Literature without a State?: On the Aporias of the Aesthetic Regime within Capitalist Modernity

Abstract

This essay explains how the aesthetic sphere was historically produced by a process of differentiation that Modernity progressively develops in several areas of social life, both practical and theoretical. Out of this process of specialization and fragmentation, literature precisely emerges as one sphere with its own specific values and possible experiences. A critical element of this process of specialization and fragmentation is also the State, which works as the material structure and the ultimate symbolic guarantor of any political power and activity. Based on this constitutive and historical distinction between aesthetics and politics, this essay suggests that attempts at throwing bridges between these two fields have systematically failed due to the centrifugal inertia that encloses these fields within their own internal rationales and institutionalities. In order to cut this Gordian knot, what is required (according to a long philosophical tradition) is the abolition of both social regimes (the political and the aesthetic), that is, the cancelation of the State and Literature.