Marc Redfield. The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0804744602. Price: US$55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0804747504. Price: US$24.95 (paper).

Early in The Politics of Aesthetics, Marc Redfield quotes from Paul de Man’s 1967 Gauss lectures as a reminder of romanticism’s once-assumed centrality: “whenever romantic attitudes are implicitly or explicitly under discussion, a certain heightening of tone takes place, an increase of polemical tension develops, as if something of immediate concern to all were at stake” (33). Throughout his thoughtful and demanding book, Redfield pursues the roots of this tension, asking, in the most challenging terms possible, what the study of literature—particularly romantic literature—offers us as members of the modern democratic state. Refusing the embattled position popular among romanticists in recent years, Redfield instead takes up what he considers to be most essential about the field. He seeks nothing less than the rejuvenation of the critical and historical category. The “surprising displays of passion or anxiety” (33) that continue to surface in discussions of romanticism concern something very deeply rooted indeed, and to ignore the investments in theory and aesthetics that provoke these feelings, he argues, is to overlook what is most fundamental about the romantic field. The book is, at bottom, a defense of theory, though it is written without a hint of defensiveness. No mere exercise in academic nostalgia, The Politics of Aesthetics presents as a missed opportunity the reception of theory in the last two decades (years that coincide with the diminishing prestige of romanticism as a field of study). Far from seeking a return to the heady days when to study literature was to study the romantics, Redfield questions the rejection of “theory” as politically suspect and asks, instead, what a reconsideration might turn up. De Man’s writings prove valuable to a reading of national and academic culture (two categories, among many others, that Redfield shows to be not so easily separated). De Manian theory is shown always to be a resistance to theory. In this, it resembles aesthetic discourse itself: “If aesthetics intends its own ultimate transformation into a political program, its dependence on figurative language … causes it to split into a critique of itself that confronts as its own condition of possibility an exposure to dispersal, dissemination, or loss” (148). Theory—like aesthetics, and like romanticism—is said to offer a version of ideology critique very much suited to an age when saturation media-coverage of wars abroad and threats at home should raise our alert-level on claims of linguistic and referential stability. As its title indicates, the book starts from the premise that the aesthetic is political—that even those conservative critics who argue to the contrary are acknowledging its fundamentally political nature. Schiller, Arnold, Eliot, along with New Historicists and multiculturalists, Redfield says, all agree: “Culture is acculturation—the forming of subjects, the reforming of the world” (1-2). Disinterestedness, in the Arnoldian argument, seeks ultimately to make itself felt in the social sphere, and even modified versions of l’art pour l’art (such as Harold Bloom’s recent writings) “find it difficult to avoid the sideways slide form aesthetics to politics” (2). So far, so simple, but Redfield proposes to complicate the customary equation, defamiliarizing it so as to reactivate its significance for us. He interrogates the very language in which we talk about such things, and this begins with the terms in his title: aesthetics (which he equates to romanticism, and whose shared boundary with theory is critical to his effort here) and politics (which is decidedly not ideology—just as this book is decidedly not Terry Eagleton’s Ideology of the Aesthetic). So this is a book about theory that is also a book about politics. And it is political through and through. Redfield writes with …