A Democratic Enlightenment: The Reconciliation Image, Aesthetic Education, Possible Politics

In A Democratic Enlightenment Morton Schoolman proposes aesthetic education through film as a way to redress the political violence inflicted on difference that society constructs as its racialized, gendered, Semitic, and sexualized other. Drawing on Voltaire, Diderot, and Schiller, Schoolman reconstructs the genealogical history of what he calls the reconciliation image-a visual model of a democratic ideal of reconciliation he then theorizes through Whitman's prose and poetry and Adorno's ...