2026 Theses Doctoral

The Indecent Imagination: Negative Ethopoetics from Kant to Kafka

Arens, Luca Alexander

This dissertation exlplores the poetics of indecency or “Unsittlichkeit.” From the late 18th to the early 20th century, the positive term “Sittlichkeit”, usually translated as “ethical life”, was a key rubric for thinking social reform in the German-speaking world. Under this rubric, the charge of “indecency” was a powerful tool for producing threats to the continued improvement of human society.

The dissertation analyzes the aesthetic techniques used to produce this threat across scientific texts and official documents from histories of medieval knights and Enlightened kings to government reports on the slave trade, forensic psychology, early academic sociology, and etiquette manuals. In a second step, I turn to popular aesthetic genres historically labeled indecent—from the Enlightenment slave play to the modernist sex workers’ diary—and trace across them an artistic and intellectual effort to reimagine modern society from the position of ‘indecent’ subjects: obstinate women, Enslaved people, the poor, revolutionaries, migrants and sex workers.

From this position, sharp distinctions of sex and race, taste and education, merit and manners did not result in ethical social orders, as thinkers of “Sittlichkeit” from Kant and Hegel to Max Weber claimed they would. Rather, these distinctions enabled a politics of domination shapeshifting: between slavery and strategic benevolence, economic exploitation and epistemic injustice, sexual violence and chivalry. So-called indecent artworks exposed this politics through a formally innovative counterpoetics of indecency, which I trace in close, situated readings that juxtapose artists canonical and obscure.

Throughout, my analyses reveal how the counterpoetics of indecency appropriated the same aesthetic techniques used to produce and discipline ‘indecent’ subjects: techniques of characterization, of generic distinction, and of focalization. What unites these techniques is their ability to effectively determine, and in the critical appropriation I traces also challenge, real and imagined hierarchies: between heroes and villains, major and minor characters; between valued and worthless modes of human expression, and between discursive agents and their mute epistemic objects.