ABSTRACT
The connection between 'the aestheticization of politic' and fascism has become firmly established. It has become such a common place that some of its affective power has wandered from the historians' treatment of the issue into a related, but not identical, discussion carried on mainly by literary critics over what is called 'the aesthetic ideology'. The author explores the implications of the shift and asks if the critique of 'the aesthetic ideology' in certain of its guises may itself rest on mystifications, which allow calling it ideological in its turn. Any discussion of the aestheticization of politics must begin by identifying the normative notion of the aesthetic it presupposes. Although the target is the aesthetic ideology, the remedy is thus a kind of extension of certain tools of aesthetic analysis into the realm of politics. For Lyotard, the result is a politics that can be called aestheticized in the sense of aesthetics of the sublime.
