De Man's Kant and Goebbels' Schiller: The Ideology of Reception

Abstract

In his posthumously published essays and lectures on aesthetic ideology, Paul de Man suggests that Schiller's aesthetics and specifically his account of the sublime represent a naive, childish and regressive reworking of Kant (AI 134, 141). De Man holds responsible for distorting the entire subsequent reception of Kant and for producing an aesthetic ideology that falsely ascribes unity and stability to the concept of the aesthetic, invariably papering over tensions within both that concept and the texts in which aesthetics is treated. In this regard the name Schiller becomes for de Man a signifier of aesthetic ideology. In his indictment of as a progenitor of aesthetic ideology, and in his invocation of a Kantian materialism, de Man appears thereby to lay claim to the legacy of critical theory and in particular Benjaminian historical materialism. Indeed he goes on to imply, with reference to Joseph Goebbels, that Schiller's celebration by National Socialist Germany may indicate a connection between 18th-century aesthetics and 20th-century genocide (AI 154-55). In what follows I would like to connect the bookends of de Man's