Transgression, Plurality, and the Romance of Philosophy

In this article I seek to underscore the ethical obligations of transgression and dissensus internal to our discursive practices, with the aim of facilitating plurality and renewing the romantic philosophic engagement with ethical subjectivity in the tradition of Kantian aesthetics. My investigation is motivated by a return to Adorno and the nonidentical, but in a way that considers new developments in an aesthetic framework of discourse-theoretic ethics. The relationship of Kantian judgment to the nonidentical stands at the foreground of recent aesthetic iterations that open up or heighten our discursive obligation toward “the otherness of the other,” the uniqueness of the human being, and the need for radical politics. I conclude by investigating the critical value of the concept of critique, which stands at the heart of Kantian judgment. The aim of my article is to emphasize the significance of the interrelationship among plurality, transgression, and critique and to reawaken the need for praxis through the tension internal to a sensus communis enlivened by both consensus and dissent.