ABSTRACT
Once Democracy in America has been reconstructed according to the aesthetic criteria we inherit from Adorno, Nietzsche, and Whitman, several theoretical conclusions can be drawn regarding the historical possibility for an aesthetic form of individuality in late modern democratic society. First, aesthetic individuality is what an individualism rooted in equality of condition and the passion for equality eventually would become, and perhaps to a significant extent. For if the equality of condition and the passion for equality have been at the center of democratic life since Tocqueville’s great work appeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, as he prophesized it would, then aesthetic individuality should have become increasingly prominent. Second, as aesthetic individuality prevailed in democratic societies, difference would be less victimized by the burden of “otherness.” What Adorno believed to be a Utopian ideal, the possibility that identity could be constituted without becoming implicated in a logic of contradiction and exclusion, would be the consequence of an individuality able to create its identity differently through an aesthetic receptivity to difference. Individuality would create the identity of the self on its surfaces and in its depths through the surfaces of every difference to which it became aesthetically receptive. Finally, the democratic society whose passion for equality had fostered the development of aesthetic individuality would have erected a barrier to the evil of demonizing difference and to its apocalyptic expression, holocaust and genocidal extermination.
