"Japaridze demonstrates an impressive grasp of the Kantian corpus and makes unexpected connections across a wide array of primary texts. Most exciting to me is the central idea: that of showing how both Kant's account of taste and the foundations of critical philosophy in general might be read in terms of structures of mourning. Japaridze's reading strategy is extremely interesting: against prevailing accounts of Kant as having defended the pure status of a self-sufficient and autonomous ego, she argues that Kant's conception of the subject is radically dependent on 'traces of the other. ' This enables her to develop a truly original interpretation of the relationship between the Critique of Judgment and the rest of Kant's transcendental system. " — Andrew Cutrofello, author of Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Resistance

"The reading of Kant's Critique of Judgment that focuses on 'affective identification' as a way to understand the Kantian subject is strikingly original. The author clearly shows that Kant in no way suppresses the realm of the sensuous in the Third Critique, but instead it is through a reflection on the sensuous, most precisely, the affective dimension, that he is able to unify the realms of nature and freedom.

"Also striking is how the author clearly shows that in the Third Critique the formation of the subject is played out anterior to its division. What is original here is the suggestion that we must invert the chronology—read the third critique first. Moreover, she clearly articulates how it is that the sensus communis developed in the Third Critique reveals that the formation of the subject takes place through a priori affectivity where the mechanism of affective identification with the other takes place as a capacity of the aesthetic self. The account of what Kant means by 'pure form' is brilliant. The analysis of this in terms of repetition and recollection is truly original. " — Peg Birmingham, DePaul University