Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Postmodern Philosophy
Samuel Heidepriem
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790), the work that invented philosophical aesthetics as we know it, continues to influence a wide breadth of the humanities and social sciences. The book even shows up in some unexpected places. For example, it is difficult to picture Kant, the famously ascetic champion of moral duty and Prussian monarchy, having any place in the counter-culture of postmodernism. It is just as hard to imagine his aesthetic theory captivating the philosophical movement that produced Derrida and Foucault. Yet this was precisely the case. Using illustrative works by Gilles Deleuze, Paul de Man and Jean-François Lyotard, this paper traces the reception of Kant’s third Critique during the height of postmodern philosophy, from the 1960s to the early nineties. In this span, Kant’s position changes: while early on, many postmodernists approach him as an antiquated villain, by the end he is one of the movement’s most vital historical interlocutors, even inspirations. We will examine this evolution and the third Critique’s crucial place in Kant’s late 20th-century legacy.
The Speaker：Samuel Heidepriem
Sam joined the IWLC after completing his PhD in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at University of Michigan in 2017. His research areas are 18th to 20th century German literature and philosophy, political theory, and intellectual history. He is currently adapting his dissertation into a book on the reception history of German Idealism in postmodern philosophy and the significance of this relationship for contemporary political theory. A second book project approaches German political philosophy from the 1790s as an early theory of modern bureaucracy. Sam also has several articles in preparation on postwar German and Austrian fiction, including Peter Weiss, Thomas Bernhard, and W.G. Sebald.
