Red Kant: Aesthetics, Marxism and the Third Critique attempts nothing less than a reclaiming of the aesthetic for the cause of emancipatory social transformation, here conceived in Marxist terms, as the title indicates. Its success in this endeavour rests largely on Wayne's rare ability to distinguish philosophical explication from his own powerful reinterpretations. Film scholars will find value in this text less for its engagement with specific films (Wayne engages only tangentially in film analysis) than for its shrewd explications of core film-philosophical concepts.

The book navigates not only the philosophical architecture of Immanuel Kant's three Critiques (of Pure Reason, of Practical Reason and of Judgment; Wayne's book serves as a primer on Kant for the uninitiated), but it also provides a useful adumbration of the various camps in Kant interpretation. Wayne's intervention, which he lays out in the introduction (1–6), seeks an alternative to what he calls ‘the bourgeois, […] the Kantian-Marxist, and the orthodox Marxist’ (4) traditions of Kantian critique. Instead, unsurprisingly, Wayne's project requires a critique of Anglo-American, or analytic interpretations of Kant. And yet it also entails a significant parting of ways with what Wayne regards as the bourgeois left, represented here by the likes of Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze. The stated goal of the book, to ‘recover a historical and materialist understanding of the aesthetic via Kant’ (6), is persuasively argued throughout and draws heavily upon the Frankfurt School perspectives of Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno.

Wayne reports in chapter one (7–26) that bourgeois interpretation of Kant suffer from a ‘massive homogenization’ (7) that remains structurally blind to the contradictions between and within each of the three Critiques. By insisting on the systemic unity of the Critiques, analytic philosophy ignores the generative contradictions intrinsic to Kant's thought (24–25). This emphasis on contradiction as a source of thought is central to Wayne's methodology, and is the reason why, despite many similarities, his treatment of the aesthetic remains incommensurate with that of Deleuze (who regards contradiction as derivative). Wayne's Kant was aware of the contradictions that prevented a closed system, and it is on account of this that the latter turns to the aesthetic as ‘a break in his philosophical structure’ (25).

Each of the book's eight chapters addresses different aspects of Kant's architectonics and their possible relation to key concepts in Marxist theory. Chapter two (27–56) argues that the a priori concepts of the Understanding (cf The Critique of Pure Reason) are a particularly severe case of reification. Indeed, the way in which the concepts of this first Critique – in which pure reason is the means by which the subject construes reality – are immune to historical change presents an obstacle to the subject's relation to the new. It is this obstacle that impels the turn to the aesthetic in the third Critique, since it is in this text that Wayne finds the source of social transformation by way of a relation to alterity. On Wayne's account, that which lies beyond our reified conceptual apparatus – i.e. Kant's noumena – ‘find[s] some register in the phenomenal’ by means of ‘the play of sensuous forms’ (54).

In this vein, the chapters that follow seamlessly entwine Kant and Karl Marx. Chapter 3 (57–87) emphasises the role of the beautiful and reflective judgment as they pertain to praxis, such that the former has the capacity to ‘de-reify the determinate concepts impregnated within the sensuous experience of everyday life’ (87) – the aesthetic emerging here as counteractant to the cliché. Chapter 4 (91–116), meanwhile, goes beyond the usual wisdom that the beautiful requires a ‘disinterested’ attitude with respect to one's relation to the world and to others (89), and makes the case that Kant provides the basis for a view of the aesthetic that is rooted in social and historical conditions. That is, the aesthetic ‘offers an experience of the universal which is inherently provisional, glimpsed in the dawning awareness of conflicting interests represented by the presence of others’ (115).

In chapter 5 (117–138) Wayne makes what for some may be a belated engagement with the sublime. However, Wayne parts ways with the many theorists who, discarding the beautiful, draw from Kant's third Critique in an effort to mobilize the sublime for emancipatory ends. Here, Wayne persuasively argues that both the sublime and the beautiful generate reflexive, critical thought: ‘The beautiful is not ideology and the sublime its critique – that schema must be laid to rest’ (136). Chapter 6 (139–166) then argues for a materialist turn in Kant and rescues from the Kantian lexicon notions such as the singular (which, inadequately understood, remains all too compatible with capitalism). This materialist turn requires that aesthetic experience and production be regarded as a mode of setting to work on the transformation of the world (148). Wayne deftly includes film theoretical debates (such as those between cognitivism and psychoanalysis) in his arguments for a materially situated aesthetics (152–153).

In Chapter 7 (167–193) Wayne explicates his special sense of metaphor, adding cognitive science to his otherwise constant bricolage of Kant, Marx, and Frankfurt thinkers. As a modality of the aesthetic, metaphor functions on the basis of a ‘projective reordering’ that ‘can open up a reified world to the possibilities that the dominant order seeks to close off’ (190–191). Wayne's adoption of negative dialectics is particularly pronounced in this chapter; any reordering requires first an explosive dismantling, an operation for which cinema is well suited. As Wayne posits, citing Benjamin: ‘Film explodes this reified world, turning it into “ruins and debris,” which is to say montage elements that can be reconfigured dialectically for cognitive travelling’ (180). Chapter 8 (195–216) usefully abbreviates and concludes the preceding chapters, insisting again that Kant is best understood only when his philosophy of the aesthetic has been rendered in terms that emphasise its capacity for transforming the grids by which the world is regimented, which means seeing the aesthetic as a thoroughly material and historical force (216).

Wayne's is a book of philosophy, but he nonetheless finds occasion to discuss film where it contributes to the demonstration of his revised, socially transformative understanding of the aesthetic. Wayne's short, but illustrative analysis of Michael Haneke's Caché/Hidden (France/Austria/Germany/Italy, 2005) exhibits what he has in mind in bringing the social to bear on the aesthetic: ‘The critique which Hidden directs at the erasure of that omniscient camera telling the story pivots precisely on the inscription of the other into the form of the film in the form of the hidden video camera’ (103). This is perhaps the central point of the book, namely that when ‘the aesthetic is working aesthetically’ (as Wayne might say), the play of form instantiates a relation to the other that is otherwise occluded by ‘dominant or typical enunciations’ of our ‘social being’ (2). Wayne is thus drawn to films that he takes to be examples of Julio García Espinosa's ‘imperfect cinema.’ Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Hurricane Katrina documentary, Trouble in the Water (USA, 2008), for example, ‘inscribes the imperfections and tensions of the social environment that is the context of the film into its very formal structure’ (190).

Wayne does more than simply make a familiar plea for the role of the aesthetic as socially transformative; he situates his case within Kant's formidable philosophical system and draws consequential links to Marx, all the while deflecting, through helpful explication, the views of his ‘bourgeois’ interlocutors.