The limits of voice

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The title of this work stems from Costa-Lima's interpretation of a key passage in Kant's Third Critique, where aesthetic judgment results are "generally communicable but without the mediation of a concept." He highlights a silence—referred to as "limits of voice"—which serves as a metonymy for the book's central theme: literary experience as a form of aesthetic experience. Costa-Lima explores this theme by viewing aesthetic and literary experiences as historically limited potentialities, examining their dependence on contextual requirements. The exploration of "limits of voice" unfolds on three levels. First, he considers subjectivity as a historical and systematic condition for aesthetic and literary experiences, emphasizing the individual's right to speak for themselves. Second, he notes that while historical modes of expression were legitimized by cosmological frameworks, true subjectivity necessitates a context independent of cosmology, termed "the Law." Lastly, he posits that both literary and aesthetic experiences rely on the emergence of subjectivity and the presence of "the Law" as both enabling and constraining factors. This work addresses a longstanding challenge in literary theory and history: how to historicize the concept of literature.