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9 In
describing how such laws are given, Schiller can only claim
that they are a matter of "dictation." See pp.
3, 9, and 211.
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10 The
essentially Goethean character of this uncriticizability is
discussed by Walter Benjamin in the Afterword to his
dissertation on Romanticism, The Concept of Criticism
in German Romanticism, pp. 178-85.
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11 The
Wilkinson and Willoughby translation of this sentence is
misleading when it states that the problem of politics in
practice is to be approached through "the problem
of the aesthetic." As interesting as this translation might
be, it does have to be stated that, for Schiller, the
solution is not a problem.
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12 On this
deception see Ferris, 58-59.
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13 Schiller
states: "All improvement in the political sphere is to
proceed from the ennobling of character—but how under
the barbarous constitution is character ever to become
ennobled? To this end we should, presumably, have to
seek out some instrument not provided by the State, and to
open up living springs which, whatever the political
corruption, would remain clear and pure. . . . This
instrument is fine art: such living springs are opened up
in its immortal exemplars." (Letter 9, 55).
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14 In this
case, what Schiller calls aesthetic determinability, is the
means by which the law that cannot be represented is
represented. Aesthetic determinability is defined as
follows in Letter 21: "The mind (Gemüt) may
be said to be determinable simply because it is not
determined at all; but it is also determinable inasmuch as
it is determined in a way that does not exclude anything,
i.e., when the determination it undergoes is of a kind
which does not involve limitation. The former is mere
indetermination (it is without limits because it is without
reality); the latter is aesthetic determinability (it has
limits, because it embraces all reality)." (145).
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