The Kantian Res Publica as the Locus of Reflective Judgment. Preliminary Notes Toward a Reading of the Transcendental Dialectic as a Manual of Political Disillusionment
Abstract
This essay offers a philosophical-political rereading of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason as a "manual of political disillusionment," engaging critically with Hegelian objections to Kantian modernity. Against the common interpretation that equates Kantian community with mere juridical formalism, the essay argues that Kant not only acknowledges the communal "void" he inaugurates, but that this void is politically rehabilitated as the locus of reflective judgment—a supplement for a res publica devoid of substantial teleology yet tasked with the infinite labor of sustaining the very space of deliberation about how to predicate itself. The text concludes that the supposed political insufficiency attributed to Kant by Hegel may in fact be a radically modern gesture: the dissolution of all communal mystification, leaving in its wake the reflective care of a shared and constitutive emptiness.
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