Communicability Without Communication: Kant and Proust on Aesthetic Pleasure

Abstract

This essay places Kant and Proust in dialogue around the question of aesthetic pleasure. It focuses upon two obscure and largely neglected instances of spectatorship staged in A la recherche du temps perdu in order to highlight an oscillation within our experience of the beautiful. This oscillation pertains to the possibility and impossibility of sharing one’s pleasures with others. When Kant separated the judgment of taste from the cognitive, practical, and moral domains of human experience, he also made it difficult to communicate much, if at all, about instances of art and beauty. This gives rise to a structure within the aesthetic experience that I call “communicability without communication.” Through an analysis of aesthetic spectatorship in A la recherche , I show how, despite its insistence upon the universality of aesthetic judgments, the Kantian notion of the aesthetic is haunted by the threat of solipsism. With Kant and Proust, I develop an original theoretical account of the ways in which works of art sustain our longing for community, while nevertheless frustrating those desires.