In The Sovereign Self, Grant H. Kester examines the evolving discourse of aesthetic autonomy from its origins in the Enlightenment through avant-garde projects and movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Kester traces the idea of aesthetic autonomy—the sense that art should be autonomous from social forces while retaining the ability to reflect back critically on society—through Kant, Schiller, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno. Kester critiques the use of aesthetic autonomy as the basis for understanding the nature of art and the shifting relationship between art and revolutionary praxis. He shows that dominant discourses of aesthetic autonomy reproduce the very forms of bourgeois liberalism that autonomy discourse itself claims to challenge. Analyzing avant-garde art and political movements in Russia, India, Latin America, and elsewhere, Kester retheorizes the aesthetic beyond autonomy. Ultimately, Kester demonstrates that the question of aesthetic autonomy has ramifications that extend beyond art to encompass the nature of political transformation and forms of anticolonial resistance that challenge the Eurocentric concept of “Man,” upon which the aesthetic itself often depends.

Grant H. Kester is Professor of Art History at the University of California, San Diego, author of Beyond the Sovereign Self: Aesthetic Autonomy from the Avant-Garde to Socially Engaged Art and The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context, and coeditor of Collective Situations: Readings in Contemporary Latin American Art, 1995–2010, all also published by Duke University Press.

-- Susan Buck-Morss, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

Introduction  1
I. From Beauty to Dissensus
1. Freedom and Sovereignty  19
2. Communism and the Aesthetic State  48
II. Negation and Performativity
3. From Vanguard to Avant-Garde  85
4. Activism and Autonomy in the 1960s  108
III. Autonomy since the 1980s
5. The Rise of the Neo-Avant-Garde  145
6. The Hirschhorn Monument: Autonomy as Brand and Alibi  180
Conclusion. Aesthetics beyond Semblance  212
Notes  219
Works Cited  243
Index  259