An Aesthetic Crime: Obscenity, Biopolitics, and the Limits of the Liberal Public Sphere

This article traces the development of early modern obscenity as a new discursive object arguing that the history of obscenity regulation tracks an important development in the history of the politics of aesthetics that occurs with the rise of the liberal public sphere. As a limit concept for free speech, obscenity marks the boundaries public reason. The article examines how the ways in which obscenity was seen as political changed alongside the development of early liberalism. Material practices of reading the obscene and the legal technology of obscenity regulation are then examined to show how early liberal law was invested in classifying and stratifying populations based on their relative capacities to sense. Indeed, this task was deemed of the utmost importance for securing the liberal public sphere, indicating the affective dimension of the public sphere itself, and therefore the development of aesthetics as a domain of biopolitics.

Forthcoming (TBA)