Existential Aesthetic judging Sensibility, Worldly Recognition and the Political Significance of Narrative Imagination: Confronting the Tragic Nature of Political Affairs

The paper explores the relevance of literary imagination to understanding and responding to political violence by drawing on the existential aesthetic judging sensibility – in particular the work of Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus – and its ability to direct attention to the specifically political, world-disclosing potentials of narrative. First, it examines the epistemological and ontological premises that underlie the recent vigilant, yet contested arguments for the ethical and political promise of narrative form, particularly its (in)ability to approach the plurality, ambiguity and unpredictability of human affairs. Thereby, it attempts to disclose why the question of intersubjective recognition as the main concern of the narrative approach becomes so pressing and at the same time so fraught with difficulty. Second, the paper brings the existentialists' aesthetic sensibility into conversation with the contemporary narrative turn. If the recent discourse on narrative manifests a lingering predominance of the epistemological, moral concern with ensuring a proper way of grasping and responding to others' experience (of suffering and injustice), the existential narrative-inspired judging orientation emerges as distinct for remaining loyal to the perspective of human plurality. In this way, it is argued, it is able to foster worldly forms of recognition and bring into existence, on the debris of history, again a space for politics among plural equals. The existentialists' plural, representative focus thus reveals the distinct political significance of literary imagination in its ability to confront the seemingly ineliminable spectre of complexity, violence and suffering haunting political affairs not by abandoning politics to the law of tragic necessity, but by constantly illuminating the possibilities and limitations of political action as they inhere within the emerging bounds of our shared world. Third, the paper concretely illustrates the proposed political promise of literary works as spaces for politics by an engagement with Camus's play The Just.