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In section 9 of the Critique of Judgment, Kant asks himself whether in aesthetic experience pleasure precedes judgment or judgment precedes pleasure, and although he knows that judgment must precede pleasure, he is unable to demonstrate it. He then asks whether it is through sensation or intellectually that we are informed of the free play or our imagination and our understanding (the very free play which would make the judgment precede the pleasure), and resolutely answers: through sensation. This chapter takes permission from Kant’s answer to submit to an empirical test the claim made by antiformalists and postmodernists according to which, from minimal art on, Kant’s aesthetics don’t apply to works of contemporary art. Robert Morris’s Untitled (Three L-Beams) of 1965 is our test case, and its poststructuralist interpretation by Rosalind Krauss is the discourse whose anti-Kantian purport is here critically examined.

This chapter revisits section 9 for a close reading and an attempt to go through the unresolved issues it raises, which are all the more important that its opening sentence states, “the solution of [the] problem [of whether the pleasure precedes the judgment or the judgment is the pleasure] is the key to the critique of taste.” This transcendental “chicken-and-egg” dilemma undergoes several formulations—as the pleasure taken in the free play of imagination and understanding preceding the pleasure taken in the object, or as the “universality of the subjective conditions of the judging” preceding the “universal subjective validity of satisfaction”—but never yields the proper transcendental solution. Particular attention is given the “state of mind” (Gemütszustand), which Kant says accompanies all acts of intellection but is itself in the nature of a feeling rather than of cognition. The interpretive hypothesis that guides the close reading of section 9—or indeed the reading of the whole third Critique—is that the task of bridging nature and freedom is bestowed on a curious amphiboly of the concept of duty that subreptitiously calls on practical reason from within the free play of imagination and understanding. Remarks on the transcendental subject as supersensible substratum conclude the chapter.

This chapter offers a polemical Auseinandersetzung with Theodor W. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory and his philosophy in general. The chapter’s premise is the realization of how much Adorno was torn between Kant and Hegel, and its main thrust is the desire to salvage his best philosophical insights from Hegelianism. “Reconciliation,” “affirmation,” and “dialectics” are examined under that light. Kant’s “free play of imagination and understanding” is reinterpreted in terms that Adorno would have endorsed, reading transcendental conditions as sedimented historical determinations. Thanks to Adorno, ugliness and its feeling, pain, are given a place in Kantian aesthetics, which Kant and orthodox readings of the third Critique failed to acknowledge. Adorno’s famous claim that poetry was impossible after Auschwitz is read as a mistaken consequence of the “fact” that sensus communis is not a “fact.” Finally, Adorno and Horkheimer’s indictment of the Enlightenment as having led to Auschwitz is debunked with the help of Lacan’s reading of “Kant with Sade.”