Aesthetics and Politics: Reflections on Love and the Origins of Fascism

Jules Simon

doi:10.13135/2704-8195/3797

Jules Simon University of Texas at El Paso

DOI: https://doi.org/10.13135/2704-8195/3797

Abstract

Arguing against the grain of conventional readings that Rosenzweig’s philosophy is a-historical, I maintain instead that a more nuanced and faithful reading should take into account the underlying logical dynamics of his speech-act philosophy that become embodied through the role that love relationships – understood aesthetically on both individual and communal levels – are ways to ‘redeem’ history messianically, thereby redeeming or creating more just political communities. This happens at the level of an immanent, normative critique of the dominant authoritarian pressures to assimilate to existing social and political conditions. I connect that with a reading of Benjamin’s philosophy, arguing that Rosenzweig’s “messianic aesthetics” determinatively influenced Walter Benjamin’s dialectics of ethical and political critique – which resulted in Benjamin’s work becoming both revelatory and historically redemptive, that is, politically messianic.

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