Politics, Aesthetics, Play: <i>The Radical Aesthetic</i> and “Epistemic Possibility”

Abstract In The Radical Aesthetic (2000), Isobel Armstrong provides an incisive critique of Terry Eagleton's condemnation of the “Kantian Imaginary” in The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990). Her objections are twofold. First, Eagleton presents this structure as one in which the subject is immobilized by an all-consuming and pleasurable maternalism that inhibits collective action for radical change. Secondly, Eagleton extends his objections to the Kantian Imaginary to suggest that the aesthetic, upon which the consoling pleasures of the beautiful and the sublime are built, is by definition ideological. As a counter to Eagleton's argument, Armstrong turns to the resources of several psychoanalysts, including L. S. Vygotsky, Melanie Klein, D. W. Winnicott, and André Green, to explore the crucial nature of play in the formation of the drives. Together, these writers examine the creation of affective and transformational types of knowledge that seek expression through representation. Armstrong proceeds to show how a range of poems, including works by William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins, give aesthetic form to the pursuit of pleasure and beauty in the name of epistemic possibility.