Grace and Equality, Fried and Rancière (and Kant)

Jean-Paul Sartre once said that Marxism is the unsurpassable horizon of our time. That may or may not be true. What certainly seems true is that Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment is the unsurpassable horizon of contemporary reflection on art. Philosophers tend to come late to Kantian aesthetics, as if it were a limit toward which their work tends. Theodor Adorno’s masterpiece Aesthetic Theory was published posthumously. Jean-François Lyotard’s Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime consummated a career of radical skepticism in a text posing as mere commentary. Hannah Arendt’s lectures on Kant’s political philosophy are all we have of a projected third volume on the “Life of the Mind” devoted to-what else?-judgment.