Kant's philosophy of the aesthetic and the philosophy of praxis

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2012 Association for Economic and Social Analysis.This essay seeks to reconstruct the terms for a more productive engagement with Kant than is typical within contemporary academic cultural Marxism, which sees him as the cornerstone of a bourgeois model of the aesthetic. The essay argues that, in the Critique of Judgment, the aesthetic stands in as a substitute for the missing realm of human praxis. This argument is developed in relation to Kant's concept of reflective judgment that is in turn related to a methodological shift toward inductive and analogical procedures that help Kant overcome the dualisms of the first two Critiques. This reassessment of Kant's aesthetic is further clarified by comparing it with and offering a critique of Terry Eagleton's assessment of the Kantian aesthetic as synonymous with ideology

Queer activism in Taiwan: an emergent rainbow coalition from the assemblage perspective

A social movement for sexual and gender minorities (the Movement) emerged in Taiwan around the 1990s after the abolition of martial law in 1987. This article, drawing on Deleuze’s assemblage theory, looks at how activists negotiate and compete over constructing the discourses of sexual rights and citizenship in a context of democratic transition. With the recent ‘Renaissance’ of conservatism, which combines Confucianism and Christianity, the Movement has been thus de- and reterritorialised in response, and such a process has brought to the fore a rainbow coalition – a larger composition of assemblage rather than simply a descriptor. Gaining greater leverage and influence on society, the coalition, based on the pursuit of self-determination and self-liberation, has inversely provided soil for a cosmopolitan identity of Taiwaneseness to grow