Balzac and Kant: On Taste in the Democratic Age

Abstract: This article examines Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons as a critical reflection on the paradoxes of aesthetic taste in the democratic age. Challenging Kantian ideas of disinterested judgment, Balzac reveals taste as shaped by the cultural and historical contingencies of one’s early socialization. The figure of Pons, whose refined sensibilities conceal the premodern desires of his religious upbringing, challenges the Enlightenment illusion of rational subjectivity. Instead of celebrating taste as a marker of moral or intellectual refinement, the novel presents it as a site of repression and displacement—calling for a new anthropology or “archaeology of consciousness” that uncovers the hidden foundations of aesthetic taste.