power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human
truths which must serve as the touchstone for our judgment.

Kennedy's speech is a classic piece of liberal rhetoric, of course,
and it is worth keeping in mind Marxist-oriented arguments that the
links typically drawn in the liberal tradition between art and freedom
may participate in a subtle strategy whereby bourgeois society creates
the illusion of individual freedom in order to assure that individuals
will in fact behave themselves properly within the dictates of a
capitalist economy. As Terry Eagleton repeatedly reminds us in his
recent historical survey of aesthetic theory, the very notion of the
aesthetic as we know it arose in conjunction with the rise of bourgeois
society. In particular, many of our conceptions of the nature of the
work of art (especially those having to do with organic unity) arise in
close complicity with the rise of the autonomous bourgeois individual
as the principal paradigm of human subjectivity. Eagleton suggests
that the work of art functions as an object of imaginary identification
through which the bourgeois subject develops a fantasy of its own
wholeness and autonomy, in a process much like the Lacanian mirror
stage ( Ideology87). However, this process is not an entirely simple
one. In his discussion of Kant, for example, Eagleton notes the double
movement of the beautiful and the sublime in Kantian aesthetics. The
beautiful, he suggests, supports this imaginary identification, shoring
up the subject and giving it the confidence it needs to compete in a
free market, while the sublime performs a humbling function,
reminding the subject that, free or not, there are in fact limits that are
not to be crossed. This double movement is, for Eagleton, essential to
the ideology of bourgeois society: "For one problem of all humanist
ideology is how its centring and consoling of the subject is to be made
compatible with a certain essential reverence and submissiveness on
the subject's part" ( 90 ).

Indeed, much of the point of Eagleton's survey is to suggest that,
despite the fact that the aesthetic is a thoroughly bourgeois concept
whose very purpose is the perpetuation of bourgeois ideology, there
is something inherently uncontrollable in the aesthetic which still gives
it a considerable subversive potential: "The aesthetic as custom,
sentiment, spontaneous impulse may consort well enough with political
domination; but these phenomena border embarrassingly on passion,
imagination, sensuality, which are not always so easily incorporable"
( 28 ). And if Eagleton himself here sounds more like a liberal than a
Marxist, it is worth keeping in mind the important role that art has
played in the thought of so many modern Marxist thinkers, including

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