ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book deals with the long-standing and seemingly never-ending debate over what ought to be considered the central problematics, themes, figures, and limits of Romantic philosophy. It examines some of the salient historical and institutional history, as well as the work of many contemporary theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Gianni Vattimo, among others. The book demonstrates how the bond between aesthetics and subjectivity is further knitted by the Romantics to a problematic of nihilism, in which the sublime immensity and force of world history overwhelms and is overcome by Romantic theory. It shows how the problems of the institution, aesthetics, and nihilism are in fact co-supplementary. The book explains a series of close readings of influential contemporary theorists, working in a number of disciplines.
