This essay considers and compares two political readings of the founding text of modern aesthetics, Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement. The two perspectives on the original text are Gayatri Spivak's post-colonial, deconstructive reading and Jacques Ranciere's use of the text in his recuperation of the political dimension of aesthetics. Comparable yet divergent structures are found in their readings: Spivak considers the aesthetic as being essentially ideological whereas Ranciere sees in the aesthetic the very possibility of a politics. Nevertheless, Ranciere's broad structural understanding of Kant's account appears to subsume the specificity of Spivak's reading, although a question is raised about the implicit geo-political specificity of Ranciere's position.
The final part of the essay takes an underlying feature of both their readings, that is, contingency, and recalls what sense this had in Kant's argument. In this respect, Henry Allison's focus on the notion of heautonomy (as distinct from the concept of autonomy) provides a way of speaking of the original significance of contingency in Kant's text.
A merit of this essay is that it brings together different areas of contemporary philosophical discourse, namely, mainstream Continental philosophy with Kantian scholarship.