Der Geschmack der Freiheit

‘The Taste of Freedom’ examines the connection between aesthetics and politics in Kant and various theories based on his ideas (Arendt, Rancière, Rorty, etc.). Using the idea of political unconsciousness, this book also addresses literary texts from Hölderlin to Proust, Nabokov and Wallace. As an alternative to Kant's theory of what is beautiful, the book develops a sensually oriented theory of what is pleasant, on the basis of which a genuinely aesthetic approach to democratic forms of life in modernity is developed. This work thus critically confronts the discontent with democracy today.