Hannah Arendt’s Aesthetic Politics

<div>We face a crisis of public reason. Our quest for a politics that is free, moral and rational has, somehow, made it hard for us to <i>move</i>, to change our positions, to visit places and perspectives that are not our own, and to embrace reality. This book addresses this crisis with a model of public reason based in a new aesthetic reading of Hannah Arendt''s political theory. It begins by telling the story of Arendt''s engagement with the <i>Augenblicke</i> of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Kafka and Benjamin, in order to identify her own aesthetic Moment. Josefson then explicates this Moment, what he calls the <i>freedom of the beautiful</i>, as a third face of freedom on par with Arendt''s familiar freedoms of action and the life of the mind. He shows how this freedom, rooted in Jaspers''s phenomenology and a non-metaphysical reading of Kant, serves to redress the world-alienation that was a uniting theme across Arendt''s works. Ultimately, this volume aims to challenge orthodox accounts of Arendtian politics, presenting Arendt''s aesthetic politics as a radically new model of republicanism and as an alternative to political liberal, deliberative and agonistic models of public reason. <br></div> <p> </p>