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Following Hannah Arendt’s seminal claim that Kant’s “Critique of Judgment” contains his unwritten political philosophy, this seminar investigates how the structure of aesthetic judgment defines the possibilities of political agency. We begin with Kant’s aesthetic theory and Arendt’s “Lectures on Kant” to understand how the ability to think from the standpoint of others constitutes the core of the political. Through this lens, we trace the genealogy of aesthetics from Baumgarten’s sensuous cognition to Herder’s empathy, Schiller’s aesthetic education, and Novalis’ poetics of the state. The course then examines exemplary and radical challenges to these models: the fanaticism of justice in Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas,” the aesthetic appeal for social justice in Bettina von Arnim’s “This Book Belongs to the King,” the fragmented political consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s “Three Guineas,” the transition from disinterested distance to radical attention in Simone Weil, and finally, the law as inscrutable form in Kafka’s “The Trial.” Readings include: Baumgarten, Kant, Herder, Schiller, Novalis, Kleist, Arnim, Arendt, Weil, Woolf, and Kafka.