Vivasvan Soni, 'Playing at Judgment: Aporias of Liberal Freedom in Kant's Third Critique'

Vivasvan Soni is Associate Professor of English at Northwestern University. His research interests include the rise of the novel, moral and political theory, narratology, theories of tragedy, utopian writing and theories of modernity. This seminar, delivered at The University of Queensland on 28 October 2016, relates to his current work on the 'crisis of judgment' in the eighteenth-century. Through a close reading of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment – the text through which aesthetics is constituted as an autonomous discipline – the paper argues that a certain liberal conception of freedom finds itself at odds with the practice of judgement.