A Capacity to Resist: Kant’s Aesthetics and the Right of Revolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT Taking Kant’s well-known refusal of the “right of resistance” as a point of departure, this paper outlines an alternative approach to the Kantian theory of revolution by investigating the aesthetic dimension of his reception of global insurrectionary movements, particularly his interest in the world spectator’s “enthusiasm” for the French Revolution. Like the experience of the sublime, where the subject confronts instances of nature’s immensity and power that exceed the imagination’s capacity for presentation, revolution confronts us with formless events of human history. The sublime, however, occasions a second moment of recovery. Following the painful experience of the imagination’s impotence, the judging subject is enlivened by the discovery of what Kant calls “a capacity for resistance,” that is, our ability to transcend forces that produce feelings of futility and powerlessness. This paper argues that Kant’s sublime right to resist not only anticipates the revolutionary imperative of Romanticism, but also foregrounds the way in which aesthetics defies the law’s efforts to prohibit disobedience and dissent. But it concludes with a note of caution towards the sublime’s tendency to suppress the rights of nature, a suppression that could be overturned by what Kant calls “a second epoch of natural revolution” that pushes aside the human species altogether.