Overview

A strategic reconstruction of modern German thought from the standpoint of aesthetic theory. The Narrowest Path reveals the characteristically modern, revolutionary project of freedom-as-autonomy to be unresolvably antinomic. Based on four seminal texts by Kleist, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno, Mehrgan develops four basic figures the literary, the person, the republic, and the artwork that flourished during the long period between the French Revolution and the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. Their main antagonist was the rule of capital, which paradoxically enabled self-determination while thwarting it. Still present in contemporary revolutionary experiments, this daunting conflict is most visible in the aesthetic but its resolution lies elsewhere.

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""Omid Mehgran’s The Narrowest Path is a superb interrogation—running through philosophy (Hegel), social theory (Marx), critical aesthetics (Adorno), and literature (Kleist)—of the central antinomy fracturing the constitutive structure of experience in modern life: the autonomy of the individual subject from the dominating mechanisms of society as the mode of their inclusion and subordination. This antinomy is lifted and repeated in aesthetic autonomy, the modern work of art as something made that appears like nature. Mehgran’s book belongs on the shelf of all students of critical theory."" —J.M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research

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