Aesthetic "Sense" in Kant and Nancy

This paper explores the distinctive character of esthetic experience in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and Jean-Luc Nancy's The Muses, by focusing on the relation between the sensory dimension of aesthetics (sense) and its communicable or linguistic meaning (sense). These dimensions of sense are irreducible to ordinary sensation and linguistic sense, giving aesthetic experience a distinctive role in elucidating the relation between the body and language. The continuity that links Kant and Nancy on aesthetic sense outlines a position that is distinguished from contemporary affect theory and from most current trends in aesthetics.