This book reconceives modern aesthetics by reconstructing its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten's
Aesthetics
and Kant's
Critique of Judgment
.
Force demonstrates that aesthetics, and hence modern philosophy, began twice. On the one hand, Baumgarten's
is organized around the new concept of the "subject": as a totality of faculties; an agent defined by capabilities; one who is able. Yet an aesthetics in the Baumgartian manner, as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of force.
The latter conceives the aesthetic not as sensible cognition but as a play of expression—propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised like a faculty, does not recognize or represent anything because it is obscure and unconscious: the force of what in humanity is distinct from the subject. The aesthetics of force is thus a thinking of the nature of man: of aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture acquired by practice. It founds an anthropology of difference: between force and faculty, human and subject.