Millennial politics: the beginning of aesthetics -- The history and problems of the idea of aesthetics: the issue of communication -- The irrelevance of aesthetics as discovered in "classical" Weimar -- Kant and his shadow: the persistence of philosophical aesthetics -- Aesthetics and hermeneutics -- The end of aesthetics: Heidegger and Adorno -- Novels and the novel -- The millennial novel and its unmasking -- Aesthetic response and propaganda: the invention of simultaneity -- The totalitarian imagination and its opposite -- Interchapter -- What's up, doc?: resistance in spite of itself.