THE SHADOW CAST BY IMMANUEL KANT'S CONCEPT OF THE DISINTERESTED nature of the aesthetic is indeed a long one. In literary studies, such ah assumption legitimized the dominance of formalism for much of the twentieth century, New Criticism being the most prominent manifestation in the United States. While late in the twentieth century, trust in aesthetic autonomy seemed to dissolve at the touch of ideological critique, debate over interpretation and the implications of Kant's Third Critique is ongoing. This essay will not join in that debate, but will look at a crucial period for the transmission of this idea of disinterest. It is generally accepted that the strongest expression of the disinterested nature of art historically is the movement of l'art pour l'art. Associated with this movement are the notions of Part pur and la poesie pure, whose very definitions seem to compel attention to form and a movement towards abstraction. But in examining the trajectory of the doctrine of l'art pour l'art from its first public expression in the lectures of Victor Cousin in Paris in 1817-1818 to its reappearance as a rallying cry for young artists in the early 1830s, what is perhaps most remarkable are the differences between Cousin's conceptualization of this disinterest and Theophile Gautier's. Given the prominence of Cousin--generally acknowledged as the most influential philosopher of the Restoration--and the notoriety of Gautier's preface to his novel, Mademoiselle de Maupin, in which he articulated ah aesthetic posture for the generation of artists and poets who defined modernity, such discrepancies in definition deserve our attention. First of all, these two articulations give us a sense of how Kant's aesthetic took shape historically once it hit the ground in the lecture halls of the Sorbonne and in the artistic circles of Paris. Secondly, if the purity--art purified of external purposes, influences, the exogenous--or autonomy of art is discrepantly defined between these two influential articulations, separated in time by about a decade and a half, what does that tell us about the coherence of Kantian disinterest as a concept? Perhaps this shift in the meaning of l'art pour l'art is simply a problem of transmission, of Cousin understanding Kant poorly and Gautier not at all. Indeed, even if this were the case, that the idea of disinterest, of artistic autonomy, remains powerful is all the more worthy of our attention. I will consider both the effect of historical contingency and problems of definition inherent in the original Kantian notion as ways of accounting for this discrepancy. If we apply Mary Douglas' insight that "in chasing dirt" we "are positively re-ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea," (1) then the question of what is excluded from the aesthetic in order to establish its disinterest or purity may well imply a difference of both idea and order between Cousin's influential philosophy and its Restoration audience, and the aesthetic doctrine and lifestyle of artists and writers in the July Monarchy.
