The Art of Freedom On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence

Introduction: Aestheticization Ð An Apologia

Part I: An Antique Diagnosis of a Crisis

1. The Provocative Beauty of Democracy: Plato

I. Freedom and Indeterminacy

2. The Slavery of the Tyrant

3. The Unstable Democrat

4. Clear-sighted, Processual and Totalized Weakness of Will

5. Weakness of Will or the Freedom from Oneself

6. The Unfree Opportunist

7. Many Jobs and Much Trespassing

8. The Occurrence of an Inner Nature or the Freedom Toward Self

9. Democrats and Theatre Types

10. Theatrocracy: The Fearlessly Judging Multitude

11. Masses and Mimesis

12. Self-Difference and Perfection

Part II: The Ethical-Political Right of Irony

2. The Morality of Irony: Hegel

1. The Beginning of Morality in Socratic Irony

2. Socrates’ Divisive Work

3. Irony and the Practice of Truth

4. Hegel’s Critique of Kant

5. A Socratic Reformulation of the Moral Principle

6. Critique of the Romantics

7. Abstract and Subjective Freedom

8. Evil and the “Natural Will”

9. The Dialectic of Freedom

10. A Less Rigorous Concept of Self-Determination

11. Conflicts with and in Morality

12. Hegel’s Expulsion of Subjective Freedom from Ethical Life

13. The Riddle of Socratic Virtue and the Historicity of the Good

3. The Ethics of Aesthetic Existence: Kierkegaard

1. The Negative Freedom of Socratic Irony and its Romantic Superseding

2. Self-Enhancement and Forgetfulness-of-Self

3. The Impotent Seducer

4. The “Helmeted” Will and its Desperation in the Face of the Aesthetic

5. Repentance and Duty: The Freedom to Choose What One Already Is

6. One Sexism for Another

7. The Love of Divorced Society Ladies

8. Aesthetic and Aristocratic Exception

9. Common sinners

10. The Leap of Faith

11. Repetitions

4. Sovereignty in Romanticism: Schmitt

1. Aestheticization and Neutralization

2. A Look at an Orange

3. Alien Power

4. The Other in the Own and Decision

5. Political Anthropology

6. Schmitt and Kierkegaard

7. Political Theology

8. “Concrete Life” and Decision

9. Schmitt’s Rousseauism

10. Politics as a Critique of Politics

Part III: Democracy and Aestheticization

5. The Spectacle of Democracy: Rousseau

1. The Irony of the Actor

2. The Public Expression of Indeterminacy

3. The Actress and Her Parodies

4. The Golden Mean

5. “Thy Magic Powers Reunite What Custom’s Sword Has Divided”: The Feast of the Brothers

6. All Brothers are also Men: The Problem of Male Self-Difference

7. The Two Paradoxes of the Social Contract

8. The Sovereignty of the Legislator and the Judgment of the “Common Man”

9. Another Kind of Equality

10. A Politicizable Boundary

11. The Two Bodies of the People

12. Representation and the Coding of Contingency

6. The Anaestheticization of the Political in Fascism: Benjamin

1. Charisma versus Ratio

2. Politicizing Art

3. Astonishment, Not Sympathy

4. The Look of the Stranger

5. Alienation

6. Adaptability and Revolution

7. Charisma and Democracy

8. Political Theatre

9. Post-Democracy and the Anaesthetizing of the Political: A Look Forward

Notes

Acknowledgements

Origins of the Text

Index

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