Relationality, Agency, and Injury: The Darkness of <i>The Radical Aesthetic</i>

Abstract This essay traces Isobel Armstrong's achievement in The Radical Aesthetic (2000) to her commitment to reflecting on difficult states of being — necessarily imperfect, inevitably incomplete — that have been inadequately addressed in some of the most influential accounts of the intersection of politics and culture. Drawing on work by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Felicia Hemans, Henry James, Alfred Tennyson, and William Butler Yeats, as well as on the critical formulations of theorists who directly influenced Armstrong's work, notably Wilfred R. Bion, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Gillian Rose, the essay illustrates the ways in which Armstrong's work offers an account of politics in which the aesthetic is far more than a site of privilege. Art, in The Radical Aesthetic, serves not simply as an object of analysis, or as a comfort when we are discomfited by the realities analysis reveals, but as the ground for new relationships that link lived experience, the hope for change, and the need to claim agency in the face of the uncertainty that is at the heart of any truly radical project.