Abstract

This project investigates how aesthetic judgment forms the groundwork for understanding political identities. I posit aesthetics as central to any conception of politics that is based on how people understand the relationship between themselves and political communities. I am interested not only in seeing how different abstract conceptions of political aesthetics contend against one another, but also how these contentions have historically developed and what they can potentially mean for contemporary disciplines within and throughout political science. The dissertation touches upon a wide variety of other fields, including philosophy, economics, cultural studies, feminism, psychology, and anthropology. Bringing each into the relationship between aesthetics and politics, I show how modern political identities cannot be explored without reference to aesthetic judgment. ;The structure of the project is as follows: in the first chapter, I outline three competing models of a political aesthetics: those of Kant, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein. I draw out the specifically political implications of each, sketch out some of the solutions and difficulties of each, and show how those which are historically successive implicitly and explicitly address those before them. The next three chapters are applications of each of these aesthetic theories to contemporary political concerns. Kant helps address the issue how to understand group political identities; a Nietzschean critique shows the perniciousness of contemporary conceptions of relations between nations; and Wittgenstein's theories dovetail with feminist and psychoanalytic ideas about how vision and sight serve to constrain and predetermine social subject positions. The final chapter traces how the strains of these aesthetic positions have influenced various contemporary political and social theories, including those of Arendt, Bourdieu, Foucault, and De Certeau. Altogether, the project argues for a conception of aesthetic theory as central to understanding political identities, and maintains that the traditional oversight of aesthetics has impoverished political science's understanding of political movements