Abstract:

For much of the late twentieth century pleasure was marginalized as an object of study in literary criticism. Recent attempts (Timothy Aubry, Robert S. Lehman et al.) at redressing this have often appealed to Kant's aesthetics with its open avowal of pleasure as the basis of judgement. Kant's universalism, however, has been largely held at arm's length out of a worry that it underwrote hegemonic canons. Yet Kant himself disputes the claims of external authorities in matters of taste and his account of the universal voice of aesthetic judgements underwrites no rules or models that would give objective form to a canon. To enjoy—in Kantian terms—a canonical work is to enjoy sociably, but without any objective marker of unity to that sociability. I follow Lyotard and de Duve in arguing for the relevance to democratic politics of the transcendental community of Kant's aesthetics. The task Kant has bequeathed literary critics is not the establishment or defence of a canon, but rather the interrogation of how the pleasure in texts is both a mode of sociability and a means of engaging with phenomena in their singularity.

摘要：

在 20 世纪后期的大部分时间里，快乐作为文学批评的研究对象被边缘化了。最近的尝试（蒂莫西·奥布里、罗伯特·S·雷曼等人）在纠正这个问题时经常诉诸康德的美学，因为它公开承认快乐是判断的基础。然而，康德的普遍主义在很大程度上被搁置一旁，因为担心它支持霸权规范。然而，康德本人对外部权威在品味问题上的主张提出异议，并且他对审美判断的普遍声音的描述不支持任何规则或模型，这些规则或模型不会为经典赋予客观形式。享受——用康德的话说——一部经典的作品就是在社交上享受，但没有任何客观的标志来表明这种社交性的统一性。我追随利奥塔和德杜夫争论康德美学的先验共同体与民主政治的相关性。康德留给文学评论家的任务不是建立或捍卫经典，而是询问文本中的乐趣如何既是一种社交方式，又是一种与奇异现象接触的手段。