THE POLITICS OF AESTHETIC AUTONOMY

As I have noted, many critics have cast the shadow of twentieth-century German National Socialism back into the previous centuries when they have assessed German political philosophy. This is particularly true of Schiller, whose idea of the aesthetic state has been charged with laying the groundwork for twentieth-century German fascism either directly, by presenting a totalizing political ideology under the guise of the aesthetic, or indirectly, by promoting an escapist aesthetic ideology of politics among German intellectuals that thus blinded them to the signs of danger in the world of Realpolitik. A version of this first kind of criticism is evident in Paul de Man's essay “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist's Über das Marionettentheater,” in which de Man criticizes Schiller for promoting an “ideology of the aesthetic” behind which hides “a principle of formalization rigorous enough to produce its own codes and systems of inscription” which “functions as a restrictive coercion that allows only for the reproduction of its own system, at the exclusion of all others”. To the familiar shadow of Nazi totalitarianism, de Man thus adds the specter of linguistic totalization. But he does not discuss the specifics of Schiller's project in the Aesthetic Letters in this essay, and, furthermore, the terms by which de Man defines the danger of Schiller's work are general enough to indite any attempt at systematic philosophy.