Nostalgic Teleology:. Friedrich Schiller and the Schemata of Aesthetic Humanism

This study develops a novel interpretation of Schiller's classical aesthetic humanism - -the fountainhead of all later German critical theory- (Wellek) - as a program of normative discipline in Foucault's sense of the term. Schiller's aesthetics establishes and puts to work a number of metaphysical schemata, such as the three-stage figure of origin and return, in order to render its subjects as programmable and as subject to a knowledge that could be strategically deployed to shape and transform them. Nostalgic teleology, the promise of a recovery of nature, wholeness, and community serves to hide the violence of this project of aesthetic education. At its center stands the formation of -the Other Sex-, which is analyzed as the truly classical elaboration of a modern -regime of truth.-"