ABSTRACT
The lateral transposition of aesthetic experience onto the planes of ethics and politics brings to the fore the imagination's role in judgments that answer the demands of different situations. Although Theodor Adorno insists that "what is true in art is something nonexistent", wresting art's utopian impulse from the aesthetics' social institution ultimately voids music's and art's mimetic power. The conjunction of the work of art's singularity and its exemplarity, which authorizes transposing aesthetic experience onto the planes of ethics and politics, is borne out by the "rule" summoned by the work. By preserving the difference between the claims stemming from the work's fictive explorations and moral and political injunctions, aesthetic experience's lateral transposition sets the question of testimony in relief. The hermeneutics of testimony is therefore tantamount to a project of liberation under the name of the absolute to the degree that exemplary acts are also concrete signs of freedom's actualization.
