Thinking destructively with aesthetics

Abstract

ABSTRACT The essay explores a hermeneutic reading of nature that expands the Kantian theory of aesthetics beyond the need for beauty to support cognition’s subjective interest. As in Kant’s third Critique, reason’s subjective interest, which refers to how the manifold can be held together by the unity of transcendental apperception, grounds nature's purposiveness in moral intelligence. By improvising on Kant’s aesthetics, as Schelling did in German Idealism, we can imagine the subject of critical reason embracing a modal possibility of existence that deals with nature's part-whole essence or nature’s original duplicity. The modality creates a subject capable of choosing and justifying a world of its own, but not without the destructive condition that precedes this act, the world's intuitive collapse. Given the contemporary engagements with Kant’s aesthetics, from Simondon, Badiou, Stiegler, Hui, Karatani, and other critical commentators (of Kant), the essay addresses how this modal possibility of existence connects aesthetics to the ethical task of destroying the known world. But to the extent that the world is exhibiting signs of collapse, as we enter a new geological era, the aesthetic sense of locating ‘where nature in this collapse is’ becomes an essential path of thinking and living with ruins.