Reply to James McFarland's review of "Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique" German Studies Review (review)

In his highly problematic assessment of Siegfried Kracauer's work, Theodor Adorno adopted the rather disreputable method of building a psychological profile of Kracauer and then reading his work off from that. It was not Adorno's finest hour and perhaps it is not too generous to say the same of James McFarland's review of my book Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique. At least Adorno could claim to have had a long friendship with Kracauer, although no doubt one that got a lot cooler after Adorno's published assessment. Imagine my surprise then when at the end of a disappointingly superficial engagement and apparently willfully misleading presentation of my arguments, I find this piercing psychological insight, camouflaged by a rather, how shall I say it, "underdeveloped" sociological framework?

A reader gets the feeling that Wayne's anticapitalist rhetoric reflects a sociological function played by research universities in modern capitalist societies, as sites of potential intergenerational class mobility, with all the psychological ambivalence such transplantations engender. The drama of Red Kantis thus primarily a personal drama; Wayne's demonstration that despite his immersion in a world of academic debate and conceptual reflection far removed from any directly practical effects on the material conditions of social existence, he has not lost his sympathy for ordinary hardworking people. Wayne's search for an "antibourgeois" Kant is an apology for the appearance of class abandonment in the adoption of academic forms of production.

(634)

I know this is only a book review, but is it too much to ask from the editors of the journal a little more attention to such scholarly protocols as actually engaging with the substance of a text even if the author disagrees with it? Admittedly I did use the terms "bourgeois" and "antibourgeois" as something of a provocation, and it seems I was perhaps overly successful. Someone seems to have taken the hook, line, and sinker. I was not however silly enough to use such terms without defining and contextualizing them. On the first page of the first chapter I note that we may define "bourgeois scholarship on Kant as constitutionally unable to interrogate the historical and class-conditioned nature of Kant's work or its own interpretations" (7). As for "antibourgeois" the term is used in relation to a carefully prepared and extended discussion of the work of Bourdieu and Rancière on the aesthetic and is meant to indicate a reading of Kant that avoids the twin philosophical traps of crude materialism and wild idealism, which, in part, these two thinkers, respectively, can be faulted on. Of course the notion that history and class inscribes itself into the innermost workings of philosophical traditions in a set of complex antinomies derives from Lukács's work. I am fairly sure that this was not motivated by a guilt-ridden psychodrama on his part and I can say the same for my own work as well.

Red Kantgoes further than Lukács in elaborating lines of thought and potentialities in Kant's work that may be helpful for our own historical moment and in suggesting that it is Kant's aesthetic turn, as it were, that allows Kant to start to push beyond those bourgeois antinomies. In this I take a cue from Lucien Goldmann who was more receptive than Lukács in thinking about Kant as a protodialectical thinker. If the term bourgeois indicates a horizon beyond which thought cannot go, it does not of course say anything about the respective merits of the content of a philosophy or theory. What it does suggest however is that it works as a diagnostic tool and a premise for immanent critique. Assuming that we cannot do without much of what we have inherited from the past, immanent critique explores the internal tensions and contradictions of a work, in order to equip ourselves...