The Narrowest Path: Antinomies of Self-Determination in Four Aesthetic Studies

by Omid Mehrgan

Overview

A strategic reconstruction of modern German thought from the standpoint of aesthetic theory.

The Narrowest Path reveals the characteristically modern, revolutionary project of freedom-as-autonomy to be unresolvably antinomic. Based on four seminal texts by Kleist, Hegel, Marx, and Adorno, Mehrgan develops four basic figures – the literary, the person, the republic, and the artwork – that flourished during the long period between the French Revolution and the aftermath of the Second World War in Europe. Their main antagonist was the rule of capital, which paradoxically enabled self-determination while thwarting it. Still present in contemporary revolutionary experiments, this daunting conflict is most visible in the aesthetic – but its resolution lies elsewhere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798888905616
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	11/25/2025
Series:	Historical Materialism
Pages:	247
Product dimensions:	9.00(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Omid Mehrgan, Ph.D. (2018), Johns Hopkins University, is adjunct assistant professor at New York University, Department of Liberal Studies. He has published on aesthetic theory, the Anthropocene, translation studies, Iranian cinema, and translations of major works in critical theory, including those by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno in Farsi.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: ‘Not Truth in History, But History in Truth’
 1 The Opus Against the Apparatus
 2 The Aesthetic Equation and Its Antinomy
 3 Antinomic of Form: The Birth of Art’s Double Character
 4 The Special Problematic: What is an Aesthetic Antinomy?
 5 The General Problematic: Structure Faces History
 6 A Note on Kleist’s Novella

1 The Antinomic Act of Literature in Michael Kohlhaas
 1 Prologue: The Desire of Michael Kohlhaas
 2 Kohlhaas Follows His Thing: A Failed Forensics
 3 Luther Stops Kohlhaas: On the Historical Plateau
 4 The Gypsy Woman Moves Kohlhaas: A Fantastic Tragedy
 5 Kohlhaas Following Kohlhaas: What is a Literary Act?

2 The Human Antinomy in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right
 1 Introduction
 2 The Human Antinomy and Its Personal Resolution
 3 The Form of the Person: Infinite Self-Relation
 4 The Personal Antinomy and Its Political Resolution

3 The Political Antinomy in Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
 1 Introduction
 2 The Constituted Form: The Proclaimed Republic
 3 The Constituent Content: The Presuppositions of the Republic
 4 The Antinomy of the Republic: The Politics of Capital
 5 The Resolution to Come

4 Figuring the Answer: A Reconstruction of Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory
 1 Problematic. Art’s Double Character as Antinomy
 2 Analytic of the Autonomous: Form as Separation
 3 Analytic of the Social: Form as Repetition
 4 Dialectic. The Sublime and The Ridiculous: Form as Participation
 5 Conclusion

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Omid Mehgran’s The Narrowest Path is a superb interrogation—running through philosophy (Hegel), social theory (Marx), critical aesthetics (Adorno), and literature (Kleist)—of the central antinomy fracturing the constitutive structure of experience in modern life: the autonomy of the individual subject from the dominating mechanisms of society as the mode of their inclusion and subordination. This antinomy is lifted and repeated in aesthetic autonomy, the modern work of art as something made that appears like nature. Mehgran’s book belongs on the shelf of all students of critical theory."
—J.M. Bernstein, New School for Social Research

From the Publisher