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Michael Wayne's Red Kant is an attempt, as he puts it, "to carve out a Marxist reading of Kant's third Critique" (3). Wayne's central contention in this study is that the theory of art in The Critique of Judgment, and in particular the theory of judgments of beauty and sublimnity, offer glimpses of an "antibourgeois Kant" (113). This insurrectionary Kant is in tension with the philosopher of the first two critiques-as well as with the bulk of Kant's reception in the more than two centuries since he wrote-and illuminating these glimpses involves reconstructing that philosophy and criticizing that reception. Unfortunately, Wayne is not able to make this contention helpful to the forces Marx was hoping to advance.
Red Kant is constructed from three relatively independent strands. There is, first, the conceptual analysis of Kant's works themselves. This is woven together with a series of engagements with contemporary or nearly contemporary philosophers. Finally, there are various exemplary interpretations of mass cultural phenomena, popular movies, for the most part, that illustrate what Wayne's antibourgeois Kant makes visible in the contemporary cultural landscape. As a work of Kantian exegesis, Red Kant has some interpretive theses that it defends. That "purposiveness without purpose," Kant's famously paradoxical formula for aesthetic beauty, is not nonconceptual, "but instead it is an attempt to generate a different kind or modality of conceptuality"...