Document Type
Article
Publication Date
Summer 1997
Abstract
Pivoting on the essay on enlightenment as a central text and referring to other thematically relevant writings by Kant, this study qualifies the view that the Kantian concepts of enlightenment and the public sphere are represented solely in a neutral, disinterested manner as open and democratic forums for all men and women. By recovering unconscious inscriptions of gender, sexuality, and class in contradistinction to the dominant "democratic" reception of Kant, this essay shows how infrastructural sexual dynamics co-articulate the surface discourses of enlightenment, the public and private spheres, and the beautiful and the sublime. As non-cognitive structures, these discourses inscribe corporophobia, orality, and paranoia, as well as a particular interplay between the heterosocial and the homosocial. While not minimizing Kant's contribution to a liberal, critical democracy, one can show that Kant's writings and their receptions are also unwitting missionaries of some complex counter-enlightenment tendencies.
Recommended Citation
Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul. "Private Reason(s) and Public Spheres: Sexuality and Enlightenment in Kant." The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 38, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 171-90.
Publisher Statement
Copyright © 2012, University of Pennsylvania Press. This article first appeared in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation: 38:2 (1997), 171-190.
Please note that downloads of the article are for private/personal use only.