Acknowledgments
Introduction: What Is the Value of Knowledge?
Two Stories About the Aftereffects of Knowledge
Knowledge, Aesthetics, and Individuality
Politics and Individuality
The Chapters That Follow
PART I: RETURNING TO OURSELVES
1. Recovering the Individual in Critical Theory
Back to Basics? Pleasure and Pain
Weakening the Link Between Theory and Practice
Reconnecting Theory with Practice: The "Causality of Fate"
Communicative Versus Subject-Centered Reason
2. Individuality Amid Social Progress
The Politics of Suffering
Habermas's Reconstruction of Progressive Ideals
Modernity and the Adolescent Crisis
Rethinking Progress
3. Dogmatic Retreats and Skeptical Adventures
The Dangers of Dialectic
Dogmatic Retreats: Habermas and Butler
Skeptical Adventures: Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptics
PART II: DEMOCRACY, AESTHETICS, AND INDIVIDUALITY
4. Habermas's Democratic Proceduralism
Procedural Compensations for Weak Individuality
The Limits of Proceduralism
Expectations of Individuals in Radical Democracy
5. Democracy and Individuality: Kateb and Connolly
Democracy and the Existential Dimension
Kateb and Emerson: Tensions Between the Moral and the Aesthetic
Connolly and Nietzsche: Can Arts of the Self Be Political?
6. Spaces for Individuality
Adding to the Pressures Against Individuality
Individuality Without the Constraints of Intersubjectivity
Individuality and Participation in Politics
Politics Without Meaning and Individuality as Citizenship
Notes
Index