an email to professor Stephen White [with some explanatory bracketing for here]:
Hi, Professor White,
My Constellations [journal issue contents] email today listed your essay [““The Aesthetics of Democratic Power“]. I recall your name from my Habermasian days. I hope you get lots of positive response. Sorry I can’t be too substantive yet in terms of your full discussion, having seen your article just a short while ago.
Searching ’value’ in your essay, I think there’s lots of promise in relating aesthetic sensibility to authentic vs. inauthentic versions of appealing to moral-political values of democratic imagination. “...valuable insight...valuable resonance...“: I’m very attached to nesting political thought in value theory and identification with values in one’s life which carry motivation into political engagements.
We who don’t experience oppression in our own lives should want to appreciate the oppression of others as a matter of feeling shared humanity. These days, for example, the chaos in Ukraine (let alone Sudan, now called genocide) should enliven our demand that “America“ not withdraw from its soft power at a global scale. So, therefore, political power that we support must represent our shared humanity effectively. It’s a matter of feeling for the other. Indeed, we should need to “imagine the spirit of freedom and dignity that might have been expressed...“ by those who still can’t, yet may.
