Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History

Enthusiasm studies what Kant calls a strong sense of the sublime, not as an aesthetic feeling but as a form of political judgment rendered not by the active participants in historical events but those who witness them from afar. Lyotard’s analysis, preparatory to his work in The Differend and subsequent publications, is a radical rereading of the Kantian faculties, traditionally understood as functions of the mind, in terms of a philosophy of phrases derived from Lyotard’s prior encounters with Wittgenstein’s theory of language games. The result is a kind of fourth critique based in Kant’s later political and historical writings, with an emphasis on understanding the place of those sudden and unscripted events that have the power to reshape the political/historical landscape (such as the French Revolution, May 1968, and others).