Terada - Looking Away (Selections).pdf - Townsend Humanities Lab

Pretext
Philosophers have never hesitated to affirm a world provided it contradicted this world
and furnished them with a pretext for speaking ill of this world. It has been hitherto
the grand school of slander; and it has imposed itself to such an extent that today our
science, which proclaims itself the advocate of life, has accepted the basic slanderous
position and treated this world as apparent, this chain of causes as merely phenomenal.
What is it really that hates here?
Die Philosophen haben nie gezögert, eine Welt zu bejahen, vorausgesetzt, dass sie
dieser Welt widerspricht, dass sie eine Handhabe abgiebt, von dieser Welt schlecht zu
reden. Es war bisher die grosse Schule der Verleumdung: und sie hat so sehr imponiert,
dass heute noch unsere sich als Fürsprecherin des Lebens gebende Wissenschaft die
Grundposition der Verleumdung acceptiert hat und diese Welt als scheinbar, diese
Ursachenkette als bloss phänomenal handhabt. Was hasst da eigentlich?
—Nietzsche, Will to Power §461; KSA 13.319
Nietzsche’s fulminations against the invention of phenomenality are the
high water mark of the moralization of arguments about appearance and
reality. While Nietzsche’s complaint against metaphysics is clear enough—
proposing that there is another world is “speaking ill of this world”—the
psychology he attributes to metaphysical philosophers is less transparent.
Nietzsche insinuates that uneasiness is the compliment these philosophers
pay to the given world; apparently, they take the elaborate detour of metaphysics
because they feel they have to be careful about their criticism.
Why, we might ask, do they need “a pretext for speaking ill of this world”?
What is it about the trompe l’oeil of appearance and reality that gets this
job of tacit world-criticism done so well? And what does Nietzsche imag-

2 looking away
ine would happen if these philosophers spoke more openly? Who, indeed,
is hating whom?
We hardly need Nietzsche’s indignation to remind us how thoroughly
the language of appearance is taken personally, in actual exchanges and in
philosophers’ fantasies of them. Stanley Cavell’s work has made the psychology
of this strain a philosophical subject, focusing especially on one
figure, the person usually referred to in the lonely singular as “the skeptic,”
who seems to care inordinately about appearance and reality. Interpreting
the mutually irritable conversation between the skeptic and her or
his—almost always, his—interlocutors, Cavell explains that the skeptic is
perceived as wanting something fundamentally unreasonable, something
more than conditions on our planet can provide. Cavell interprets the
skeptic’s language as a request for social acknowledgment in the guise of a
failed epistemic statement. In his account, skeptical scruples about appearance
and reality transmit fears and desires about interpersonal understanding:
“acceptance in relation to objects” corresponds to “acknowledgment in
relation to others.” 1 I’ll return to Cavell, since I share his emphasis on the
infusion of the problem of appearance and reality with value judgments
and psychological needs. Like Cavell in The Claim of Reason, I am interested
in how one might feel about aspects of existence that, in their exigency
and impersonality, transcend feelings. Such exigencies are often
called “facts.” The notion of the “given” in the Kantian sense, meaning appearances
that present themselves and the laws and limits that produce
them, is another such figure of exigency, and the “given world” can function
as a figure of the largest fact—not directly perceivable, but knowable
through Kantian critique. 2 Nietzsche is outraged that anyone could imagine
liking or disliking a necessity as powerful as “this world.” That he can
be suggests that fact perceptions are normative, not only of actions, but of
likes and dislikes, thoughts and feelings. We must not only take fact perceptions
into account when navigating reality, but our feelings about them
1. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1979), 454; Cavell refers as well here to his own “Avoidance of Love: A Reading of
King Lear,” inMust We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1969), 267–353, p. 324.
2. I’ll always use “given” in this sense, not the pre-Kantian one of the surfaces of
things.

pretext 3
must stay within acceptance. Cavell’s analysis too assumes that “acceptance”
is the default response to objects. My first thesis is that such an endemic
normative pressure on thoughts and feelings cannot be without
consequence.
Obviously, figures of exigency stand within the social. One can and
should argue about what counts as a fact, a natural law, a given, and my assumption
throughout is that these arguments are always ongoing. They
may also concern different objects: fact perceptions, psychic facts, social
facts, givens, the given world. One of the reasons the arguments never stop
is that one comes under some pressure from every perceived fact. And
since that pressure arises even in cases that are mistaken, my main point is
not to say where I think the argument about what counts as a fact (or a
given, or the given world) should end. At issue is the dynamic that unfolds
when someone approaches or arrives at what counts in the case at hand as
one of these things. I’m especially interested in the way this happens after
Kant establishes that the world of stable appearances is the given world.
The idea of “accepting” givens or not—especially on the largest scale,
that of the Kantian enabling conditions of space, time, and consciousness—can
seem fantastic from the outset. When we persevere in such
thoughts anyway, it’s with embarrassment about extending them to the areas
where they seem to matter the least. Amid that embarrassment, I want
to suggest, the discourse of mere phenomenality registers surreptitiously
the difficulty of opining about the given. “Appearance” here carries the
Nietzschean connotation of “mere” appearance, of pejorative attenuation.
We think about appearance in this way when we want to create distance
between ourselves and the given world, and this distance reads as a failure
to endorse the given world, just as Nietzsche charges. At the same time
implying, as Nietzsche also does, the illegitimacy of any desire to refrain
from endorsing the given, the discourse of mere phenomenality stops
short of objection: it only registers a wish to be relieved for a moment of
the coercion to accept whatever one does not dispute.
If the idea of mere appearance is a consequence of the felt pressure of
fact perception, this effect takes on a particular intensity in the post-
Kantian era for the very reason that Kant normalizes appearance. After
Kant, one needs particularly ephemeral perceptual experiences, perceptions
that seem below or marginal to normal appearance, to figure the possibil

4 looking away
ity of fleeting relief from the pressure to endorse what Kant calls the
world “as is.” I’ll refer to the cultivation of such perceptions—as we’ll see,
it takes a little technique—as “phenomenophilia.” Phenomenophilia is
looking away at the colored shadow on the wall, or keeping the head
turned to the angle at which the sunspot stays in view. Studies of looking
away have been undertaken in various disciplines. Erving Goffman, citing
Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, remarks on a “kind of inward emigration
from the gathering [that] may be called ‘away,’” to which “strict
situational regulations obtain.” 3 Observing his data source, a group of hospitalized
mental patients, Goffman notices that they “frequently employed
. . . ‘toy-involvements’ as a means of going away. Walking up the steps in a
line of patients coming back from lunch, one person would suddenly stoop
and take delight in examining a small fleck of color in the concrete” (Behavior
in Public Places, 74). Jonathan Crary has documented the history and
visual technology of such gestures eloquently and understands well their
imbrication in “a tangled social and psychic machinery of sublimation.” 4
The romantic and post-romantic discourse of mere appearance reflects,
positively and negatively, a subterranean practice of phenomenophilia in
which the most transient perceptual objects come to be loved because only
they seem capable of noncoercive relation.
Although I agree with Cavell that one can only think about what it
means to “accept” the given in psychological, not strictly philosophical,
terms, his conclusion that the skeptic needs to have concerns acknowledged
by others, and in return acknowledge the inescapable conditions
of interpersonal relation, calls for further analysis. The origin of the friction
between skeptic and realist is no less obscure in social than in
epistemological terms, and the imperative to acknowledge unavoidable
3. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings (New York:
Free Press, 1963), 69.
4. The “absorbed perception” of Manet, Cézanne, and Seurat, Crary explains, involved
“the evasion of a vision that laid bare an injured horizon of unfulfilled yearnings.
Yet in its suspension, it also produced the conditions in which the apparent necessity
and self-sufficiency of the present could be dissolved” (Suspensions of Perception: Attention,
Spectacle, and Modern Culture [Cambridge: MIT P, 1999], 362). My project is
wholly in sympathy with Crary’s, although I emphasize phenomenophilia’s responsiveness
to a newly stabilized fact perception.

pretext 5
conditions of relation to others is no more self-evident than the imperative
to accept objects. Leszek Kolakowski points out that while one can bear to
imagine that objects are illusions of a Cartesian demon, one cannot bear to
imagine that other people are. 5 While this thought experiment shows hunger
for communication with others, there remains a gap between the value
of the communication itself and the value and content of its affirmation.
The question becomes important because the need for communication per
se is usually not in dispute in the first place, while what one should feel
about its presence is. There are times in Cavell’s work when the requirements
of acknowledgment seem lighter or heavier than at other times; and
in the texts I read, what counts as “acceptance” varies as well from bare
registration to emphatic affirmation. What counts as acceptance is as ambiguous
as what counts as given. I will argue, however, that even registration
at its barest brings an expectation of some endorsement and hence potential
difficulty. Maybe this expectation—an expectation that goes by the
philosophical name of the fact/value problem—even accounts for human
beings’ resistance to the mere recognition of unwelcome facts.
Although I realize that the fact/value problem is not going to clear up, I
do believe that the rigidity of particular assumptions within it causes unnecessary
duress. In this book, I try to dwell in the space before the acceptance
of any perceived fact, and hope by doing so to make available a different
kind of epistemological therapeutics. Its first and, if necessary, only
phase is letting the duress be there. The realm of mere phenomenality to
which Nietzsche objects dilates in the romantic era to compensate for the
absence of such a free space. From the perspective from which such a
space is desirable and possible, one can hope to understand better what
was and remains at stake in the margins of phenomenality.
There is probably no such thing as a quick outline of my argument, but
I’ll summarize its stages now, and afterward will address further some of its
main suppositions and aims. In Chapter 1, I consider S. T. Coleridge’s
Notebooks as a case study of the mind that feels guilty about its discomfort
with the coercion of the given and becomes a connoisseur of ephemeral
phenomenality in order to manage a discomfort that remains unspeakable.
5. Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror, ed. Agnieszka Kolakowska, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 2001), 25.

6 looking away
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, I’ll argue, sets up structures whose unfore-
seen consequences Coleridge lives out. Coleridge becomes enamored of
optical illusions and other visual ephemera (which he calls “spectra”) because
they make no claim on his endorsement, over and against obsessive
thoughts and memories, which he experiences as immutable internal facts
(“spectres”). Although Coleridge considered himself a Kantian, his psychic
life reads like an involuntary flight from critical philosophy, with its inexorable
inner laws from which he seeks respite in the most transient and
merely apparent phenomena he can find.
In Chapter 2, I explain how Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason triggers the
interest in offbeat perception in which Coleridge participates. By normalizing
appearance (Erscheinung) and requiring its acceptance, Kant unwittingly
encourages fantasies of aberrant perception that might escape his
strictures and hence his recommended path to world-acceptance. To understand
the resistance Kant inspires, it helps to understand that the First
Critique proposes a kind of therapeutics: by establishing narrow limits for
knowledge, the Critique of Pure Reason isolates minimal responsibilities of
acceptance. What’s radical about the First Critique is how minimal Kant is
willing to be: Kant would make accepting the world bearable by miniaturizing
the endorsement due to it. Kant wants his readers to realize the given
world’s limits—in the pejorative sense of liabilities as well as boundaries—
in order to realize, secondarily, that the amount of respect we have already
paid it in this very apprehension is all we owe. What Kant succeeds in conveying,
however, is mostly that the world “as is” is necessarily appearance.
So, in the new circumstances of replete appearance that Kant furnishes, to
anyone who is not ready to accept Kant’s world aberrant appearance becomes
suddenly indispensable. This result also bears implications for post-
Kantian aesthetics. The Critique of Judgment excludes the most ephemeral
and indefinite perceptions from aesthetic experience because they cannot
sustain the thought of commonality that Kant wishes to affirm; from the
phenomenophilic point of view, however, that’s exactly the appeal of these
perceptions. Because no one can be imagined to share them, no one can be
imagined to appropriate, benefit from, or push one to endorse them. They
offer a glimpse, not of spontaneous accord but of freedom from the demand
for agreement. Of course, spontaneous accord is itself a figure of
freedom from the obligation to agree. But while Kant’s aesthetic is posi-

pretext 7
tive, looking away is its negative other: nothing less than an alternative to
aesthetics, a counteraesthetic that plays on the periphery of the aesthetic.
In the third and fourth chapters, I explore Nietzsche’s, Hegel’s, and
Adorno’s reactions to Kant. Chapter 3 skips forward to Nietzsche’s response
to the First Critique, especially in The Birth of Tragedy and late
fragments. An even guiltier phenomenophile than Coleridge, Nietzsche
alternately extols the pleasures of phenomenophilia and expresses contempt
for anyone, most of all himself, who needs its help. He identifies
anxiously with the “nihilist” who “cannot endure this world though one does
not want to deny it” and consoles himself by looking away at “attenuated,
transient [verflüchtigt]” phenomena, “the less real, the more valuable,” 6
yet repels this same impulse as a sign of constitutional weakness. Eventually
Nietzsche rejects the very concept of appearance and attempts to
force acceptance of totality in the theory of the eternal return. In Nietzsche’s
typically hyperbolic language, robust affirmation is required for acceptance.
The phases of Nietzsche’s career, moving from commitment to
appearance to radical affirmation, demonstrate the tension between affirmation
and the concept of phenomenality as such, and what Nietzsche believes
to be the need to choose between them.
Chapter 4 reads Adorno’s reply to philosophy’s policing of worldacceptance
through his 1960s lectures and writings on Hegel and his major
late texts, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory. On the way this
section also circles back to take stock of Hegel’s response to Kant. Deploying
legal figures of right and appeal that recall Kant’s “tribunal” of
critical reason, Adorno dialecticizes “fact” and “illusion” to analyze their
ambiguity and susceptibility to ideological use. As Adorno points out,
Hegel works in a territory of explicitly social facts that sharpens questions
about what counts as given. Hegel too dialecticizes appearance and actuality,
but only to reinforce the authority of facts. Although he argues that
mere appearance is more valuable than mere existence, he is no friend
to ephemera; his belief that appearance is a stage in the development of
6. The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), §12, §572, hereafter WP; Sämtliche Werke
(Kritische Studienausgabe), ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter,
1967–1977), 13.48, 12.253, hereafter KSA.

8 looking away
actuality is the opposite of the phenomenophilic appeal to mere appear-
ance for a reprieve from endorsing the inevitable. Hegel intensifies facts’
capacity to intimidate by positioning them as outcomes of legitimate historical
processes. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory argue
for the value of unfulfilled possibility and the insignificant particular over
and against historical process and the dominant facts it seems to produce,
redialecticizing fact and illusion to undo Hegel’s bias. For Adorno,
“Schein”—the word Kant reserves for illusion, often rendered by Adorno’s
translators as “semblance”—is most of all fact perception itself, naturalized
and emboldened to coerce.
Adorno’s relation to phenomenophilia, though, is almost as conflicted as
Coleridge’s and Nietzsche’s. Aesthetic Theory follows the Third Critique
more than the First, canonical aesthetics more than phenomenophilia. On
the one hand, artworks that struggle against the Schein of facticity by trying
to bare their own illusion win Adorno’s allegiance. In Adorno’s aesthetic
theory, the artwork’s explosion of fact perception frees its perceivers,
for a moment, to do the same. Its self-negation provokes the thought that
the given world could and should be otherwise; it demonstrates the “concrete
possibility of doing things differently” from the given prescribed as a
norm. 7 On the other hand, to do this, Adorno believes, artworks have to
risk the status and borrow the illusory authority of facts in the social world.
Adorno therefore passes over phenomenophilia, which, rather than negating,
declines to affirm, and discovers a free space before rather than within
the aesthetic. Like Nietzsche, Adorno is phenomenophilic in a guilty mode,
and is reluctant to undermine the artwork by indulging in perceptions that
cannot be imagined to be shared. Nonetheless, Adorno is the great philosopher
of dissatisfaction with the given. With Adorno, I’ll argue that one
may feel justified in having desires even when there is no possibility of fulfilling
them, and in the dissatisfaction that is their shadow; and that the absence
of a grammar for such feelings reflects a prevailing, and deeply internalized,
unfreedom. Unlike Adorno, I’ll also suggest that these sentiments
whose value he recognized are best expressed on the edges of the artwork
and outside it.
7. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge:
Polity, 2006), 68, hereafter HF.

pretext 9
Finally, by reading features of the texts in this book that have often been
understood as queer—for instance, the recurrent fear that alienation is
caused by bodily difference, and the justifiable intuition that alienation is
grounded in some difference—I would like, throughout, to show that the
phenomenality/dissatisfaction connection reflects a momentous collision
between enlightenment epistemology and queer thought. Reread through
this idea, Kant may be seen to observe the collision and arrange terms for
its assimilation by philosophy. Attention to the queer strands of the discourse
of mere appearance helps to explain the conflict between accepters
and dissenters from the given. Historically, it’s queer consciousness that
has sensed most keenly the moments when fact is ambiguously social or
natural, and has had motive and energy to examine and reexamine even
those pervasive conditions that seem most natural. In the persistence of
the queer mind and body, dissatisfaction “against nature” discerns its own
durability and legitimacy. This is a point I won’t make in any one place,
but neither will it ever be far away.
The origin of Western culture’s association of phenomenality with a discourse
of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, in which to call something apparent
is usually to imply dissatisfaction with it, is often traced to Greek and
Christian metaphysics. In the passage I’ve used as an epigraph, Nietzsche
pushes further, asking why metaphysicians ever thought of a merely apparent
world in the first place. I agree with Nietzsche that the question demands
a fuller answer. The phenomenality/dissatisfaction coupling is too
odd to be taken for granted, even as its entrenchment channels notions of
experience toward teleology and affirmation. As a result, too much interest
in phenomenality for itself, whether celebratory or critical, becomes hard
to understand. No one less than Sextus Empiricus announces, “Nobody, I
think, disputes about whether the external object appears this way or that,
but rather about whether it is such as it appears.” 8 Sextus’s point is that
8. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism, trans. with introduction
and commentary by Benson Mates (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), Book 1, §22.
Mates notes that the secondary literature on Sextus often suggests that since a skeptic of
Sextus’s type “is not sure of even the most elementary facts about the external world, he
will be paralyzed or hesitant in many circumstances in which confident behavior is

10 looking away
no matter what position one takes on object skepticism, it shouldn’t matter
whether objects seem pale or vivid. Nonetheless, it’s striking that even
Sextus, philosophy’s major advocate of the consequences of particular sensations,
wants to claim that “nobody” is interested in the phenomenology of
phenomenality. Berkeley similarly dissociates himself from such an interest,
partly to ward off the suspicion that there is something qualitatively
different about experience for someone who believes that all experience
is phenomenal. Berkeley finds the implication of deviance hard to shake,
and believes that it is projected onto him by an audience that fears that its
quality of life is imperiled by his system. “Be not angry,” he writes to an
imaginary reader in his Commonplace Book. “You lose nothing, whether real
or chimerical. Whatever you can in any wise conceive or imagine, be it
never so wild, so extravagant, and absurd, much good may it do you. You
may enjoy it for me. I’ll never deprive you of it” (quoted in The Skeptic
Way, 73). Berkeley fantasizes an interlocutor like Nietzsche who takes
phenomenalism personally, as an offense against the given world—or
somebody’s given world. 9 Who is imagined to threaten here?
If turning to phenomenality gives offense, that is because fact is so
deeply conflated with value. Much as Cavell argues that acknowledging
others and accepting objects are versions of the same problem, here two
problems are really one: debates about dissatisfaction and satisfaction, on
the one hand—how to feel about givens that are either natural or so pervasive
as to be possibly natural, as in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents—
and debates about appearance and reality, on the other. The latter conversation
is a transposed, politer rendition of the former. Now, the close relation
between the positive terms in these two series—satisfaction and reality—is
well recognized in discussions of the fact/value problem, beginning
with Hume’s classic diagnosis of fact/value conflation:
called for; and that even if he somehow overcomes this handicap, he will, at the very
least, talk in odd ways and thus suffer the consequences of being considered eccentric or
worse.” For his part, Sextus tries to make it clear that “the Skeptic will be hard to distinguish
from the common man” (Mates, Skeptic Way, 70). This slide in the discussion of
skepticism from the merits of differing epistemologies to style and conformity is common,
as Mates points out.
9. “Phenomenalism” is Berkeley’s term for the belief that physical objects can be
redescribed as sensations.

pretext 11
In every system of morality which I have hitherto met with, I have always
remark’d, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary
way of reasoning, and establishes the being of God, or makes observations
concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surpriz’d
to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and
is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought,
or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the
last consequence. For as this ought or ought not, expresses some new
relation or affirmation, ’tis necessary that it should be observ’d and
explain’d; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what
seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction
from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors
do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend
it to the readers; and am persuaded that this small attention wou’d
subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction
of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of
objects, nor is perceiv’d by reason. 10
John R. Searle summarizes the “modern version” of Hume’s observation
this way:
there is a class of statements of fact which is logically distinct from a
class of statements of value. No set of statements of fact by themselves
entails any statement of value. Put in more contemporary terminology,
no set of descriptive statements can entail an evaluative statement
without the addition of at least one evaluative premise. To believe
otherwise is to commit what has been called the naturalistic fallacy. 11
Although the naturalistic fallacy may have been standardized in the era of
late positivism during which Searle was trained, it afterward lapsed into
unpopularity again. Hume’s skepticism regarding fact and value remains
10. A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–1740], ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford
UP, 1888), 469.
11. “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is,’” in The Is-Ought Question: A Collection of Papers
on the Central Problem in Moral Philosophy, ed. W. D. Hudson (London: Macmillan,
1969), 120–134, p. 120.

12 looking away
remarkable; many twentieth-century thinkers decline the “precaution” he
prescribes. J. L. Austin famously refers to the fact/value distinction as a
“fetish.” 12 Today critics are properly likely, like Austin, to doubt that facts
can present themselves at all without preexisting values that help them to
their factive status. Fact/value conflation is defended not only by value
relativists and analysts of ideology, but also by moral realists who still hope
to use facts to stabilize values. Thus Searle continues, “one of the things
wrong” with “the traditional empirical view....isthat it fails to give us any
coherent account of such notions as commitment, responsibility, and obligation”—a
good description of what is productively radical about Hume
(“How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is,’” 130). About two thirds of The Is-Ought
Question, the 1969 collection of essays in which Searle writes, including his
own essay, is devoted to reducing “ought” to “is” or deriving “ought” from
“is” for disparate motives. Cumulatively, the essays in the collection give a
strong impression of the force of the fact/value conflation, if not of the
arguments in its favor. My point is not that the fact/value conflation can
or should be purged—through a reading of Kant’s First Critique in Chapter
2, I’ll agree with Kant that at a single crucial point, fact and value do
come together—but to give a sense of the enormous pull of the fact/value
conflation and therefore of its potential psychological violence. 13
Psychoanalysis provides a naturalistic ground for valuing fact, and adds
that the fact/value conflation runs in both directions: from value wishfully
to would-be fact as well as from fact to value. In Freud’s and Ferenczi’s
pioneering essays on the formation of the sense of reality, the infant ignores
all external and internal unwanted facts. In the infant’s world, protoversions
of both the ego and external reality are felt to be omnipotent. Before
fact and value can be said to exist in mature form, “whatever was
12. How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed., ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà (Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 1975), 150. See also Hilary Putnam, The Collapse of the Fact/Value
Dichotomy and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002).
13. When George Kateb notes that “the world, as given, is disliked; it is disliked in
large part just because it is given” (“Technology and Philosophy,” Social Research 64
[1997]: 1225–1246, p. 1241), he writes from within the fact/value conflation, against the
dislike. Kateb believes that dislike can be explained by a primary preference for action
and frustration with action’s limits. Possibilities left out by assuming a primary preference
for action are explored in Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted
Experience (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008).

pretext 13
thought of (wished for) was simply presented in a hallucinatory manner.” 14
To survive, the infant has to trade magical principles for empirical ones
and learn to distinguish fact and value enough to recognize “what [is] real,
even if it happen[s] to be disagreeable” (Freud, “Two Principles of Mental
Functioning,” 219). Still, psychoanalysis does not maintain that fact and
value should remain entirely independent. While the infant proceeds from
value to fact, the adult may proceed from fact to value, striving to see
whatever is or has happened as deserving respect to some degree. The
question is how much value facts are owed. Ferenczi writes that facts are
“reckoned with,” a figure that posits an ability to calculate the respect different
facts are owed. Radically, for psychoanalysis even psychic fact has a
hold by its very existence on value, so that part of the challenge of working
through is to recognize adequately both psychic and external facts, even
when they conflict. Freud’s principle of minimal value reaches even to one’s
illness, for example, which “must no longer ...seem contemptible,” but
rather be understood as a “worthy” enemy “out of which things of value
. . . have to be derived.” 15 By itself this principle sets psychoanalysis apart
from traditional a priori moral systems. Complementary to Hume’s empiricism,
which refuses to value any type of fact a priori, psychoanalysis declines
to exclude a minimum positive value from any.
14. Sigmund Freud, “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning”
[1911], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1958), XII: 218–226, p. 219, hereafter
SE. See also Sandor Ferenczi, “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality,” in
First Contributions to Psycho-Analysis [1916], trans. Ernest Jones (New York: Brunner/
Mazel, 1952), 213–239; and “The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasant Ideas—Advances
in Knowledge of the Sense of Reality” [1926], in Further Contributions to the Theory
and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Jane Isabel Suttie et al., ed. John Rickman
(London: Hogarth, 1950), 366–379. Hans Loewald adds that “not only the ego, at such
a stage, has magical powers or is a magical power, but also reality is a magical power.”
See “Ego and Reality,” in Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven: Yale UP, 1980), 3–20,
p. 19.
15. Freud, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” [1914], in SE XII:
147–156, p. 152. The pragmatic situation of the infant shows that any knowledge of fact
is potentially useful and hence valuable, and that fact’s usefulness outlasts that of wishing.
This utilitarian explanation implies that the reality principle is defenseless when
there seems to be no point to grasping a difficult fact, or not enough to overcome the
advantage of ignoring it.

14 looking away
Again, there are many ways of imagining what it means to “value”
facts—from the bare identification of a piece of reality, at one pole, to “accepting”
it (the most undertheorized possibility), to endorsing it, to cheering
it on. Not only is fact/value conflation ingrained in psychology; the
various senses of “value” are also, as a consequence of the fact/value conflation,
secondarily conflated. The more you conflate fact and value, the
more you’re going to count identifying the bare existence of something as
endorsing it. And as already mentioned, it’s also uncertain what counts as a
fact. There’s all the difference in the world between natural, inevitable
facts or conditions and contingent, temporary ones, yet it’s often obscure
which are which, and that ambiguity is available to be exploited. Gardenvariety
facts may be treated as though by their facticity as such they participated
in a more significant and lawful necessity. In the realm of the social,
there are probably very few true inevitabilities, yet many conditions
are constant or recurrent enough to make one ask whether they might
possibly be inevitable, even though questions about the bounds of the social
can never be laid to rest from within the social. Freud’s question about
whether the baseline discontent caused by “states and societies” is finally
“a piece of unconquerable nature” is the paradigm of all such open questions.
16
Now, the association between phenomenality and dissatisfaction—the
subject of this book—is the underside of the fact/value problem, formed
by the negative members of the series appearance/reality and dissatisfaction/satisfaction.
Descartes describes the “various motions ...traced out
in the air by the tip of the quill” while he is writing, which sketch a second
script behind him “even though I do not conceive of anything real passing
from one end to the other.” 17 Like that second, aerial script, the problem
of phenomenality and dissatisfaction follows that of fact and value in an
unattended way.
There would seem to be something illegitimate about the position of
“appearance” within this formulation. Even before Kant, an appearance is
16. Civilization and Its Discontents [1930], in SE XXI: 64–145, p. 88.
17. Rules for the Direction of the Mind, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans.
John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1985), 1: Rule 12.

pretext 15
not the opposite of a fact. Rather, in the vernacular notion of appearance,
vision across distance is a metaphor for seeming: an appearance is something
like a hypothesis that is either borne out or discovered to be misleading
on closer inspection. (Because of the metaphor that links seeing with
understanding, and for other reasons that will emerge later, visuality is the
privileged form of phenomenality involved in the discourse of satisfaction
and dissatisfaction.) By the logic of this figure, perceiving an object as an
instance of appearance—in the mode of appearance—comes to be experienced
as postponing the requirement to endorse it as reality. This faux-logical
inference insinuates itself into various styles of thought.
Analytic philosophy’s useful distinction between object perception and
fact perception, for example, deploys it, and helps to show why the demand
for affirmation raised by the fact/value conflation could make one
want to linger in a self-conscious mode of appearance. According to this
distinction, perceiving an object (it passes across my field of vision) isn’t
the same as perceiving the fact of the object (I recognize that it’s there,
what it is); and it is perceiving the fact of the object that’s generally taken
to produce, seamlessly, knowledge of and belief in the existence of the object.
Only fact perception induces belief. 18 The question is what is entailed
by “belief”—minimal realization? Consent? Affirmation? But the difference
between reluctant acceptance and robust affirmation isn’t as great as
one might think, since fact/value conflation tends to make acceptance
count as affirmation, and so to demand affirmation. That whatever is entailed,
however, is not required by object perception suggests that if one
wants to avoid the value entailments of fact, it might seem possible to do
so by lingering in object perception. The luxuriousness of lingering comes
from the lifted obligation to declare oneself. So, Walter Benjamin prefers
one hashish experiment to another by noting that while the first one “loosened
objects, and lured them from their accustomed world,” the second
“inserted them quite quickly into a new one—far inferior to this intermediate
realm.” 19 For as long as object perception refrains from fact percep-
18. For an open consideration of the epistemic issues, see Fred Dretske, “Seeing, Believing,
and Knowing,” in Visual Cognition and Action: An Invitation to Cognitive Science,
Vol. 2, ed. Daniel N. Osherson, Stephen Michael Kosslyn, and John M. Hollerbach
(Cambridge: MIT P, 1990), 129–148.
19. On Hashish, trans. and ed. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006), 27.

16 looking away
tion, the teleology of judgment is eluded, and the world feels lighter.
We’re a hair’s breadth here from Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgments,
which also enjoy the lightness of nonconceptual perception. I’ll explain in
a moment why this hair’s breadth nonetheless makes the difference between
Kant’s aesthetic and its other. For now, I only want to point out that
the suspensiveness and potential evasiveness of appearance with regard to
fact—the manner in which object perception holds itself apart from fact
perception without negating it, and so lends itself to personification as gentle
and noncommittal—gives appearance its fanciful appeal. The association
of appearance with mereness, lightness, radiance, and hypothesis is
our only way of registering the absence of a weight we carry without
knowing it, the perceived pressure of the given world and its natural laws
on our potential endorsement. 20
This pressure is itself “Phantom or Fact,” as Coleridge would put it. To
feel the pressure is to personify facts, projecting on them a desire for approval
that only other people could really demand. Keats appreciates the
flower for declining to call, “admire me I am a violet!” 21 —and while Keats
was no stranger to the enigmatic force of other people’s mere existence, it’s
possible to measure the distance between his state of mind and Coleridge’s
20. As some forms of appearance have the effect of deferring the imperative to endorsement,
appearance may also be experienced as qualifying the endorsement required
by presenting or seeming to present degrees of facticity. Some facts are better established
than others and could merit different degrees of acceptance; the experience of
mere appearance before or after fact perception awakens our sense of such a possibility.
As though we thought too many givens were all too well established, the notion of degrees
of facticity can also become attached figuratively (and weirdly) to different types
of objects. Elaine Scarry, for example, argues that flowers charm because they are already
filmy and imagelike (Dreaming by the Book: Imagining under Authorial Instruction
[New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001]). Sextus rightly dismisses the epistemological
significance of variously organized objects: laciness or diaphaneity cannot lend an object
a lesser degree of actuality, or qualify our fact perception of it. The attractiveness of rarefaction,
though, responds to the desire for more degrees of actuality, fewer exigencies,
more options. The transient objects typically celebrated by lyric poetry may be experienced
as less demanding with more legitimacy, since they can obligate us only for the
few moments they last. On the various associations of substance understood as rarefied
or “massy,” see Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: U
of California P, 2000).
21. Letter to J. H. Reynolds, February 3, 1818, in Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert
Gittings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970), 61.

pretext 17
by the fact that Coleridge does think the violet requires an admiration he
cannot deliver: he sees, not feels, how admirable it is, and feels guilty accordingly.
22 Even the idea that other people take an interest in one’s ability
to endorse facts must be in part a holdover from the fantasy of omnipotence.
But the feeling of coercion isn’t just paranoid, either; social pressure
is sometimes merely imagined or anticipated and sometimes actually polices
fact/value conflation. The reception of skepticism often validates the
fears of the skeptic, as Cavell demonstrates. Phantom or fact, one can feel
it: an imperative to value facts that is itself a good example of something
ambiguously natural. There is no more logic in endorsing exigencies than
in withholding endorsement from them, however. The main rationale for
accepting givens is the hope that it may make the perceiver or the community
feel or do better, while refraining from accepting them may make
them feel or do worse. But this defense basically reiterates the fact/value
conflation, asserting that valuing facts is in itself productive. The asymmetrical
resistance to negative, but not positive, feelings about givens is
tendentiously normative.
In this way we come around again to the implication that people who
are a little too interested in phenomenality are dodging their affirmative
obligations, and that beneath their evasion is a dissatisfaction that is incoherent
and ought not to be possible. In the dynamic that is the subject of
this book, guilt over what’s repeatedly called a lack of “right” to dissatisfaction
with the given motivates a shift from fact perception to the merely
phenomenal as an evasive manuever. The more dissatisfied the skeptic or
nihilist is, and the guiltier he—almost always, he—feels about his dissatisfaction
(because he supposes, by the logic of the fact/value conflation, the
unnaturalness of his feeling), the more phenomenophilia seems to offer
22. Coleridge knew the answer to W. H. Auden’s rhetorical question: “How would
you feel if the stars were to burn / With a passion for you you could not return?”
Auden’s lines defend unrequited love and fear others’ feelings: “on earth indifference is
the least / We have to dread.” See Auden, “The More Loving One,” in Collected Shorter
Poems 1927–1957 (New York: Vintage, 1975), 282. Rilke’s Orphism is more typically
lyric: “Ja, die Frühlinge brauchten dich wohl [Yes, the springtime needed you]” (Duino
Elegies, in Selected Poetry, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell [New York: Vintage, 1984],
151). Perceiving the fact/value conflation as a psychic pressure furnishes, in effect, another
way to understand the literature of lyric animation.

18 looking away
short-term relief from socially unacceptable sentiments. For tarrying with
phenomenality implies but never spells out mental reservation. Much as
the skeptic and the nihilist have become familiar figures, then, one can be
aware of the solitary, apologetic figure of the phenomenophile, who is
afraid of what he might have to say when called upon to endorse the world
and tries to avoid that moment by lingering in object perception, looking
away at something too slight to present a demand—some wavering
reflection or trick of light. Judging by his interlocutors’ impatience and
his own unease, the phenomenophile isn’t really fooling anybody. Cultivating
mere phenomenality violates the fact/value conflation, whose
logic requires that phenomena which are “not nothing”—a phrase the
phenomenophile likes—be merely not yet discarded, rather than secretly
loved. His stolen reservations are themselves noticed and criticized.
Although premodern theories of appearance provide some indispensable
reference points, 23 I’ll focus here on the modern frame of the problem
established by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason. The First Critique constitutes
a new era in phenomenality and dissatisfaction. It simultaneously
creates a newly normative sense of appearance (Erscheinung) and proceeds
as though the questions of how to know and how to come to terms with
the world were deeply related. In the First Critique Kant seems to think he
is demonstrating not only the limits of knowledge, but how one can accept
what one does know, including those limitations themselves, by providing
a methodology—Kantian critique—that both distinguishes the necessary
from the contingent and shows why one must accept only the necessary. As
I’ll explain, I believe that Kant largely fulfills these goals, and in that respect
has offered more than his readers have cared to take. For thinkers in
the wake of Kant, the First Critique is often experienced as raising the
stakes of perception and rephrasing, rather than dissolving, the problem of
accepting the world. Kant himself backs off from the implicit psychology
of the First Critique, starting with the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, in that he supplements its de facto naturalism—what he might call
its “anthropological” psychology—with moral systematization in the im-
23. The most relevant of these earlier theories are Platonic metaphysics’ use of “appearance”
to render the given world provisional and the Lucretian theory of mere appearance
as a kind of vacated shell.

pretext 19
perative mode. In other words, Kant is himself one of the readers who is
disturbed by the First Critique. All this happens, I think, mostly because
the Critique of Pure Reason is too right: it shakes dearly held wishes for a nature
that is inherently meaningful as it dissolves the fantasmatic responsibilities
for endorsement that would go along with the existence of such a
nature. Modernity still lives its phenomenality and its dissatisfaction in a
peculiar style that comes into being as a kind of defense against the First
Critique.
Kant’s epistemological lexicon will be important, then, yet doesn’t completely
encompass the various senses of phenomenality that arise in the
texts I want to consider, nor the diverse vocabularies of Coleridge, Nietzsche,
and Adorno. A combination of Kantian and other terms is needed.
Most crucial from the First Critique, to begin with, is Kant’s distinction
between “appearance” (Erscheinung) and “mere appearance” or illusion
(Schein).
For Kant, the whole of the plenum is appearance (Erscheinung) by
definition; what is not appearance is “merely intelligible.” 24 As Erscheinung,
appearance is replete, lawful, and connotes no attenuation of the intensity
or reality of what appears. In order to make this point, Kant stresses that
Erscheinung differs from Schein (illusion or semblance, often translated as
“mere appearance”). Unlike Erscheinung, Schein designates a sensory or
cognitive aberrance, a wayward experience that really is an epistemological
dead end. By this criterion, Schein is quite rare. I take it to be a consequence
of Kant’s system that, apart from the exceptional interruption of
Schein, in normal perception appearance is broken only by appearance,
that is, by the renewal or reflexive awareness of appearance. Turning for a
moment from Kant back to the useful distinction between object perception
and fact perception, the reflexive appearance of appearance can be described
as follows: much as one has object perception (something crosses
my gaze) and fact perception (a dragonfly is passing in front of me), one
can also focus on appearance as appearance (I realize that I’m seeing what
I’m seeing, this blurry shape or multicolored dragonfly). Such reflexive
24. Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St.
Martin’s, 1965); Kritik der Reinen Vernunft, ed. Raymond Schmidt (Hamburg: Felix
Meiner, 1956), A259/B315, hereafter CPR.

20 looking away
awareness of appearance, an appearance of appearance, can occur in object
perception or in fact perception, whether one is perceiving Erscheinung or
Schein at the time. Wordsworth, P. B. Shelley, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche,
among others, like to describe what it feels like. Many epistemologists,
including Kant, hold that some kind of apperception is necessary for
any experience at all. In some models, this necessary apperception may be
unconscious; if so, then conscious reflexivity of the sort above would not
be the primary instance of reflexivity, but would only be experienced as if it
were. 25 If, to the contrary, basic apperception is normally minimally conscious,
the reflexive “appearance of appearance” is a matter of intensity: I
feel primarily “I am seeing this” rather than “(I am seeing) this.” “I am seeing
this” is a perfectly rational thought and no illusion. Yet the funny thing
is, appearance with an index has the subversive effect of seeming to suspend
the fact/value conflation and its demand. And this side effect of suspension
is illusory, a trick of the mind.
The suspensive illusion comes about because the relationship between
Schein and the reflexive appearance of appearance is close enough to be
confusing: the latter has come to stand for the former in an almost Pavlovian
way. Because of its exceptionality, Schein is more likely to trigger
reflexivity. If you’re seeing a shower of silver dots, you can hardly forget
that you’re having a perceptual experience. And because Schein induces
reflexivity in this way, reflexivity can make us view Erscheinung as
Schein—as it does every time one looks at something within a literal
frame. In a passage of The Birth of Tragedy that I’ll read later, Nietzsche
observes the suspensive side effect of the awareness in and of itself of appearance.
He remarks of a lucid dream that by virtue of its lucidity we
“have, glimmering through it, the sensation that it is mere appearance [die
durchschimmernde Empfindung ihres Scheins],” and goes on to assert on
the model of the lucid dream that “philosophical men ...even have a presentiment
that the reality in which we live and have our being is also mere
25. Daniel Dennett points out that “second-order thought does not itself have to be
conscious in order for its first-order object to be conscious” (Consciousness Explained
[Boston: Little, Brown, 1991], 307). Richard Moran argues that it is only when the second-order
thought is unconscious that we strongly believe in the object (Authority and
Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001]).

pretext 21
appearance [Schein].” 26 One could call such reflexivity attentiveness to ap-
pearance or to the “process of appearing [Erscheinen].” 27 Reflexivity can
seem to tarry in object perception by foregrounding the for-itselfness of
the perception, its sheerness rather than its mereness. 28 There’s a kind
of analogy, then, between the permanent irrelevance of Schein to fact
perception and the temporary, illusory suspensive effect of reflexive perception
with its conscious second-order thought. The thing to remember
about Schein and the appearance of appearance, given their confusability,
is the following: (1) only Schein is “mere appearance” in the sense of being
misleading illusion and an epistemological dead end; (2) Schein almost
necessarily includes reflexivity, whereas reflexivity’s Schein-effect is
itself an instance of Schein, even as its content may be Erscheinung; (3)
both Schein and the “appearance of appearance” can have either heightening
or attenuating emotive effects; and (4) both are suspensive in relation
to fact perception, Schein epistemically and the appearance of appearance
rhetorically. It is this reflexive, suspensive quality—included in Schein but
also, without loss of reality, in the appearance of Erscheinung—understood
as a temporary phenomenological event and rhetorical effect, in
which I’m principally interested. Reflexive awareness of either Schein or
Erscheinung, of object perception or of very fleeting phenomena, has
liberating or faux-liberating effects, and the cultivation of any of these
states is what I mean by “phenomenophilia.” If I said that Pessoa was
26. The Birth of Tragedy [1872, 1886], trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage, 1967), 34, KSA 1.26.
27. Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing [2000], trans. John Farrell (Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2005), 4. Seel surveys appearing from Baumgartner to contemporary art in order to
argue that art constitutes a special kind of appearing.
Gestalt psychology and Wittgenstein’s notion of aspect-seeing provide related accounts
of perceptual patterns. See Kurt Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1935); Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968). For illuminating
commentary, see Stephen Mulhall, On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on
Seeing Aspects (London: Routledge, 1990).
28. For a brilliant account of the “mere [bloss]” in Kant, see Rodolphe Gasché, The
Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 13–41. Gasché
remarks that unlike the English “mere,” “bloss” does not connote the sheer or utter.

22 looking away
phenemenophilic, I would mean that he is attracted to the way things appear
to him, to his own awareness that they appear to him, and to the
power of looking away to treat Erscheinung as Schein.
Complementarily, when Erscheinung is not experienced as though it
were Schein, or when Schein is perceived as though it were normal appearance,
one is back in the realm of fact perception: the effect of freedom
from the imperative to accept the given is unavailable. So, Kaja
Silverman configures phenomenality and dissatisfaction quite differently
when she (properly) emphasizes the identity between appearance and the
given world. Silverman takes the part of the “world spectators” who, as
she retells the story, decline ideality and remain in Plato’s cave out of
commitment to the given world and the appearances that compose it. 29
For her, the world spectator is a “desiring subject” who “derives pleasure
from his own nonsatisfaction” (World Spectators, 11). Since she construes
appearance as Erscheinung, it makes sense for Silverman to claim
that seeing fundamentally “says ‘yes’ to the world” (20). By the same
logic, though, if you do not want to say “yes” to the world, after Kant
you need an alternative to appearance as Erscheinung. Silverman’s world
spectator also belongs to a community of world spectators for whom one
of the main purposes of language is to enable the comparison of perceptions.
So, Silverman’s narrative moves from perception to language.
Again, using the very same logic, the phenomenophile recedes
from language to mere phenomenality: because no one can share (or appropriate)
one’s merely suspensive, illusory or ephemeral perception,
phenomenophilia becomes a way to get away, or imagine getting away,
from other people.
Defenders of the given tend to be impatient with less than explicit affirmation.
Jean-Luc Marion, for example, objects to Pollock’s and Monet’s
concentration on the “intentional” half of the phenomenological subject/
object dyad because to do so is to create a world “to itself,” “only that,”
where intention dies on the surface of the painting. “Without the work of
the invisible [that is, transcendental laws],” he writes, “what we perceive
as visible actually would offer only a rhapsodic spectacle and confusion
29. Kaja Silverman, World Spectators (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

pretext 23
of colored spots.” 30 Actually, Pollock’s and Monet’s paintings conform to
transcendental laws as much as anyone’s; the laws would not be transcendental
if they didn’t. They only omit what counts as rhetorical affirmation
of those laws, that is, Albertian perspective. Marion’s theory of appearance
is characterized throughout by hostility toward the diversity of perceptual
experience. But it is only somewhat more aggressive than usual in its insistence
on the endorsement of the inevitable.
Phenomenophilia’s asocial moment makes it the other of Kantian aesthetics.
Kant’s aesthetics too appreciates relief from the felt requirement to
value objects that appear through concepts. But while Kant recognizes a
panoply of perceptual objects in the Critique of Judgment, for him only
some of these options are qualified to be objects of aesthetic reflection.
Kant specifically excludes unstable, irregular, and very transient phenomena
from the possible objects of aesthetic reflective judgments, classifying
them as “charms [Reizen]” (literally, attractions or sensory stimuli). They
are ineligible because in Kant’s aesthetic, the perceiver must feel as though
everyone should agree that the object of contemplation is beautiful, even
though one may also know that in fact not everyone will; and we can’t believe
ourselves entitled to this feeling about a perceptual object so ephemeral
that we can’t even imagine that someone else would see it as we do, or
even see it at all. The beauty of phenomenophilia is the mirror image of
Kant’s proto-communitarian beauty. It suits the occasions on which we
don’t want to imagine that someone else could be with us; in which we
want to be sure that someone else doesn’t have to share our perception.
Theories of aesthetic pleasure after the Third Critique tend to ameliorate
the asociality of such a desire. But, as I’ll elaborate in Chapter 2 and Chapter
4, the possibility of a free aesthetic judgment depends on this desire’s
being allowed to exist—even to exist indefinitely.
The dissatisfaction one finds around phenomenophilia is attenuated,
diffuse, and reflexive. One can suffer, or just be uncomfortable, without
30. The Crossing of the Visible [1996], trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford UP,
2004), 21, 12.

24 looking away
minding it (one can even enjoy it); dissatisfaction is minding. Dissatisfac-
tion is discomfort—probably suffering as well, felt with apologetic understatement
as discomfort—accompanied by the comment that it ought not
to be. I can find no reason to distinguish it from the “Unbehagen” of Civilization
and Its Discontents, translated as “discontent” or “malaise.” Freud’s
observation of the social character of Unbehagen and the extra layer of
frustration that comes with its apparent gratuitousness describes the dissatisfaction
associated with phenomenality. It is stronger in social than in
solitary settings; bearable and nontragic, yet relentless. It is reputedly
common, so common that it might be natural and inevitable, yet its commonness
only becomes an excuse for suppressing conversation about it
(why complain about the natural and inevitable?). Freud’s Unbehagen, the
“unbefriedigend” (dissatisfaction) of Nietzsche’s nihilist, and Baudelaire’s
“insatisfaction” decline to name their cause; and that is not surprising, because
phenomenophilic dissatisfaction is diplomatic through and through.
Unlike straightforward derogations of the given world that believers in another
reality feel free to express, it insinuates a reservation it never articulates.
Yet in spite or because of the fact that the phenomenophile’s mild
implication of dissatisfaction promotes no violent thoughts or feelings, it’s
often attached to an internal intolerance of its presence so cruel that it
brings real suffering after all. 31 The phenomenophile is convinced that he
has “no right”—this legal and political figure runs throughout the texts at
hand—to his dissatisfaction.
In his dilemma, the phenomenophile effectively raises the questions of
queer desire. Whether the pervasive conditions from which one demurs
are natural and inevitable, or possibly not; what it means to “accept” the
given world, and by whom and why one’s acceptance seems to be solicited;
whether one would want to endorse it even if one did conclude that its
conditions were necessary and inevitable; what would happen to someone
who decided these were inevitable and yet not acceptable—these concerns
of Coleridge, Kant, Nietzsche, and Adorno resonate with the problems
of queer sensibility. In particular, they are the concerns of closeted desire.
Although phenomenophiles can thematize dissatisfaction’s association
31. Sharp guilt and nonviolence are causally connected, since guilt, like depression,
suppresses violent thoughts prophylactically.

pretext 25
with phenomenality, in itself their recourse to phenomenality politely
postpones judgments. Indeed, phenomenophilia would seem to be the
province mostly of solitary, conflictedly heterosexual and vaguely homosexual
unmarried and mismarried men of dubious or unusually configured
health. In this book, Coleridge, Kant, and Nietzsche are surrounded by
penumbral characters such as Wordsworth, Kleist, Kierkegaard,
Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Pessoa, and Wittgenstein, and associated discourses
of addiction and deviance. Unfolding within the closet in Eve
Sedgwick’s sense—the closet as a figure for the islanded mind with a good
reason to select its own society32 —the phenomenality/dissatisfaction connection
reveals the impact of queer imagination on post-critical thought.
It is not simply that Coleridge, Kant, Nietzsche, and Adorno need to
be included in the annals of queer literature (they already have been). 33
Rather, the phenomenality/dissatisfaction axis shows that the annals of
queer literature pose what is taken to be, as the subtitle of The Is-Ought
Question puts it, “the Central Problem of Moral Philosophy.” In and through
its tact, looking away sheds light on interior and exterior depths of obligation
to the given; the dilemma of givens experienced as mutually exclusive
(the dual intransigences of what is and what ought to be, each of which
may be brought to support either the socially normative or the socially
marginal); and the vast cultural generativity of phenomenophilia as a psychological
strategy. Cavell notes that “if we speak of perversions of human
existence, this will encompass disturbances of satisfaction no more sexual
32. Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990).
33. On Coleridge, Kant, and Nietzsche, see for example Wayne Koestenbaum, Double
Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration (New York: Routledge, 1989); David L.
Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others,” CR: The New Centennial Review
1 (2001): 201–289; and Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, respectively. Adorno’s relation
to queer sexuality has been interpreted variously. Thomas Pepper argues that
Adorno makes available a critique of the “property relation of human beings” without
noticing that this relation “is even more primordial than the gender relations it conditions”;
he suggests that homophobia in texts like the Minima Moralia entry “Tough
Baby” serves to distance the implications Adorno’s thought might have for gender (Singularities:
Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century [Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1997], 48, 42). For more on homophobia in Adorno, see Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions:
Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996).
Adorno’s determined advocacy of homosexuals’ civil rights, however, expresses his vision
of a society free of coercion.

26 looking away
than epistemological, and no more these than political” (The Claim of Reason,
471). In turn, to read looking away as something other than trivially
perverse is to trouble the waters of sexual, epistemological, and political
acceptance of the given as such.
The sections of this book are arranged not quite chronologically. I have
not written a history of aesthetics, perceptual techniques, or post-critical
literature. 34 The plot designates not a progressive historical development,
but the errant route of the recurring association between phenomenality
and dissatisfaction, from which glimpses of the history of philosophy can
be seen, like the ocean from the road.
The texts I consider contribute to larger cultural movements, each of
which potentially opens a new arena. Coleridge’s fondness for optical transience
informs his invention of a type of modern lyric—a first-person
poem that rotates around a single transitory “image” (the prototype is
“Frost at Midnight,” and it models a privileged brand of lyric poem into
the 1970s). Coleridge’s and Nietzsche’s struggles with phenomenal consolation
and self-denial flow from and into the nineteenth-century culture of
decadence through Pater, Wilde, and others. Both Coleridge and Nietzsche
(trailing aspects of Kant’s thought as well, and resembling the post-
Kantian De Quincey’s) associate the optical manipulations of looking
away with appearance-altering drugs. The dynamic of phenomenality and
dissatisfaction contributes in various ways to Goethe’s and Schopenhauer’s
color theories; the development of post-Kantian irony in Kleist and
Kierkegaard; the phenomenality-enthralled nineteenth-century painting
criticized by Duchamp and others as “retinalist”; 35 and avant-garde tech-
34. For a reconsideration of phenomenology that hopes to do justice to perception
for itself, see Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of
Perception [1999], trans. Paul R. Milan (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006); for a
phenomenological approach to phenomenality that treats appearance in historical and
rhetorical terms, see Karl Heinz Bohrer, Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance
[1981], trans. Ruth Crowley (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).
35. On post-Kantian developments in visual taste, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of
the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT P,
1990). On Goethe’s optical theories, see Claudia Brodsky, The Imposition of Form: Studies
in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987). Thanks to
Mia McIver for drawing my attention to the latter.

pretext 27
niques of defamiliarization. Photography, film, and video experiment with
fantasies of solitary phenomenophilia and communal aesthetics. Although
I didn’t feel that I could or should pursue each of these tempting avenues,
I do what I can along the way to indicate where the phenomenality/
dissatisfaction association sparks cultural production, and treat a few
subplots in more detail than the others. As it stands, the texts in this
book are Germanic—even Coleridge is an honorary German. As I didn’t
limit the scope of the project in advance to a national tradition, and am
in no way a Germanist, I take this result to confirm the extraordinary
effect of the First Critique upon the problem and project of accepting the
world.
The texts of phenomenality and dissatisfaction are usually written by
men, as I noted earlier. I’m not sure I can make this impressionistic observation
into something more definitive, or that I know enough about
noncanonical nineteenth-century literature to have a chance of doing so.
Women participate enthusiastically in two discourses next door to that of
mere phenomenality—the Gothic novel, and the romantic activity of affirming
mineral and vegetable nature in a way that notes a problem with
human nature. Both of these modes provide normative terms that could
be more attractive to women writers, who may have had both more motive
and more obligation to practice affirmatively social forms of writing.
The Gothic mode of prolonging object perception, deferring for as long
as possible a determination of fact, is phenomenophilic in desire, while
the ostensible frame of the Gothic emphasizes purposive investigation
and finally closes on facts and their attendant values as solidly as possible.
Similarly, if praising nature is romanticism’s dominant way of criticizing
the all too human—congenial to mainstream romantics like Wordsworth
and Goethe—that’s because the criticism is at least delivered in the act
of endorsing something more enduring and deep—or so it’s hoped—than
society. The negative power this mode can muster can be seen in a remark
attributed to Anaxagoras by Aristotle and quoted by Hannah Arendt
in The Life of the Mind: “When asked why one should choose rather
to be born than not—a question, incidentally, that seems to have preoccupied
the Greek people and not merely philosophers and poets—
[Anaxagoras] replied: ‘For the sake of viewing the heavens and the things
there, stars and moon and sun,’ as though nothing else were worth his
while.” 36 But like Nietzsche’s metaphysicians, praise of nature “affirm[s] a

28 looking away
world” as it speaks ill of another, and so both protects and compromises its
negative force. In the twentieth century there are more female
phenomenophiles; Virginia Woolf is a spectacular and complicated example.
37 I don’t, however, want to support the cliché that until recently
women could not afford speculation, or some such idea, so I’m not satisfied
with these reflections. The only thing that’s clear to me is that I somehow
write about male writers in order to write about myself (thus my
choice of third-person pronoun).
The great philosopher of post-Kantian appearance is Arendt, but she is
not a phenomenophile. I thought of ending this book by considering her
reflections on thinking and the high value she places, in those reflections,
on being able to achieve a robust judgment that fulfills Kant’s dream of a
liking and disliking freely added to cognition. For Arendt, to think is to
perceive a fact and render a judgment on it that is no longer minimal or
obligatory. 38 Unlike all the other readers of Kant in this book, Arendt
reads Kant the way he wanted to be read: appearance for her is always
Erscheinung, with no stolen thrill of the mere or sheer; and she follows
Kant’s direction to progress from reflective withdrawal, to the minimal acceptance
accomplished by critique, to a full-fledged evaluative judgment
that she never hesitates to render. What Arendt has to say about fact perception
begins a related but distinct line of thought about what to do
about world-acceptance amid the all but unassimilable traumatic facts of
the twentieth century. It doesn’t belong to the paradigm of looking away
which I want to consider in and for itself, and which Arendt rarely uses
because she is so good at confronting the Kantian world. Here, I’d like
to give space for once to the notion that one might wish to do something
else.
If the phenomenality/dissatisfaction association furnishes yet another
36. The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 133–134,
quoting Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, trans. J. Solomon, in The Complete Works of Aristotle,
ed. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), 2: 1:1216 a .
37. Ann Banfield describes Woolf’s effort to organize “sensible ephemerids” that resemble
Lucretian appearances into a modernist theory of matter. See Banfield, The
Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2000), 154–158.
38. I address Arendt in “Thinking for Oneself: Realism and Defiance in Arendt,”
ELH 71 (2004): 839–865.

pretext 29
way to understand the social meaning of an epistemological assumption,
one might still ask, given the availability of other approaches, what particular
interest lies in this one, which raises consciousness about a relatively
mild and possibly unavoidable psychic bruise. Obviously enough, impulses
to elude the pressure of the given, calling out what Adorno calls the “too
many legitimate reasons for fleeing” reality, 39 furnish an opportunity to
explore the quality and significance of that pressure. More pointedly,
though, I’d like to propose that not only the capacity for insight in the
phenomenophile’s look away is respectable. Its very desire to withdraw from
what it perceives is worthy of respect, and this desire does not need to be
linked to any future possibility (for genuine sociality, critical perspicuity,
etc.). It is a desire that remains after the suspension of ephemeral perception
has ended, after the ability to withdraw from a perceived demand has
been exhausted. It doesn’t need to be expunged when the hopes that gave
rise to it have expired; it needs not to have to be expunged. I’ll explore the
perhaps utopian implications of this idea through Adorno’s defense of the
particular’s dissatisfaction with the universal in Chapter 4.
Because I want to give the feeling behind phenomenophilia unconditional
space, I won’t argue that looking away justifies itself through the
transcendental movement of reason, reaching for the impossible and thereby
creating a logical space for new possibility. Sartre argues that Baudelaire
“called insatisfaction” what “philosophers today call transcendence,” that
is, the sense that “infinitude [is] the lot of consciousness”; Blanchot reads
Kafka’s Castle as the tale of “an avid and dissatisfied will that always exceeds
the goal and always reaches beyond.” 40 This stance, a legacy of both Kant
and Hegel, is adopted by all of the thinkers in this book at times. I too
think psychic and social structures may be reimagined when one finds one-
39. Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 9, hereafter AT.
40. Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire [1946], trans. Martin Turnell (New York: New Directions,
1967), 38, translation modified; Maurice Blanchot, “Kafka and Brod,” in
Friendship [1971], trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 240–251,
p. 247. Blanchot connects K.’s overreach to the Kantian world of appearance and transcendental
illusion: “K. senses that everything outside of himself—himself projected on
the outside—is only an image. He knows that one cannot trust images nor become attached
to them” (249–250). The association of Erscheinung with mistrust is part of the
misreading of Kant I will be exploring through Coleridge and Nietzsche.

30 looking away
self thinking “unthinkable” thoughts. The idea of transcendental dissatisfaction
can also, however, be a somewhat guilty attempt to instrumentalize
dissatisfaction, if only hypothetically, recasting its recoil as a socially useful
impulse. Although phenomenophilia does have social motives and potential,
when mere phenomenality becomes a figure for the imperative quality
of such a potential, it is no longer part of the discourse of phenomenality
and dissatisfaction. In other words, while heretofore unknown, less compulsory
forms of sociality may be conceived through dissatisfaction and
the kind of appearance that’s related to it, it would be wrong to figure the
appeal of mere phenomenality as a call to which one must respond. It’s
just the opposite. In Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, the spectre is an idealization
on the model of transcendental illusion—an idealization that is never
substantialized, but is “not nothing.” For Derrida, however, the spectre
that is “not nothing” saturates the interior of life. By virtue of its very ontological
indeterminacy it possesses “spectral density” and, with the density
of psychic fact, executes the demand of fact: in Marx’s phrase, it “weighs
like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” 41 In Chapter 2 I’ll suggest, in
41. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, &
the New International [1993], trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 109.
See also Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial
Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia UP, 2003). Cheah extends Derrida’s spectrality
to nationality as an image for the state, then to the postcolonial nation, the image
of unrealized but ever possible freedom (395).
ÒiÓek argues that “the pre-ideological ‘kernel’ of ideology thus consists of the spectral
apparition that fills up the hole of the real. ...What the spectre conceals is not reality but its
‘primordially repressed,’ the irrepresentable X on whose ‘repression’ reality itself is founded”
(“The Spectre of Ideology,” in Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj ÒiÓek [London: Verso,
1994], 1–33, p. 21. Later he gives this X the negative content of “freedom”; and since
“the spectre itself already emerges out of a fear, out of our escape from something even
more horrifying: freedom,” it follows that “our primary duty is not to the spectre” but
to what it defends against (27). Comparing Derrida and ÒiÓek, Orrin N. C. Wang argues
that, unlike Derrida, “ÒiÓek’s analysis of the spectre is still entrenched within the
vocabulary of an opposition between physically genuine materiality and simply mental
idealism,” as seen in ÒiÓek’s use of “the notion of a ‘concrete social analysis’ [ÒiÓek,
“Spectre of Ideology,” 25] that would determine whether class struggle is indeed the
dominant form of antagonism today” (Wang, “Ghost Theory,” Studies in Romanticism
46 [2007]: 203–225, p. 222). I too believe that “our primary duty is not to the spectre,”
but for me both Derrida and ÒiÓek are too idealistic, and too “concrete” in the sense
that they are too idealistic. Derrida is idealistic to the extent that the spectre is felt to

pretext 31
contrast, that in the First Critique transcendental illusion’s status as “not
nothing” means that we have no obligation to act on its basis, no requirement
to respond to its demand. 42 As Coleridge finds, the experience of
the spectre is anything but phenomenophilic; looking away seeks out perceptual
objects that ask for nothing, like violets in Keats and friends in
Kant. It turns toward these perceptions to deflect the other’s invasion, by
the reasoning—the comically quick and amoral reasoning typical of the
unconscious—that if the other is inexorable once perceived, then obviously
one should put off perceiving it or not look straight on. Weightless,
merely phenomenal perception complements the spectre as figure
of the other: it is the other of the inexorability of the other, and of equal
rank.
To the idea of dissatisfaction as transcendental promise we may contrast
the notion that transgression possesses an immanent value, an argument
found in strains of queer theory such as Michael Warner’s The Trouble with
Normal and Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 43
Edelman asks queer theory “to refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation,
which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register
as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (No Future, 4), and suspends along
with that insistence “a faith in the consistent reality of the social” (4, 6). 44
present an injunction whose “power ...lies not in its certitude but in exactly the opposite,
in constative inconstancy,” as Wang points out (Wang, “Ghost Theory,” 204);
ÒiÓek is idealistic because, similarly, he figures the negative force of the real as compulsory
and transcendental. Mere phenomenality is the other of the spectre that presents a
demand, and looking away is the opposite of ÒiÓek’s “looking awry” that projects a new
and repressed real, however unrepresentable it remains.
42. The case is different in later works by Kant. In my canon the Critique of Pure Reason
is Kant’s best work of moral philosophy.
43. Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000); Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham: Duke UP, 2004).
44. Writing in a very different register, Dana Villa observes that “across the political
spectrum we find an emerging consensus that worthwhile criticism must be of the connected
or ‘immanent’ sort,” and continues, “the price of such effectiveness is that no
real challenge to reigning orthodoxies occurs.” Villa asks whether community “engagement
as such is good, regardless of its form or tonality,” and advocates “a partial, never
fully realized transcendence, not luxuriating in custom and convention but straining
against it.” See Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 307, 300, 308.

32 looking away
My argument is closer to this style of thought. The embrace of transgression—if
that’s what it is; this characterization is already tendentious—is
criticized for impracticability and self-contradiction; but to worry about
whether the most compelling givens are really resistible, or what one gets
out of resisting them, seems to miss the point, capitulating in advance to
the instrumental. 45 The point is the usual neglected one of what we think:
whether, inevitable or not, we want the given world to be omnipresent as it
is given, whether and to what degree we endorse it, and whether we want
to have to endorse it. Further, the idea that the recession or even “refusal”
of the phenomenophile is transgressive in the first place adopts a slightly
paranoid point of view, in which simply declining to participate is society’s
fantasy of an insult to itself. Much of what I will describe, and what
Edelman describes for that matter, barely registers as refusal; difference is
the real issue. One of the most moving parts of No Future is Edelman’s description
of the way society, congratulating itself, pursues the merely
omissive queer dissenter Scrooge in Dickens’s Christmas Carol: “‘Keep
Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine,’ Scrooge urges his
nephew, Fred; ‘Keep it!’ the nephew counters, ‘But you don’t keep it.’ ‘Let
me leave it alone, then,’ his exasperated uncle responds” (45). Scrooge has
complained aloud, but it’s not enough that he not complain: nothing would
be enough except his active participation in what everybody is already affirming.
It isn’t a new norm that’s being sought here, only a vacation from
orchestrated affirmation. But from the perspective that has internalized
the coercive point of view, leaving something alone is an aggression toward
it. In contrast, Anne-Lise François expands noninstrumental thought
by bringing forward occasions on which it may not matter whether one affirms
something or not (Open Secrets). François makes the principle of
minimal value I find in Kant and Freud into a principle of humane interpersonal
labor, by which it can never be one’s unilateral job simply to make
oneself known, or simply to provide an awaited endorsement.
The imperative to accept, endorse, and/or affirm things that seem to
45. R. Benjamin Bateman’s review of No Future restores instrumentalism axiomatically,
asserting that the argument “proves insufficient” politically because few readers,
“we can safely assume, want to live in a void or die Antigone’s death.” See “The Future
of Queer Theory,” Minnesota Review 65–66 (2006): 171–175, p. 174.

pretext 33
stand beyond dispute may be understood differently, as a worthy enemy
that is not, finally, more worthy than our feelings are when we feel constrained
by it. One cannot alter inevitabilities, but can release oneself
from hyperboles of affirmation and metaburdens of guilt about wanting
them to be different—another thing from perceiving them as different.
The phenomenophile’s suspensions and imagined suspensions of fact perception
imply critical insight, as though they were proto-assertions of
something that could be coming to be and does not yet have the liabilities
of anything that is. Yet what’s most significant about the phenomenality/
dissatisfaction connection is neither its tacit wish for possibility nor its
negativity per se, but—turning the fact/value conflation around one more
time—its own inherent right to be. We’re within our rights to feel uncomfortable
even with natural inevitabilities, to mind feeling uncomfortable,
and to want to say something about it; and, often, right to wonder whether
we can meet the eye of our neighbor as we think such thoughts. As I mentioned
in connection with Arendt, there are, on the other hand, benefits
that come only through confronting, evaluating, and making public one’s
views about what Arendt always likes to call “the facts.” But that work can
take place amid and beside minding them. Kant and Freud recognize that
getting from A to B—for example, from Coleridge’s state of mind to
Arendt’s—takes a process that Kant calls critique and Freud calls working
through. There is no contradiction between Coleridge’s right to linger as
long as he wishes in phenomenal consolation and Arendt’s satisfaction in
taking on the facts. There is only the paradox of noninstrumental direction:
to achieve a certain state of mind, the best way to set out is to drop
the requirement to get there. 46 Through the realizations of critical reason,
the First Critique makes the judgments of the Third possible—only possible,
not obligatory. To imagine ever sequencing errant looking away and
Arendt’s fully realized, public Erscheinung, it’s actually necessary to refrain
46. Mary Jacobus reflects on D. W. Winnicott’s defense of noncommunication as a
necessary personal resource, and reads Wordsworth’s exploration of similar experiences
of privacy. Wordsworth is remarkable for the scale of his imagination of a mind cavernously
free of objects and available to be filled with its own thoughts. See “Communicating
and Not Communicating: Wordsworth and Winnicott,” in The Poetics of Psychoanalysis:
In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005), 148–169. Thanks to Michelle
Cho for this reference.

34 looking away
from planning that the former give way to the latter: the deconstruction of
instrumentalism is that noninstrumentalism comes first even from an instrumental
perspective.
This right of dissatisfaction with the given world to be there is “the
other of the other”—the other side of the fact/value conflation and its
minimal truth. If the fact/value conflation is minimally valid, as Kant and
Freud hold, we shouldn’t be surprised if it relates to a minimal counterforce
as natural and axiomatic as it is. The spiral of metasuffering that
Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents begins by repressing feelings
about minor sufferings because they are minor, because they are ours,
because they are inevitable, because we know or imagine others would
criticize them, or because we’re not sure what the point of being aware of
them is. This is where moralized arguments about appearance and reality
repeatedly end: in a debate not only about whether human life is inherently
painful, but about whether we have a right to mind. If Adorno is
right that we do, the dilemma of moral philosophy is to work through the
discovery that the fact/value conflation and our resistance to its claims
themselves have equal claims to value. The discourse of phenomenality
and dissatisfaction consists of glimmerings of that discovery that surface
only to disappear, doubting their own right to exist.

1
Coleridge among the Spectra
The last thing Coleridge wanted to be called was an empiricist, yet he devoted
hours of his life to minute descriptions of optical illusions, hallucinations,
and sensory oddities—“spectra,” as he calls them. He records occurrences
as ordinary as afterimages of colors, 1 double vision (N 1863, 2632),
double-take (N 2212), and reflections taken as objects (N 1844, 2557,
3159), and as dramatic as flowers on the curtain that turn into faces
(N 2082); “a spectrum, of a Pheasant’s Tail, that altered thro’ various
degredations into round wrinkly shapes” (N 1681); a “spectrum” of his
own thigh that registered touches as luminous white trails (N 1108); and
the apparition of an acquaintance whom he knows not to be in the room.
On the occasion of this last hallucination Coleridge recalls, “I once told a
Lady, the reason why I did not believe in the existence of Ghosts &c was
that I had seen too many of them myself” (N 2583).
1. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn with Merton
Christensen and A. J. Harding, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957–1990,) 925,
1974, hereafter N.

36 looking away
“Afterimage” is one of the literal meanings of the word “spectrum.”
What Coleridge calls “spectra,” however, are more broadly afterimages,
optical illusions, errors in perception, and very ephemeral visual experiences.
Some of them are what Kant calls “charms,” the stimuli or “attractions”
too fragile to be aesthetic. The meticulousness of Coleridge’s notebook
entries on spectra indicates that Coleridge thought of his enterprise as
a kind of research. 2 It is because Coleridge isn’t a Lockean empiricist that
he is interested in idiosyncratic or illusory appearances that contribute little
to his knowledge; he gathers evidence against overreliance on appearance
by noting every time it misleads. “Often and often I have had similar Experiences,”
he explains, “and therefore resolved to write down the Particulars
whenever they any new instance should occur/as a weapon against Superstition”
(N 2583). Still, Coleridge often sounds as though he doesn’t
quite know why he finds spectra so fascinating—for he is not only intrigued,
but moved. He could fear and love for their own sake mere appearances
that he believed to be insignificant and illusory; complementarily, he could
not always summon fear and love for things that he thought real, pressing,
fearsome, and lovable. His exclamation about the stars and moon in “Dejection:
An Ode”—“I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!” 3 —is exemplary
2. A good example, for patient readers, of Coleridge’s scientific patience is this entry
of 1804: “Tuesday Afternoon, 6 o clock long on my bed within the musquitoe curtain,
which was not drawn by its rings all round the iron rods of the bed, but was within half a
foot or a foot of my face/the curtain muslin with french grass-like Streaks, a little less
than 1 2 an inch broad/divided into three equal parts, the middle red, the 2 outward
green/—As I lay, if I directed my eyes on these streaks, & looked at them, I saw them as
they were/but when I merely lay, & suffered myself to see them only because they were
there, one streak straight before my eye appeared at first to be just by the iron
at the foot of the bed; but in a moment or so the iron rods were all
within the streaks—& by opening voluntarily the pupil of my eyes a little, & rather
thinking of them than looking at them, or to me still more accurately, looking at the
walls of the room, & merely letting the streaks impress my eye, all these streaks fourfold
or more as large as they really were, and much, very much more vivid, lay on the wall up
to the very ceiling, bending up to the very with the wall & ceiling (an which formed an
arch); and the iron rods all distinctly within these/—nay, by rapid glances I could produce
a momentary sensation of the real streaks in their natural size & faintness, & real
situation within the rods that were within these long & vivid Streaks on the wall of the
room—The wall was about just 10 feet from my eyes—a small window right opposite to
my eyes, the curtain about 9 feet or 9 1 4 from it/—” (N 2191).
3. Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text), ed. J. C. C. Mays (Princeton: Princeton UP,
2001), 293, hereafter PW.

coleridge among the spectra 37
of the state of mind in question, one long contemplated in the secondary
literature and utterly characteristic of Coleridge.
Coleridge’s generally pleasurable absorption in spectra stands in contrast
to his terror of obsessive thoughts and ideas, memories, and dreams
as opposed to daydreams. Although they may seem similar in that both
seem epistemologically nearly useless—and what’s worse, one may turn
into the other—there is a strong distinction for Coleridge between spectra
and these experiences, which he calls “spectres.” I believe the terminological
distinction between spectra and spectres is intended by Coleridge: although
their contrast is nowhere thematized in the Notebooks, I cannot find
a single instance when he deviates from the pattern (and he was, as we
know, fond of disambiguation). A spectrum (plural: spectra) is a knowing
collaboration with the sensorium; a spectre (plural: spectres) seems to take
place inside the self, lacks visual distance and often even visualizable attributes,
and is involuntary. Spectres are unwelcome, intractable impositions
that might be called internal objects or psychic facts. 4 If Coleridge is
sometimes puzzled by his attraction to spectra, he is even more puzzled
and frustrated by his fear of spectres he doesn’t believe in. “Most men affected
by belief of reality attached to the wild-weed spectres of infantine
nervousness,” he notes in a jotting of 1806, “but I affected by them simply,
& of themselves” (N 2944).
Coleridge’s concerns—his investment in external and internal objects in
whose reality he doesn’t believe and his perplexity about what he should
feel toward them—are not his alone. Phenomenological qualities of derealization
and hyperlucidity have been treated as signatures of the aesthetic
and of ideology. Recent analyses observe that ideology can captivate
while leaving reality testing untouched: the magic of commodity fetishes
and the senseless resilience of cultural prejudices affect many people
simply and of themselves. 5 Various philosophical traditions struggle, as
Coleridge does, to articulate relations to merely apparitional appearances
4. Versions of Coleridge’s questions about spectra echo in psychoanalytic and psychiatric
discussions of dissociation and in the literature of object relations, especially the
work of D. W. Winnicott, Melanie Klein, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok.
Particularly relevant is Winnicott’s Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971).
5. See Slavoj ÒiÓek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989). See also
Martin Harries, Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of
Reenchantment (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000).

38 looking away
and intransigent psychic facts. In the history of these struggles, I want to
suggest, the attitudes that thinkers take toward phenomenality recurrently
reveal attitudes toward diffuse, low-level dissatisfaction. In classical skepticism,
dissatisfaction is what we’re supposed to feel toward appearance: the
principle of akatalepsia, the idea that appearance tells nothing about nonappearance,
is often treated as though it meant that appearance told nothing
worth knowing. But too much dissatisfaction with appearance is also
treated with suspicion, this time by realists, on the reasoning that even
skeptics’ mistrust of appearance overvalues it. People who seem to be expecting
something from phenomenality can expect to be accused of expecting
too much.
Too much what? Interest in phenomenality for its own sake is interpreted,
and resented, as a desire to escape the inescapable. Skepticism toward
appearance is resented on complementary grounds, as indicating the
questioner’s queer craving, “against nature,” for more than experience can
give. Behind discomfort on these topics lies the assumption that dissatisfaction
with natural conditions—or with social relations broad enough to
suggest dissatisfaction with natural ones—should not be uttered or perhaps
even felt. The conflict over appearance and reality is a second-order
social conflict about what conflicts it is sociable to have.
Coleridge ponders the social dimensions of epistemological attitudes, as
we can see in his remark about “wild-weed spectres.” In what turns out to
be a frequent association, Coleridge attributes his enthrallment with spectra
and his fear of spectres to something like but worse than the credulity
of children. It’s childlike to attach “belief of reality” to ghosts; it’s worse
than childlike—it’s incomprehensible—not to believe in ghosts and still be
affected by them. Caring about phenomena he doesn’t believe in divides
him from “most men,” Coleridge notes with both pride and exasperation.
Although caring beyond belief shows off his autonomy, demonstrations of
that autonomy, ironically, diminish Coleridge’s credibility with other people,
or so he thinks. The situation can also be read the other way around,
to imply that Coleridge cares about spectra because he feels alienated from
most men in the first place. The circularity of explanations means more
than either explanation alone, since it suggests the mutually constitutive
relation of interpersonal and perceptual experience. While we accept in
theory and yet often ignore the idea that every least perception is also a so-

coleridge among the spectra 39
cial interaction, for Coleridge the interfusion of social and perceptual experiences
is noticeable 24/7. One thing that interests Coleridge in spectra
is their capacity to reflect social coercion negatively, their apparent
freedom from the normative force of fact perceptions. By lavishing his
imagination on spectra, Coleridge suspends perception; but even as spectra
are escapist, they also reveal that the imperative to affirm fact perceptions
constrains social relation, and register discomfort with that
constraint.
Of course, Coleridge explored social interaction in his philosophy and
poetry, especially in his thought about collaboration and his development
of the figure of conversation. His interest in spectra is highest when his
partnership with Wordsworth is also at its height, and functions in part
as a shadow commentary on their rivalry. This commentary appears in
Coleridge’s poetry but more often in his Notebooks, as though his reflections
on spectra were even in their private form alternatives to conversation;
and indeed an association between looking away and fragment or
note form recurs throughout the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction
(we will return to this with Nietzsche and Adorno). The challenge
of the Notebooks is that spectra are more rewarding than the personal
exchanges from which they withdraw. This conclusion reaches further
than the curious misfortunes of Coleridge’s interpersonal life. Coleridge’s
thought about spectra suggests that philosophical denigration of the mode
of appearance—dissatisfaction with appearance—displaces the crucial possibility
that appearance is a mode of expressing and repressing dissatisfaction:
that appearance appears where our hope for communication runs
out. This idea radicalizes Georges Didi-Huberman’s observation that
words and images supplement one another, that “an image often appears
where a word seems to fail, a word often appear where the imagination
seems to fail.” 6 Dissatisfaction is built into the pre-Kantian concept of appearance,
in which the appearing world must be underwritten by an ideal,
eternal one. But what if we made these assumptions, invented appearance,
in order to transfer dissatisfaction to appearance and absorb it there? Since
dissatisfaction with nontragic facts and natural laws seems wayward, even
6. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz [2003], trans. Shane B. Lillis
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008), 26.

40 looking away
impossible, 7 it is displaced into attitudes toward our most explicitly contin-
gent perceptions: Schein, fleeting visual phenomena, and the rhetorical trompe
l’oeil of the appearance of appearance. Lingering among the spectra, Cole-
ridge expresses something we do not feel entitled to say because it is so
comprehensive and banal: the world as given leaves a lot to be desired, and we
can neither be reconciled to it nor simply accept our lack of reconciliation.
1. purple haze
Like many people who experience dissociation, Coleridge thought himself
isolated and misunderstood. He ascribed this state of affairs to his
phenomenological and epistemological deviance. The inverse ratio between
Coleridge’s consciousness of his perceptions and his ability to communicate
with others is partly a matter of philosophical taste, as he notes.
Thus Coleridge complains of “the pain I suffer & have suffered, in differing
so from such men, such true men of England, as [. . .], & their affectionate
love of Locke” (N 1418; see also N 3566, N 4605). The dominant
attitude of empiricism, he believes, is only nominally liberal, intolerant of
alternative perspectives. In this context, Coleridge’s plagiarisms of idealists
express his hunger to be in agreement with someone at last. 8
7. Again, the situation is asymmetrical, since satisfaction with the inevitable is permitted:
although it’s supposedly perverse to protest or object to nontragic natural conditions,
it isn’t supposedly perverse to affirm the same conditions. It takes someone as
meticulous as Wittgenstein to be annoyed by pointless affirmation.
8. Tillottama Rajan and Julie Ellison, especially, have pointed out the self-abnegation
in Coleridge’s sociability, a subordination that renders suspect his desire to form happy
alternative families. “The wish for vicarious gratification, in poems written throughout
Coleridge’s career, produces stories of self-exclusion,” Ellison remarks (Delicate Subjects:
Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding [Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990], xii).
Rajan reads Coleridge’s figuration of auditors within the conversation poems as the invocation
of “a surrogate self, through whom the poet must represent himself in a place
where he is not.” Unlike Wordsworth, “Coleridge remains physically isolated from the
being on to whom he projects his own naiveté, able to live his dreams only through another
and at a distance that seems to negate his claim of proximity to this being.” The
distance and miscommunication conveyed by all this conversation, she notes, do not
lead Coleridge to revise his ideal of conversation: “the inversion of the conversation
mode...rather confirms, from a position of complete despair, a vision which Coleridge
is content to celebrate in the mode of exile” (Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism
[Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980], 229–230, 233).

coleridge among the spectra 41
Coleridge views his estrangement from his peers not only as ideological,
but as a necessary consequence of the sort of creature he must be to hold
his beliefs:
And yet I think, I must have some analogon of Genius, because, among
many other things, when I am in company with Mr Sharp, Sir J.
Mackintosh, R. and Sydney Smith, Mr Scarlet, &c &c, I feel like a
Child—nay, rather like an Inhabitant of another Planet—their very
faces act upon me, sometimes as if they were Ghosts, but more often
as if I were a Ghost, among them—at all times, as if we were not
consubstantial. (N 3324)
Coleridge conflates his feelings of depersonalization with his derealized
perceptions and queer sense of being differently embodied; and he associates
all of these ideas with the involuntary state of childhood. 9 Feeling like
a child means living with the possibility of being dominated by another
who may even claim access to one’s mind: if I think you overwhelm my autonomy,
I may of course feel depersonalized, ghostly, and ontologically
different from you. When “a thing acts on me ...aspurely passive,”
Coleridge notes, “I am thinged” (N 3587). The power struggle has its delectations
and plots of reversal, which Coleridge describes in the language
of the sublime: “Ghost of a mountain—the forms seizing my Body as I
passed & became realities—I, a Ghost, till I had reconquered my Substance”
(N 5242). A child feels like, and really is, the plaything of a stronger
being; calling a child’s alienation an “analogon of Genius” only figures
the inequality between child and adult in a positive way, turning ghostliness
into refinement. But how does an adult sitting in a room with his
peers come to feel “act[ed] upon” by “their very faces”?
In a discussion of Swedenborg’s visions, Coleridge opines that effects
of ghostliness are caused by insufficient consciousness of one’s actions.
Swedenborg’s fantasies perhaps “arose out of a voluntary power of so bedimming
or interrupting the impressions of the outward senses as to produce
the same transition of thoughts into things, as ordinarily takes place
on passing into Sleep.” Because the “successive Images and Sounds” pro-
9. For reflections on moments of queer spatial orientation, see Sara Ahmed, Queer
Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke UP, 2006).

42 looking away
duced in this way are still “distinguishable from actual impressions ab extra
chiefly by the uniform significancy of the former,” however, and because
the visionary fails to credit himself with the voluntary action that would
account for the high organization of the imagery he experiences, he ascribes
his visions to “a Will or multitude of wills alien from the Will of the
Beholder” (N 3474). At a loss for other explanations, he posits supernatural
presences. 10 By this logic, superstition is a consequence of starting out
from empiricism. If we didn’t believe in the first place that we were passive
receptors of perceptions, we would never make the mistake of looking outside
ourselves to account for them.
This analysis would imply that Coleridge experiences himself in an
attenuated way in the presence of his parlor companions because he “bedim[s]”
certain sensory impressions at the outset. Again, two complementary
explanations, one social and one perceptual, together make one circular
one. We feel attenuated, first, when other people are active and we’re
passive, as in cases involving adults and children; and, second, when we
voluntarily filter out the perception of our activity. One hypothesis as to
why, in turn, we do that is that it offers self-anesthesia in anticipation of
social pain. 11 We would rather see and be ghosts than people because however
frightening ghosts are, they’re safer. The sequence child—alien—
ghost moves through stages of a retreat: “I feel like a Child”; I’d “rather”
feel queer but equal, “like an Inhabitant of another Planet”; I’d really
rather feel “as if I were a Ghost” who, already dead, couldn’t be harmed
and could frighten others. When Coleridge complains that his aberrant
perceptual attitudes cause his isolation, he uses a language of bodily sub-
10. For a similar account of auditory hallucinations, see G. Lynn Stephens and
George Graham, When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien Voices and Inserted Thoughts
(Cambridge: MIT P, 2000).
11. Coleridge often describes hope as a kind of dread (N 3547). In his sonnet “Composed
on a Journey Homeward; the Author Having Received Intelligence of the Birth
of His Son, Sept. 20, 1796,” he describes a morbid fantasy that his newborn son is dead
“(As sometimes, through excess of hope, I fear)” (PW 273–274). Coleridge’s idea that
“motives by excess reverse their very nature” (Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and
W. Jackson Bate [Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983], 1:303–304) implies that the line in
parentheses could be read “As sometimes, through excess of fear, I hope.” On the reversibility
of affections, see also Thomas Love Peacock, Memoirs of Shelley and Other Essays
and Reviews, ed. Howard Mills (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970), 110–111.

coleridge among the spectra 43
stance as a correlative for perceptual deviance. In the complementary theory,
his motives run the opposite way: Coleridge is alienated from other
people, so he profits from muting his impressions. Circularly, interpersonal
and perceptual systems present themselves as two sides of a single
surface.
In order for the single surface model to hold, spectra would have to
be more than symptoms of contingent neuroses. They certainly are more
to Coleridge, who casts his experiences with spectra as rediscoveries of a
very primary-sounding capacity to adjust one’s forms of contact with the
world. Although Coleridge reinforces this point every time he praises the
“esemplastic” imagination, it’s easy to underestimate his affection for the
tiny perceptual modulations that indicate the awakening of imagination.
Imagining is as easy as squinting. Bringing a book close to his eye (N
1681), putting on green spectacles and removing them (“O what a lovely
Purple when you pull them off” [N 1974]), are fundamental aesthetic acts
whose uses are familiar to visual artists. Man Ray liked to watch films
“through his fingers, spread to isolate certain parts of the image”; 12 “Sir G.
Beaumont found great advantage in learning to draw from nature thro’
Gause Spectacles,” Coleridge notes (N 1973). We can create a similar effect
anytime: “just half wink your Eyes and look at the Land, it is then all
under water, or with that glossy Unreality which a Prospect has, when
seen thro’ smoke” (N 1844).
In his poems and notebooks Coleridge depicts the production of
Schein-effects out of Erscheinung as effortless, on the model of the wink.
In “To William Wordsworth,” Coleridge portrays himself in infantine
thrall to absorptive pleasure at Wordsworth’s reading of The Prelude (PW
815–819). In a scene narrated in a notebook of 1801, Wordsworth again
plays the adult to Coleridge’s child, but Coleridge subsumes Wordsworth’s
influence into a world of his own vivifaction. At the beginning of the
scene, Coleridge lies “abed” in the afternoon:
Wednesday—Afternoon. Abed—nervous—had noticed the prismatic
colours reflected transmitted from the Tumbler—Wordsworth
12. Robert B. Ray, How a Film Theory Got Lost: And Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies
(Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2001), 26.

44 looking away
came—I talked with him—he left me alone—I shut my eyes—beauteous
spectra of two colors, orange and violet—then of green, which
immediately changed to Peagreen, & then actually grew to my eye
into a beautiful moss, the same as is on the mantle-piece at
Grasmere.—abstract Ideas—& unconscious Links!! (N 925)
From the spectrum of prismatic colors arise “beauteous spectra” of more.
Colors give way to aftercolors, as in the literal meaning of the word “spectra,”
and words generate images and vice versa. The terms of Coleridge’s
description suggest that this is the way things were longer ago than he can
remember. While he is immobilized in the middle of the day in an infantine
fashion (as in “This Lime-Tree Bower, My Prison”), Wordsworth
looks in on him. After the conversation has stirred Coleridge’s associations,
he forms a kind of protopoem of resonances. Green spectra take on
vegetal characteristics that typify the “streaminess” of association (thus
Coleridge also writes of “wild-weed spectres” and perceives “grasslike
Streaks” on his muslin curtains). 13 The vegetation association brings up a
“pea” shade of green, then the animation of associations allegorizes itself
in the transformation of green color into “moss” as at “Gras(s)mere.” 14
The model for contact with others here consists in finding oneself literally
prone to their influence, then elaborately creating distance and context.
Earlier we saw Coleridge identifying with the (relatively) powerless child;
here we see what that child can do. Coleridge sketches his own version of
the growth of the poet’s mind: the infant in his crib mingling thoughts and
colors in free association before autonomy or even vision has fully developed.
15 This radiant virtual environment responds to the mind’s wishes,
13. See N 1770. On Coleridge’s interest in vegetation in connection with his “immersion
in a continual present-tense of pure phenomenality,” see Harold D. Baker,
“Landscape as Textual Practice in Coleridge’s Notebooks,” ELH 59 (1992): 651–670, especially
p. 667.
14. “Mere grass” is a good synonym for imaginary moss.
15. Colors exemplify the nexus of construction and perception in romantic color theory,
since their appearance is context-dependent; Coleridge’s Notebooks show his enjoyment
at being able to change the colors of appearances (N 1974, 2094). Coleridge is
aware of himself as a colorist, even through the similarity of his name to the word
“color.” Of an unnamed person—a painter, or even himself?—he writes, “Women . . .

coleridge among the spectra 45
yet retains many of the values of nature. Marshaling ambiguities of scale,
placement, and cause, spectra offer Coleridge a way to fantasize negotiations
with conditions that seem to admit no possibility of negotiation.
They become images of “freedom in unfreedom.” 16
Coleridge’s musings imply particular psychological motives for entertaining
spectra, as when Coleridge proves himself against the mountain.
“Why do I seek for mountains,” Coleridge asks,
when in the flattest countries the Clouds present so many so much
more romantic and spacious forms, & the coal-fire so many so much
[sic] more varied and lovely forms?—And whence arises the pleasure
from musing on the latter/do I not more or less consciously fancy
myself a Lilliputian, to whom these would be mountains—& so by
this factitious scale make them mountains, my pleasure being consequently
playful, a voluntary poem in hieroglyphics or picture-writing—
“phantoms of Sublimity” which I continue to know to be phantoms?
(N 2402)
A similar constellation of fire, childhood, and animism informs the canonical
lyric “Frost at Midnight.” There Coleridge’s narrator “makes a toy of
Thought” by animating the slip of film that flutters on his fire grate—
surely one of the most indefinite and transient objects ever to be the focus
of a poem (PW 452–456). The notebook entry helps to frame the type of
situation depicted in the poem: Coleridge looks for mountains in coal
fires, forgetting scale to “fancy [him]self a Lilliputian.” He makes a toy of
thought to imagine or remember himself at a size susceptible to being
toyed with. At the same time, to the extent that the coal fire shapes stand
in for memories or idealizations of bigger entities, comparing these entities
to the fire shapes diminishes them. Coleridge is a Gulliver fancying
himself a Lilliputian fancying himself a Gulliver—and so on. Despite their
psychological uses, though, the beauty of Coleridge’s manipulations of ap-
are better judges of his Coloridng, than of his Design & Composition—” (N 4277). To
be mostly color would be to be similarly context-dependent, a chameleon.
16. The phrase is the title of a lecture by Adorno in History and Freedom, trans.
Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 200–208, hereafter HF.

46 looking away
pearance is that they do not confine him to reshuffling the specific ideas
that trouble him. Spectra may seem to be fancies, but in their repleteness
they are opposed to mechanical recombination. Their coextensiveness
with perception makes them as holistic as any natural phenomenon. Lingering
over a purple afterimage, Coleridge does not thematize the struggle
between child and adult or any other preoccupation, but brings about a
wholesale shift in his way of engaging the world.
On one occasion, Coleridge demonstrates this capacity of phenomenophilia
to his son Hartley:
March 17, 1801. Tuesday—Hartley looking out of my study window
fixed his eyes steadily & for some time on the opposite prospect, &
then said—Will yon Mountains always be?—I shewed him the whole
magnificent Prospect in a Looking Glass, and held it up, so that the
whole was like a Canopy or Ceiling over his head, & he struggled to
express himself concerning the Difference between the Thing & the
Image almost with convulsive Effort. (N 923)
Hartley has a question about the most permanent natural facts of the
earth, and seems to yearn for security. A conventional answer might go
something like, “They’ll be there long enough”; answering in this way
pretends to ignore the worry in Hartley’s question, and teaches that one
doesn’t think too hard about this kind of thing. The literal answer is
no, but that too fails to respond to the need implied in the question.
Coleridge’s Zen-like response, bringing a looking glass to warp the landscape,
respects the impetus of Hartley’s question by refraining from
closing it off as either “yes” or “no” would do. Rather, it shows how the experience
leading to the question can be adjusted, rather than erased, by
reframing perception. It’s uncertain whether Hartley gets into the spirit
of Coleridge’s gesture—he seems to take it as another emotional and
epistemological struggle—but the gesture itself reveals Coleridge’s belief
in the ability of self-modified perceptions to shift the terms of what seems
to be given.
In its ability to vary the terms of experience, looking away, like dreams,
resembles art production. Whether one wants to say it is art depends

coleridge among the spectra 47
on how one feels about the peripheral artlikeness of tiny private performances.
Kant and Adorno would say that such performances may be
protoartistic but produce no art (I’ll consider this in Chapter 4).
Coleridge, however, goes so far as to call the coal fire fantasy “a voluntary
poem in ...picture-writing.” The metaphor of hieroglyphics—Freud’s
metaphor for dreams—assimilates controlled perception, as in lucid
dreaming, to the externalization of thoughts in writing, as though what
Coleridge saw when he looked at the fire were his writing about it. Writing
the account of a spectrum, too, is a final way of prolonging it. “I make
this note ...topreserve the circumstance,” Coleridge writes of a double
image of a single candle (N 1863). While all writing is intended to preserve
a circumstance, Coleridge’s propensity to time spectra gives his common
phrase an uncommon resonance. One of the appeals of always writing
something is that writing comes to frame all other relations, and
provides an index to appearance that seems to qualify its factive authority
and loosen the perceiver’s obligation to it. (Of his hashish experiences,
Walter Benjamin observes, “perhaps it is only for this reason that so much
of what one sees presents itself as ‘arranged,’ as ‘experiment’—so that one
can laugh about it” [On Hashish, 20]). Of course, the relief of spectra is fed
by social dilemmas; their freedom is valuable in proportion to the problematic
relations they momentarily suspend. “Like the Gossamer Spider,
we may float upon air and seem to fly in mid heaven,” Coleridge remarks,
“but we have spun the slender Thread out of our own fancies, & it is always
fastened to something below” (N 2166).
Coleridge locates the virtue of spectra especially in their consensual
quality. When he comes upon spectra he is eager to log, he plays with
them and extends them. He savors them, confirming his participation
in their appearance, and often notes how long a spectrum lasts. A dose
of “Castor Oil in Gin & Water” helps to bring on a double image of
Coleridge’s seal “exactly as if seen thro’ a common Reading-glass”; notable
in this event, Coleridge writes, is that “I saw and (after noticing the
circumstance) still continued to see it, like a fixed reality not dependent
on my will, without dimness or swimmingness of Vision” (N 2632). In
another incident he experiments with the lines of sight that support “a
phantom of [his] face upon the night cap which lay just on [his] pillow.”

48 looking away
It “came only as my head was bent low,” he observes; “I moved the Night
Cap and lost it/the night cap & the associations” (N 1751). 17 Another time,
a chasm opens between Coleridge’s bed and chest of drawers and the wallpaper
pattern grows larger and more vivid:
As I gazed at this, I again voluntarily threw myself into introversive
Reflections, & again produced the same Enlargement of Shapes &
Distances and the same increase of vividness—but all seemed to be
seen thro’ a very thin glaceous mist—thro’ an interposed Mass of Jelly
of the most exquisite subtlety & transparency. But my reason for noting
this is—the fact, in my second & voluntary production of this Vision
I retained it as long as I like, nay, bent over with my body &
looked down into the wide Interspace between the Bed & Chest of
Drawers, & the papered Wall, without destroying the Delusion/—
then started my eyes & something [. . .] of the Brain behind the
eyes started or jirked them forward, and all was again as in common./
The power of acting on a delusion, according to the Delusion, without
dissolving it/—carry this on into a specific Disease of this Kind—
Prophets, &c— (N 3280)
Coleridge’s cultivation of spatial distortion and hyperintensity through
“voluntary production” and as long as he likes—at least, as long as he likes
until it suddenly ends—is both a suspensive pleasure and a redramatization
of perception as an epistemological problem that reminds him to be vigilant
about the disease of credulity. Associating the Schein of the chasm he
knows isn’t there with the absorption of delusional people in their visions,
Coleridge plays on the edge of becoming a person who lives his Schein as
Erscheinung. He remains aware, however, of the difference between himself
and the “Prophets, &c,” 18 and shows no mixed feelings about the
17. Peter Schwenger argues that Coleridge’s study of spectra leads him to discover
that “dynamics of the framing process. ...[generate] vision ...whether it be the
hypnagogic substratum made visible, or the shapes of the real world” (Fantasm and Fiction:
On Textual Envisioning [Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999], 160n36).
18. On Coleridge’s distinction between mystics and visionaries, enthusiasts and fanatics,
see David Vallins, “The Feeling of Knowledge: Insight and Delusion in
Coleridge,” ELH 64 (1997): 157–187.

coleridge among the spectra 49
undesirability of what is for Kant the ultimate error—accepting Schein as
Erscheinung, contrary to evidence. Such a belief would be evidenced by
“acting on” the delusion, “according to the delusion.” As long as a spectrum
lasts, then, Coleridge practices withholding his belief from it, even
when it is “like a fixed reality” (N 2632). Sustaining a perception as long as
he likes until it stops may seem like a contradiction, but it makes sense that
Coleridge appreciates both dependence and independence in mere appearances.
Fastened by threads to forces more fundamental than themselves,
they nonetheless better display the mind’s competence in reality
testing the more they can seem to have lives of their own—“outness”—and
still be mere appearances. They can and should come vanishingly close to
normal appearances.
Logically, spectra need to remain distinct from ordinary appearances
(in Coleridge’s vocabulary, “impressions”) in order to retain their advantage
as releases from the imperative to affirmation instated by the fact/
value conflation. Of course, if a spectrum ever were identical to an impression,
Coleridge would never know it. Interestingly, he doesn’t worry about
it; he never asks whether an impression is actually a spectrum—whether
Erscheinung is actually Schein. In the meditation on Swedenborg mentioned
above, Coleridge notes that spectra are “distinguishable from actual
impressions ab extra chiefly by the uniform significancy of the former, and
by the absence of that apparent contingency and promiscuous position of
Objects by which Nature or the World of the bodily sense is discriminated”
(N 3474). Even if one accepts that spectra possess this distinction,
by Coleridge’s own logic they achieve their maximum impact when the
line of discrimination is “infra-thin.” 19 Fetishizing the fragility of spectral
self-consciousness itself, Coleridge praises the “interposed ...Jelly” of his
self-created atmosphere for “its most exquisite subtlety and transparency.”
Still, when Coleridge transcribes spectra “as a weapon against Superstition,”
he has in mind some harm that would ensue if spectra were
ontologized. “What if instead of immediately checking the sight and then
19. Thierry de Duve develops Duchamp’s concept of the “infra-thin” nominalistic
line drawn by aesthetic judgment (Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage
from Painting to the Readymade [1984], trans. Dana Polan [Minneapolis: U of Minnesota
P, 1991]), 159–161.

2
Appearance and Acceptance
in Kant
As a self-help book for victims of transcendental illusion, Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason achieved mixed results. Coleridge, De Quincey, Kleist,
Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche are among the many who register the failure
of Kantian comfort to soothe the nervous mind. Stanley Cavell remarks,
“you don’t ...have to be a romantic to feel sometimes about
[Kant’s] settlement: Thanks for nothing.” 1 “Thanks for nothing” is in fact
close to Kant’s own point. As a project of reconciliation to the world, the
Critique of Pure Reason asks what it means to accept necessary limits; what
counts as acceptance (it may be less than thanks) and what counts as necessity
are both at issue. From the point of view of acceptance, I’ll suggest,
Kant’s notoriously narrow definitions of the indispensable make for relatively
light—that is, strictly delimited—obligations to value.
Kant views these obligations as so light that he has been interpreted as
1. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1988), 31.

74 looking away
severing fact from value altogether; so light that he himself sometimes discounts
them. Kant’s figures for the distinction between understanding and
reason, “is” and “ought”—an abyss, a chasm, etc.—seem to name the structural
axis of the critical system. It goes without saying that for Kant, free
moral and aesthetic judgments are different in kind from causal and cognitive
mechanisms. Still, the assumption that organizes Kant’s project and
has been read as nearly splitting it apart—that any truly causal connection
between fact and value cannot at the same time be a free judgment—also
implies the positive conclusion that only something ambiguously quasicausal
and quasi-free could connect fact and value. If it existed, such a thing
would blur the inner edges of “fact” and “value.” This ambiguous something
does exist in the critical project. Fact and value blend in what must
look, from the perspective of freedom, like a quasi-value, a value hardly
worthy of the name. Value of this dubious, quasi-causal sort is carried by
fact perception. In the Third Critique Kant calls it “objective liking.” 2
I’ve contended that because the coercion of fact perception is hard to
take, that is, because it seems to require an endorsement that we don’t
want to deliver, it becomes appealing to flee from fact perception into
phenomenophilia, which sidesteps it, and that many post-critical romantic
texts are phenomenophilic in this sense. The Critique of Judgment is, in a
way, another of these texts—the most organized, positive, and integrative
of them. 3 In the Third Critique Kant seeks a noncoercive, fully subjective
alternative to objective liking, and finds it in aesthetic reflective judgments
of taste. In retrospect, however, Kant’s trajectory from the First to the
Third Critique obscures the alternative therapeutics of acceptance presented
by objective liking in the First Critique. Although objective liking
does not imply a basis for noncoercive, optional community, it does con-
2. Critique of Judgment [1790], trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987),
210, 366, hereafter CJ.
3. Meanwhile, in the sciences a concern to explain what produces fact perception
drives theoretical and experimental optics in the post-Kantian era. Timothy Lenoir discusses
in this context Helmholtz’s empiricist theory of perception, in which “nothing is
given in the act of perception” itself and what analytic philosophy calls fact perceptions
are achieved by learning and conditioning. See “Operationalizing Kant: Manifolds,
Models and Mathematics in Helmholtz’s Theories of Perception,” in The Kantian Legacy
in Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann (Cambridge:
MIT P, 2006), 141–210, p. 143.

appearance and acceptance in kant 75
stitute minimal acceptance of nonoptional reality and is the precondition
for anything more affirmative. Objective liking is at least as significant as
aesthetic reflective judgment, and necessary to aesthetic reflective judgment,
which, to be free, must be free to follow or not. The function of fact
perception in the critical system is overlooked because it is so prosaic that
no one wants to look for it: tangential to the sphere of free thought, touching
it at a single point, the value of fact as such is a thing of no circumference.
Yet it is important to notice this fact of minimal fact value: as though
reenacting a discovery of the reality principle, such a realization approximates
an apprehension of the meaning of “reality” itself. The First Critique
suggests that concluding by reason that seeming limits really are inevitable
already constitutes a minimal, quasi-subjective endorsement of
them, and that this minimal endorsement completes our obligation to accept
the given world (in the new Kantian sense in which the given includes
one’s own cognitive structures). To the extent that we can realize that we
have already fulfilled this obligation—understand that we have already
paid the entrance fee for life on Earth—we can know that our value judgments
are voluntary: what is beyond is “free.”
The principle of minimal fact value afforded by the First Critique is a
major contribution to the literature of world-acceptance. When we keep
this principle in mind, the unfinished business of the critical system is not
how to connect fact and value—since they are already connected at a single
point—but how to get from minimal value, which is obligatory and
quasi, to a value judgment that is robust. While there is a chasm in the
critical system, then, it’s smaller than one might think, and placed between
acceptance (objective liking) and active affirmation (subjective liking). It
surprises me to say it, but I’ve come to believe that this conclusion makes
for a new interpretation of the relation between the First and Third Critiques,
a relation made possible by Kant’s not taking acceptance of the
given for granted in the first place. In part 4 of this chapter I’ll give some
thought to Kant’s consideration of the contrast between objective liking
and aesthetic reflective judgments in the Critique of Judgment. I’ll begin,
however, by reading the First Critique on its own, less with an eye toward
the eventual development of the aesthetic than with attention to the role
of appearance in producing a version of reconciliation to the given world
particular to the First Critique. In the Critique of Pure Reason, the question

76 looking away
of necessity and acceptance leads through appearance, in the form of obligations
to and freedoms from value that arise through necessary and contingent
appearances.
1. from mere to necessary appearance
What makes the First Critique’s solution to world-acceptance and responses
to it peculiar is that both filter their attitudes toward acceptance
through attitudes toward appearance and vice versa. Appearances—normal,
replete Erscheinungen—are what Kant first asks us to accept. So, one
of the unintended effects of the First Critique is to intensify attention to
the forms of appearance marginalized by the First Critique—for instance,
the optical illusions Coleridge records in his notebooks, or the ocular
afterburns, “sparks of fire,” and “spectres of light” that populate Goethe’s
Theory of Colors. 4
For Goethe, timing the duration of afterimages, measuring conditions
for “subjective halos,” and the like (Theory of Colors, §§89–100) form part
of a straightforwardly post-Kantian exploration of perceptual infrastructure.
Filled with the critical jargon of “exhibit[ion] ...inanunbroken series”
and “demands [for] completeness” (lvi, §60), Goethe’s Theory of Colors
aspires to be a Critique of colors—to show “the circumstances under which
they simply appear and are, and beyond which no further explanation of
them is possible” (lviii). Unlike Goethe, Coleridge isn’t sure he is being as
good a Kantian as he’d like to be. Kant emphasizes recognizable appearances
as end products of successful cognition; Coleridge pursues exotic,
transient images and associates them with deviance and procrastination.
Kant assures us that many optical and logical illusions are normal and inevitable;
Coleridge feels guilty about being interested in illusions for their
own sake, even when he knows they are normal and inevitable. It isn’t un-
Kantian for Coleridge to be affected by illusions; it’s un-Kantian for him
to continue to mind being affected after Kant has explained why he must
be, because Kant’s explanation of transcendental illusion is supposed in itself
to be ameliorating.
4. Theory of Colors [1810], trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (Cambridge: MIT P, 1970),
§118.

appearance and acceptance in kant 77
Thus, Kant’s establishment of appearance and necessary illusion as the
realm of normalcy and proper frame of human life infuses abnormal
appearance and contingent illusion with rebellious appeal. An eccentric,
rarefied image now comes forward, figured as more eccentric and more
rarefied than images used to have to be—De Quincey’s Spectre of the
Brocken is a stellar example. The optical illusions that Coleridge tracks
in his Notebooks often do and sometimes don’t conform to the normal appearances
and necessary illusions that Kant carefully includes within the
bounds of benign human perception. Whether they do or don’t, however,
Coleridge, as a good reader of Kant, faces—or believes he faces—the new
problem of having to figure out whether a perception is his fault or not.
This obligation arises for the very reason that Kant urges us not to feel
guilty about perceptions that aren’t our fault.
In and after Kant, then, several varieties of appearance are available, including
some new ones. There is still the traditional sense that appearance
is always mere appearance, an obstacle to knowledge and immediacy; and
there is Kant’s new sense of positive, normal Erscheinung. There are
stable, explicable optical illusions, which are the heuristic model for normal
appearance; and there are special cases of illusion, truly florid or exotic,
that take on the burden of deviance which appearance in general used
to bear.
It is these rogue illusions to which Kant refers when he starts his discussion
of appearance with the proviso that “we are not here concerned with
empirical (e.g. optical) illusion” (CPR A295/B352). To distinguish the
kinds of illusions that do concern him, Kant deploys fault and right. 5
Anomalous illusions can reveal nothing very important, since they are
happenstance mistakes “in the empirical employment of rules of under-
5. “Fault” (Schuld) and “right” (Recht) are not exactly opposites; the opposite of
Recht is Unrecht, injustice. If you don’t have a right, what you have instead isn’t anything
at all, but only a lack of right. The opposite of a fault, too, would seem to be less
something positive than faultlessness, that is, freedom from fault. But for Kant, I’ll suggest,
freedom from fault is a positive right that may be held subjectively; it is the very
model of right.

appearance and acceptance in kant 77
Thus, Kant’s establishment of appearance and necessary illusion as the
realm of normalcy and proper frame of human life infuses abnormal
appearance and contingent illusion with rebellious appeal. An eccentric,
rarefied image now comes forward, figured as more eccentric and more
rarefied than images used to have to be—De Quincey’s Spectre of the
Brocken is a stellar example. The optical illusions that Coleridge tracks
in his Notebooks often do and sometimes don’t conform to the normal appearances
and necessary illusions that Kant carefully includes within the
bounds of benign human perception. Whether they do or don’t, however,
Coleridge, as a good reader of Kant, faces—or believes he faces—the new
problem of having to figure out whether a perception is his fault or not.
This obligation arises for the very reason that Kant urges us not to feel
guilty about perceptions that aren’t our fault.
In and after Kant, then, several varieties of appearance are available, including
some new ones. There is still the traditional sense that appearance
is always mere appearance, an obstacle to knowledge and immediacy; and
there is Kant’s new sense of positive, normal Erscheinung. There are
stable, explicable optical illusions, which are the heuristic model for normal
appearance; and there are special cases of illusion, truly florid or exotic,
that take on the burden of deviance which appearance in general used
to bear.
It is these rogue illusions to which Kant refers when he starts his discussion
of appearance with the proviso that “we are not here concerned with
empirical (e.g. optical) illusion” (CPR A295/B352). To distinguish the
kinds of illusions that do concern him, Kant deploys fault and right. 5
Anomalous illusions can reveal nothing very important, since they are
happenstance mistakes “in the empirical employment of rules of under-
5. “Fault” (Schuld) and “right” (Recht) are not exactly opposites; the opposite of
Recht is Unrecht, injustice. If you don’t have a right, what you have instead isn’t anything
at all, but only a lack of right. The opposite of a fault, too, would seem to be less
something positive than faultlessness, that is, freedom from fault. But for Kant, I’ll suggest,
freedom from fault is a positive right that may be held subjectively; it is the very
model of right.

78 looking away
standing that are otherwise correct” (A295/B352). In contrast, the appearances
we normally experience are no “mere illusion[s]”:
when I say that the intuition of outer objects and the self-intuition of
the mind alike represent the objects and the mind, in space and in
time, as they affect our senses, that is, as they appear, I do not mean to
say that these objects are a mere illusion [Schein]. For in an appearance
the objects, nay even the properties that we ascribe to them, are
always regarded as something actually given. ...When I maintain
that the quality of space and of time, in conformity with which, as a
condition of their existence, I posit both bodies and my own soul, lies
in my mode of intuition and not in those objects in themselves, I am
not saying that bodies merely seem [scheinen] to be outside me, or
that my soul only seems to be given in my self-consciousness. It would
be my own fault, if out of that which I ought to reckon as appearance, I
made mere illusion [Es wäre meine eigene Schuld, wenn ich aus dem,
was ich zur Erscheinung zählen sollte, bloßen Schein machte]. (B69–
70; my italics)
Kant’s introduction of “fault” here sounds the keynote of the First Critique:
it’s no exaggeration to say that the mission of the First Critique is to
absolve human beings, and specifically human reason, of blame for the
transcendental illusions. This mission statement appears in the famous
first sentences of Kant’s preface to the first edition:
human reason has this peculiar fate that in one species of its knowledge
it is burdened by questions which, as prescribed by the very nature
of reason itself, it is not able to ignore, but which, as transcending
all its powers, it is not able to answer.
The perplexity into which it thus falls is not due to any fault [Schuld]
of its own. (Aviii)
As we’ll see, ordinary appearances will be distinguished by associated qualities
of regularity and innocence. In appearance “the objects...arealways
regarded as something actually given”; “appearance without anything that
appears” would be “absurd” (Bxxvii, Bxxvi). While an appearance with

appearance and acceptance in kant 79
no relation to consciousness could never appear in the first place, 6 the ap-
pearances we do perceive need to be synthesized, and are synthesized, by
the imagination (A120), which, acting through the senses, “combine[s]
[impressions] so as to generate images of objects” for the understanding
(A120n). “If the synthesis of the manifold of appearance is interrupted,”
appearance breaks into fragments (A170/B212). “A pure imagination ...
is thus one of the fundamental faculties” (A124), since “otherwise” the
senses, “though indeed yielding appearances, would supply no objects of
empirical knowledge” (A124). The senses and/or imagination may malfunction
and present errant appearances, “illusory representations to
which the objects do not correspond, the deception being attributable
sometimes to a delusion of the imagination (in dreams) and sometimes to
an error of judgment (in so-called sense-deception)” (A376). If ordinary
appearances are achievements of imaginative synthesis, then “illusory representations”
are symptoms of sensory or imaginary disorder or errors of
judgment. It’s “my own fault”—that is, the fault of a defective or misused
imagination and/or understanding—if I render what could have been perceptions
as illusions. The fact that a physical failing, as well as an error in
judgment, may be responsible for a mistake in perception doesn’t necessarily
mute the moralization of blame. As the social history of sexuality
shows, blame can be cast upon a deviant body even when its flaws are involuntary,
and the close proximity in Kant’s text of errors in imagination
and errors in judgment invites the reader to remember that history.
Unlike the blunders of substandard sense organs or imagination, the
transcendental illusions of reason—for instance, my conviction that I
ought to be able to solve a problem I can never solve—are not my fault. I
can tell they are not my fault because they are so consistent and virulent.
6. As Lewis White Beck points out, at one point Kant writes startlingly that “appearances
might very well be so constituted that the understanding should not find them to
be in accordance with the principles of its unity. Everything might be in such confusion,
for instance, in the series of appearances that nothing presented itself which might yield
a rule of synthesis and so answer the conception of cause and effect” (A89–90/B122–
123, quoted in Beck, “Did the Sage of Königsberg Have No Dreams?,” in Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason: Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Kitcher [Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
1988], 103–116, pp. 103–104). Beck shows that in the second edition of the
First Critique and in the Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant makes efforts to
countermand this assertion, which should be a contradiction in terms by his logic.

80 looking away
Transcendental illusion [Schein] distinguishes itself from mere illusion—
empirical or logical—by intransigence of effect: it “does not cease even after
it has been detected and its invalidity clearly revealed” (A297/B35). As
Michelle Grier points out, Kant insists that “although the illusions that
ground the metaphysical errors are, in each case, ‘unavoidable’ and ‘necessary,’
the subsequent errors (fallacies) are not.” 7 Kant can maintain both
that the transcendental illusions are “inevitable” and that he can help us
avoid their ill effects.
It is at this point, to secure the contrast between contingent and inevitable
illusion, that Kant brings necessary empirical (optical) illusions in, for
they are marked by the same merciful regularity that allows us to adjust for
them. Inevitable optical phenomena offer precedent for precisely the distinction
between illusion and self-deception:
We...take the subjective necessity of a connection of our concepts,
which is to the advantage of the understanding, for an objective necessity
in the determination of things in themselves. This is an illusion
[Illusion] which can no more be prevented than we can prevent the
sea appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore, since we see it
through higher light rays; or to cite a still better example, than the astronomer
can prevent the moon from appearing large at its rising, although
he is not deceived by this illusion. ...That the illusion
should, like logical illusion, actually disappear and cease to be an illusion,
is something which transcendental dialectic can never be in a
position to achieve. For here we have to do with a natural and inevitable
illusion, which rests on subjective principles, and foists them upon
us as objective; whereas logical dialectic in its exposure of deceptive
inferences has to do merely with an error in the following out of principles,
or with an illusion artificially created in imitation of such inferences.
There exists, then, a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure
reason—not one in which a bungler might entangle himself through
lack of knowledge, or one which some sophist has artificially invented
to confuse thinking people, but one inseparable from human reason,
and which, even after its deceptiveness has been exposed, will not
7. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), 304.

82 looking away
doesn’t have to be a “bungler” or a “sophist” to be taken in by transcendental
illusion clears us of shame and guilt respectively—and hence
implies that shame and guilt are what we might be feeling. Since “even
the wisest of men” “will never be able to free himself from the illusion
[Schein], which unceasingly mocks and torments him” (A339/B397),
Kant’s text calls on the reader to discriminate erroneous thinking and
looking from judging and acting on the basis of erroneous thoughts and
looks. The thinking/judging distinction recalls Stoic theories of mental
consent to interior states, with their implication that moral life consists in
self-correction. Unlike Kant’s later texts, however, the First Critique escapes
the anxious hypervigilance of self-correction. Correction will be
necessary, but most of all the point is that life will be easier if we don’t berate
ourselves for being unable to keep unwilled thoughts and perceptions
from arising in the first place. Kant’s calming appeal to “natural tendency”
(A642/B670) has a familiar ring to contemporary ears: we know it from the
psychiatric discourse of illness, addiction, and, most relevantly, homosexuality.
10 The wisest of men cannot prevent the mental manifestations of
these things from occurring, either, any more “than the astronomer can
prevent the moon from appearing large at its rising.”
It may seem odd to attribute psychological permissiveness to Kant, the
inventor of the categorical imperative. But therapeutic discourse, too,
means to ease responsibility by talk of “clear boundaries.” Kant exploits the
convenience of boundaries methodologically when he asserts that philosophers
“are not called upon to incur any responsibility through unnecessary
undertakings from which we can be relieved” (A241). And in the psycho-
able for its absence of lamentation. A similar view is shared by H. W. Cassirer, who
opines that Kant’s feeling “that it would not even be desirable if we possessed any
knowledge other than that which we actually do possess....goes to show that the metaphysical
temperament proper is lacking in him” (Kant’s First Critique: An Appraisal of the
Permanent Significance of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [London: Allen & Unwin,
1954], 236).
10. On the covalence of historical logics for homosexuality and addiction, see Eve
Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 172; on the historical
conjuncture of recreational drugs and romantic literature, see Marcus Boon, The
Road of Excess (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002). On the queer Kant, see Andrew
Cutrofello, Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Resistance
(Albany: State U of New York P, 1994), and David L. Clark, “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology
and Its Others,” CR: The New Centennial Review 1 (2001): 201–289.

appearance and acceptance in kant 83
logical as opposed to moral realm, he demands little, refusing to prescribe
thoughts and feelings. Kant regulates the self by maxims rather than by
seeking to strengthen its capacities; he accepted depression and hypochondria
as part of his personality—“staying-at-home à la Kant,” Nietzsche
called it (WP §444)—and considered himself, in his own words, “healthy
in a weak way.” 11 About his own character Kant wrote to Moses Mendelssohn
that “there may be flaws that even the most steadfast determination
cannot eradicate completely” (quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 172). 12 This is not
the Kant of the moral writings. The psychology of the First Critique is peripheral,
something that winds up in the text as Kant tackles epistemology;
when Kant notices the tacit psychological laxity of the First Critique, he
supplements its laissez-faire implications with overt moral schemes.
3. the right to a phenomenal world
When the moon rises in Kant’s text, inevitable empirical illusion comes
into its own, separating from contingent empirical illusion to become the
standard of normal appearance13 and benign illusion (for it is both). The
11. Quoted in Manfred Kuehn, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2001), 172.
12. In his lectures on moral philosophy, Kant opines that when it comes to interpersonal
relations these flaws cannot participate: “Even to our best friend, we must not discover
ourselves as we naturally are and know ourselves to be, for that would be a nasty
business” (Lectures on Ethics, trans. Peter Heath, eds. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind
[Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], 188). The implication is that one would have to
turn for self-expression to experiences that cannot be imagined to be shared with another
person. For subtle commentary on this remark, see Candace Vogler, “Sex and
Talk,” in Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), 48–85; for consideration
of Kantian sexuality in the Ethics in general, see Lara Denis, “Kant on the
Wrongness of ‘Unnatural Sex,’” History of Philosophy Quarterly 16 (1999): 225–248. Also
compare Kant, “On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer
Resolution,” in The Conflict of the Faculties, trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor, in
Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1996), 233–327. Clark observes, “What is curious about this essay is
that it ends by pointing out the inability and finally unwillingness of the mind to master
its morbid feelings, a slippage that might remind us that the negative attention of refusal
or abstraction is a leaving out which is never complete—why else would it demand
such incessant reiteration?” (“Kant’s Aliens,” 271).
13. P. F. Strawson questions this reality of real appearance: “what sort of truth about
ourselves is it, that we appear to ourselves in a temporal guise? Do we really so appear

84 looking away
moon really does appear large; we can’t make it appear small by changing
our position, squinting, or reading astronomy. If it’s hard to be dissatisfied
with the moon, which is beautiful in every changing shape, perhaps that’s
because the only relation we want to have to it is the only one we can have,
namely, looking at it. 14 The moon is a good figure for the satisfaction that
consciousness of appearance affords, one that shows how its appeal lies in
its not threatening to overwhelm—in there not having to be more.
Thus Kant’s language of boundaries and rights comes together with the
discourse of appearance and reality to make room for the odd notion of a
right to appearance. 15 We have a right to no more than appearance—to
to ourselves or only appear to ourselves so to appear to ourselves? . . . But now what
does ‘really do appear’ mean? The question is unanswerable; the bounds of intelligibility
have been traversed, by any standard” (The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason [1966][London: Routledge, 1989], 39). This new notion of real
appearance comes to dominate post-Enlightenment realism. Thus Ian Hacking writes
that Thomas Kuhn’s nominalism is not “very strict”—it is informed by realism—because
for Kuhn “the anomalies [in a scientific description] ‘really’ do have to seem to be
resolved in order for a revolutionary achievement to be recognized” (Historical Ontology
[Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002], 40).
14. There are now legal arguments about property rights to astronomical objects,
which would make it possible to resent them.
15. Obviously Kant’s project is built on legal metaphors. Kant describes the Critique
itself as “a tribunal which will assure to reason its lawful claims [gerechten
Ansprüchen]” (CPR Axi) by investigating “in what way and by what right [Recht] reason
has come into possession” of its concepts (Bxxxv). Kant specifies several rights of
faculties, sometimes using the term “claim,” but associating the two terms, as when he
writes of “all the rights and claims [Rechte und Ansprüchen] of speculation” (A669/
B697). Logically first, reason has a right to a fair tribunal: thus Kant defends the part of
the Critique that might seem, as method, most controversial—the staged conflict of
antinomy: “no one can be blamed for, much less prohibited from, presenting for trial
the two opposing parties . . . before a jury of like standing with themselves, that is, before
a jury of fallible men” (A476/B504). Beyond this, reason has a right to tools it legitimately
possesses and a right to pursue ventures formed according to its “natural constitution
[Naturbestimmung]” (Axiii). The understanding too may be “assured of its
claims” and “possessions” and the ability to use them (A238/B297). Reason and understanding
have rights to prescribe rules, “to serve as our guide” (A819/B847), and so on.
Only reason and understanding ever have rights in Kant’s figurative legal system; sensibility
doesn’t have a right to the appearance of the landscape any more than the bosom
of the lake has a right to reflect the mountain. The understanding, however, with its obligation
to apply concepts and principles to appearances, has a right to do so, even to the
point of producing inevitable illusion (as opposed to appearances that do not connect to

appearance and acceptance in kant 85
hear this as a lament, as Peter Fenves does, is to miss the relief Kant finds
in being able to have, and being supposed to do, no more. 16 As Kant’s critics
complain, his writings tend to offer freedom from something more
than freedom to do something. 17 But the enjoyment Kant experiences
when there’s nothing further to do indicates that the epistemological
rights the First Critique establishes gratify not only because they ward off
dangers, but because they ease preceding fears and guilts and render the
pleasure of vanished pain.
The idea of a right to appearance may seem, and may be, incoherent:
rights and inevitabilities are usually opposed, and real appearances and
necessary illusions of the sort Kant discusses are inevitabilities. If this is incoherence,
it is very characteristic of Kant, who resists separating obligations
from rights and urges that natural laws he locates within us be regarded
as claims by us. The ambiguousness of the German word “Recht”
(law, justice; right, claim, title—similar to French “droit”) assists him in
this. Derrida remarks that for Kant, the “value of exteriority distinguishes
pure rights from morals”; the reciprocal relations of the Doctrine of Right
in The Metaphysics of Morals, for example, compose the sort of “external
constraint” that alone justifies “the consciousness of an obligation.” 18 Ob-
empirical intuitions and “are a mere play of imagination or of understanding” [A239/
B298]).
Kerry Larson points out that Emerson takes up the possibility Kant avoids—extending
the “rhetoric of natural rights” to nonintentional things: “we have as good right,
and the same sort of right to be here, as Cape Cod or Sandy Hook have to be there”
(The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. VI: The Conduct of Life, ed. Barbara L.
Parker, Joseph Slater, and Douglas Emory [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003], 134,
quoted in “Justice to Emerson,” Raritan 21 [2002]: 46–67, p. 53). As Larson argues,
Emerson uses the analogy to claim that people have no right to expect more security
than things in nature possess.
16. Complementarily, Kant’s fear of addiction shows his horror at the idea of having
to have more. See David L. Clark, “We ‘Other Prussians’: Bodies and Pleasures in De
Quincey and Late Kant,” European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 261–287.
17. Paul Guyer reconstructs Kant’s development of the notion that “we take a unique
and indeed higher satisfaction in the fact of our freedom itself than in any of the products
of this freedom,” and points out that for Kant freedom is in this way connected to
happiness despite Kant’s restrictions on interest (Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness
[Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000], 108).
18. “Privilege: Justificatory Title and Introductory Remarks,” in Who’s Afraid of Philosophy?
Right to Philosophy I [1990], trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002), 46, 47.

86 looking away
jective constraint like that of the laws of physics, according to Derrida,
“is the very definition of right according to Kant” (“Privilege,” 51). Things
that can’t be otherwise are the only ones that require our endorsement.
This very Kantian issue of the endorsement of inevitability pertains especially
vividly to appearances in the First Critique because Kant has just
moved them from the column of contingencies to the column of necessities.
At this moment, “right” is coming into being as the positive of a lifted
guilt or resentment—a newly enjoyable state of not being wrong or wronged.
Reason had been trying to get rid of certain appearances and feeling bad
about them, and now it doesn’t have to: suddenly it’s free to regard them as
exigencies in which, in typically Kantian style, we have a guilt-free duty/
right to participate.
In this respect the First Critique draws on pre-critical writings such as
Kant’s 1753 manuscript jottings on “optimism” and the 1759 “Attempt at
some reflections on optimism.” By “optimism” here Kant means the science
of determining the optimal. In these writings Kant defines the “best”
as the most real, and the most real as that which couldn’t be otherwise. In
the 1759 text, a jaunty and largely sympathetic response to Leibniz, Kant
“equate[s] the absolute perfection of a thing with its degree of reality” 19
and the maximal degree of reality with the concept of God. In effect, Kant
identifies God with reality: “in God everything is reality, and nothing harmonizes
to a greater degree with that reality than that which itself contains
a greater reality [than other things]” (“Reflections on optimism,” 75–76).
In one of the 1753 notes, Kant justifies the flaws in God’s world by “unavoidable
necessity.” 20 Although he agrees with Leibniz that this world is
the best possible, he rejects, on the basis of contradictions internal to
Leibniz’s argument, the notion that God wishes everything in the world to
be just the way it is: “the being of the world is not as it is simply because
God wishes to have it so, but because it was not possible in any other way”
(“Reflection 3705: Defects of Optimism,” 82). Kant underlines the strain
19. “An attempt at some reflections on optimism by M. Immanuel Kant, also containing
an announcement of his lectures for the coming semester 7 October 1759,” in
Theoretical Philosophy 1750–1770, ed. and trans. David Walford in collaboration with
Ralf Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 72.
20. “Three manuscript reflections on optimism (Reflections 3703–05)” [1753], in
ibid., 79, 81.

appearance and acceptance in kant 87
in Leibniz’s logic, which allows that “at least it is not [God’s] fault” that the
world is deeply flawed, at the cost of implying an “unfathomable conflict
which exists between the general will of God ...andthemetaphysical necessity
which is not willing to adapt itself to that end” (ibid., 81). Kant unravels
this tangle by letting go of the absolute omnipotence that Leibniz
wishes to preserve for God. For Kant, even God works under the constraint
of a reality principle; and the effect is that both God and humans
can only choose “the best” using “the greatest reality which can belong to
a world” as a limit (“Reflections on optimism,” 76). Admitting the renunciation
of absolute freedom in holding that one is “not ...able to choose
other than that which one distinctly and rightly recognizes as the best,”
Kant declares that if he must “choose between errors”—between the constrained
acceptance he is arguing for and the subjective freedom of being
able to negate anything, including all we can have—he does not hesitate to
“cry: ‘Happy are we—we exist!’” (ibid.). Having floated to this climactic
fact/value conflation, Kant continues, back on the ground, “In the coming
semester, I shall, as usual, be lecturing on logic using Meier,” etc.—an example
of the existence one is able to go on with, perhaps: thanks for (almost)
nothing.
If exigencies are what we have a right to, we need to know how to tell
what an exigency is. Identifying an exigency may be understood as the
functional equivalent of what I’ve been calling having a fact perception,
with the proviso that specific facts are of varying degrees of exigency. The
peculiar problem for world-acceptance is that the model of conceptual
recognition of a physical object cannot be extended to something like “nature
as a whole,” which we can never apprehend. Kant imagines himself
arriving to save the day: finding a way to deal with this stalemate is the
project of critical philosophy.
Kant figures the notion of a process for identifying exigency in the First
Critique’s most conspicuous metaphor, in which he depicts knowledge as a
foggy island in an icy sea, unpromising real estate but worth a second look:
it will be well to begin by casting a glance upon the map of the land
which we are about to leave, and to enquire, first, whether we cannot
in any case be satisfied with what it contains—are not, indeed, under
compulsion to be satisfied [nicht allenfalls zufrieden sein könnten,

88 looking away
oder auch aus Not zufrieden sein müssen], inasmuch as there may be
no other territory upon which we can settle; and, secondly, by what title
we possess even this domain, and can consider ourselves as secured
against all opposing claims. (CPR A236/B295)
In this passage—the opening of the Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment—the
given world seems to be a place much like England, the climatologically
challenged isle of empiricism. Kant supposes that it’s hard to
feel satisfied with a territory when insecure in one’s title to it and, typically,
that having nowhere else to go would place us “under compulsion
to be satisfied” where we are. Exemplifying the constraint by which Kant
defines right, literal inability to move to another country becomes an argument
for enjoying one’s current residence “allenfalls,” “if need be.” If
“we are about to leave” the scene, that’s because only actual exigency, not
mere probability or persuasion, can make us stay. We don’t automatically
know—so it seems—how to recognize an exigency. For Kant no sooner
asks whether we can be satisfied with our place than he answers that, at the
outset of the procedure at least, we cannot: “we are not satisfied with the
exposition merely of that which is true, but likewise demand that account
be taken of that which we desire to know” (A237/B296). At this juncture,
the difference between being where one is and being satisfied with where
one is consists in being unsure whether there is anyplace else to go. The
process of making sure opened here will take the entire time of the First
Critique. There is nothing to accept until this time is exhausted: until,
having done all we can, we’re free from blame if we do nothing more.
In the 1787 edition Kant further traces “the cause of our not being satisfied”
(A251), at first, with our only possible circumstances to the concept
of appearance itself:
The cause of our not being satisfied [befriedigt] with the substrate of
sensibility, and of our therefore adding to the phenomena noumena
which only the pure understanding can think, is simply as follows.
The sensibility (and its field, that of the appearances) is itself limited
by the understanding in such fashion that it does not have to do with
things in themselves but only with the mode in which, owing to our

appearance and acceptance in kant 89
subjective constitution, they appear. The Transcendental Aesthetic, in
all its teaching, has led to this conclusion; and the same conclusion also,
of course, follows from the concept of an appearance in general; namely, that
something which is not in itself appearance must correspond to it.
For appearance can be nothing by itself, outside our mode of representation.
Unless, therefore, we are to move constantly in a circle, the
word appearance must be recognized as already indicating a relation
to something, the immediate representation of which is, indeed, sensible,
but which, even apart from the constitution of our sensibility
(upon which the form of our intuition is grounded), must be something
in itself, that is, an object independent of sensibility. (A251–252;
my italics)
So far Kant reproduces the traditional attitude toward appearance: we are
inherently dissatisfied with it because incompleteness is built into “the
word appearance,” which “indicate[s] a relation” to “something in itself.”
If Kant’s concept of the noumenon were positive, it would simply fill out
the traditional scheme: noumena would be hypothetical things or hypothetical
aspects of things, ever absent from our perspective, that correspond
to the indication created by “the word appearance.”
When Kant gives the concept of the noumenon “only ...anegative
sense” (B309; see also A252–253), however, he breaks new ground, and
undermines the built-in disappointment indicated by “the word appearance”
in an innovative way, with the idea of categories that extend further
than appearances:
if...Ileave aside all intuition, the form of thought still remains—that
is, the mode of determining an object for the manifold of a possible
intuition. The categories accordingly extend further than sensible intuition,
since they think objects in general, without regard to the special
mode (the sensibility) in which they may be given. But they do
not thereby determine a greater sphere of objects. For we cannot assume
that such objects can be given, without presupposing the possibility
of another kind of intuition than the sensible; and we are by no
means justified in so doing.

90 looking away
If the objective reality of a concept cannot be in any way known,
while yet the concept contains no contradiction and also at the same
time is connected with other modes of knowledge that involve given
concepts which it serves to limit, I entitle that concept problematic.
The concept of a noumenon—that is, of a thing which is not to be
thought as object of the senses but as a thing in itself, solely through a
pure understanding—is not in any way contradictory. For we cannot
assert of sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition. Further,
the concept of a noumenon is necessary, to prevent sensible intuition
from being extended to things in themselves, and thus to limit
the objective validity of sensible knowledge. The remaining things, to
which it does not apply, are entitled noumena, in order to show that
this knowledge cannot extend its domain over everything which the
understanding thinks. But none the less we are unable to comprehend
how such noumena can be possible, and the domain that lies out beyond
the sphere of appearances is for us empty. That is to say, we have
an understanding which problematically extends further, but we have
no intuition, indeed not even the concept of a possible intuition,
through which objects outside the field of sensibility can be given,
and through which the understanding can be employed assertoricially
beyond that field. The concept of a noumenon is thus a merely limiting
concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility;
and it is therefore only of negative employment. At the same time
it is no arbitrary invention; it is bound up with the limitation of sensibility,
though it cannot affirm anything positive beyond the field of
sensibility. (A254–255/B310–311)
There is a great deal of debate about Kant’s intricate noumenon, and especially
about whether he really does mean it to be only negative. Why attempt
to figure at all that which has an “only . . . negative” employment,
why talk about it under erasure, why call what corresponds to an empty,
agnostic space “a thing” and so substantialize it rhetorically? Robert Pippin
gives a vivid summary of the problem: if noumena are merely “that
which we could not know by means of any experience,” then “the claim
that we ‘do not know noumena’ would not at all be a restricting claim on
what we can know, but merely a needlessly involved way of insisting that

appearance and acceptance in kant 91
we cannot know what we cannot know.” 21 I would like to suggest, however,
that Kant realizes that a “needlessly involved way” of coming to the realization
that knowledge is limited to phenomena is exactly what we need
therapeutically. We can realize appearance’s repleteness only by taking a
long and necessarily rhetorical way around—all the way around the world,
like Benjamin’s forward path to the Garden of Eden. Only by having simulated
this journey, and taken the time to simulate this journey, do we work
through the impossibility of knowing something outside phenomena. If
we only realize anything by context or contrast with what it’s not, how
could we ever begin to realize, in the full sense of the word, the repleteness
of the apparent world, except through the heuristic aid of merely intelligible
spaces?
One can also understand the motive for thinking the noumenon in emotive
terms. Kant states that the direct cause of our “adding” noumena to
phenomena is “our not being satisfied [befriedigt] with the substrate of
sensibility.” Given this inevitable dissatisfaction—the emotional correlative
of reason’s overreaching—thinking the noumenon, like Freud’s negation,
serves to recognize both the familiar object and one’s recoil from it.
Thinking the noumenon commits aggression against the phenomenon by
saying “I can think beyond you,” or, more confrontationally, “Not you.”
As Freud and Winnicott argue, experiments with symbolic minor violence
are a vital part of our negotiation with reality, and, completed successfully,
21. Kant’s Theory of Form (New Haven: Yale UP, 1982), 202. To avoid this conclusion,
Pippin argues that the noumenon should be considered to have both negative and positive
meanings—that, even as “transcendentally considered, the concept of a thing in itself
should be considered wholly negatively . . . there is another type of reflection on
things in themselves, whereby we do not consider phenomenal objects as they are in
themselves, but we consider types of objects which, by their very definition, could not be
phenomenal objects” (200). Without this second way of thinking of things in themselves,
“that is, if the concept of noumenon only means a phenomenal object considered
independently of any way we could know it, then the supposed contrast between phenomena
and noumena is hardly a contrast between what we can know and what we cannot
know, but is instead just a difference between knowledge in general and the rather
abstract notion of not-knowing-at-all. ...Butherein [that is, in the interpretation of
noumena as nonphenomenal objects—R.T.] lies the familiar paradox again, since to establish
something about noumena independently of this merely negative contrast with
phenomena would violate the very restriction the whole phenomenality thesis is meant
to establish” (201).

92 looking away
bring the sense of reality into being. 22 Winnicott calls this violence “de-
stroying” to emphasize that at the moment the self commits the aggression,
it does not know that the aggression is symbolic or minor. The distinction
between symbolic and literal, minor and major violence is learned
only by taking the risk of violent thought. The object remains unrealized
as long as one remains afraid of the omnipotent power of one’s criticism.
In “destroying” the object, expressing dissatisfaction with it, one makes
contact with its actual independence and begins to realize that, for better
and worse, one cannot think it away. The fact that there is no other world,
by this logic, is precisely no excuse for prematurely “accepting” it, since accepting
it before realizing that it exists independently of our acceptance
sells it short. In the First Critique, the object challenged and realized
through the challenge of thinking beyond it is nothing less than nature as a
whole.
Some readers of Kant, including Nietzsche, interpret the noumenon as
an escape clause in Kant’s contract with Erscheinung. In order to do so,
they identify reality with value. Correctly perceiving the noumenon as a
slight to the given world, Nietzsche leaps to the conclusion that Kant’s acknowledgment
of dissatisfaction with the world indicates his weak commitment
to its reality. Kant, however, is demonstrating exactly the opposite:
that one can harbor and express a natural dissatisfaction without
implying that this dissatisfaction is the object’s fault or our own, much less
that if we can think other worlds, they are real in something other than
thought. 23
Another kind of disappointed reader, best represented by Kleist, takes
Kant to be asking us to be satisfied with dissatisfaction itself. Notoriously,
Kleist’s response to Kant’s epistemological first aid was to feel “deeply
22. Freud, “Negation” and “Formulations on Two Principles of Mental Functioning,”
in SE XII: 218–226; D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional
Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 1–34.
23. The thought of the noumenon is sensible, since a thought is “not nothing,” in
Hartley Coleridge’s unbeatable phrase. But the thought of the noumenon is not the
noumenon. Pippin believes that “Kant is quite interested in arguing for the ‘necessity’
of some determinate connection between the thought of things in themselves and phenomenal
knowledge itself, as his position on regulative ideals make clear” (Kant’s Theory
of Form, 200; my italics). But the thought of things in themselves is already part of the
phenomenality of the inner world.

appearance and acceptance in kant 93
wounded” “in the innermost sanctum of his being.” 24 Readers in this group
regard appearance as a diluted version of reality, and assume that dissatisfaction
with a world of appearances must therefore either persist or be
“denied.” To both audiences—those who feel that Kant damaged and
those who feel that Kant didn’t inflict nearly enough damage to the hypothesis
of another, more real world—Kant sounds contradictory simply
because he continues to call the world “phenomenal” while promising
“complete satisfaction.” The very fact that this sounds like satisfaction
with dissatisfaction—that the seeming paradox of satisfaction with dissatisfaction
is embedded in the idea of replete appearance—indicates the
strength of the association between dissatisfaction and phenomenality
from which Kant is trying to work free.
Kant does not avoid conflating fact with value entirely, however, even
though his relationship to the fact/value problem is differently deep. Kant
assumes that at some degree of completeness, realization adjusts the emotions.
Realization, for Kant, is a much larger field than that of fact perception;
its boundaries are drawn by critical reason. Yet the project of critical
reason remains true to the empirical spirit of fact perception. Kant embarks
on it in order to be able to effect a recognition of reality when dealing
with necessities that burst the bounds of fact perception—“objects” such
as nature as a whole. By establishing necessary conditions through critical
reason, new givens in the sense peculiar to himself, Kant makes fact perception
equivalents of them, so to speak; and so, he hopes, he makes them valuable
objectively. His radical humanism lies in his conclusion that where the
intransigence of the world’s natural laws seems to run up against the persistence
of equally natural human laws, there is no fault, since the dualism
is illusory. For him, not winning is a bargain price to pay for the triumph
of, for the first time, not losing simply by being a finite living thing.
The psychological logic of the First Critique is circular in ways that
echo the strengths and weaknesses of its epistemology. Kant’s assumption
that we won’t feel guilty over perceptions and thoughts that aren’t our
24. Letter to Wilhemine von Zenge, quoted by Nietzsche in “Schopenhauer as Educator,”
Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995),
188–189. It’s ironic that Kleist feels raped by Kant’s phenomenalization of objects;
Kant’s main purpose in the First Critique is to encourage a nonpenetrative relationship
with objects, but Kleist feels violated by that.

94 looking away
fault is no more plausible than the assumption it replaces, that we
shouldn’t desire to experience what we know we cannot. Just as I may want
to “see beyond phenomena” even after I recognize the contradiction, I
may keep feeling guilty about the continuation of this desire even after I
know its persistence is truly inexorable. Kant acknowledges the threat of
interminability by positing the correction of “momentary aberrations ever
and again.” It may be encouraging to know it’s possible, as Kant shows in
his own person, not to feel angry or guilty about one’s limits. But the question
remains whether we will want to count the minimal acceptance that
objectively accompanies recognition of reality as value that is worthy of
the name.
Suppose a maximally unacceptable trauma meets the maximum of contextualization,
perspective, and hence realization, given infinite time. Do
we then endorse the trauma itself as an inalterable fact of the past? 25 Kant’s
answer is formal: our endorsement, like our knowledge, is framed by a set
of exigencies that coincides exactly with our right, with what we may expect.
Our obligation will never be more than to accept all we can, while
the world’s part of the bargain is never to present us with anything we can’t
conceivably accept: in Kant’s system, anything we can’t conceivably assimilate
is guaranteed not to appear at all. “Accept only what you can”: a modest-sounding
claim, until we remember how implausibly much we can
stand. The meaning of “acceptance” is sliced correspondingly thin, however,
its claim minimized: it means not that human experience is great or
even good, but that it is tolerable—literally tolerable, in the sense that as
long as we’re having experience, we’re minimally tolerating it, and that as
soon as it becomes intolerable, we aren’t having any. These algebraic cancellations
are neither tragic nor noble. That for Kant there was no space
between minimal tolerability and “complete satisfaction,” that this makes
him smile his Mona Lisa smile—people will feel different ways about this:
amused, admiring, appalled. The solution of the First Critique resembles
25. Derrida’s modification of this theme holds that “forgiveness” includes forgiveness
of the unforgivable, and that such forgiveness is incalculable and mad. Although the inevitable
could be incalculable and mad, in Derrida’s terms such forgiveness is merely
possible (On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes
[London: Routledge, 2002]).

appearance and acceptance in kant 95
the ironic endings of Kleist’s stories, in which something that occupies the
place of justice loses all its glamour in prevailing. The audience is not
asked to celebrate these outcomes. In the First Critique, Kant is satisfied
with this kind of conclusion (it leaves one’s judgment free of further obligations).
For Kleist, a freedom like this fails to make life worth living.
As long as one is convinced that the world as described by the First
Critique is the only one but doesn’t—yet—feel like endorsing it, and, like
Kleist, believes that endorsement is a voluntary affirmation one has to
generate entirely from within, then the tendency to read fact perception
as entailing acceptance loads the philosophical question about phenomena—Is
this real? Am I seeing what I’m supposed to be seeing?—with the awkward
aggression of aesthetic and moral judgment: Do I like it? Is this good
enough? Given the parameters of Kant’s solution, protest at the given conditions
of a world assumed to be inevitable looks, in the mode of appearance,
like derealization: I must be dreaming. Once the apparent world is
recognized as the only real one, objections generate the image not of an alternative
world but of the absurd, unjustified (ungereimte [CPR Bxxvi]), or
unjust one of absurdist literature.
So, Coleridge flees the realm of coerced endorsement of appearance for
the peripheral domain of temporary optical illusion, the stranger and more
transitory the better; when he compares his fondness for these ephemera
to Kant’s doctrine of benign appearance, Kant seems to torture him by
drawing a line of normalcy just in front of him. Similarly, Goethe asserts
that “physiological colors” hitherto regarded “as illusion and infirmity”
(Theory of Colors, §1) are in fact “healthy” and “necessary” (§101), only to
create another category for “pathological colors” that really do function as
“deviation from the general law” (§109). Without making any reality claim
that post-Kantians would perceive as false, such phenomena seem to suggest
that we can sidestep necessity, if not escape it. So, Nietzsche pours
scorn on lyrical imagery for celebrating “the more subtilized, attenuated,
transient” objects, and blames this pathos on the psychology of metaphysics
(WP §572; KSA 12.253). Lyrical imagination after Kant finds would-be
exceptions to exigency in phenomenal rarities. Depicted longingly by poets,
such ephemera seem to solicit sympathy with all that is irregular.
Among feral phenomena that fail to make the factive claim of normative
appearances, the pressure for acceptance disappears. Despite Kant’s

96 looking away
efforts to rehabilitate phenomenality, these marginalized phenomena are
once again figured as deviant. There is an utterly paradigmatic meditation
on the whole complex of phenomenal errancy and its queer affinities
in W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, in which the elderly but “youthful” Great-
Uncle Alphonso initiates his nephews into the pleasures of looking away.
Alphonso is a full-time phenomenophile who “generally [wears] glasses
with gray silk tissue instead of lenses in the frames” and produces art that
consists of “faint images” in fainter colors of fragmentary natural shapes. 26
He takes his nephews moth-watching on summer nights, and explains that
the “trails of light” that moths seem to “leave behind them in all kinds of
curlicues and streamers and spirals...didnotreally exist, but were merely
phantom traces created by the sluggish reaction of the human eye, appearing
to see a certain afterglow in the place from which the insect itself, shining
for only the fraction of a second in the lamplight, had already gone”
(Austerlitz, 92–93). Like the wavering images in Coleridge’s Notebooks, the
trails of light lead Sebald’s characters into a queer idyll, as if they raised the
hope that their apparent irregularity made them fitting representatives of
all we wish the world would make exceptions for, even when we know it
won’t. “Such unreal phenomena,” Sebald writes, “the sudden incursion of
unreality into the real world, certain effects of light in the landscape spread
out before us, or in the eye of a beloved person ...[kindle] our deepest
feelings, or at least what we [take] for them” (93).
4. legalize it
What is the relation between the minimal satisfaction afforded by the First
Critique and the development of critical philosophy? How would the
reading I’ve offered here affect one’s reading of the whole? This is a fair, if
large, question; in what follows, I’ll sketch a few possibilities.
Critical reason in the First Critique extends what counts as given beyond
what the senses can experience, yet remains in the spirit of fact perception.
Kant assumes that the recognition of exigency it establishes carries
a minimal value. He often indicates that knowing can “bring by itself
26. Austerlitz (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 88. Thanks to Bernie Richter for
giving me this book.

appearance and acceptance in kant 97
[bei sich führt]” a kind of value or “liking” (CJ 366). Such an objective
value, Kant makes clear, is coerced—“carried,” as Kemp Smith’s translation
has it. 27 I’ve suggested, however, that the value coerced by recognition
of exigency in the First Critique is not as coercive as it may at first seem,
for various reasons. The value it requires is very small—a near-zero degree
of value—and all but automated. To the extent that this value is “carried”
by a conclusion of reason, we do not have to will it, and it is not bestowed
by a separate operation. But because the conclusion of reason itself is
never automatic, this value is not completely empty, either—only nearly
so. When we look very closely at “objective value,” in other words, we can
discern an ambiguous quasi-subjectivity that, I want to suggest, is just the
thing Kant needs to get from fact to value. Looking away, I’ve argued, expresses
resistance against coercion by fact perception where Erscheinung
takes on the authority of a given. If I’m right that the First Critique’s coercion
of value is real, yet minimal and untraumatic, then phenomenophilic
romantic texts that take Kant to have intensified the obligation to affirm
the given world, and especially its given mode of appearance, are mistaken.
A reader like Kleist imagines himself asked to praise the startlingly
neutral post-Kantian world and doesn’t know how to do so; he doesn’t
understand that he can revise not only his epistemology, but with it his
moralization of epistemology. We are not obligated to support a disenchanted
world with the enthusiasm we would have for an enchanted one.
The subsequent narrative of the critical project hints that even
Kant was no stranger to the impulse to downplay the no-fault vision
of the First Critique, as though it were “too austere even for Kant himself,”
as Paul Guyer comments. 28 Like the subterranean discourse and
practice of phenomenophilia and the literature of absurdity, Kant’s devel-
27. For a contemporary analogue to Kant’s sense of “carrying,” see Robert Nozick on
“tracking.” Nozick points out that “when a belief is caused appropriately by the fact,
that connection appears desirable and plausibly is held to constitute knowledge.” I’m
indebted, in general, to Nozick’s pursuit of “a way for action to parallel belief, to be so
connected to the world, even causally, in a way that is desirable”—what he calls his
“project of paralleling.” See Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981),
170–171.
28. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005),
225.

98 looking away
opment of the aesthetic is itself, in part, a nervous reaction to the Critique
of Pure Reason. Of course, phenomenophilia is different from the aesthetic.
The phenomenophile cherishes his marginal status and the private, temporary
nature of the perceptions he collects; Kant’s aesthetic reflective
judgments of taste are felt to be universally valid and shareable. Still,
aesthetic reflective judgments have something in common with the techniques
of looking away, as we’ll see, and both lines of thought respond
to weaknesses they perceive in the “satisfaction” of the First Critique.
The anti- or protoaesthetic of phenomenophilia and aesthetic reflective
judgments are cousins—illegitimate and legitimate cousins. It’s almost as
though Kant had learned from romantic misinterpretations of the First
Critique and their recourse to contraband phenomena (though he didn’t
really get his ideas for the aesthetic in this way). The best way to describe
the relation of the Critique of Judgment to phenomenophilia is to say that it
legitimizes it.
The Third Critique, we might say, selects from phenomenality in order
to define aesthetic reflective judgments. I mentioned at the outset that
there are various ways to achieve the phenomenophilic effect. One can (1)
actually have an aberrant perceptual experience or make a perceptual mistake,
(2) frame perception to emphasize object perception over fact perception,
for example by intervening in the conditions of perception; or (3)
concentrate on a transient or supposedly unstable object. Now, (2), cultivating
object perception, produces results very similar to aesthetic reflective
judgment—subjective feelings of liking without a concept. One
can make a case that aesthetic reflective judgments, which use no concept
and abstract any concern with the actual existence of their objects, are constructed
to contrast with fact perception—that what the subtractive logic
of aesthetic reflective judgments seeks to subtract is precisely the coercive
effect of fact perception. This hypothesis suggests something of a new way to
understand what the implausible “disinterest” of aesthetic reflective judgments
is all about. Kant wants aesthetic reflective judgments to do more
than elude fact perception and their normative force, however (the marginal
experiments of the phenomenophile also do that). Kant’s aesthetic
reflective judgments therefore exclude avenues (1) and (3): contingent mistakes
and responses to objects that are too irregular or fleeting to make us
imagine that other people ought to feel about them the way we feel. Relieving
the coercive effect of fact perception—an effect I would argue we

appearance and acceptance in kant 99
can extend as well to Kant’s critical supplement to fact perception, that is,
reason’s recognition of the conditions that limit knowledge—aesthetic reflective
judgments are also able to present themselves as necessary conclusions
to which everyone ought to come. In developing a universalist aesthetics,
Kant trades irregular enjoyment for what he hopes is something
better: a glimpse of a basis for spontaneous community.
Kant cannot stress enough that the free liking of aesthetic reflective
judgment differs in kind from various coerced likings. 29 In the Third Critique,
“objective value” paradigmatically belongs to what we call good, and
“objective liking” is what we feel when confronted with perfection (CJ
210, 366). The objective value of the good corresponds to “what we esteem,
or endorse [billigen],” or “respect” (210), and respect is what we feel
when we recognize our own limits. Kant notes in the clarifying “Comment”
of §54 that objective value can be added to sensations: we can like
or dislike “in addition” our own joy or pain. Thus objective value “is the
same as approval or disapproval” (331), and includes metafeelings of satisfaction
and dissatisfaction with our own reactions. Produced by reason’s
conclusions, objective value is required from everyone. Although I’m approximating,
and putting together passages that Kant never joined, objective
value would seem to describe the “satisfaction” attainable through
critical reason in the First Critique. Critical philosophy’s verification of
the conditions of possibility for knowledge is the utmost of reason’s conclusions,
and the endorsement of the given relation of reason to nature as a
whole carried by the Critique of Pure Reason would seem to be the apex of
objective value. The question of whether the First Critique is satisfied
merely with itself or with its object is a live one here; certainly Kant’s mind
is satisfied with its own capacities, but I think not only so. Kant writes of
the land we must live in that we can “be satisfied with what it contains [was
es in sich enthält]” (CPR A236/B295; my italics). This is not to say that it
becomes beautiful.
When Kant considers the “objective liking” that responds to perfection
(a kind of good [CJ 241]), he similarly points out that the judgment of perfection
is a task of reason (228´). The intellectual judgment of a circle’s
perfection, in Kant’s example, “carries with it an objective liking [objektive
29. It’s also distinct from interested pleasure, of course, but that’s not as relevant to
my point.

100 looking away
Wohlgefallen]” or “intellectual liking [intellektuelle Wohlgefallen]” that
may be “commonly called beauty,” though “it would be better to call it ...
relative perfection” (366). Remember the conclusion of Kant’s notes on optimism,
that one should judge the optimization of the world according to
“its degree of reality” (“Reflections on optimism,” 72), and we are closer
yet to viewing satisfaction with the givens of our world as a whole as a
kind of objective liking. Aesthetic pleasure must “go beyond the concept
of the object, and even beyond the intuition of the object” (CJ 288), to go
beyond objective liking.
Therefore, Kant wishes to “add as a predicate ...something that is not
even cognition: namely [a] feeling of pleasure (or displeasure)” to which
one feels everyone should assent (CJ 288–289). The spatial metaphors in
which pleasure “go[es] beyond” or is “add[ed]” to the concept are misleading;
what counts is whether pleasure is off the concept, paraconceptual.
Reflective judgment according to Kant famously meets this criterion by
“devis[ing] a law of its own” to use as a principle instead of subsuming the
particular under a concept (179), “refer[ring] the presentation to the subject
and his feeling of pleasure or displeasure” alone (203). For this purpose,
stopping short of the concept works as well as ignoring or going beyond
it. In §39, “On the Communicability of a Sensation,” pleasure
occurs by means of a procedure [that is, reflection—R.T.] that judgment
has to carry out to give rise to even the most ordinary experience.
The only difference is that in the case of ordinary experience
the imagination has to engage in this procedure in order to [obtain]
an empirical objective concept, whereas in the present case it has to
do so merely in order to perceive that the presentation is adequate
for harmonious (subjectively purposive) activity of the two cognitive
powers in their freedom, i.e., in order to feel the presentational state
with pleasure. (292; translation modified, my italics)
Here we don’t “add” liking or disliking to cognition. Rather, in aesthetic
judgments the imagination “merely” finds out whether the presentational
state gives pleasure, whereas in ordinary experience it has to engage reflection
“in order to” find the concept—as though, as in the logic of
phenomenophilic consolation, the imagination declines to continue on to
fact perception. So, Rodolphe Gasché can use a chronological metaphor

appearance and acceptance in kant 101
diametrical to Kant’s metaphor of adding on—“aesthetic judgment precedes
all conceptual understanding of the object”—while stressing that literally,
“the achievements of reflective judgment—which comprises both
aesthetic and teleological judgment—are in no way foundational for or anterior
to those of cognitive judgment.” 30
In Kant’s initial descriptions of what it is like to make aesthetic reflective
judgments (§§1–2), we can see that aesthetic reflective judgments resemble
object perceptions over and against fact perceptions, and serve a similar
psychological function:
To apprehend a regular, purposive building with one’s cognitive
power ...isvery different from being conscious of this presentation
with a sensation of liking. Here the presentation is referred only to
the subject, namely to his feeling of life, under the name feeling of
pleasure or displeasure, and this forms the basis of a very special
power of discriminating and judging [Beurteilung]. (CJ 204)
Suppose someone asks me whether I consider the palace I see before
me beautiful. I might reply that I am not fond of things of that sort,
made merely to be gaped at. Or I might reply like that Iroquois sachem
who said that he liked nothing better in Paris than the eatinghouses.
I might even go on, as Rousseau would, to rebuke the vanity of
the great who spend the people’s sweat on such superfluous things. I
might, finally, quite easily convince myself that, if I were on some uninhabited
island with no hope of ever again coming among people,
and could conjure up such a splendid edifice by a mere wish, I would
not even take that much trouble for it if I already had a sufficiently
comfortable hut. The questioner may grant all this and approve of it;
but it is not to the point. All he wants to know is whether my mere
presentation of the object is accompanied by a liking, no matter how
indifferent I may be about the existence of the object of the presentation.
(204–205)
When we understand human beings’ tendency to resist the coercion of
value carried by the recognition of “the existence of the object,” we may
30. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999), 27, 4.

102 looking away
understand more easily what Kant’s example wants to abstract. In Kant’s
fiction an interlocutor asks whether the palace is beautiful, and Kant sidesteps
the question, talking instead about how he doesn’t need it or disapproves
politically of its existence. The examples of point-missing responses
(from the philistine, the Iroquois, and Rousseau—it’s all quite a
joke, these juxtapositions) are there to indicate that people refuse to make
aesthetic judgments when they either don’t really understand what they
are or insist on speaking morally or instrumentally, like museum-goers
who can’t like Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ because it displays urine. The
whole incident seems inverted, however, like a dream, and this inversion
deflects the articulation of dissatisfaction. The going assumption of the
narrative is that Kant cannot stand the palace. A more likely scenario than
the one we are given, in which Kant plays the role of a person who evades
his own aesthetic judgment, would be that Kant would be aware of his
nonaesthetic reactions to the palace—that it bothers him; that he disapproves
of what it stands for; that he feels oppressed by its very existence
and wishes it weren’t there—and would avoid articulating his inconvenient
and perhaps controversial objection to its existence by saying that it is or
isn’t beautiful, that is, by deflecting his objection into a nonconceptual relation
to the palace: into aesthetic reflection, where one cannot be blamed
for one’s likes and dislikes, for they are not likes and dislikes of anything or
anyone; where, far from being at fault, one can’t even be criticized for feeling
that everyone else should feel the same way. Instead, Kant provides a
narrative in which observers flee from aesthetic judgment into instrumental
or moral reason, hence obscuring the deflective powers of the aesthetic.
As an exposition of the psychological motives for the aesthetic, such a
reading of §§1–2 finds some justice in views of aesthetics as escape from
reality (while acknowledging how escapeworthy a piece of reality may be).
Its nonmoralistic point, however, is that by defining aesthetic experience
by way of reflection, Kant joins the resistance to fact perception: he sidesteps
the objective value carried by fact perception and recognition of exigency
and does what readers of the First Critique historically tend to do:
he lingers in object perception.
This pleasure [of aesthetic judgment] is also not practical in any way
...Yetitdoes have a causality in it, namely, to keep the state of the

appearance and acceptance in kant 103
presentation itself, and [to keep] the cognitive powers engaged without
any further aim. We linger [weilen] in our contemplation of the
beautiful. (222; translation modified)
Given the coercion of our every waking moment as conceptual beings,
why would we not try to draw out the reprieve of reflection?
Aesthetic reflective judgment selects from experiences of phenomenality
in order to provide positive images for the conviction—over
and against the apologetic, haunted demeanor of the phenomenophile—
that the desire for relief from the coercion of fact perception is universally
valid. The pleasures cherished by phenomenophiles for their very
irrelevance are excluded; only the second kind of my three types of
phenomenophilic technique, the foregrounding of object perception while
one is engaged with Erscheinung, may be aesthetic. What is gained and
lost when we compare the aberrant appeal of looking away to the rightful
claim of beauty we may share?
One passage that affords a comparison involves an example Kant gives
of the distinction between beauty and charm (Reiz). In the “General Comment
on the First Division of the Analytic,” Kant contrasts “beauties” to
“beautiful views” whose “distance prevents us from recognizing them distinctly”
31 or to the “changing shapes of the flames in a fireplace or of a rippling
brook.” According to Kant, “neither of these are beauties, but they
still charm the imagination because they sustain its free play” (243–244).
Usually Kant discriminates charm from beauty by the sensory basis on
which we judge it, which places charming things among the merely agreeable
objects of taste; and his favorite example of charm is the delight of
color (which associates charm with spectra) (224–225, 297, 302, 347). Although
charm is sensory for Kant, however, sensory delight doesn’t prevent
an object from triggering an aesthetic reflective judgment (objects per
se are not beautiful or unbeautiful); aesthetic judgments are not characterized
by their objects but by the internal harmony of the faculties when
31. As we saw in the example of the risen moon, distance can function as though it
were a phenomenophilic manipulation of appearance such as squinting: one can cultivate
effects of distance. The classic text is Hazlitt’s “Why Distant Objects Please”
[1821], in Selected Writings, ed. Ronald Blythe (London: Penguin, 1982), 148–160.

104 looking away
imagination takes the lead. Reflection on charming things through which
the mind perceives “the regular play of the impressions (and hence the
form in the connection of different presentations)” can be aesthetic (224),
so it isn’t automatically clear why the experience of the rippling brook is
not aesthetic. The example of “beautiful views” and “changing shapes”
therefore introduces a structural distinction between these objects and objects
of aesthetic reflective judgments. Kant explains that “in beautiful
views of objects, taste seems to fasten not so much on what the imagination
apprehends in that area, as on the occasion they provide for it to engage
in fiction [dichten], i.e., on the actual fantasies with which the mind entertains
itself as it is continually being aroused by the diversity that strikes
the eye” (243). If we mix fantasy with perception, our confused pleasure
may be unable to lead to a harmony in the mind. The evanescence of
Kant’s examples—the “changing” flames and “rippling” water—suggest
that these experiences are too brief and contingent to universalize. Inspiring
free play but not “free lawfulness” (240) or “regular play” (224), they are
among the traditional instances of phenomenality, blissfully and fleetingly
transmorphic. Working backward from Kant’s insistence that aesthetic
judgments must be thinkably shareable, we can hypothesize that rippling
water is not a beauty because it conveys no impression that someone else
must like it in just the way we do.
Even if we were to reflect on the formal elements of our experience of
“beautiful views” and “changing shapes,” at least some of these reflections
would be subaesthetic—not beautiful, not sublime (although in their wildness
they could be contrasted interestingly to the sublime as well as to the
beautiful). In The Idea of Form, Gasché argues with great originality that
aesthetic judgments discover “the minimal conditions of cognizability” (9);
beautiful views, changing shapes, and “mixed colors” (CJ 225) don’t meet
those minimal conditions. 32 The contrast between beauty and charm thus
supports Gasché’s contention that aesthetic judgment is defined by the fact
32. Because purity involves form, “all simple colors, insofar as they are pure, are considered
beautiful; mixed colors do not enjoy this privilege, precisely because, since they
are not simple, we lack a standard for judging whether we should call them pure or impure”
(CJ 224–225). The discourse of phenomenality is obsessed with variegated
color—for example, the mixed colors of Coleridge’s “Fire screen inscribed with the nitrate
& muriate of Cobalt” (N 3547).

appearance and acceptance in kant 105
that in it, a judgment that could be “reduced to concepts” is not reduced to
concepts (Idea of Form, 56). Beautiful views could never be reduced to concepts
(at least not with eighteenth-century technology). Again, the implication
is that aesthetic reflective judgments are object perceptions—or,
more precisely, reflections on object perceptions—that don’t become fact
perceptions: “As long as the judgment remains aesthetically reflective, the
indispensable transcendental possibility of cognition in general does not
turn into the possibility of an actual act of determined cognition” (ibid.).
The emphasis of the distinction between aesthetic reflective judgments
and charming perceptions, then, falls on the imaginable shareability of the
former, over and against the not even conceivable normativity of the latter.
This conclusion is in tension but not in contradiction with the poststructuralist
conclusion that aspects of the sublime destabilize the aesthetic,
with the effect that the Third Critique opens up rather than closes
Kant’s system. Portions of Kant’s descriptions of sublimity, and especially
poststructuralist interpretations thereof, do work in sympathy with the
proto- or antiaesthetic of phenomenophilia, as we can only now understand,
even as the Third Critique attempts to envision a robust normative
aesthetics. A good way to show this sympathy is by turning to Paul de
Man’s “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” which takes up a matter
close to the concerns of looking away: the role within the Third Critique
of Kant’s idea of “Augenschein,” the sublime form of nonconceptual perception
“that is how things are to the eye...andnottothemind.” 33 First,
a summary of de Man’s point of view.
De Man’s famous example of Augenschein is the expanse of sky or
sea that Kant asks his readers to “view . . . as poets do, merely in terms
of what manifests itself to the eye,” because “only under this presentation
can we posit the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment attributes” (CJ
Kant’s own feelings about color went into his clothes: “late in his life Kant preferred
mottled [meliert] colors,” but in his thirties he was a fashion plate and liked extravagant
ones, believing that “the colors of one’s dress should follow the flowers” (Ludwig Ernst
Borowski, Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kants [1804], in Immanuel
Kant: Ein Lebensbild nach Darstellungen der Zeitgenossen Borowski, Jachmann, Wasianski,
ed. Hermann Schwarz [Halle: Hugo Peter, 1907], quoted in Kuehn, Kant, 115).
33. “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej
Warminski (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 70–90, p. 82.

106 looking away
270, translation modified, cited in “Phenomenality,” 80). As de Man points
out, Augenschein supposedly exemplifies the aesthetic because it is purely
nonteleological and nonconceptual. According to Kant, it’s “the poets”—
the “romantic poets” and their eighteenth-century precursors, de Man
adds (81)—who know how to see like this. Augenschein is a problem for
the Third Critique because it
stands in direct contradiction to all preceding definitions and analyses
of the sublime given in section 24 on until this point in section 29.
Still, in the condensed definition that appears in the same chapter
the stress falls on the sublime as a concrete representation of ideas
(Darstellung von Ideen). . . . And there has been so much emphasis,
from the start, on the fact that the sublime does not reside in the natural
object but in the mind of man (Gemütsbestimmungen) that the
burden of the argument, much rather than emphasizing the purely inward,
noumenal nature of the sublime, becomes the need to account
for the fact that it nevertheless occurs as an outward, phenomenal
manifestation. Can this in any way be reconciled with the radical materiality
of sublime vision suddenly introduced, as if it were an afterthought,
at this point in the argument? How is one to reconcile the
concrete representation of ideas with pure ocular vision, Darstellung
von Ideen with Augenschein? (83)
De Man contrasts Augenschein with the conclusion of the aesthetic, when
it’s open to the mind to contemplate aesthetic experience as representation.
That conclusion is to be achieved through the self-“sacrifice” of
imagination after the “ocular vision” of the sublime, he explains. The
imagination sacrifices an experience of play, associated with “natural freedom,”
to the tranquility of reason:
The free, empirical reaction of the imagination, when confronted
with the power and might of nature, is to indulge, to enjoy the terror
of this very magnitude. Taming this delectable, because imaginary,
terror...andpreferring to it the tranquil satisfaction of superiority, is
to submit the imagination to the power of reason....theimagination

appearance and acceptance in kant 107
achieves tranquility, it submits to reason, achieves the highest degree
of freedom by freely sacrificing its natural freedom to the higher freedom
of reason. (86)
For de Man, imagination’s intervention seems to be argued by reference to
mental laws but takes place through the figurative “story of an exchange”
(87). He doubts that this story can really be connected with the ocular vision
he decides to call—for lack of a better word, he claims—“material”
(82), and that Kant has substituted for the phenomenality “based on an adequacy
of the mind to its physical object” that had previously been the
hallmark of aesthetic experience (88).
Now, Augenschein is object perception on a sublime scale: the not yet
conceptual, nonteleological perception of something like the sea or sky.
The identity of Augenschein with object perception is especially clear in
de Man’s adduction of a smaller-scale example from Kant’s Logic, of “a wild
man who, from a distance, sees a house of which he does not know the
use” (quoted on 81). “The poet who sees the heavens as a vault is clearly
like the savage,” de Man remarks; “he does not see prior to dwelling, but
merely sees” (ibid.). The poet doesn’t see the fact perception of the sky,
that is, that it is the lower portion of the atmosphere around the earth; he
sees, for a moment, something blue-gray that appears to arch over him in a
domelike shape. On the sublime scale, one’s first reaction to such a mere
appearance is “shocked, but pleasurable surprise,” which modulates almost
instantaneously into the desire “to indulge, to enjoy” the sensation (85). A
better word than “material”—“the only word that comes to mind” for de
Man (82)—would be the phrase with which eighteenth-century philosophers
would have described it, “merely empirical.” As we’ve seen, the sensation,
and the freedom associated with it, do not last long. The sensation
fades, the concept dominates; the imagination gives up its self-indulgence
and returns to reason. It cognizes and hence consents minimally to the
sky. Is this an account of how the imagination reconciles itself freely to
reason—namely, through the fact that the imagination’s capacity to linger
in object perception naturally expires—or of how the imagination must
be at odds with its own desires, which subside unreconciled, so that
Augenschein remains pre- or antiaesthetic? In my terms, there is minimal

108 looking away
consent, thin consent, in objective liking for the sky, and the aesthetic
has not necessarily yet occurred.
If we decide, with de Man, that in the passages about Augenschein Kant
presents the fading of imagination’s fondness for object perception as aes-
thetic freedom, then I would agree with de Man that the Third Critique
fails to be persuasive here. Yet the reader does not need the passages on
Augenschein to be difficult for Kant to integrate in order to have something
within Kant to oppose to aesthetic harmony—nor does de Man ever
say that’s so—since that work is also done by minimal acceptance in the
First Critique and by objective liking in the Third. It is even done by aesthetic
reflective judgments themselves, which provide a basis, as we’ve
seen, for comparing the experience of the wild man who encounters the
house with the phenomenophile poet who arranges to encounter a startling
reflection in the lake.
The case for object perception as opposed to aesthetic perception is
made most strongly of all, however, by charming perceptions (Reizen),
those aspects of phenomenality that are excluded from the aesthetic and
fall back into mere sensory gratification. As gratifications of taste, they
concern no one but oneself. 34 According to Kant, all sensory tastes that
one “bases on a private feeling” are merely “agreeable,” so that one says of
such a taste, “It is agreeable to me” (CJ 212; see also 238):
if we suppose that our liking for the object consists entirely in the object’s
gratifying us through charm or emotion, then we also must not
require anyone else to assent to an aesthetic judgment that we make:
for about that sort of liking each person rightly consults only his private
sense. But, if that is so, then all censure of taste will also cease,
unless the example that other people give through the contingent
harmony among their judgments were turned into a command that we
approve. At such a principle, however, we would presumably balk, appealing
to our natural right to subject to our own sense, not to that of
34. For this, judgments of taste have long been preferred to aesthetic judgments by
the person philosophy calls “the skeptic.” See Barbara Herrnstein Smith’s discussion of
taste and judgment in Hume and Kant in Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives
for Critical Theory (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988), 54–72.

appearance and acceptance in kant 109
others, any judgment that rests on the direct feeling of our own wellbeing.
(278)
Kant’s argument is a bit circular: when objects concern “entirely” one’s
own well-being, they cannot be required to be shared. That doesn’t sound
like a completely bad thing. As soon as Kant introduces the comparison
between the beautiful and the agreeable in §7, the double edge of the
agreeable stands out. Kant writes of the perceiver of sensory taste, “many
things may be charming and agreeable to him; no one cares about that”
(212). On the one hand, what matters only to me lacks significance—I cannot
expect anyone else to find it as enjoyable as I do, so if I want company,
I’m in trouble. But on the other, to the extent that I don’t want to have to
share my experience, I’m in luck: the object is not doing anything but gratifying
me, only me; and (freedom of freedoms) no one cares! Further, if my
peculiar taste fails to meet a social norm, I can rest assured that I have a
“natural right” to like it anyway, and not to prefer what someone else enjoys
(for although we can’t expect other people to share our tastes, we do
compare them [213]), because we have a right to “subject to our own
sense, not to that of others, any judgment that rests on the direct feeling of
our own well-being.”
The advantages of private pleasure are risked, and their complements
acknowledged, when we graduate from sense to aesthetic judgment. Other
people occupy our aesthetic world from the beginning—from before the
beginning. It’s notable, though, that Kant depicts the aesthetic as a realm
in which we have done all we need to do by way of value judgment and can
mentally “require” the same from everybody else. Even though logically,
aesthetic requirements are reciprocal (other people are justified in their
feelings), the demand of aesthetic judgment in the Third Critique tends to
be exemplified in a presumption one makes about others and not a presumption
that others make regarding oneself. Aesthetic judgment generally
occurs in the first-person active voice. As described in the Third Critique,
the aesthetic isn’t a realm of obligation, but one in which we get to
know what it’s like to make mental demands on others’ feelings—demands
about which we may be mistaken, but for which we need not apologize.
J. M. Bernstein makes an eloquent case for the utopian yearning of
Kant’s “common sense,” the basis for aesthetic agreement that we presup

110 looking away
pose. What’s more, he understands common sense as a reaction to the objective
strictures of the First Critique, in which
what is sense-perceptible gets reduced through transcendental legislation
to its lowest common denominator, namely, what accords
with the dictates of categorial causality and physical theory so understood.
...
To now conceive of a world in which determinate, subsumptive
judgment predominates over common sense is to conceive of a world
in which the interest in knowledge has come to mean an interest in
what things are apart from any other interests; and where, therefore,
what provides the commonness of the world, its shareability, are the
sense-perceptible properties of ordinary objects in their (reductively)
determinate relations to one another. ...
From the perspective of reflective judgment the attainment of such
a world looks like a loss; a loss of commonness and solidarity. Or
better, it images a common world without solidarity. Things and persons
are meaningless, without value, in terms o[f] what can be said
about them “objectively,” perceptually, through the deliverances of
the senses.
In such a world, our world, judgments of beauty are memorial: in
making aesthetic judgments we judge things “as if” from the perspective
of our lost common sense, a common sense that may never have
existed. 35
Bernstein captures the way that the First Critique bases the “shareability”
of the world in invariance rather than in solidarity. Because I have been focusing
on objective value, I do not find that “things and persons are meaningless,
without value, in terms o[f] what can be said about them ‘objectively’”;
but I do find them to hold a value that is almost empty except for
the fact that we are required to acknowledge it through a conclusion of
reason that carries a minimal objective liking or respect, and at which
each person has to arrive independently. And I can completely understand
35. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University
Park: Penn State UP, 1992), 60.

appearance and acceptance in kant 111
why readers of the First Critique, including Kant, would want to add to
that minimal liking, or substitute for it, something more affirmative—also
something that, to put it more negatively, might express our resistance
to the coercion of the “lowest common denominator[s]” of the given
world. Bernstein describes the dream of common sense as the figure of an
attunement we never have to try to achieve: “common sense is the communicability
of feeling, and not the demand for such” (The Fate of Art, 61).
The aesthetic project, in Bernstein’s narrative, looks within itself for the
wishful memory of a time and place “where, perhaps...nothing is beautiful
that is not also holy or good or true” (59). Other portions of the Third
Critique, however, are written with reference not to such a time but to civilization
as we know it, in which the character of existing relations explains
why “we have an ‘interest’ in producing judgments that are disconnected
from what anyone desires, or thinks beautiful or holy or good” (58). For
Bernstein, to say that aesthetic reflective judgments replace that interest
with the presupposition of common sense is to say that the trace of what
ought to be informs the aesthetic reflective judgments we actually experience—mostly
in the negative, in the cancellation of interest. Bernstein’s
reading of common sense reminds us why we mind the coercion of fact
perception so much; fact perception, as the application of concepts to
object perception, is epistemic, but society moralizes epistemology, makes
its requirements into social obligations, and therefore makes object perception
seem like a reprieve from society’s attempts to appropriate the
world’s givenness to itself. If perception needs “correcting” by “another
tribunal, equal to or higher than it,” as Kolakowski proposes, and this tribunal
turns out to be “human communication,” 36 then tarrying in object
perception marks the appeal from the normative biases of human communication
to a realm that Kolakowski finds beneath consideration because it
“ha[s] no practical meaning, and [is] thus excluded from our communication
process” (Metaphysical Horror, 13). In this line of thought, object perception
evokes versions of the aesthetic which are protopolitical, and in
which the presupposition of common sense only holds the place of a com-
36. Leszek Kolakowski, Metaphysical Horror, ed. Agnieszka Kolakowska, 2nd ed.
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001), 68.

112 looking away
munity in which human communication is altogether different—even excluded—from
what it is now.
But if that’s so, the all but neutral vision of the First Critique also contributes
heavily to the proto-political, to the point where I want to ask not
whether the Third Critique sufficiently repairs a deficiency in the First,
but whether there is any deficiency at all; whether the impression of deficiency
is not created by later works, in which Kant attributes weaknesses
to the First Critique in terms that are not quite its own. To appreciate the
aesthetic achievements of the First Critique we need to look again at objective
liking, and how, although it may happen in a flash, it contains the
enigmatic depths of Kantian subjectivity.
The conceptualization of empirical experience between object perception
and fact perception and the critical passage by which we arrive at a
conclusion of reason regarding our relation to nature as a whole both
carry and are carried by objective value, but the central tenet of critical
philosophy is that these value-producing processes must occur in subjective
space and time. The subjective ratification of objective liking bridges
fact to value in miniature. Minimalist rather than meaningless, objective
liking is the place where the discovery of reality is first performed (an insight
recovered by the artistic movement of minimalism). The moment of
objective liking is pivotal and frightening, but also lighter than we imagine
it to be from the perspective of deep, community-supposing, subjective
liking—in other words, from the perspective that the Third Critique has
institutionalized. If the Third Critique bears dimly in its memory the trace
of a light value, on which we agree naturally and independently, not because
we have made each other agree; a value that is based in the internal
harmonies of reflection, which harmonies can be discerned in the processes
as well as in the conclusions of cognition, then is the Third Critique
trying to remember—the First Critique?
Supposing that objective liking conditions subjective liking, however,
still leaves untouched the whole question of what we desire and like enthusiastically—the
questions of practical reason and aesthetic judgment.
Viewed in light of fact value, The Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical
Reason would stand to the Critique of Pure Reason as Coleridge’s spectres
stand to phenomenal experience, except that Kant phrases inner laws
in the imperative. While the First Critique deals with fact perceptions as

appearance and acceptance in kant 113
objective values, the moral writings deal with inner laws as fact perceptions—that
is, as perceptions of psychic facts, which exist only in and as
value. As Coleridge notices, appearances are more or less temporally and
spatially limited and the value obligations they prescribe are also always
limited, up to the obligation incurred by the most durable external facts.
Psychic facts and inner moral laws, however, are empirically unlimited and
outrageously pressing. It’s this asymmetry of intensity between external
and internal fact perceptions that gives the impression of a shocking gulf
between the sensible and the supersensible, as critics have noted. 37 The
“supersensible” inner world does not wait for empirical support before it
legislates, nor is it daunted by empirical bounds; in its domain “the concept
of nature determines nothing,” as Kant writes in the Introduction to
the Third Critique (CJ 195). Implicitly, Kant’s sojourn in the intensity of
inner law creates, dialectically, a desire to develop—or, I would argue, recover—a
nonmoral form of value in the Critique of Judgment. It’s easy to
agree with Kant that it would be good to have a model for free pleasure, an
affect that could pave the way for the “desiring power” that, Kant asserts
toward the end of the Third Critique, alone gives purpose to the “existence
of the world” (443). Among systems that propose such a model, the
Critique of Judgment utterly outshines its rivals. The Third Critique is by
far the most ambitiously legitimating and the most astoundingly refined,
while the phenomenophile anti- or protoaesthetic of looking away is perhaps
the least organized, the least ambitious, and the most errant. We can
still ask, though, which furnishes the more appealing image of freedom.
37. Guyer comments that “by 1790, Kant had come to feel that there was a gulf to be
bridged between nature and freedom” because he no longer believes that moral perfection
can lie in reason alone without “the development of feelings compatible with and
conducive to those intentions that are dictated by pure practical reason alone” (Kant and
the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality [Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1993], 30).

4
Court of Appeal, or, Adorno
With Adorno we arrive at a historicized account of phenomenality and dissatisfaction
unavailable earlier, developed as it is from Marx. For Adorno,
the critique of fact perception as social artifact is research in the phenomenology
of ideology. As such, it suggests a cultural explanation of the motives
for phenomenophilia, one echoed in criticism by Fredric Jameson,
Mary Poovey, and Jonathan Crary, among others. Adducing Marx’s Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts, Jameson remarks in The Political Unconscious
that
the very activity of sense perception has nowhere to go in a world in
which science deals with ideal quantities, and comes to have little
enough exchange value in a money economy dominated by considerations
of calculation, measurement, profit, and the like. This unused
surplus capacity of sense perception can only reorganize itself into a
new and semi-autonomous activity, one which produces its own specific
objects, new objects that are themselves the result of a process of

154 looking away
abstraction and reification, such that older concrete unities are now
sundered into measurable dimensions on one side, say, and pure color
(or the experience of purely abstract color) on the other. ...astyle
like Impressionism, which discards even the operative fiction of some
interest in the constituted objects of the natural world ...offers the
exercise of perception and the perceptual recombination of sense data
as an end in itself. 1
Complementarily, Poovey suggests that one reaction to the consolidation
of the modern fact is a romantic resistance to “the need to yoke
knowledge systems to observed particulars.” 2 These readings of romanticism
and modernism argue that the social and economic dominance of fact
perception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provokes a counterreaction
in which invisible (Poovey) or autonomously sensory (Jameson)
realms take on the character of “compensation for everything reification
brings with it” (Jameson, Political Unconscious, 236).
Adorno’s work is a part of the reaction Jameson sketches, and he is
himself an analyst of its formation. Adorno connects the developments
Jameson observes to the ideological legacy of Hegel’s philosophy of history,
attending especially to Hegel’s reformulation of what counts as given.
To the extent that Hegel’s philosophy is a defense against Kant, Adorno
can be seen to enter the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction
to fulfill Kantian promises overlooked or dismissed in the nineteenth century.
From the perspective of the phenomenality/dissatisfaction association,
the most striking feature of Adorno’s writing is its pointed use of “Schein”
to refer, for the first time, to fact perception. 3 In the twentieth century,
1. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell UP,
1981), 229–230.
2. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
(Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 327.
3. The English translation of Aesthetic Theory renders “Schein” as “semblance,” underlining
the sense of false likeness or fiction; it’s illuminating to preserve the German
word, however, because it encompasses not only semblance, but the generalized sense
of illusion that is usually linked to mere phenomenality and the radiance that is its acknowledged
attraction.

court of appeal, or, adorno 155
“the facts that have been advanced as a counterweight to mere illusion
have themselves become a sort of cloak and so reinforce the impression of
mere illusion [blossen Schein].” 4 The uncanny luster of facts absorbed
without attention to the conditions that make them appear as they do—
fact perception that goes directly to the bloodstream—is the height of
Schein. 5 Hence Adorno’s special dislike of positivism, which would like to
identify data exempt from the need for historical analysis. 6 All kinds of
perception are historically bounded, but what we have been calling fact
perception is most likely to dispense with a qualifying metalanguage and
the kinds of mental reservation that it brings. Here we might recall Richard
Moran’s idea that the proposition “P” induces belief and commitment
more strongly than the proposition “I believe that P.” 7 For Moran, this
qualifying effect is a reason not to muffle in representations of reflection
4. HF 29; Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2001), IV 13:45, hereafter NaS.
5. Adorno adds in the same breath that dialectics should not simply consist in “the
demonstration that what appears to be a brute fact [ein factum brutum entgegentritt] is
in reality something that has become what it is, something conditioned and not an absolute.
...Itwould ...bejust as foolish to demand of history that it should concentrate
solely on the so-called context, the larger conditioning factor, as it would be for historiography
to confine itself to the depiction of mere facts” (HF 20–21, translation modified;
NaS 13:32).
6. T. W. Adorno et al., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey
and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976). See also, e.g., HF 164 and Introduction
to Sociology [1993], ed. Christophe Gödde, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2000), 37.
7. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge (Princeton: Princeton UP,
2001), 85. Moran’s mentor for this point is the Sartre of Being and Nothingness. Adorno
complementarily views Sartre’s brand of “commitment” as a celebration of unfreedom
in disguise: “the prescribed form of the alternatives through which Sartre wants to
prove that freedom cannot be lost [die Unverlierbarkeit von Freiheit] negates freedom”
(“Commitment,” Notes to Literature [1974], Vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen
[New York: Columbia UP, 1974], 79–81, translation modified); Gesammelte Schriften,
ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 11:413, hereafter GS. Similar
remarks in Negative Dialectics stress existentialism’s blurred sense of facticity and
“existence”: “existentialism raises the inevitable, the sheer existence of men, to the status
of a mentality which the individual is to choose, without his choice [Wahl] being determined
by any reason [Bestimmungsgrund der Wahl], and without there really being
another choice” (Negative Dialectics [1966], trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum,
1992], 49–52, hereafter ND); GS 6:60.

156 looking away
facts to which one wants to commit oneself. For Adorno, the fact/value
conflation’s coercion of assent to the given is a good reason to maintain
awareness of reflection, lest we endorse without noticing it historically
conditioned facts that don’t deserve affirmation. In this context, Schein
names the “façade of facticity [der sich durchsetzenden Faktizität]” (HF
30; NaS 13:46)—an illusory rhetorical aspect of fact perceptions—that is
“bound up” with “the affirmative power [Druck] of society.” 8 Adorno’s ideology
critique releases conscientious objectors to the world “as is”—the
“thinking men and artists [who] have not infrequently described a sense of
being not quite there, of not playing along, a feeling as if they were not
themselves at all, but a kind of spectator” (ND 363; GS 6:356). Like realism,
ideology critique assumes that the person who tarries in appearance is
tacitly critical of fact perception; unlike realism, it validates that criticism,
and dismisses any need to apologize for reservations about whether “this
could be all” (ND 363; GS 6:356). Any embarrassment should be on the
side of facts that have the nerve to present themselves as necessities. 9
Protesting a given, then, including protest that takes the form of seeing
a fact with mental reservation as Schein, not only is distinguished by
Adorno from “denying” fact, but is the opposite of denial. Adorno illustrates
this point to his Frankfurt students by recalling “the experience of
having his house searched early in the National Socialist regime” (HF 19;
NaS 13:30). The house search exceeds the distinction between fact perception
and perception of Schein:
8. Aesthetic Theory [1970], trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997), 110, hereafter AT; GS 7:168.
9. Social facts potent enough to be possibly natural are the ones most at issue, which
is to say that the question of the natural cannot help being at issue. Kantian critique
renders time and space, but not qualitative experiences of time and space, leaving room
for the social/natural ambiguity. What should count as a concept and as an intuition are
historical, as J. M. Bernstein points out in his analysis of Aesthetic Theory (The Fate of
Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park: Penn State
UP, 1992), 198–200; see also page 166 below); similarly, Adorno insists that “natural
beauty” “is at its core historical” (AT 65; GS 7, 102). When Adorno cites approvingly
Hegel’s idea that “the consciousness of a people” is “like a necessity; the individual is
raised in this atmosphere and knows of nothing else” (ND 327; GS 6:321), his emphasis
is on the suitability of necessity as a figure. Later, Adorno will stress that Hegelian necessities
are still only quasi necessities.

court of appeal, or, adorno 157
the very concept of “fact” ensures that it cannot be insulated from its
surrounding environment—just as I could probably not have really
experienced that house search if I had not connected it in my mind with
the political events of the winter and spring of 1933. If all that happened
was that two relatively harmless officials belonging to the old
police force had turned up on my doorstep ...myexperience would
have been quite different from what it was....Afurther factor should
not be overlooked, if the dialectic is not simply to degenerate into
something like a superstition or a trivial pursuit [leeres Spiel]. By referring
something back to the conditions that prove immediacy to
have been conditioned, you do indeed strike a blow against immediacy,
but that immediacy survives nonetheless. For we can speak of
mediation only if immediate reality, only if primary experience, survives.
(HF 20–21; NaS 13:31–32; see also ND 301)
The dissociation between the incident’s malignancy and its “relatively
harmless” strictly empirical features, as well as its utter lack of a legitimate
rationale, give it illusionistic qualities that are part of its “primary experience.”
The illusory core of the incident is one of the main facts about it:
not experiencing it as Schein would not make it any more factive, and abstracting
its full facticity would not make one’s understanding of the events
of 1933 clearer or more complete. To the contrary: a fact like the house
search “is both an actuality and at the same time a socially necessary illusion
[gesellschaftlich notwendiger Schein]”—as Adorno remarks in a later
lecture of “the organic nature” of an ideological society as a whole (HF
118; NaS 13:170; see also ND 327).
I agree with Jameson, then, that “virtually the central issue raised by the
relationship between the universal and the particular ...iswhat Adorno
will call positivism (along with its accompanying value, ‘nominalism’),” if
one means positivism “in as generalized a cultural and intellectual fashion
as possible.” 10 Adorno does use the term broadly, and seldom attempts to
present positivist philosophers’ views. Rather, “positivism” stands for one
pole of fact/value conflation, in which value emanates unidirectionally
10. Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic (New
York: Verso, 1990), 89.

158 looking away
from a parsimoniously empirical construction of fact. While Jameson emphasizes
Adorno’s polemic against positivism, I’ll emphasize equally his
polemic against the counterforce that appears parenthetically in Jameson’s
comment as “nominalism” and also informs idealism. Adorno knows that
everything depends on what counts as a fact, and takes exception to convenient
uses of the fact/value conflation in either direction. Positivism
locks too much out of the category of fact, yet self-servingly inclusive
ontologies can elicit from Adorno statements of which any positivist would
be proud. To live up to Adorno’s meticulous analysis of experience, everyone,
including the positivist, has to pay more, not less, attention to facts and
values alike. 11
1. critique of facticity
Nineteenth-century social thought from Hegel and Marx to Durkheim returns
again and again to the peculiar reality of the social fact. Marx’s pages
on commodity fetishism remain the most vivid example of this line of
thought for contemporary readers. 12 Adorno is haunted by Durkheim’s
characterization of the fait social that feels like an impenetrable “thing,” 13
and reminds his students that anyone who has had the impression of
“‘run[ning] into a brick wall [auf Granit beisst]’” has experienced the
violence of the social fact (Introduction to Sociology, 36; see also 50–51, 77;
NaS 15:66). As Adorno’s lectures on sociology show, nineteenth-century
thought draws his attention to the urgency of this enigma. What is
uniquely Adorno’s is his realization that the artwork is the other of the social
fact (and hence of the commodity) 14 to such a degree that a philosophy
11. It follows that “the strongest argument against a positivist view of society is that,
in placing the concept of experience so far in the foreground in the name of ‘empiricism’
or ‘logical empiricism,’ it actually fetters experience” (Introduction to Sociology, 51;
NaS 15, 90).
12. Karl Marx, Capital [1867], trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1:163ff.
13. Émile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method [1912], ed. Steven Lukes, trans.
W. D. Halls (London: Macmillan, 1982). Durkheim’s account is all the more haunting
because it is uncomplaining, written from within the enigma.
14. See AT 236; GS 7:350–351.

court of appeal, or, adorno 159
that aims to explain social fact has to be rewritten from the perspective of
aesthetics and vice versa. This philosophy and aesthetics—or to be more
exact, the hybrid enterprises that replace them—are the complementary
projects of Adorno’s late books, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.
They constitute between them the dialecticization of the discourses of
phenomenality and dissatisfaction.
Adorno’s attitude toward fact perception in his late work resembles
Hegel’s toward public opinion, that it “is to be respected as well as despised
[ebenso geachtet als verachtet].” 15 Now, “respect [Achtung]” is the sentiment
Kant matches to “objective liking” (CJ 210)—the minimal consent
one gives to facts simply by absorbing their existence. As Ferenczi observes,
fact recognition is marked by admission to the realm of calculation;
however grudgingly, we “reckon with” facts. Public opinion, for example,
may hold little insight, and yet the fact that people think something has
to be reckoned with. Respecting facticity, objective liking respects precisely
the kind of existence that Kantian aesthetics sets aside. We may also
count as facts, however, ontologies even more ambiguous than that of
public opinion; and there are of course divergent approaches to what
ought to count and why. Adorno’s rereading of Hegel belabors a significant
difference between Hegel and himself in this regard: Hegel conflates
value with fact far more readily, and is generous and inconsistent
about what counts as fact—a treacherous combination. This may seem to
be a counterintuitive conclusion. Adorno’s contempt for positivism suggests
that he himself would like a more capacious approach to fact; since
“dialectics is necessarily and permanently concerned with the critique of
mere facticity” (HF 19; NaS 13:30), as Adorno points out, and Hegel is
none other than the philosopher most responsible for the historicization
of facts, one might think that Hegel’s critique of facticity would suit
Adorno. And it does, up to a point. Nonetheless, Adorno’s early-sixties
thought concludes that Hegel’s critique, unlike his own, enlarges the do-
15. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans.
H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 355; Werke (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1970), 7:485. Adorno is fond of this catchphrase and echoes it in “Skoteinos,
or How to Read Hegel,” in Hegel: Three Studies [1963], trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen
(Cambridge: MIT P, 1993), 113, hereafter HTS; HF 93; and Introduction to Sociology, 7.

160 looking away
main and strengthens the value of social fact, and with it the affirmative
power of society. This conclusion instigates Adorno’s long reply to Hegel
and Marx in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory.
It is easier to understand how Hegel can come to be seen as the champion
of fact when we recall that a “fact” is not mere existence but existence
recognized conceptually, already raised to consciousness. The notion of
facticity registers the way in which value in Hegel is attached to history.
(As Timothy Bahti argues of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History—
in perceptual language—unimportant events “rot away” from historical
consciousness; they “vanish like a deceptive appearance.”) 16
Between 1957 and 1969 Adorno alludes repeatedly to Hegel’s phrase
“the course of the world [der Weltlauf].” 17 In History and Freedom Adorno
introduces “the course of the world,” among “various turns of phrase”
such as “‘the logic of things,’” as a reasonable synonym for world spirit
(HF 27, translation modified; NaS 13:42). I’ll return momentarily to this
correlation. First, however, let’s note that Adorno identifies the course of
the world with world spirit at just this time. In “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy”
(1957) Adorno defends Hegel against the complaint that he displays
“a complicity [Einverständnis] with the course of the world” (HTS 45; GS
5:290); by History and Freedom, he describes precisely that complicity as a
necessary effect of Hegel’s philosophy in acid, psychological, and nearly ad
hominem terms (which are then moderated again in the more public utterance
of Negative Dialectics; for this reason, I’ll emphasize History and Freedom
throughout). In “Aspects” he asserts that Hegel’s philosophy is “essentially
negative” and that Hegel “denounced the world, whose theodicy
constitutes his program, in its totality as well” (HTS 30; GS 5:275–276); in
“Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel” (1963), the midpoint of Adorno’s reinterpretation,
he still opines that “with incomparable tact, even the later
chapters of the Phenomenology refrain from brutally compacting the science
of the experience of consciousness and that of human history into one an-
16. Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
UP, 1992), 97.
17. Phenomenology of Spirit [1807], trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977),
401–412. See “Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy” (1957), in HTS 45; HF 27, 43, 47, 51,
59–68, 72; ND 318; AT 49.

court of appeal, or, adorno 161
other,” rather allowing them to “hover, touching, alongside one another”
(HTS 142; GS 5:371). At the outset of History and Freedom, however,
Adorno announces that “in Hegel history is regarded immediately as progress
in the consciousness of freedom, such that consciousness for Hegel
amounts to a realized freedom” (HF 3; NaS 13:9); and the lectures in their
entirety argue that, deploying an “affirmative construction of history” (HF
49; NaS 13:73), Hegel “interprets this primacy of the universal, this actual
primacy of the concept, as if it meant the world itself were concept, spirit,
and therefore ‘good’” (HF 43; NaS 13:65). What emerges through the arc
of Adorno’s Hegel-centric works is the thesis that Hegel’s creation of a
new kind of facticity—the facticity of those particulars that have a course,
that is, of history as the ongoing activity of spirit—expands compulsory affirmation.
Adorno locates Hegel in the tradition of fact/value conflation in a remarkable
passage of History and Freedom, in his lecture of November 24,
1964. Having just suggested that Hegel’s “hypostatization of reason” can
be interpreted as “the hypostatization of mankind as a species ...that
maintains itself as a whole” over individual claims (HF 44; NaS 13:67),
Adorno continues:
the human race in fact [tatsächlich] can only survive in and through
the totality. The only reason why the optimism [Geschichtsoptimismus]
of the philosophy of absolute spirit is not a mere mockery is because
the essence of all the self-preserving acts that culminate in this
supreme concept of reason as absolute self-preservation is after all the
means by which humanity has managed to survive and still continues
to do so. And it has succeeded in doing so despite all the suffering, the
terrible grinding of the machinery and the sacrifices of what Marx
would have called the forces and means of production. The infinite
weak point of every critical position (and I would like to tell you that I
include my own here) is that, when confronted with such criticism,
Hegel simply has the more powerful argument. This is because there
is no other world than the one in which we live, or at least we have no
reliable knowledge of any alternative despite all our radar screens and
giant radio telescopes. So that we shall always be told: everything you

162 looking away
are, everything you have, you owe, we owe to this odious totality,
even though we cannot deny that it is an odious and abhorrent totality.
18 (HF 47; NaS 13:71–72)
By calling the philosophy of spirit a kind of “optimism,” Adorno appends
it to the debate set off by the Berlin Academy’s 1755 essay contest “All is
right” (discussed in Chapter 2), in which Leibniz and Kant participated.
Moreover, he echoes Kant’s outline of the dilemma faced by reason in the
First Critique, namely whether and how to go about confirming that one
must reconcile oneself to the given world after all “because there is no
other world than the one in which we live, or at least we have no reliable
knowledge of any.” Adorno doesn’t much like this moment of the First
Critique; like most readers, he interprets it in isolation from the passages
on transcendental illusion and hears Kant’s acceptance as robust rather
than minimal—he finds in it at best the “self-satisfied, manly resignation
of a philosophy settling down in the external mundus sensibilis” (ND 73; GS
6:80). Hegel’s rebellion against this passage of the First Critique could be
said to drive his entire project, and Adorno agrees strongly that Kant’s
conclusions should not be used in the positivist way to persuade humanity
to “affix itself to the finite” (ND 383; GS 6:376). Nonetheless, Adorno’s
placing Hegel next in line in the chronicle of optimists indicates that
he does no better (and since I don’t share Adorno’s reading of the First
Critique, to me Hegel’s contribution looks even worse than it does to
Adorno—it looks positively regressive). Hegel historicizes Kant’s cognitive
understanding of human limitation in order to inject history with exigency,
making it seem circumscribing. Since by definition the human species
has no other history than the one that has occurred, “it always looks as
if human beings and the course of the world that is imposed on them are
truly similar in nature, are genuinely identical. ...asifwehadnoright to
complain about the course of the world that has made people what they
are” (HF 72; NaS 13:107). As Kant demonstrates how to identify exigency
through critique, Hegel invents a method—Hegelian dialectic—for revealing
social facts as effective exigencies, given-substitutes. In the end,
18. See also HF 43, on Hegel’s “realism,” and ND 300–360, especially 303–304,
319–320.

court of appeal, or, adorno 163
these effective exigencies press for affirmation even more strongly than
natural givens, since history ratifies them in human terms. There’s more to
be said about Hegel’s shift from hard-core necessity to “de facto” necessity
and his mechanisms for justifying it. For now, let’s observe that when
Adorno criticizes Hegel’s “unquestioned parti pris for the prevailing universal”
(HF 51; NaS 13:76), the more familiar part of his criticism—that
Hegel favors the universal over the particular—occludes his equally important
point that the Hegelian universal arranges for itself to be valued
because it is prevailing, i.e., as fact.
Marx notes that “capital ...onthebasis of its own reality, positions the
condition for its realization” in a retrospective operation that converts history
into the history of capital. Dipesh Chakrabarty writes that Marx also
notices alternative “antecedents” of capital that are “not ...antecedents
established by itself,” antecedents neither naturally nor necessarily connected
to capital. 19 This second set of antecedents, which Chakrabarty
terms Marx’s “History 2,” is, he argues, Marx’s way of showing “that the
total universe of pasts that capital encounters is larger than the sum of
those elements in which are worked out the logical presuppositions of capital,”
and that these pasts “interrupt and punctuate” the history of capital
(“Two Histories of Capital,” 64). With a similarly enlarged set of elements
in view, Adorno complains that Hegel “give[s] precedence over possibility”
to certain facts that are reinforced in a circular way (HF 51; NaS 13:76).
Adorno’s texts instate a “court of appeal” for particulars and possibilities
on the losing side of history, as I’ll explain in the last part of this section.
Adorno’s concern in History and Freedom is to register this complaint in
philosophical terms. His phrasing of it involves a complex assertion of
methodological bias: Hegel, who sets aside the operative facticity of alternative
possibilities—possibilities as things to be reckoned with—extends
that facticity to presuppositions that are equally mental entities, to the extent
that they are attached to the course of the world.
Adorno’s methodological point is argued best in “Skoteinos,” his long
19. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin
Nicholas (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 459, quoted in Dipesh Chakrabarty,
“The Two Histories of Capital,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical
Difference (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 63.

164 looking away
and brilliant essay on Hegel’s obscurity (“Skoteinos” = dark, opaque).
Published in 1963, it precedes the lectures collected in History and Free-
dom, delivered in the academic year 1964–65. Much of “Skoteinos” attacks
the legitimacy of the reconstructed presupposition in dialectics. In Hegel
the concept “is turned this way and that” and “breaks up when it insists on
itself [geht in die Brüche, sobald er auf sich beharrt],” revealing a nonidentity
“inherent” in its meaning (“Skoteinos,” HTS 133, translation modified;
GS 5:363). Hegel’s treatment of what is thus exposes dynamism
within the copula: “what is, is more than it is [Was ist, ist mehr, als es ist]”
(ND 161; GS 6:164; see also “Copula,” ND 100–104). 20 “But,” Adorno
goes on,
the usual conception of the dynamic of Hegel’s thought—that the
movement of the concept is nothing but the advance from one to the
other by virtue of the inner mediatedness of the former—is one-sided
if nothing else....Often, accordingly, the presentation makes a backward
leap. What would be new according to the simple schema of
triplicity reveals itself to be the concept that formed the starting point
for the particular dialectical movement under discussion, modified
and under different illumination. (“Skoteinos,” HTS 134–135; GS
5:364–365)
Hegel’s texts proceed by culling “starting point[s]” from the shadows of
what they are said to have produced—or else introducing new points in
the guise of reconstructed starting points. Either way, Adorno argues,
Hegel exploits the value of what is: either really or rhetorically. Hegel’s
method embodies his rhetorical reliance on fact/value conflation in that
the texts move the reader along without exactly arguing. He “can be understood
only when the individual analyses are read not as arguments
but as descriptions of ‘implied meanings’”; his unwillingness to acknowledge
prescription leads him to “[make] fun of theses, calling them ‘dicta’
20. See Derrida’s analysis of the Hegelian “is” in Glas [1974], trans. John P. Leavey,
Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986), especially the relation of the
copula to Christian revelation (56–58) and to the ambiguously descriptive or prescriptive
status of Hegel’s texts (197–198).

court of appeal, or, adorno 165
[‘Spruch’ or sayings—RT]” (ibid., HTS 140, 141; GS 5:370). Although
any moment of being in the Hegelian text is transitive, Adorno claims that
Hegel does not dynamize the “is” to “add anything to the grammatical
concept that forms the subject, as ...with Kant” (ibid., HTS 133; GS
5:363), but only in the name of a “retroactive force,” modeled on Christian
figura, that radiates from what has come to pass to what appears in hindsight
to be its antecedents. What is for Hegel is not so much qualified by
its transience as it is expanded to encompass existence in a hypothetical
past and future. Thus Adorno concludes that there is a “latent positivistic
moment contained, for all Hegel’s invectives against narrow-minded reflective
thought, in his philosophy’s stubborn insistence on what is” (ibid.,
HTS 145; GS 5:373). 21 The “latent positivistic moment” mirrors the latency
of Hegelian fact—a kind of right of the unborn fact to be welcomed,
by virtue of consciousness of it, among the living.
Hegel’s criteria for what is lead to the question of the status, for Hegel,
of thoughts in logical space. The paradigmatic instance for studying this
question, in turn, is the ontological argument for God from Anselm and
Descartes to Kant. The ontological argument has already appeared in
Chapter 1 as a symptom of the compulsory reality of spectres, ideas that
seem like things. Remember Hartley Coleridge’s urgent wish: “‘It is not
yet, but it will be—for it is—& it cannot stay always, in here’ (pressing one
hand on his forehead and the other on his occiput)—‘and then it will be—because
it is not nothing’” (N 3547). Adorno cites Hegel’s version in Aesthetic
Theory and Negative Dialectics, underlining the power of Hegel’s claim that
“the moment a limit is posited, it is overstepped” in thought (AT 6, GS
7:16; see also HTS 6). Adorno adduces Hegel’s ontological argument—for
Hegel does, in this case, offer an argument—in Aesthetic Theory to introduce
the idea that art can manage only “intermittent” closure, not “the
fixed circumference of a sphere” (AT 6; GS 7:17). Hegel’s riposte to Kant
is productive, Adorno suggests, insofar as it supports “the deepest promise
21. Carl Schmitt notes that in Hegel “what is right will make itself effective, and
what should merely be, without actually existing, is not true but only a subjective mastery
of life” (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1926], trans. Ellen Kennedy [Cambridge:
MIT P, 1985], 57). On Schmitt’s criticism of Hegel’s identification of world history
and “the world court [Weltgericht]” (56), see Stathis Gourgouris, Does Literature
Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 97ff.

166 looking away
interpretation makes to the mind,” namely “the assurance it gives that
what exists is not the ultimate reality [dass das was ist nicht das letzte ist]—
or perhaps we should say: what exists is not just what it claims to be” (HF
138, NaS 13:194). 22 But Hegel’s extension of facticity to mental entities is
no longer productive when it begins to imply that ideas back-projected by
history are any more factive than alternative past or future possibilities.
Adorno grants possible facticity to thought insofar as Kantian forms themselves
must be historical phenomena, “not that ultimate which Kant described”
(ND 386; GS 6:379). J. M. Bernstein comments that “the issue,
then, is ...dissolving the understanding’s claim to hegemony over what
belongs within the domain of possible experience.” 23 Adorno’s suggestion
that even the forms of space and time are historical and may produce new
versions of experience is, however, careful not to assert the presence of this
new experience. Adorno contrasts his own caution to the “too positive” valence
Hegel gives to “his theory of the way in which immediacy constantly
reasserts itself,” producing the impression of “natural existence” in “the
realm of pure reason, pure logic” (HF 136, translation modified; NaS
13:191). I disagree, then, with the upshot of Bernstein’s conclusion that
the promise of Adornian art “arises from the belief that if something can
materially appear, even in the mode of semblance, it must be possible to
imbue it with figures of being,” as is “almost definitive of the ontological
proof of God’s existence” (“Why Rescue Semblance?,” 198). Semblances
can be “imbue[d] ...with figures of being,” but figures of being are only
figuratively closer to being. The quasi entities between the empirical and
the merely intelligible can comment negatively on what is, but cannot suggest
that the specific things thought of or appearing are possible. 24
22. Adorno takes the same attitude toward Kant’s own reply, so to speak, to the First
Critique, namely, the addition of “the construction of immortality” as a necessary postulate
of practical reason; Adorno admires its admission of “the intolerability of extant
things [Unerträglichkeit der Verzweiflung]” (ND 385; GS 6:378).
23. “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics,”
in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn
and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997), 194.
24. “By itself, the logically abstract form of ‘something,’ something that is meant or
judged, does not claim to posit a being; and yet, surviving in it—indelible for a thinking
that would delete it—is that which is not identical with thinking, which is not thinking
at all” (ND 34; GS 6:44).

court of appeal, or, adorno 167
Hegel can attribute presence to thought because he has already trans-
ferred thought to fact, the connector through which being and value travel
back and forth, without a proportional adjustment in fact. Hegel’s dynamic
“is” and the blur of his moving objects—the Hegelian object is “not firmly
delineated as an object [nicht gegenständlich fest umgrenzt ist] but frayed,
as it were, at the edges” (“Skoteinos,” HTS 133; GS 5:364)—reflect his infusion
of the demand for affirmation into the reconstructed presuppositions
and mental entities covered within the vague bounds of the Hegelian
fact. With borders as cloudy as Kant’s are crisp, Hegel thus replaces Kant’s
minimalist exigency and minimalist obligation with a stream of effective
necessities and metalepses that his writing treats as verging on inevitability.
The result—and goal—is the creation of asymptotic, virtual fact that,
because it has historical process behind it, demands assent even though it
doesn’t even exist yet, so evident is the course of things.
Etienne Balibar investigates the status of the “effective” through
Machiavelli’s enigmatic phrase “la verità effetuale della cosa [the effective
truth of the thing],” 25 observing that in using the phrase, Machiavelli links
his own action in writing The Prince to the power of princes to make things
be. 26 Balibar explores how in the “rather strange word, ‘effetuale,’ ...we
hear directly the notion ‘in effect,’ but without knowing exactly how to interpret
it”: as claiming the performative power to make the truth or, as
Claude Lefort interprets Machiavelli, as claiming to gain authority from
following the truth of things. 27 Therefore, Balibar goes on, “the term ‘effective’
...involves a kind of play of words, indeed amphibology.” The
debate between Balibar and Lefort recalls the often-noted ambiguity of
prescription and description in Hegel’s prose. Adorno frequently calls attention
to the way that Hegel’s creation of virtual or effective facts is also
an artifact of his writing. Like Machiavelli, Hegel disdains argument as
though it were too distant from the source of power. He brings writing
closer to action by stressing its capacity to describe and, crucially, to ig-
25. “La verità effetuale della cosa: Praeter Mathesin,” lecture delivered at UCLA,
February 10, 2003.
26. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince [1532], trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa
(Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 52.
27. Claude Lefort, “Machiavelli and the Verità Effetuale,”inWriting: The Political Test
[1992], trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), 109–141.

168 looking away
nore. Rounding off a description into a law in the making—or to put it a
different way, evidence for the possibility of a law into a law—is Hegel’s
signature rhetorical move, Adorno points out:
Without...thereality of a class society that stands as the very principle
of bourgeois society, there would have been neither the huge population
increase that we have seen, nor the growth in transport, nor
would there ever have been anything like enough by way of food supplies
for the population. It will not have escaped your attention that
the starting-point of a critique of this entire way of seeing is the idea
(one that Hegel pursued with especial rigor right on into the heart of
his Logic) that from the outset reality is given precedence over possibility.
And of course it is here that we see that unquestioned parti pris
for the prevailing [durchsetzende] universal of which I have already
spoken at some length [in Lecture 5 of History and Freedom—R.T.].
To recapitulate, then, the fact is that mankind has survived not just in
spite of but because of conflict, which has such weighty consequences
for the theory of history because Hegel has inferred from it with a
very great semblance of justice [Schein von Recht], a semblance of
justice that cannot be dismissed out of hand, that categorically, in
terms of the idea, when looked at from above, life can be reproduced
only by virtue of conflict. And this has resulted in what might be
termed the theodicy of conflict. 28 (HF 51–52, translation modified,
my italics; NaS 13:76–77)
28. Hegel’s optimism “is not a mere mockery” as long as the species proceeds by virtue
of its conflicts as it has done so far (HF 51). What would it take to refute it? Evidence
for the non-inevitability of the course of the world might be furnished, on the
one hand, by a transformation of the world and “establishment of humanity” (HF 146;
NaS 13, 206); a discontinuous messianic model of transformation might provide such
an alternative to Hegelian history. Or, on the other hand, Hegel would be refuted as
soon as it becomes clear that history isn’t survivable; when that happens, no one will feel
up to enjoying the demise of Hegel’s reputation.
At times, Adorno considers that the genocide of European Jews and other twentiethcentury
disasters do constitute this evidence: “The catastrophe there was not just a disaster
predicted by Spengler, but an actual reality, one that makes all talk of progress toward
freedom seem ludicrous. The concept of the autonomous human subject is refuted

court of appeal, or, adorno 169
Hegel’s performative message is that the nonidentity of world and spirit
is perfectly noticeable but doesn’t matter: the difference is simultaneously
observed and dismissed. This difference, isomorphic with alternative possibility,
lacks the authoritative value that, after Hegel, the course of the
world—“the whole of the movement, seen as a state of repose [als Ruhe
aufgefasst]” (Hegel, Phenomenology, 28) 29 —alone confers. Adorno observes
that Hegel’s commentators have the same tendency to round off the corners
when reading Hegel: “the intention is taken for the deed [Tat], and
orientation to the general direction of the ideas is taken for their correctness:
to follow them through would then be superfluous. Hegel himself is
by no means innocent of this inadequate way of proceeding” (“Skoteinos,”
HTS 93; GS 5:329). Such writing acts as though one doesn’t have to concern
oneself with the distinction between the probable and the inexorable;
everybody knows what’s important and what’s going to happen. To Hegel,
the course of the world furnishes an authentic “court [Gericht]” (Phenomenology,
27; Werke II:3, 46) because history is such a frictive and critical
medium. But Adorno argues that Hegel creates facts of unheard-of vigor
by crediting the energy of the process cumulatively to the outcome and
“tend[ing] simply to accept that something that has evolved then disappears
into what has evolved” (HF 136, translation modified; NaS 13:192).
When Adorno writes that Hegel “believes that non-identity ...should
somehow be incorporated into the concept of identity in the course of its
elaboration” (HF 65; NaS 13:96), he means that Hegel is not content
to leave uncooperative particulars “lying who knows where outside it”
by reality [Realität]. By the same token, if freedom and autonomy still had any substance,
Auschwitz could not have happened. And by Auschwitz I mean of course the entire
system” (HF 7; NaS 13, 14).
29. Hegel’s point in this passage is that “negative and evanescent [verschwindend]”
moments are preserved in the movement of appearance taken as a whole, not “left lying
who knows where outside it” (Phenomenology, 28, 27; Werke, II:3, 46). For Adorno’s response,
see HF 64–65, discussed below. Benjamin inverts Hegel’s figure of history as a
static image of a moving stream in his idea of the dialectical image (“Theses on the Philosophy
of History” [1940], in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
[New York: Schocken, 1969], 255). Max Horkheimer and Adorno, writing of symbols as
cultural sediment, claim that “the dread objectified as a fixed image becomes a sign of
the established domination of the privileged” (Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944], trans.
John Cumming [New York: Continuum, 1993], 16).

170 looking away
(Phenomenology, 27), but insists on their participation in the process that
crushes them.
Terry Pinkard, whose history of German philosophy focuses throughout
on its handling of normative authority, comments that Kantian exigency
modulates in Hegel into “practical” necessity. Facts that compose the
course of the world hold authority “by virtue,” in Pinkard’s words, “of the
way they have shown themselves to be unavoidable for us.” 30 Hegelian necessities
are “that which we, as part of a developmental story we must tell
about ourselves, come to find that we practically cannot do without” (German
Philosophy, 359). But who are “we”? The qualification “practically” indexes
the constitutive ambiguity of social fact—the quality that renders it
“probably equally valid” to state, as Adorno and Horkheimer do in Dialectic
of Englightenment, that society either “is” or “seems to be” under a spell
(HF 172–173; NaS 13:241). Ambiguity at the source about whether a social
fact must be or seems to be—the undecidability of the possible naturalism
of social facts—ought, to Adorno’s mind, to throw the emphasis on
what one prefers. He suspects thinkers who love to dwell on inevitability
of cheering on the status quo with redundant declarations of its supposedly
obvious necessity. This “us” that seems so ready to embrace the going assumption
about what is unavoidable has been the target of queer theory’s
criticism of social dependence on norms. 31 A norm presumed by an event
30. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2002), 359, my italics.
31. Adorno’s impatience with the notion of the natural person, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s,
his realization that “the spell cast by the identity principle . . . perverts whatever
is different [der verkehrt noch das, was anders ist]” (HF 97; NaS 13, 143), and his conclusion
that of all tactics, “reflection on difference would help towards reconciliation”
(HF 98; NaS 13, 144) offer serious resources for queer theory. Michael Warner recalls
that Adorno “embraced [the] cause” of the nascent gay rights movement in his 1962 essay
“Sexual Taboos and Law Today” (The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics
of Queer Life [Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000], 22). There Adorno considers the “abominable”
“Paragraph 175” that legally proscribed homosexuality far into the postwar period
(Adorno, “Sexual Taboos,” in Critical Models, trans. Henry Pickford [New York:
Columbia UP, 1998], 71–88, especially 79–80 [GS 10.2:533–564]). Adorno dedicates
“Sexual Taboos” to the memory of Fritz Bauer, a progressive jurist and coeditor of
Sexualität und Verbrechen: Beiträge zur Strafrechtsreform (Frankfurt: Fischer Verlag,
1963). On the abysmal state of gay rights in postwar Germany, see Robert G. Moeller,
“The Homosexual Man Is a ‘Man,’ the Homosexual Woman Is a ‘Woman’: Sex, Society,

court of appeal, or, adorno 171
or claim can instead be taken, however, not as a precondition of a state
of affairs but as its epiphenomenon—the kind of phenomenon that can
be described as “not nothing.” The principle that “even in extremis [im
Äussersten] a negated negative is not a positive” (ND 393; GS 6:385) is the
spine of Negative Dialectics. Nietzsche would say—in A Genealogy of Morals,
for example—that a norm often has force because we read history backward
and take metaleptic projections for causes. This element of Nietzsche’s
thought contributes to Foucault’s and queer theory’s excavation of
norms so as to refuse the way they limit what counts as proceeding. 32 As
with Pinkard’s equanimity about what is “unavoidable for us,” there is
something troubling in the systematization of effective necessities and
virtual acceptance in Habermas’s presuppositions of “ideal content” which
participants may not aver, but which “all participants must de facto
[faktisch] accept.” 33 People may accept on another level what they do not
avow, but that doesn’t mean that they must accept the idealizations projected
by their language. “De facto” acceptance of projected discursive
norms follows from taking mental entities as facts that obligate more than
Kant’s minimal respect. In Habermas’s statement, loosening what counts
as necessity drifts, with the best of intentions, into prescribing to all members
of a community tacit affirmations that they neither perceive nor endorse,
or even explicitly disclaim. From the perspective of phenomenality
and dissatisfaction, the first rule of a discourse community should be that
and the Law in Postwar West Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 4 (1994):
395–429.
32. Adorno notes that “one cannot move from the logical movement of concepts to
existence” (“Skoteinos,” HTS 147; GS 5, 375). He makes this remark while noting that
Hegel behaves as though having the concept of the nonidentical gave him a way to
imagine the dialectic “to have gone beyond nonidentity” itself (“Skoteinos,” HTS 147;
GS 5:375). My point is not that the ontological status of thought entities is easy to resolve,
but the opposite: they occupy a gray area of fact and value, and no one can jump
over arguments about their status. One of the main uses in contemporary theory of
counting norms as encrypted givens is to enforce, with an imperative “must,” tacit assent
to a “necessity” that someone explicitly does not endorse; for example, to argue that
Derrida really must subscribe to all the concepts that he places “under erasure,” or that
queer theory reinscribes the norms it repudiates because it represents them.
33. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of
Law and Democracy [1992], trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: MIT P, 1998), 16, my italics;
Faktizität und Geltung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), 31.

172 looking away
the desirability of communication itself will not be assumed. As long as social
reality is suffused with an imperative to communicative reason, there
will be great appeal in withdrawing to “always particular, episodic, and
only privately accessible, hence consciousness-immanent representations”
(Between Facts and Norms, 12).
Having learned from Kant that affirmation can be almost fully automated—in
Kant, by cognition—Hegel affirms the totality Nietzsche envisions
in The Will to Power without going through nearly as much anguish. 34
Spirit affirms as well as cognizes, and does so robustly to the extent that
the course of the world is progressive. So, Hegel’s optimistic account of
necessity has been more popular than Kant’s minimalist one, for reasons
anticipated by Kant. 35 If Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Adorno all
think through the relationship, within affirmation and negation, between
automation and intention, between collective and individual psychology,
Adorno’s Hegel stands at the apex of the collective automation of affirmation—an
affirmation that orchestrates individual participation and legitimates
itself by it. Finally, Adorno writes, law formalizes the bias inherent
to norms: “the legal norms cut short what is not covered, every specific experience
that has not been shaped in advance [präformierte],” and forbids
“the admission. ...ofanything quod non est in actis” (ND 309; GS 6:304).
Although the value of givenness is supposed to be weaker in Hegel than in
the First Critique (since givens in Hegel are historical and in Kant naturalistic
and invariant), the reverse is true. Hegel spreads necessity broadly
over effective social facticity, and with it the assent it carries; his world offers
both less rigorous exigency and an epidemic of dubious authority.
34. A neo-Adornian reading of Nietzsche’s Will to Power might suggest that Nietzsche
goes part of the way toward automating the affirmation of the course of the world
by deintentionalizing will, but, to his credit, continues to register individual suffering
within that process and hence the impossibility of harmonious affirmation. On Nietzsche’s
pragmatic desire to follow “the interests of sheer survival” in comparison to
Adorno, see Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European
Philosophy (New York: Verso, 1995), 24.
35. Kant reflects on the “popularity” of “transcendentally idealizing reason” in CPR
A473/B501–A474/B502.

court of appeal, or, adorno 173
2. illusion in total illusion
Launched from within his critique of fact perception, Adorno’s disquisitions
on art depict twentieth-century civilization as a field of illusion. A
“negative feel for reality [negativen Realitätsgefühls]” reigns, as Adorno
reflects of Kafka (AT 19; GS 7:36); normatively neutral fact perception appears
in a lurid shade. The reference to Kafka recalls the romantic reading
of Kant, in which having fact perceptions without feeling able to endorse
them arouses the suspicion that this facticity does not merit the name, that
a world of this kind of facticity is absurd and unjustified (“ungereimte”
[CPR Bxxvi]). Adorno’s prose renders the tilt of just such a world. As
though it were the voice of dissatisfaction with the world “as is,” the
Adornian artwork is “unconsciously polemical” toward the “spell” of social
fact (AT 5; GS 7:14–15).
The artwork is unconsciously polemical because it protests the world “as
is” mainly by being in it:
What is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not
its manifest opinions. Its historical gesture repels empirical reality,
of which artworks are nevertheless part in that they are things. Insofar
as a social function can be predicated for artworks, it is their
functionlessness. Through their difference from a bewitched reality,
they embody negatively a position in which what is would find its
rightful place, its own. (AT 227; GS 7:336–337)
In its combination of difference and existence, otherwise known as its
“form,” the artwork causes its perceiver to find it remarkable that something
like the artwork ever came into the world. Being a “thing that negates
the world of things” (AT 119; GS 7:182), the artwork can leverage
the fact/value conflation against social fact. If it were not a thing, so the argument
goes, it would not make the strongest case for the fact of possibility
it introduces. For this reason, perhaps, Adorno remarks that “real denunciation
is probably only a capacity of form [Gestaltung]” (AT 230; GS
7:341). Of course, the artwork also does too much, and gives the impression
that the possibility it represents has already been actualized. Because

174 looking away
“artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another
world, one opposed to the empirical world. ...however tragic they
appear, artworks tend a priori toward affirmation” (AT 1; GS 7:10). So art
generates again the kind of problem at issue in the ontological arguments
for God: it ought to demonstrate what is thinkable, not that what is thinkable
is present through the thought. The impression of actual formal unity
that is art’s limit and even goal composes a second-order Schein, a new
species of illusory fact perception.
The energy of the implosive moment—obsessively repeated in spiral
patterns—when Adorno proposes that artworks harbor a self-contradiction
the awareness of which is also what they have to contribute, dominates
Aesthetic Theory and its commentary. 36 The burgeoning secondary literature
evaluates the complexity of Adorno’s theory in learned detail; I
don’t revise its main conclusions here, but rather sketch Adorno’s affinity
with and ultimate difference from phenomenophilia. As you might guess,
the difference is already given away by his focus on form. By defining the
artwork by its deployment of a notion of form that outperforms fact perception
in the game of Schein, Adorno leaves phenomenophilia even further
behind than the Third Critique does. In this way he clarifies what is
otherwise implicit, that looking away is aesthetic without being artistic.
Although artists are always pulling phenomenophilic tricks, as Nietzsche
confides, looking away rests content with evanescent perception that cannot
be shared, and lets the chance at art go. Someone who channels the
36. Since about 1990, after an initially quite hostile reception, Adorno’s aesthetic theory
has found an appreciative academic audience. See Bernstein, The Fate of Art;
Jameson, Late Marxism; Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work: On
Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge: MIT P, 1997); Huhn and Zuidervaart, eds., The Semblance
of Subjectivity; Albrecht Wellmer, “Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity,”
Telos 62 (1984–85): 89–116; and Lambert Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:
The Redemption of Illusion (Cambridge: MIT P, 1991). For a sense of the bitterness of
earlier Adorno scholarship, see J. F. Lyotard, “Adorno as the Devil,” trans. Robert
Hurley, Telos 19 (1974): 128–137; and Michael Sullivan and John T. Lysaker, “Between
Impotence and Illusion: Adorno’s Art of Theory and Practice,” New German Critique 57
(1992): 87–122, an article that surveys and replies to earlier attacks (as does Wellmer).
Lyotard complains, among other things, that Adorno is not affirmative: “what can an affirmative
politics be, which does not look for support in a representative (a party) of the
negative, etc.? That is the question left, abandoned by Adorno” (“Adorno as the Devil,”
137; see also 130).

court of appeal, or, adorno 175
memory of merely phenomenal experience into works that may inspire
similar experiences in others is already doing something else—such a person,
the artist, fulfills a communal function, negotiates a compromise in
which the possibility of phenomenophilia becomes a sublimated element.
Aesthetic Theory furnishes a nonlinear narrative of this sublimation. At the
same time, Adorno’s aesthetics, like Nietzsche’s, glances backward wistfully
at mere phenomenality even as it absorbs it into the artistic so that it
is no longer mere.
Adorno’s identification of Schein with “form in the broadest sense” 37
(AT 110; GS 7: 169) recalls the development of essence (Wesen) in Hegel’s
Science of Logic:
At first, essence shines or shows within itself, or is reflection; secondly, it
appears; thirdly, it manifests itself. In its movement, essence posits itself
in the following determinations:
I. As simple essence, essence in itself, which in its determinations
remains within itself
II. As emerging into determinate being, or in accordance with its
Existence and Appearance
III. As essence that is one with its Appearance, as actuality. 38
Traditionally, appearance is compared with confirmed existence and so
seems pale (and therefore, in the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction,
appealingly light). Like Kant, Hegel associates Erscheinung instead
with “determinate being” and existence. “If it is said that something
is only Appearance,” though, “in the sense that contrasted with it immediate
Existence is the truth, then the fact is that Appearance is the higher truth”;
for it is “when Existence passes over into Appearance that it ceases to be
37. Adorno’s translator, Hullot-Kentor, underlines the connection: “in that artworks
as such remain semblance, conflict between semblance—form in the broadest sense—
and expression remains unresolved.” Adorno leaves it implicit, though clear enough:
“Weil sie aber doch als Kunstwerke Schein bleiben, ist der Konflikt zwischen diesem,
der Form in weitesten Verstande, und dem Ausdruck unausgetragen” (GS 7:169).
38. The Science of Logic [1812], trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanity, 1969), 391;
Werke 6:16.

176 looking away
essenceless” (Logic, 499; Werke, 6:148). When appearance is “only appear-
ance” it is at least higher than mere existence. But Erscheinung is not, as
in Kant, replete with form from its very onset, because evanescence can
emerge into being in accordance with its existence without being unified
with its appearance. Formal repleteness is reserved for “actuality.” So,
Hegel’s progressive version of history renders degrees of form, along the
lines of the “degrees of reality” that outrage Nietzsche. 39 In that hierarchy,
appearance figures determination toward actuality, and actuality, in turn,
becomes a way of thinking about formal unity: “actuality as itself the immediate
form-unity of inner and outer is ...anactuality as against a possibility”
(Logic, 542; Werke, 6:202).
Hegel’s account of form supports Adorno’s insistence that the artwork
cannot just as well have been anything—that it is more, as well as less, by
virtue of not being what it’s not. The “Essence and Appearance” section of
Negative Dialectics interprets essence as “that which lies concealed beneath
the façade of immediacy, of the supposed facts, and which makes the facts
what they are” (ND 167; GS 6:169). At the same time, Adorno again refuses
Hegel’s inclination to round off historical tendency into actuality. In
Hegel’s account of formal actuality, “real possibility and necessity are. ...
only seemingly different”; their identity “does not have to become but is
already presupposed and lies at their base” (Logic, 549; Werke, 6:211).
(Typically, Hegel acknowledges that possibility and necessity do seem different
on the way to subordinating that apparent difference to the presupposition
of their identity.) In Adorno’s version, an artwork’s form includes
its gesture of negation (AT 49) but also its self-difference (for example, AT
143–144); its spirit is not identical with its form. Because artworks have
the form of not-being other empirical objects, however, what ought to be a
promise of unity appears in the guise of a fact perception—the Schein of
Hegelian “actuality”: “what they appear to be appears as if it could not be
prevaricated [was sie scheinen, so erscheint, dass es nicht gelogen sein
kann]” (AT 132; GS 7:199).
When Schein becomes the name of the false repleteness of “actuality,”
Erscheinung takes the part of the fluid principle that breaks its surface
39. A nonprogressive history would render simply transformation, not degrees of
formality.

court of appeal, or, adorno 177
from beneath. “Appearance,” “appearing,” and “apparition” are all mobile
and astringent in Aesthetic Theory, while Adorno reserves the term “image
[Bild]” for efforts to fix appearance’s fluidity. When we apprehend “nature
as appearing beauty” (AT 65; GS 7:103), for example, Adorno lends “appearing”
the phenomenophilic sense of nonteleological manifestation: “by
rejecting the fleetingness of natural beauty, as well as virtually everything
nonconceptual, Hegel obtusely makes himself indifferent to the central
motif of art, which probes after truth in the evanescent [Entgleitenden]
and fragile” (AT 76; GS 7:119). For Adorno, artworks remember nature’s
apparitional quality, and summon appearance in strategies of dissonance
that contest Schein. A good deal of Aesthetic Theory details these strategies.
Following the vacillation between Erscheinung and Schein produces the
spiral form I mentioned earlier—a narrative of successive paragraphs that
all begin with “but.” Rather than narrating their relation chronologically,
we might try to glimpse it in Adorno’s dramatization of Erscheinung’s
ability, at its most intense, to burst aesthetic Schein. In that moment their
distinction is sharpest, even as both remain aspects of the same selfconflicted
force.
One such moment occurs in Adorno’s discussion of the “instant of expression
[Augenblick des Ausdrucks]” (AT 79; GS 7:123):
Artworks become appearances [Erscheinungen], in the pregnant
sense of the term—that is, as the appearance of an other—when the
accent falls on the unreality of their own reality. Artworks have the
immanent character of being an act, even if they are carved in stone,
and this endows them with the quality of being something momentary
and sudden. This is registered by the feeling of being overwhelmed
when faced with an important work. This immanent character
of being an act establishes the similarity of all artworks, like that
of natural beauty, to music, a similarity once evoked by the term
muse. Under patient contemplation artworks begin to move. To this
extent they are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder in the age
of reification. (AT 79; GS 7:123–124)
Awareness that the artwork is artificial interrupts aesthetic Schein, as
Brecht might hope. The trace of artifice on the work is the secular “after

178 looking away
image” of the seeming animation humans used to shudder at in the cultic
object. “The shudder is past and yet survives” (AT 80; GS 7:124) in the
artwork’s capacity to overwhelm, as the scars of action on it evoke the instant
when it became a work, and project as active force the energy the
work absorbed. What is unreal is the work’s insinuation of life, an effect
inseparable from that of “form,” another way of thinking of the artwork’s
illusion of being more than the sum of its materials and labor. Freed from
“mythical deception,” the shudder gains a new ground in the autonomy of
the artwork that presents it “as something unmollified [Ungemildertes]
and unprecedented” (AT 80; GS 7:125). The effect is not even all that
transient, and as Adorno continues to describe it, its collaboration with the
artwork’s facticity comes through:
If the deities of antiquity were said to appear fleetingly [flüchtig
erscheinen] at their cult sites, or at least were to have appeared there
in the primeval age, this act of appearing became the law of the permanence
of artworks, but at the price of the living incarnation of what
appears [Leibhaftigkeit des Erchscheinenden]. The artwork as appearance
is most closely resembled by the apparition, the heavenly vision
[Himmelserscheinung]. Artworks stand tacitly in accord with it
as it rises above human beings and is carried beyond their intentions
and the world of things. Artworks from which the apparition has been
driven out without a trace are nothing more than husks, worse than
what merely exists, because they are not even useful. ...Thepregnant
moment of their objectivation is the moment that concentrates
them as appearance, which is by no means just the expressive elements
that are dispersed over the artworks. Artworks surpass the
world of things by what is thing-like in them, their artificial objectivation.
They become eloquent by the force of their kindling of
thing and appearance. They are things whose power it is to appear.
(AT 80; GS 7:125)
No longer “the living incarnation of what appears,” like an idol, the
artwork, appearing only as itself, remains “the appearance of an other”
among prosaic objects, more like a “heavenly vision” than Kantian
Erscheinung. Appearance, the trace of artifice, explodes aesthetic Schein;
put another way, the self-differential momentum of the artwork’s creation

court of appeal, or, adorno 179
carries it past its form. “This rupture [Durchbruch] is the instant of appari-
tion” (AT 88; GS 7:137), figuring with almost unbearable freshness the
moment of the artwork’s determination and with it, its full blast of negation.
Adorno’s language recalls Nietzsche’s would-be identification with
Raphael’s Transfiguration: the artwork sides with the vision “as it rises
above human beings and is carried beyond their intentions and the world
of things.” Reading this, it can be difficult to hang on to the realization
that Adorno is writing here not of the peak of Schein but of the peak of
Erscheinung: all of this takes place when “the sudden unfolding of appearance
disclaims aesthetic Schein” (AT 85, my italics; GS 7:132). Apparition,
in other words, isn’t just another illusion. Erscheinung, unlike Schein, is
true in a negative mode: the power of showing, showing what is not, when
there isn’t anything else yet to show. 40 Things are complicated by the
circumstance that appearance needs substance to carry it, as fire needs
something to burn. Similarly, a minimal, often irregular materiality or hylÃ
supports even spectra—the inside of the eyelid, the film in Coleridge’s
fireplace. Although initial illusion is not the only criterion for aesthetic
impact, Adorno prefers the larger impact of negation that goes with a
fuller illusion of facticity: the more illusion, the bigger the bang when it
vanishes. Thus artworks “surpass the world of things by what is thing-like
in them,” and the benefit is that their facticity, Schein included, pressures
the perceiver to feel and credit their negation of what is, including that
very facticity. 41
Rupturing Schein, appearance also ruptures itself in a “catastrophic fulfillment
[katastrophische Erfüllung]” that takes art with it:
The shocks inflicted by the most recent artworks are the explosion of
their appearance. In them appearance, previously a self-evident a priori
of art, dissolves in a catastrophe in which the essence of appear-
40. Compare Derrida’s critical approach to pure monstration or theatrical luster in
Mallarmé, Dissemination [1972], trans. Barbara Johnson [Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1981], 173–286, especially 179, 206.
41. See Zuidervaart, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, 184, and Jameson, Late Marxism, 180–
181. A parallel philosophical stance appears in Adorno’s suggestion that “we have no
power over the [Heideggerian] philosophy of Being if we reject it generally, from the
outside, instead of taking it on in its own structure—turning its own force against it”
(ND 97; GS 6:104).

180 looking away
ance is for the first time fully revealed. ...Even this volatilization of
aesthetic transcendence becomes aesthetic, a measure of the degree to
which artworks are mythically bound up with their antithesis. In the
incineration of appearance, artworks break away in a glare from the
empirical world and become the counterfigure of what lives there; art
today is scarcely conceivable except as a form of reaction that anticipates
the apocalypse. Closely observed, even tranquil works discharge
not so much the pent-up emotions of their makers as the works’ own
inwardly antagonistic forces. The result of these forces is bound up
with the impossibility of bringing these forces to any equilibrium;
their antinomies, like those of knowledge, are unsolvable in the unreconciled
world. The instant in which these forces become image
[Bild], the instant in which what is interior becomes exterior, the
outer husk is exploded: their apparition, which makes them an image,
always at the same time destroys them as image. (AT 84–85; GS
7:131–132)
Spirit drives form to Schein until it manifests itself in appearance; appearance
releases essence, flash-burns its “husk,” and singes the empirical
world. Now, Adorno notably identifies the denouement of Schein with the
self-negation of art altogether—“art,” not merely the “artwork”: “as a result
of its determination as appearance, art bears its own negation embedded
in itself as its own telos: the sudden unfolding of appearance disclaims
aesthetic Schein” (AT 85; GS 7:132). Albrecht Wellmer calls art’s explosion
a “‘setting free’ of forces which in their non-aesthetic use can re-establish
a continuum between art and the life-praxis” (“Adorno’s Aesthetic,”
110). Yet Adorno implies more than the reestablishment of art and life
when he calls art’s teleology the self-negation of art. If the artwork’s selfdestruction
models the self-destruction of the “unreconciled world,” then
the latter destruction would also dissolve art altogether.
Adorno frees objection to the inevitable from guilt, as I noted at the beginning
of this chapter. The sphere of art, however, remains a theater of
guilt and thrill for Adorno, as the participant in art eddies in the addiction
cycle of negation and Schein. Aesthetic Theory narrates art’s “entanglement
in the guilt context of the living [die Schuld des Lebendigen]” (AT 144;
GS 7:217) and the “shame” of the perceiver, who, hypnotized by aesthetic

court of appeal, or, adorno 181
Schein, implicitly damages “what does not yet exist by taking it for existent”
(AT 74; GS 7:115). The secondary literature takes the position that
the Adornian artwork’s difficult trajectory is the only way: according to it,
art resists turning against itself, and has to turn against itself. Unfolding
Adorno’s remark that “irritation with Schein has its locus in the object itself”
(AT 101; GS 7:156), Zuidervaart suggests that “the artwork could
shed its illusory character if it would rid itself of all likeness to a false reality.
For this to happen, society would have to become true” (Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory, 181). The rhetoric here is that we would all love things to
be different—the course of the art world, along with everything else. But
the guilt persists, even in the face of the conviction that the artwork
must and should fall into Schein. The persistence of Schuld measures the
difference between Kantian exigencies and effective exigencies, their different
degrees of reality; effective exigencies are not strong enough to dissolve
guilt. The guilt and shame that trail aesthetic Schein insinuate that
the all but irresistible course of Schein in art is not literally irresistible,
that the space between plausibility and inevitability is not closed. Comparison
with Kant’s aesthetic or with phenomenophilia makes the axiomatic
conceptuality and facticity of the Adornian artwork look less than necessary.
This is so because even if we concede that the artwork must lead to
Schein, we would still need an argument that artworks must come into
being.
Adorno defines art by his conceptual notion of form—“art has precisely
the same chance of survival as does form” (AT 141; GS 7:213)—using the
sort of tautological formulations whose motives he suspects in others.
Without form, he writes, nothing would distinguish art from the things
it resists through its form. So, Adorno complains that Webern withdraws
from conceptuality: when “sonata movements shrink to aphorisms,”
Webern “executes [vollstreckt] tensions that originate in the genre. ...
Aesthetics is not obliged, as under the spell of its object, to exorcise concepts
[die Begriffe zu eskamotieren],” but rather to free them from false
objects and “bring them within the work” (AT 180–181; GS 7:269–270).
Art therefore cannot be merely or mainly “involuntary” (AT 69; GS
7:109), nor the unbinding of sounds and colors from context (AT 90; GS
7:140), nor “the grouping of color [Farbkomplex] that is simply factual”
(AT 144; GS 7:216). Art must invite interpretation, even if it finally repels

182 looking away
it; to claim otherwise “would erase the demarcation line of art” (AT 128,
translation modified; GS 7:193). Conditional clauses like the one above
signal vulnerable points in Adorno’s theory—places where hope runs out, 42
in the sense that no choice appears:
As soon as the artwork fears for its purity so fanatically that it loses
faith in its possibility and begins to display outwardly what cannot become
art—canvas and mere tones—it becomes its own enemy, the direct
and false continuation of purposeful rationality. This tendency
culminates in the happening. . . . The difference of artworks from the
empirical world, their Schein character, is constituted out of the empirical
world and in opposition to it. If for the sake of their own concept
artworks wanted absolutely to destroy this reference back to the
empirical world, they would wipe out their own premise. (AT 103; GS
7:158)
This passage moves between two criteria that separate the Adornian from
the Kantian artwork: conceptuality and the coercive use of fact perception.
Adorno’s “if” phrases make it sound as though art would like to loosen its
ties to both criteria, and that the only reason it doesn’t is that if it did it
would no longer be art. The assumption that art must not do anything
self-destructive, though, belies its teleology in self-negation, as well as the
impetus that its teleology offers for thinking beyond givenness. Granted
that art consists in conceptual form and, once it comes into being as such,
must be torn by the irreconcilable forces Adorno analyzes—its need to destroy
its “husk” and have a husk to destroy—why, finally, must art come
into being? Adorno famously declares in the first sentence of Aesthetic Theory
that art’s “right to exist” is not “self-evident,” yet the assumption seems
to be that if art doesn’t come into being, nothing else will step up to the
plate; that only form constitutes itself “out of the empirical world and in
opposition to it,” while only facticity flexes muscle. Nothing will do the
42. “The mental stages within the human species, and the blind-spots in the individual,
are stages where hope petered out [die Hoffnung zum Stillstand kam]” (Dialectic of
Enlightenment, 258 [GS 3:296]; the last clause is Horkheimer’s phrase, Adorno notes
[HF 314n]).

court of appeal, or, adorno 183
job as well as the artwork if the task is to turn the fact/value conflation
against itself.
3. circus colors
The conviction that that is so leads Adorno to pass over some possibilities.
Adorno disagrees with Benjamin’s idea that play (Spiel) may represent
an alternative to Schein because it, too, posits a false harmony (AT 100;
GS 7:154). Similarly, he claims that “the ineffability of illusion [Illusion]
prevents the solution to the antinomy of aesthetic semblance [ästhetischen
Scheins] by means of a concept of absolute appearance [absoluter
Erscheinung]” (AT 103; GS 7:159). Adorno’s dismissal of brief and relatively
amorphous ventures such as “happenings” suggests that merely demurring
from duration is insufficient. Like Kant, who requires the aesthetic
object to seem to be eligible for conceptuality even as it deflects
it, Adorno prefers that the artwork be able to be mistaken for another
fact among social facts. 43 If the subaesthetic lack of pretense to public presence
seems to be too little for Adorno, however, we can also wonder
whether it isn’t, rather, too threatening—an alternative to negation that is
no longer art, but might be something better, something that overflows
art’s “obligation” by “execut[ing]” tensions, as Adorno writes of Webern
(AT 180–181; GS 7:269–270), or registers a different kind of resistance to
history by looking away from it. It is an embarrassment to history that mere
phenomenality touches, then falls away from the threshold of what is, as
though facticity were no great prize.
Adorno approaches the phenomenophilic element within art whenever
he calls artworks “afterimages” (Nachbilder)—literally, spectra. Artworks
may be afterimages of various things: they are “for the disenchanted world
. . . afterimage[s] of enchantment” (AT 58; GS 7:93); they are “afterimages
of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside
their own sphere” (AT 4; GS 7:14); of nature’s communicative silence
(AT 74; GS 7: 115); and “of the primordial shudder in the age of reificat-
43. This preference sets off criticism of Adorno’s aesthetic narrowness, notably by
Peter Bürger in The Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974], trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1984).

184 looking away
ion” (AT 79–80; GS 7:124), as we’ve seen. In phenomenophilia, the afterimage
figures the trace of fact perception’s lifted pressure. Adorno can almost
crave that weight, when it is that of enchanted nature or the cultic
object, or feel its attenuation in the phenomenophilic manner, as relief
from the effective reality of the given. Then, Adornian artworks’ influence
on what is achieves the rethinking of fact and illusion that Hegelian dialectic
could bring about if it were consistent. The “is” in Georg Trakl’s poetry,
for instance, “expresses no existential judgment but rather its pale afterimage
qualitatively transformed to the point of negation” (AT 123; GS
7:187). The Trakl copula happily fails to trigger the fact/value conflation
at full strength. The judgment of the lyric poem is only an afterimage of a
judgment. Similarly, the poem’s negation is only the afterimage of a negation.
In balance in the pure example of Trakl, the afterimage-like artwork
doesn’t so much negate what is as solicit a question of itself—“‘What is
it?’” (AT 121; GS 7:184)—that should be asked of the fact perceptions
around it. Trakl accomplishes what Hegel does not, a dialectical revision of
what is that expands and dilutes it equally without being tied to a progressive
history. Leaving aside Adorno’s previous, more Hegelian formulation
that “what exists is not just what it claims to be” (HF 138, NaS 13:194),
“the assertion [in Trakl] that something is amounts to both more and less
and includes the implication that it is not [dass etwas sei, ist darin weniger
und mehr, führt mit sich, dass es nicht sei]” (AT 123, translation modified;
GS 7:187).
The Adornian artwork can scarcely hold this balance in the wind of the
fact/value conflation. 44 It’s in order to try to do so that Aesthetic Theory
incorporates nonconceptual qualities of natural beauty and naive “preartistic”
features into the artwork. These elements are homeopathic, the
artwork’s attempts to metabolize extra-artistic forces that could obviate it:
The phenomenon of fireworks is prototypical for artworks, though
because of its fleetingness and status as empty entertainment it has
scarcely been acknowledged by theoretical consideration; only Valéry
44. De Man’s theory of the inherent overassertion of position offers one way to understand
the difficulty.

court of appeal, or, adorno 185
pursued ideas that are at least related. Fireworks are apparition kat‰
ezoxhn [par excellence]: they appear empirically yet are liberated
from the burden of the empirical, which is the obligation of duration;
they are a sign from heaven yet artifactual, an ominous warning, a
script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its
meaning. The segregation of the aesthetic sphere by means of the
complete afunctionality of what is thoroughly ephemeral is no formal
definition of aesthetics. It is not through a higher perfection that
artworks separate from the fallibly existent but rather by becoming
actual, like fireworks, incandescently in an expressive appearance.
They are not only the other of the empirical world: everything in
them becomes other. It is this to which the preartistic consciousness
of artworks responds most intensely. This consciousness submits to
the temptation that first led to art and that mediates between art and
the empirical. Although the preartistic dimension becomes poisoned
by its exploitation, to the point that artworks must eliminate it, it survives
sublimated in them. (AT 81)
Prototypisch für die Kunstwerke ist das Phänomen des Feuerwerks,
das um seiner Flüchtigkeit willen und als leere Unterhaltung kaum
des theoretischen Blicks gewürdigt wurde; einzig Valéry hat Gedankengänge
verfolgt, die zumindest in seine Nähe führen. Es ist apparition
kat‰ ezoxhn: empirisch Erscheinendes, befreit von der Last der
Empirie als einer der Dauer, Himmelszeichen und hergestellt in eins,
Menetekel, aufblitzende und vergehende Schrift, die doch nicht ihrer
Bedeutung nach sich lesen läßt. Die Absonderung des ästhetischen
Bereichs in der vollendeten Zweckferne eines durch und durch Ephemeren
bleibt nicht dessen formale Bestimmung. Nicht durch höhere
Vollkommenheit scheiden sich die Kunstwerke vom fehlbaren Seienden,
sondern gleich dem Feuerwerk dadurch, daß sie aufstrahlend zur
ausdrückenden Erscheinung sich aktualisieren. Sie sind nicht allein
das Andere der Empirie: alles in ihnen wird ein Anderes. Darauf
spricht das vorkünstlerische Bewußtsein an den Kunstwerken am
stärksten an. Es willfahrt der Lockung, welche zur Kunst überhaupt
erst verführt, vermittelnd zwischen ihr und der Empirie. Während

186 looking away
die vorkünsterlische Schicht durch ihre Verwertung vergiftet wird,
bis die Kunstwerke sie ausmerzen, überlebt sie sublimiert in ihnen.
(GS 7:125–126)
“Ephemeral through and through,” the firework’s apparitional moment of
“becoming actual” is its only moment. Singularly among Adorno’s examples
of art, the firework’s difference from other objects suggests “no formal
definition of aesthetics,” only a temporal one; it arrives to vanish, and
“cannot be read for ...meaning.” Like spectra, it reveals the “burden of
the empirical” by opting for minimal empirical existence. Lighting up the
sky, fireworks also bring forward a threatening power to alter the way everything
around them looks—magnified, in Adorno’s fantasy of the “writing
on the wall [Menetekel],” into a power to lay waste—that remains implicit
and private in spectra. Thus the difference between fireworks and
spectra, and what makes fireworks an Adornian choice among transient
phenomena, is that fireworks are directed to public view. Synthesizing the
evanescence celebrated by solitary pleasure in spectra, on the one hand,
with communal wishes at once to destroy, to be saved from destruction,
and to let be, on the other, fireworks represent the idea of spectra we all
can share—a moment of mass rebellion against fact perception. Adorno
warns that theatrical luster can return as a “poison”; a mass spectacle like
cinema, which lures the “preartistic consciousness” with the wonder of artificial
light, is easily exploited for ideological and commercial purposes.
But the appeal of fireworks also poisons art in another way; it suggests how
much aesthetic desire is fulfilled at art’s margin, in throwaway “preartistic”
perceptions.
Complements to aesthetic Schein born in form from spirit, fireworks,
or another example Adorno entertains, “water fountains of the seventeenth
century” (AT 80; GS 7:124), float on nonconceptual sensuous appeal.
Adorno’s shorthand for this feature is “circus colors” (AT 81). His
phrase “Buntheit des Zirkus” (GS 7:127) actually refers to motley, that is,
to the variegated color that Kant excludes from the aesthetic because it is
so subconceptual. Adornian artworks assimilate the preartistic as a feature,
amid safeguards. So, “Beckett’s plays, as crepuscularly grey as after sunset
and the end of the world,” nonetheless “remain true” to circus colors “in
that the plays are indeed performed on stage” with costumes and sets, and

court of appeal, or, adorno 187
don’t renounce wholly the naive magic of theatrical monstration: “the curtain
lifts expectantly even at the beginning of Beckett’s Endgame” (AT 81;
GS 7:126–127). 45
The artwork is not afterimage, firework, nor even fountain, but something
that would like to have their ephemeral radiance, but not quite as
much as it would like to have “form.” Looking away makes the opposite
tradeoff: it would like to negate fact perception—it stirs with this desire—
but does not want to do that as much as it wants to be relieved, if temporarily,
of fact perception’s demand and the normative concepts that go with
it. So phenomenophilia looks away from fact perception or suspends it in a
frame of metaperception. The phenomenophile verifies the first sentence
of Aesthetic Theory, that art’s “right to exist” is no given. In order for art to
exist in freedom, the phenomenophile has to have a preceding right to linger
in the preartistic indefinitely and unconditionally, because only a profound
conviction that there is no imperative to art can make artistic reception
or creation free social acts. Without looking away, there is no art; and
by the same logic, looking away cannot be art. That’s why Adorno begins
the book with a disclaimer, and why he discusses “natural beauty” before
“art beauty”; but, significant as these gestures are, it’s hard to be persuaded
by reading Aesthetic Theory that it really doesn’t matter to Adorno whether
art exists or not. The paradox of art is that nothing less (or more) than that
is called for. 46
The phenomenophile dwells on object perception not only because of
mixed feelings about his possible deviance, then, but because he seeks release
from even negative assertion, including that of art production. Art
tends inherently to affirm, as Adorno notes on the first page of the book.
Art production places the artist closer than the phenomenophile to the
theologian, Platonist, or naturalist who points to a world better than the
45. “The bow or baton of the conductor—of the orchestra—waiting, depending, like
a lifted quill, can also be illuminated by some such suspension or lustre ‘. . . when the curtain
is about to rise upon the desert magnificence of autumn The imminent scattering of luminous
fingering, which the foliage suspends, mirrors itself, then, in the pit of the readied orchestra’”
(Derrida, Dissemination, 180, quoting Stéphane Mallarmé, L’Oeuvre de Mallarmé:
Un Coup de dés [Paris: Librairie des Lettres, 1951], 388).
46. Arguably, within the art world this need to divest art of its imperative is best
fulfilled by minimalism, which allows the smallest gesture to satisfy the imperative.

188 looking away
world “as is,” even though art only gestures, like the statues in Last Year at
Marienbad, to what isn’t there. Art also has a teleology, if only in its own il-
luminating destruction. 47 In looking away there is neither a perceived right
nor an imperative to negation, only an awkward silence suspending negation
and affirmation; and no work, only preartistic perception. Below the
conceptuality of even the happening (which is fairly rational and intentional
in practice), there are experiences and perceptions that never crystallize
a form—spectra, or the phenomena Kant excludes from the aesthetic
as “charms [Reizen].” These comprise a special variety of natural
beauty because, although they figure harmony as Adorno writes images of
natural beauty do, they take no public shape and time themselves out. The
few moments that one can hold on to the realization that the perception is
illusory are, in the case of these phenomena, all that the perceiver needs,
since the experience itself is so brief. And because their temporal limits are
obvious at first sight, they never really coerce. Their superiority to art is
that they cannot be bought and sold. A gallery may pay me for sitting in a
room and saying that I’m seeing colors; it would then be paying me for my
idea that this could occur and for my self-presentation, but not for my perception
itself, which cannot be shared. And this is actually what is happening
when galleries exhibit artworks; artworks are not perceptions. The
gestures of art and exhibition are our way of compromising with and paying
respect to the worthlessness (beyond worth) of perceptions that can
never be duplicated or exchanged.
There is pathos in Adorno’s sublimation of mere appearance in the
47. Visual artworks may be especially susceptible to Schein because of the semblance
(here is a good place to use this word) of totality more strikingly achieved by visual
form. The more obviously temporal arts, music and writing, can negate themselves in
successive phrases and can activate the perceiver’s awareness that there is no single moment
of realization. Visual apprehension gives a stronger illusion of grasp—a quality
Lacan mobilizes when he makes the mirror into the emblem of that illusion, and one
that Hegel exploits figuratively in the passage of the Phenomenology cited earlier, when
he considers history “in a state of repose.” For the same reason, however, visual art furnishes
a good counterpoint to the facticity of the world “as is”—that is, to a world that
conveys its power less through discourse than through existing. Visual form replies to
that world in its own terms. By the same logic, the transient visuality of spectra demurs
pointedly from visual aesthetic illusion and social facticity alike.

court of appeal, or, adorno 189
artwork, as art’s mementos of the preartistic seem to commemorate an
inadmissible desire to be preartistic. Art may recall the early childhood experience
of the visual stimulation also encompassed by Kant’s “charms,” a
sensory experience more radically unfactive than that of art. Once upon a
time we were happy when luminous object perceptions simply appeared:
the large colored beads that hang over a crib resemble Anaxagoras’s stars
and moon for which alone life is (already) worth living. Memories of some
such experience stir in Adorno’s treatment of the preartistic. In comparison
to art that “bends under the burdensome weight of the empirical [der
lastenden Schwere der Empirie] from which, as art, it steps away” (AT 105,
translation modified; GS 7:161), Adorno portrays fountains, “circus colors,”
and the like as merely recreational, even as he notes that sensitivity to
their allure is necessary for quality aesthetic work. They recall the era of
direct stimulation:
By its mere existence, every artwork, as alien artwork to what is alienated,
conjures up the circus and yet is lost as soon as it emulates it. Art
becomes an image not directly by becoming an apparition but only
through the countertendency to it. The preartistic level of art is at
the same time the memento of its anti-cultural character, its suspicion
of its antithesis to the empirical world that leaves this world untouched
[ihres Argwohns gegen ihre Antithese zur empirischen Welt,
welche die empirische Welt unbehelligt läßt]. Important artworks
nevertheless seek to incorporate this art-alien layer. When, suspected
of being infantile, it is absent from art, when the last trace of the vagrant
fiddler disappears from the spiritual chamber musician and the
illusionless drama has lost the magic of the stage, art has capitulated.
(AT 81; GS 7:126)
Although an “infantile” state of openness is the only one in which perception—before
fact perception—is spontaneously embraced, such a state is
vulnerable to exploitation, as Adorno warns in writing of preartistic “poison,”
and one might say that the infant’s openness is fated to be exploited.
Looking for shelter from exploitation, the Adornian artwork gives up the
preartistic magnetism of “unmediated” appearance (sheer Erscheinung)

190 looking away
and sets out on the long way around to apparition. As it embarks on its
travels it carries a little shred of circus color, like a lucky charm. 48
4. court of appeal
Marxism and critical theory enter the discourse of phenomenality and dissatisfaction
to answer the question of what it means to object to the world
“as is.” Adorno observes that Kant “would say: very well, individual conscience
and the course of the world are absolutely incompatible. But then
he would add: so much the worse for the course of the world [um so
schlimmer für den Weltlauf]” (HF 65; NaS 13:96–97). 49 Adorno is a Hegelian
and not a Kantian in that he dwells more fully on individuals’ participation
in the course of the world, an imbrication that takes place on levels
additional to that of judgment. Therefore, Adorno’s objection to the course
of the world does not “deny” something like world spirit. Rather, it is
based in two responses to Hegel’s system, one that asks Hegel’s use of fact
to be consistent in its own terms (Marx’s History 1, à la Chakrabarty) and
another that credits the worth of possibilities and particulars excluded
from history’s logic (Chakrabarty’s History 2).
In the first case, Adorno perceives that Hegel’s system “oscillates between
thinking in invariants and unrestrained dialectical thinking” (AT
208; GS 7:309) and handles unevenly presuppositions and possibilities that
share similar ontological status. Hegel treats presuppositions read out of
what (now) is as more actual than possibilities that have not come to be.
Adorno’s turn to possibility, correcting Hegel’s leaning, is based in what he
48. While Adorno’s desire to insure against the illusion of the unmediated is well
founded, it’s not clear in his own terms that rejecting play is the right decision: the limited
duration and ontic thinness of spectra and “charms” protect the perceiver from aesthetic
ideology as well as the autonomous form of the artwork does.
49. It’s a mark of Adorno’s darkening interpretation of Hegel that he here ascribes to
Kant words that he used to ascribe to Hegel: “If in the last analysis Hegel’s system
makes the transition into untruth by following its own logic, this is a judgment not simply
on Hegel, as a self-righteous positivist science would like to think, but rather a judgment
on reality [Wirklichkeit]. Hegel’s scornful ‘so much the worse for the facts’
[‘Desto schlimmer für die Tatsachen’] is invoked against him so automatically only because
it expresses the dead serious truth about the facts” (“Aspects,” HTS 30–31; GS 5:
276).

court of appeal, or, adorno 191
considers to be a more capacious as well as more careful attention to reality
than Hegel’s. What “allows reason, and indeed compels and obliges reason,
to oppose the superior strength of the course of the world is always
the fact that in every situation there is a concrete possibility of doing
things differently [der ist stets und in jener Situation der Hinweis auf die
konkrete Möglichkeit, es anders zu machen]” (HF 68; NaS 13:100). The
fact of possibility, a “concrete possibility of doing things differently,” “present
and sufficiently developed” (HF 68; NaS 13:100), is the only thing that
constrains Hegel’s attempt to convert a series of events and ideas into a
law. Although Adorno would, I think, defend the right to take seriously
possibilities that one cannot quantify at all, the alternative possibility he
has in mind is often enough strongly indicated, for example by the palpable
weakness of existent institutions. Such a possibility is factive enough
that, once it enters awareness, it “compels and obliges reason” to reckon
with it. This is not to say that the fact that things could be otherwise is as
powerful as the fact that they are what they are; only that since possibility
is a piece of reality, one cannot dismiss it without proportionally diminishing
one’s apprehension of the world “as is.” The fact of possibility should get
the same respect as other ontologically similar pieces of reality. Adorno
does not, in practice, give as much credit as he should to counterhistories—the
almost infinite resource of available facts from disparate
places and times that touch Hegelian history without being of it. Unfamiliar
pasts and spaces seem to alarm him, so that rumors about them lend his
aesthetics the “shudder” of the primitive. When Adorno opines that “any
casual glance at the wretched existence of primitive peoples who have survived
but still live in Stone Age conditions ought to persuade us to abandon
every . . . idealization of primitive society once and for all” (HF 53),
his glance is “casual,” for sure—indeed, he has no idea what he’s talking
about. Adorno believes, however, in making available both present possibilities
and fragments of the past that show historical discontinuity.
The second and more idiosyncratic tactic of Adornian objection to the
world “as is”—to which I’ll turn in the rest of this section—is Adorno’s defense
of the inherent right of the particular and the individual to judge the
course of the world by their own perspectives instead of by that of the universal.
In Kantian vocabulary, this means that in moving from objective
liking to free judgment, I reserve the right to despise what I respect, even

192 looking away
when the given at issue is the world “as is.” Nietzsche dismisses the idea of
such a right with the question: “from where does it derive the right to this
judgment? How does the part come to sit as judge over the whole?” (WP
§331; KSA 12.316). Adorno takes the position that the right is self-evident
and symmetrical to that of universality: it’s necessary in order for there to
be anything for universality to work with, but it is also inherent. His unconditional
intensity on this point distinguishes him from almost every
other philosopher. He elaborates on it in brilliant pages of History and
Freedom, zeroing in on the phrase “mit Grund” (with reason, “justifiably”)
in Hegel’s statement that the universality that constitutes law “is justifiably
regarded as the main enemy by that feeling which reserves the right to do
as it pleases, by that conscience which identifies right with subjective conviction”
(Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 17; Werke 7:20). Adorno captures
the false magnanimity of the moment:
this “justifiably” has to be taken much more seriously than even
Hegel believes. It is characteristic of Hegel’s thinking that he really
wants to have it all ways; that he really wants to include everything,
even things that simply cannot be reconciled. By this I mean that he
adopts the standpoint of the universal; he tends always to claim, ideologically
and in a conformist spirit, that the universal is in the right.
But equally, almost as an afterthought, he would also like to be credited
with wanting fair play for the individual. And he does this with
a throwaway remark [einer Partikel], in this case the single adverb
“justifiably,” merely in order that the individual should get his just
deserts, simply so that it does not look as if anyone is being left out. 50 (HF
64–65, my italics; NaS 13:95–96)
50. Adorno liked the point enough to preserve it in Negative Dialectics, but a comparison
of the two texts shows why I prefer History and Freedom: “this word of Hegel’s looks
like a philosophical slip of the pen. He is blurting out what he denies in the same breath.
If the individual conscience actually regarded ‘the real world of that which is right and
moral’ [Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 17] as hostile because it does not recognize itself
in it, no avowal would serve to gloss this over; for it is the point of Hegelian dialectics
that conscience cannot act differently, that it cannot recognize itself in that real
moral world. Hegel is thus conceding that the reconciliation whose demonstration
comprises his philosophy did not take place” (ND 310; translation modified). The reading
in History and Freedom is freer, clearer, more direct, and winds up going further.

court of appeal, or, adorno 193
Adorno’s point is not that the universal necessarily does injustice to the individual,
but that justice is flawed by dependence on the universal vantage,
which cannot represent fully that of each particular at the same time that it
represents itself. The universal judges from the perspective of the universal,
because it cannot do otherwise. Why should the particular, in turn, not
judge from its own perspective? Why should it do the work of the universal,
as well as its own work?
An aphorism of Minima Moralia, “Golden Gate,” contemplates the
rights of the particular and universal as they inform the rights and judgments
of love:
Someone who has been offended, slighted, has an illumination as
vivid as when agonizing pain lights up one’s own body. He becomes
aware that in the innermost blindness of love, that must remain oblivious,
lives a demand not to be blinded. He was wronged; from this he
deduces a claim to right and must at the same time reject it, for what
he desires can only be given in freedom. In such distress he who is rebuffed
becomes human. Just as love uncompromisingly betrays the
general [Allgemeine] to the particular in which alone justice is done
to the former, so now the general, as the autonomy of others, turns fatally
against it. The very rebuttal through which the general has exerted
its influence appears to the individual as exclusion from the general;
he who has lost love knows himself deserted by all, and this is
why he scorns consolation. In the senselessness of his deprivation he
is made to feel the untruth of all merely individual fulfillment. But he
thereby awakens to the paradoxical consciousness of generality: of
the inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved.
With his plea, founded on no titles or claims, he appeals to
an unknown court, which accords to him as grace what is his own and
yet not his own. The secret of justice in love is the sublation of right,
to which love mutely points. “So forever / cheated and foolish must
love be.”
Hegel may also mean “mit grund” more darkly and brutally, if his intention is to indicate
that what the particular fears is about to happen. Thanks to David Lloyd for this
idea and other contributions to this chapter.

194 looking away
Dem Gekränkten, Zurückgesetzten geht etwas auf, so grell wie heftige
Schmerzen den eigenen Leib beleuchten. Er erkennt, daß im Innersten
der verblendeten Liebe, die nichts davon weiß und nichts wissen
darf, die Forderung des Unverblendeten lebt. Ihm geschah
unrecht; daraus leitet er den Anspruch des Rechts ab und muß ihn zugleich
verwerfen, denn was er wünscht, kann nur aus Freiheit kommen.
In solcher Not wird der Verstoßene zum Menschen. Wie Liebe
unabdingbar das Allgemeine ans Besondere verrät, in dem allein jenem
Ehre widerfährt, so wendet tödlich nun das Allgemeine als Autonomie
des Nächsten sich gegen sie. Gerade die Versagung, in der das
Allgemeine sich durchsetzte, erscheint dem Individuum als Ausgeschlossensein
vom Allgemeinen; der Liebe verlor, weiß von allen sich
verlassen, darum verschmäht er den Trost. In der Sinnlosigkeit des
Entzuges bekommt er das Unwahre aller bloß individuellen Erfüllung
zu spüren. Damit aber erwacht er zum paradoxen Bewußtsein
des Allgemeinen: des unveräußerlichen und unklagbaren Menschenrechtes,
von der Geliebten geliebt zu werden. Mit seiner auf keinen
Titel und Anspruch gegründeten Bitte um Gewährung appelliert er
an eine unbekannte Instanz, die aus Gnade ihm zuspricht, was ihm
gehört und doch nicht gehört. Das Geheimnis der Gerechtigkeit in
der Liebe ist die Aufhebung des Rechts, auf die Liebe mit sprachloser
Gebärde deutet. “So muß übervorteilt / Albern doch überall sein die
Liebe.” 51
The Kantian antagonism of Civilization and Its Discontents, that freedom is
constrained by others’ freedom, plays for erotic stakes in this aphorism,
written in the language of rights and titles. The slighted lover has suffered
an “injustice [unrecht]” in love, but realizes that even from his own particular
perspective, he wants the other to be free, since otherwise there would
be no possible happiness. It’s an instance in which the individual really
does grasp the universal and the particular together—for reasons that are
as interested as disinterested—and “reject[s]” his own claim. What makes
51. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life [1951], trans. E. F. N. Jephcott
(London: Verso, 1978), §104; GS 4:185, hereafter MM. The quotation is from
Hölderlin, “Tränen,” Selected Verse, ed. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil, 1986).

court of appeal, or, adorno 195
Adorno Adorno, however, is that the story doesn’t end there. He neither
writes off the loss nor averages it into the communal pool of lovers’ luck
(win some, lose some). Rather, losses remain classified as injustices no matter
how fair they are. Similarly, physical suffering “tells our knowledge
that suffering ought not to be” (ND 203; GS 6:203), and death properly
remains intolerable because and in spite of its natural inexorability (ND
385; GS 6:378). The original demand to be loved, turned aside by the
plaintiff himself, has merit that no rival merits have the power to cancel—
that he himself does not have the power to cancel. “The inalienable and
unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved” extends beyond titles.
A right based on no reason, it appeals to an “unknown court” that
does not operate on the scarcity principles of justice, thus a messianic
“Golden Gate” where judgment and plenitude are the same. This court
would overturn what is just on the basis of a greater right to universal happiness.
“Golden Gate” alludes to the original source of the phrase associated
with Hegel, “world history is the world’s court.” “Right” is what “world
history, as the world’s court, exercises [Der Weltgeschichte, als dem
Weltgerichte, ausübt],” Hegel writes in Elements of The Philosophy of Right
(§340). The legal metaphor develops, of course, out of the homology
between “process” and “trial” in German (making Kafka, again, an apt respondent
to Hegel). The figure recurs in Hegel’s Encyclopedia, in the section
entitled “Die Weltgeschichte.” 52 In both passages Hegel draws a connection
between the spirit of a people (Volksgeister) and the justice of
“Weltgerichte”; history’s justice is founded in the spirit of a people, the
rightful agent of history. The “Instanz” of “Golden Gate,” in contrast,
names the special appeal stage of a trial. In appealing the verdict of the
people, “Golden Gate” returns to the source of Hegel’s phrase, Schiller’s
poem “Resignation: A Fantasy.” Schiller’s poem functions as a kind of
poetic precedent against philosophy, since Hegel’s allusion to the poem
does misapply it. Far more Adornian than Hegelian, “Resignation” is the
plaint of a narrator who has given up a real love for a delusory hope—
based on the promise of an afterlife—and whose justifiable complaint of
breach of contract is brushed off with the phrase Hegel selects: “Die Lehre
52. G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1830], trans. Gustav Emil Mueller
(New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), §548; Werke, 10, §548.

196 looking away
/ ist ewig wie die Welt. Wer glauben kann, entbehre. / Die Weltgeschichte
ist das Weltgericht [the doctrine / is eternal as the world. Who can believe
it, does without. / World history is the world’s court].” 53 Like “Golden
Gate,” Schiller’s poem insists that losses are by definition never recompensed:
“was man von der Minute ausgeschlagen / gibt keine Ewigkeit
zurück [what’s lost to the moment / eternity does not give back]” (Werke,
1:169). The Hegelian phrase bears the “resignation” of the title, a resignation
recommended to, but not taken up by, the poem’s narrator. Instead he
retains the sealed envelope containing his “Vollmachtbrief zum Glücke,” a
power of attorney for accomplishing the happiness never delivered. This
unopened letter captures well the Adornian fact of possibility—that “unfinished
business [dieses Unerledigte]” (Introduction to Sociology, 96; NaS
15:164) that outlives the disregard of history. Far from resigning, the
speaker forwards his file to the reader as “phantasie,” in other words, in a
form that exceeds the norms that legitimate appeal. Adorno casts himself,
then, as the reader who is willing to hear “Resignation’s” appeal—or to
read the poem properly.
Adorno believes that Kant’s merely intelligible realm in Critique of Practical
Reason prefigures such a court of appeal (ND 385; GS 6:378), not in its
attitude toward happiness but at least in its introduction of the thought of
immortality. In this he follows the reading that the Critique of Practical Reason
withdraws, if only in thought, some of the exigency of the First Critique.
He reuses the same legal metaphor for Hegel’s rebellion against
Kant’s so-called barriers to thought: Hegel argues that Kant “presupposes
already that there is a position beyond the realms separated on the Kantian
map, that there is a court of last resort [eine dritte Instanz], so to speak”
(ND 383; GS 6:375). In both cases the court of appeal surveys the facts
and judges independently of their pressure. From it the world “as is” can
never coerce endorsement:
Nietzsche in the Antichrist voiced the strongest argument not merely
against theology but against metaphysics, that hope is mistaken for
53. Friedrich Schiller, “Resignation: Eine Phantasie [1786],” in Werke (Weimar:
Böhlaus, 1943), 1:167–169. De Man would have said something about Hegel’s seduction
by rhyme: the return of the same in rhyme beats the time of the course of the
world. ...

court of appeal, or, adorno 197
truth. ...Herefutes the Christian “proof by efficacy [Kraft],” that
faith is true because it brings felicity. For “could happiness—or, more
technically, pleasure—ever be a proof of truth? So far from this, it almost
proves the converse, at any rate it gives the strongest grounds
for suspecting ‘truth’ whenever feelings of pleasure have had a say
in the matter. The proof of pleasure is proof of: pleasure—nothing
more; why in the world should true judgments cause more enjoyment
than false ones and, in accordance with a preordained harmony, necessarily
bring pleasant feelings in their train?” [Nietzsche, Antichrist,
§50]. But Nietzsche himself taught amor fati: “thou shalt love thy
fate.” This, he says in the Epilogue to The Twilight of the Idols, was his
innermost nature. We might well ask whether we have more reason to
love what happens to us, to affirm what is, because it is, than to believe
true what we hope. Is it not the same false inference that leads
from the existence of stubborn facts to their erection as the highest
value, as he criticizes in the leap from hope to truth? ...Intheend
hope, wrested from reality by negating it, is the only form in which
truth appears. Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even
thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence
to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized.
Here, rather than in the opposite, lies the crime of theology that
Nietzsche arraigned without ever reaching the final court [zur letzten
Instanz]. (MM §61, “Court of Appeal,” translation modified; GS
4:109–110)
From the stance of factive illusion and illusory facticity, both sides of
the fact/value conflation—“the leap from hope to truth” and the inference
from “stubborn facts” to “the highest value”—are equally theological.
Only inside the awareness of what Adorno reveals to be the inherently
ambiguous zone of social fact do we “wrest” hope “from reality”—
Adorno continues, “by negating it,” while I have focused throughout on an
alternative tradition of suspension and reservation. Nietzsche and Adorno
agree that the very fact that one feels put upon, “like a memory of freedom,”
asserts “that we ought by rights to be free” (HF 205; NaS 13:284),
but Nietzsche demands a title for the assertion, whereas Adorno finds in
discomfort itself a perfectly natural right to want to be comfortable, and in
pressure a right to want to be free. As a result, he exceeds the imagination

198 looking away
of society, which in its bourgeois phase, he notes, “established formal freedom,
but had not envisaged [a society] free from every coercion [von jedem
Zwang befreiten]” (HF 195, translation modified, my italics; NaS 13:270).
Who else has defended the desire for a society free from every coercion?
Adorno’s critique of facticity is a platform to support the right to want universal
happiness, a wanting that is more contested—because more pointless—than
the right to be happy. Visionary as Adorno’s philosophy may be,
it is also his attempt to represent more realistically than Kant, Hegel, or
Nietzsche what is given in the world “as is.”

Postscript
Freud begins Section VI of Civilization and Its Discontents with a confession
of superfluity: “In none of my previous works have I had so strong a feeling
as now that what I am describing is common knowledge and that I am
using up paper and ink and, in due course, the compositor’s and printer’s
work and material in order to expound things which are, in fact, selfevident
[um eigentlich selbstverständliche Dinge zu erzählen].” 1 Freud has
been describing a faultline in happiness: as its pursuit may impede others’
happiness, the existence of other happiness-seekers constricts one’s own
satisfaction even as it makes it possible—obviously.
For Freud, this point is singularly obvious—the world’s most gratuitous-feeling,
ink-wasting point. Gratuitousness, however, is anything but
gratuitous in the argument of Civilization and Its Discontents. If discontent
is structurally inevitable, then it would seem to be a natural condition that
1. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, SE XXI: 117, translation modified;
Gesammelte Werke (London: Imago, 1948), XIV: 476.

200 looking away
it is not the task of therapy to change. Freud notably does not use the language
of acceptance; it’s too soon for that, and there is no process of critique
that can resolve this question. Rather, he raises a doubt in principle
about the position of discontent at the limit of psychoanalysis, dependent
as it is on a hypothesis that he can neither accept nor reject. The doubt
Freud ponders is similar in consequence to the doubt he has, in the same
text, about groups and masses. “In an individual neurosis,” he writes, “we
take as our starting-point the contrast that distinguishes the patient from
his environment, which is assumed to be ‘normal.’ For a group all of whose
members are affected by one and the same disorder no such background
could exist; it would have to be found elsewhere.” The problem is that one
can’t psychoanalyze from “elsewhere,” “since no one possesses authority to
impose such a therapy upon the group” (Civilization and Its Discontents,
144). If a group or mass cannot come in for therapy, still less can a civilization.
Even though discontent may be built into culture and even into
nature, however, it is a strange nature that never feels natural, as Freud
observes. The superfluity of writing about discontent reflects and reverses
an equally persistent sense of superfluity in discontent itself. Relations
to other people, Freud writes, generate “suffering” that “we tend to regard
...asakind of gratuitous addition, although it cannot be less fatefully
inevitable than the suffering which comes from elsewhere” (77). The
metasuffering of resentment implies that there ought not to be suffering
(or, on a more banal scale, discomfort): as I’ve suggested, dissatisfaction is
minding. Yet, by the same logic, the guilt that attends dissatisfaction and
that Freud attacks in his sensation of gratuitousness also implies that it
may be important to pause over the awareness of dissatisfaction just where
it starts to seem futile. Where does this guilty feeling of taking up too
much space and time come from? In Minima Moralia Adorno is on the
lookout for “the castration of perception by a court of control” (MM §79);
Freud notes that censorship makes “the same objections” even to the most
determined mind (such as his own) and cannot be prevented, “only set
aside subsequently—by a court of appeal, as it were.” 2 To be told what to
perceive is to be told what not to look at, and when to cut a look short; it’s
2. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, SE XV: 115.

postscript 201
also to be told where to look—to maintain one’s focus on the things that
matter.
Nietzsche’s remark in The Gay Science, “Looking away shall be my only
negation,” hints at an alternative both to the coerced acceptance of
the given and to Adorno’s modernist aesthetics of negation. Michael
Vahrenwald’s photographs of grasses on Wal-Mart lots inhabit Nietzsche’s
hope very simply. Since the Wal-Mart never appears, it’s neither made
to condemn itself nor given the honor of being allowed to do so. Nor is
its existence denied. What one does see—slopes and patches of greenery
to which almost no one pays attention—takes part of its interest from
what it’s not, but not all. The viewer’s implicit thought is both “I would
prefer not to look at that Wal-Mart” and “I’d prefer to look at this grass.”
Stopping short of celebration or transcendence, avoiding any implication
of particular depth or spirituality in the perceptual object, Vahrenwald’s
photographs find relief in a neutrality that Wal-Mart remains incapable of
buying off—in “nature” not as romance but as invariance. The photographs
are not, perhaps, phenomenophilic, except for their emphasis on
color and their choice of a nearly worthless object to spend time with.
They are highly therapeutic in a way common to minimalist art, finding
and making available the kind of free space familiar to the child tarrying
between the house and the fence, or in the unofficial spaces of the
school. 3
Still, photography itself can’t be looking away, only influenced by it,
since the photograph lasts indefinitely, to be revisited and imagined to
be shared. In everyday experience, how long can a look such as the one
Vahrenwald depicts last? Juxtaposing Vahrenwald’s representation of
looking away to Freud’s discussion of the possibility of therapy for discontent
exposes the contrast between the fleeting moments that phenomenophilia
steals and the kind of therapeutic time that dissatisfaction
may want. Phenomenophilia expires in no more than a few minutes; that
seems like a defense, making sure that no one can intrude, but also making
sure that the phenomenophile doesn’t take much relief (since he feels he
lacks a right to any). Minimalism’s deep vacancy suggests that what the
3. Thanks to Toshi Tomori for this idea.

202 looking away
[To view this image, refer to
the print version of this title.]
Green Slope, Wal-Mart, Davenport, Iowa. Photograph by Michael Vahrenwald, 2005.
phenomenophile needs is time, the long and potentially infinite time it
may take to wash away the sense of coercion. As Adorno suggests, we are
melancholy and restless during periods of freedom not because we don’t
know what to do with freedom, but because there is not yet enough of it
(“Spoilsport,” MM §113).
A response to the dissatisfaction associated with phenomenophilia, then,
would be to allow theoretically infinite time to realize the possibility of experiences
that others need not share. “Theoretically” means that this is an
attitudinal, not empirical, recommendation, although attitudes have empirical
consequences; and it also suggests that this attitude is one that the
phenomenophile would try out on himself, the only person for whom one
can conceivably have a theoretically infinite tolerance. Although this psychoanalytic
value is not necessarily an ethical one, it can be connected (by
paradox) to ethics. Winnicott’s essay “Communicating and Not Communicating,”
for example, establishes the domain—a domain formed out of
dialogue with others—of a “secret self” closed even to intimates, as a con-

postscript 203
dition for noncoercive relation. 4 Something like the secret self is what
phenomenophiles feel they have no right to possess, and may be what
Cavell imagines the skeptic cannot have. The frustration toward too much
interest in phenomenality that often emerges in philosophy reflects both
the sense that recession of this kind is an insult to the given world shared
with society and the related suspicion that there is no end to it: the person
who wants to linger in mere appearance is really always doing it, as Nietzsche
says of the artist; he would live there all the time if he did what he
wanted. The phenomenophile feels the danger and futility of looking away
as well. The fear of the open-ended tension of an endless desire cuts its
losses by gravitating to lyric instants that are figured as all one can expect.
In this way the hope for freedom surfaces and times out.
Freud faces the macrocosmic version of a similar problem in his negative-therapeutic
gesture at the end of Civilization and Its Discontents:
I should find it understandable if someone were to point out the
obligatory nature of the course of human civilization and were to say,
for instance, that the tendencies to a restriction of sexual life or to the
institution of a humanitarian ideal at the expense of natural selection
were developmental trends which cannot be averted or turned aside
and to which it is best for us to yield as though they were necessities of
nature [my italics]. I know, too, the objection that can be made against
this, to the effect that in the history of mankind, trends such as these,
which were considered unsurmountable, have often been thrown
aside and replaced by other trends. Thus I have not the courage to
rise up before my fellow-men as a prophet, and I bow to their reproach
that I can offer them no consolation: for at bottom that is what
they are all demanding—the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately
than the most virtuous believers.
The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be
whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in
4. “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,”
in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory
of Emotional Development (New York: International Universities P, 1965), 179–192.

204 looking away
mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct
of aggression and self-destruction. (145)
The “developmental trends” of civilization may or may not be unstoppable,
and Freud does not feel up to prophecy on a matter that can only be
resolved by continuation to infinity. Instead, he takes up the position outside
civilization that he earlier describes as both impossible and necessary
for civilization-therapy. In these last two paragraphs, separated by a break
from the rest of the book, Freud removes himself from the first-person
plural. His “fellow-men” become and remain a “they” in whose predicament
he no longer seems to participate: “the fateful question for the human
species seems to me to be ...their cultural development.” From outside
“the human species,” Freud stops short of opining that the course of
the world is obligatory, that the developmental trends for better and worse
of this civilization will have been natural and unalterable. He does not allow
the consolations of history or prophecy to take the place of tolerating
a present and future question that may last forever. What Freud produces,
disturbingly and amusingly, is a figure of the ideal analyst, the one whose
theoretically infinite patience is literalized—an analyst who could wait out
the acting out of world spirit. No one possesses this patience, least of all
the phenomenophile or his interlocutors, and not even very talented analysts
like Winnicott. Like many figures in the discourse of phenomenality
and dissatisfaction, this is a utopian figure of plenitude, as well as a
dystopian one that tries to take the measure of the trouble civilization is in.
Bringing this figure back to the critical debate about whether and how to
think about impossible projects, though, may help to clarify why, for a reservation
that seems both too small and too large to be spoken, an unconditional
space is a better idea than the few seconds of tolerance we usually
give ourselves.

Bibliography
Index

Bibliography
Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature.
New York: Norton, 1971.
Adorno, T. W. Aesthetic Theory [1970]. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann,
trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.
———. “Commitment.” In Notes to Literature [1974]. Vol. 2, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, 1974, 76–94.
———. Gesammelte Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. 20 vols. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1986.
———. Hegel: Three Studies [1963]. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge:
MIT P, 1993.
———. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965. Trans. Rodney Livingstone.
Cambridge: Polity, 2006.
———. Introduction to Sociology [1993]. Ed. Christophe Gödde, trans. Edmund
Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
———. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason [1995]. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2001.
———. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life [1951]. Trans. E. F. N.
Jephcott. London: Verso, 1978.
———. Nachgelassene Schriften. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2001.
———. Negative Dialectics [1966]. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Continuum,
1992.
———. “Sexual Taboos and Law Today.” In Critical Models: Inventions and Catchwords,
trans. Henry Pickford. New York: Columbia UP, 1998, 71–88.
Adorno, T. W., et al. The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology. Trans. Glyn Adey
and David Frisby. London: Heinemann, 1976.
Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz [1999]. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen.
New York: Zone, 2002.

208 bibliography
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke
UP, 2006.
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Rev. ed.
New York: Viking, 1964.
———. The Life of the Mind. Ed. Mary McCarthy. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt,
Brace, Jovanovich, 1978.
Aristotle. Eudemian Ethics. Trans. J. Solomon. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed.
Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.
Assoun, Paul-Laurent. Freud and Nietzsche [1980]. Trans. Richard L. Collier, Jr.
London: Athlone, 2000.
Auden, W. H. Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957. New York: Vintage, 1975.
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Ed. J. O. Urmson and Marina Sbisà. 2nd
ed. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1975.
———. Sense and Sensibilia. Ed. G. J. Warnock. London: Oxford UP, 1962.
Bahti, Timothy. Allegories of History: Literary Historiography after Hegel. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1992.
Baker, Harold D. “Landscape as Textual Practice in Coleridge’s Notebooks.” ELH
59 (1992): 651–670.
Balibar, Étienne. “La verità effetuale della cosa: Praeter Mathesin.” Lecture delivered
at UCLA, February 10, 2003.
Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
Barbaras, Renaud. Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception
[1999]. Trans. Paul R. Milan. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2006.
Barrell, John. The Infection of Thomas de Quincey: A Psychopathology of Imperialism.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1991.
Bass, Alan. Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros. Stanford: Stanford UP,
2000.
Bateman, R. Benjamin. “The Future of Queer Theory.” Minnesota Review 65–66
(2006): 171–175.
Beck, Lewis White. “Did the Sage of Königsberg Have No Dreams?” In Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays, ed. Patricia Kitcher. Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1988, 103–116.
Benjamin, Walter. On Hashish. Ed. and trans. Howard Eiland. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 2006.
———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History” [1940]. In Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969.
Bernstein, J. M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and
Adorno. University Park: Penn State UP, 1992.
———. “Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility
of Ethics.” In The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,
ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997, 177–212.
Bishop, Paul, and R. H. Stephenson. Friedrich Nietzsche and Weimar Classicism.
Rochester: Camden House, 2005.
Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation [1969]. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1993.

ibliography 209
———. “Kafka and Brod.” In Friendship [1971], trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1997, 240–251.
———. The Writing of the Disaster [1980]. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska
P, 1986.
Bohrer, Karl Heinz. Suddenness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance [1981].
Trans. Ruth Crowley. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.
Boon, Marcus. The Road of Excess: A History of Writers on Drugs. Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 2002.
Borowski, Ludwig Ernst. Darstellung des Lebens und Charakters Immanuel Kants
[1804]. In Immanuel Kant: Ein Lebensbild nach Darstellungen der Zeitgenossen
Borowski, Jachmann, Wasianski, ed. Hermann Schwarz. Halle: Hugo Peter, 1907.
Brodsky, Claudia. The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and
Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.
Bürger, Peter. The Theory of the Avant-Garde [1974]. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota P, 1984.
Cartwright, William. Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with Other Poems. London:
Humphrey Moseley, 1651.
Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Human Culture.
New Haven: Yale UP, 1944.
Cassirer, H. W. Kant’s First Critique: An Appraisal of the Permanent Significance of
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Allen & Unwin, 1954.
Cavell, Stanley. “Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear.” InMust We Mean
What We Say? A Book of Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1969, 267–353.
———. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1979.
———. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1988.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Two Histories of Capital.” In Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000,
47–71.
Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures
of Liberation. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Clark, David L. “Kant’s Aliens: The Anthropology and Its Others.” CR: The New
Centennial Review 1 (2001): 201–289.
———. “We ‘Other Prussians’: Bodies and Pleasures in De Quincey and Late
Kant.” European Romantic Review 14 (2003): 261–287.
Clark, Maudmarie. Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
Coleridge, S. T. Biographia Literaria. Ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1983.
———. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. 6 vols.
Oxford: Clarendon, 1956–1971.
———. The Friend [1818]. Ed. Barbara Rooke. 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1969.
———. Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. E. H. Coleridge. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 1895.
———. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Ed. Kathleen Coburn with Mer

210 bibliography
ton Christensen and A. J. Harding. 5 vols. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957–
1990.
———. Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text). Ed. J. C. C. Mays. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2001.
Connor, Steven, and David Trotter, eds. Cultural Phenomenology. Critical Quarterly
42 (2000).
Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture.
Cambridge: MIT P, 1999.
———. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century.
Cambridge: MIT P, 1990.
Cutrofello, Andrew. Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism, and the Problem
of Resistance. Albany: State U of New York P, 1994.
de Duve, Thierry. Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting
to the Readymade [1984]. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P,
1991.
de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke,
and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
———. “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant” [1983]. In Aesthetic Ideology, ed.
Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996, 70–90.
Denis, Lara. “Kant on the Wrongness of ‘Unnatural Sex.’” History of Philosophy
Quarterly 16 (1999): 225–248.
Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991.
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination [1972]. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1981.
———. Glas [1974]. Trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln: U of
Nebraska P, 1986.
———. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael
Hughes. London: Routledge, 2002.
———. “Privilege: Justificatory Title and Introductory Remarks.” In Who’s Afraid
of Philosophy? Right to Philosophy I [1990], trans. Jan Plug. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2002, 1–66.
———. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International
[1993]. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Descartes, René. Rules for the Direction of the Mind. In The Philosophical Writings
of Descartes, Vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald
Murdoch. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Dews, Peter. The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy.
New York: Verso, 1995.
Didi-Huberman, Georges. Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz
[2003]. Trans. Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008.
Dretske, Fred. “Seeing, Believing, and Knowing.” In Visual Cognition and Action:
An Invitation to Cognitive Science, Vol. 2, ed. Daniel N. Osherson, Stephen Michael
Kosslyn, and John M. Hollerbach. Cambridge: MIT P, 1990, 129–148.
Durkheim, Émile. The Rules of Sociological Method [1895]. Trans. W. D. Halls. London:
Macmillan, 1982.

ibliography 211
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham: Duke UP,
2004.
Ellison, Julie. Delicate Subjects: Romanticism, Gender, and the Ethics of Understanding.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Vol. VI: The
Conduct of Life, ed. Barbara L. Parker, Joseph Slater, and Douglas Emory.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003.
Eribon, Didier. Insult and the Making of the Gay Self [1999]. Trans. Michael Lucey.
Durham: Duke UP, 2004.
Fenves, Peter. A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysics and World-History in Kant. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1991.
Ferenczi, Sandor. “The Problem of Acceptance of Unpleasant Ideas—Advances in
Knowledge of the Sense of Reality” [1926]. In Further Contributions to the Theory
and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, ed. John Rickman, trans. Jane Isabel Suttie
et al. London: Hogarth, 1950, 366–379.
———. “Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality.” In First Contributions
to Psycho-Analysis [1916], trans. Ernest Jones. New York: Brunner/Mazel,
1952, 213–239.
Ferguson, Frances. Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation.
New York: Routledge, 1992.
Ford, Jennifer. Coleridge on Dreaming: Romanticism, Dreams, and the Medical Imagination.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998.
François, Anne-Lise. Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2008.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents [1930]. In The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James
Strachey. London: Hogarth, 1958, Vol. XXI, 64–145.
———. “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” [1911]. In
Standard Edition, Vol. XII, 218–226.
———. Gesammelte Werke. 17 vols. London: Imago, 1940–1968.
———. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis [1916–1917]. In Standard Edition, Vol.
XV, 3–239.
———. “Negation” [1925]. In Standard Edition, Vol. XIX, 235–242.
———. “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through” [1914]. In Standard
Edition, Vol. XII, 147–156.
Gasché, Rodolphe. The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1999.
Goethe, Johannes. Theory of Colors [1810]. Trans. Charles Lock Eastlake. Cambridge:
MIT P, 1970.
Goffman, Erving. Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gatherings.
New York: Free Press, 1963.
Gourgouris, Stathis. Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical
Era. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003.
Grier, Michelle. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 2001.

212 bibliography
Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality.
Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993.
———. Kant on Freedom, Law, and Happiness. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.
———. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
2005.
Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of
Law and Democracy [1992]. Trans. William Rehg. Cambridge: MIT P, 1998.
Hacking, Ian. Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002.
Harries, Martin. Scare Quotes from Shakespeare: Marx, Keynes, and the Language of
Reenchantment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Hazlitt, William. “Why Distant Objects Please” [1821]. In Selected Writings, ed.
Ronald Blythe. London: Penguin, 1982, 148–160.
Hegel, G. W. F. Elements of the Philosophy of Right [1820]. Ed. Allen W. Wood,
trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.
———. Encyclopedia of Philosophy [1830]. Trans. Gustav Emil Mueller. New York:
Philosophical Library, 1959.
———. Phenomenology of Spirit [1807]. Trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1977.
———. The Science of Logic [1812]. Trans. A. V. Miller. New York: Humanity,
1969.
———. Werke. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970.
Hewitt, Andrew. Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996.
Holmes. Richard. Coleridge. Vol. 2: Darker Reflections, 1804–1834. New York: Pantheon,
1998.
Horkheimer, Max, and T. W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment [1944]. Trans.
John Cumming. New York: Continuum, 1993.
Huhn, Tom, and Lambert Zuidervaart, eds. The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in
Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature [1739–1740]. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1888.
Jacobus, Mary. “Communicating and Not Communicating: Wordsworth and
Winnicott.” In The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein. Oxford: Oxford
UP, 2005, 148–169.
Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The Persistence of the Dialectic. New
York: Verso, 1990.
———. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1981.
Kant, Immanuel. “An attempt at some reflections on optimism by M. Immanuel
Kant, also containing an announcement of his lectures for the coming semester
7 October 1759” [1759]. In Theoretical Philosophy, 1750–1770, ed. and
trans. David Walford in collaboration with Ralf Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge
UP, 1992, 67–76.
———. Critique of Judgment [1790]. Trans. Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1987.

ibliography 213
———. Critique of Pure Reason [1781, 1787]. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New
York: St. Martin’s, 1965.
———. Kritik der Reinen Vernunft [1781, 1787]. Ed. Raymond Schmidt. Hamburg:
Felix Meiner, 1956.
———. Lectures on Ethics. Trans. Peter Heath, ed. Peter Heath and J. B.
Schneewind. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.
———. Lectures on Logic. Trans. J. Michael Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,
1992.
———. “On the Power of the Mind to Master Its Morbid Feelings by Sheer Resolution.”
In The Conflict of the Faculties [1798], trans. Mary J. Gregor and Robert
Anchor. In Religion and Rational Theology, ed. Allen W. Wood and George
di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996, 233–327.
———. “Three manuscript reflections on optimism (Reflections 3703–05)” [1753].
In Theoretical Philosophy, 1750–1770, 77–83.
Kateb, George. “Technology and Philosophy.” Social Research 64 (1997): 1225–
1246.
Keats, John. Letters of John Keats. Ed. Robert Gittings. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.
Koestenbaum, Wayne. Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration. New
York: Routledge, 1989.
Koffka, Kurt. Principles of Gestalt Psychology. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World,
1935.
Kofman, Sarah. Nietzsche and Metaphor [1972]. Trans. Duncan Large. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1993.
Kolakowski, Leszek. Metaphysical Horror. Ed. Agnieszka Kolakowska. 2nd ed. Chicago:
U of Chicago P, 2001.
Kracauer, Siegfried. Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time [1937]. Trans.
Gwenda David and Eric Mosbacher. New York: Zone, 2003.
Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: A Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
Lacan, Jacques. Le Séminaire IV: La relation d’objet (1956–1957). Ed. J.-A. Miller.
Paris: Seuil, 1994.
Laplanche, Jean. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis [1970]. Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
Larson, Kerry. “Justice to Emerson.” Raritan 21 (2002): 46–67.
Lefort, Claude. “Machiavelli and the Verità Effetuale.” InWriting: The Political Test
[1992], trans. David Ames Curtis. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.
Lenoir, Timothy. “Operationalizing Kant: Manifolds, Models and Mathematics in
Helmholtz’s Theories of Perception.” In The Kantian Legacy in Nineteenth-
Century Science, ed. Michael Friedman and Alfred Nordmann. Cambridge:
MIT P, 2006, 141–210.
Loewald, Hans. “Ego and Reality.” In Papers on Psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale
UP, 1980, 3–20.
Löwith, Karl. Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence. Trans. J. Harvey
Lucretius. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.
Lyotard, J.-F. “Adorno as the Devil.” Trans. Robert Hurley. Telos 19 (1974): 128–
137.

214 bibliography
Machiavelli, Niccolò. The Prince [1532]. Trans. Peter Bondanella and Mark Musa.
Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979.
Marion, Jean-Luc. The Crossing of the Visible [1996]. Trans. James K. A. Smith.
Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004.
Marx, Karl. Capital [1867]. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Vintage, 1977.
———. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Martin
Nicholas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
McKusick, James C. Coleridge’s Philosophy of Language. New Haven: Yale UP, 1986.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception [1945]. Trans. Colin Smith.
London: Routledge, 1962.
Modiano, Raimonda. “Coleridge’s Views on Touch and Other Senses.” Bulletin of
Research in the Humanities 81 (1978): 28–41.
Moeller, Robert G. “The Homosexual Man Is a ‘Man,’ the Homosexual Woman Is
a ‘Woman’: Sex, Society, and the Law in Postwar West Germany.” Journal of
the History of Sexuality 4 (1994): 395–429.
Moran, Richard. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 2001.
Mulhall, Stephen. On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects.
London: Routledge, 1990.
Nehemas, Alexander. Nietzsche: Life as Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
Nicholsen, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno’s Aesthetics.
Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil [1886]. Ed. and trans. Walter
Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1966.
———. The Birth of Tragedy [1872, 1886]. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New
York: Vintage, 1967.
———. The Gay Science [1882]. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage,
1974.
———. Sämtliche Werke (Kritische Studienausgabe). Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari. 15 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967–1980.
———. “Schopenhauer as Educator” [1784]. In Unfashionable Observations [1876],
trans. Richard T. Gray. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
———. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton.
Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996.
———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra [1883–1885]. Ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann.
New York: Viking, 1966.
———. Twilight of the Idols [1888]. Trans. Duncan Large. Oxford: Oxford UP,
1998.
———. The Will to Power [1901, 1904, 1910–1911]. Ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans.
Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1968.
Nozick, Robert. Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981.
Peacock, Thomas Love. Memoirs of Shelley and Other Essays and Reviews. Ed.
Howard Mills. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1970.
Pepper, Thomas. Singularities: Extremes of Theory in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 1997.

ibliography 215
Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2002.
Pippin, Robert. Kant’s Theory of Form. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.
Poellner, Peter. Nietzsche and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995.
Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of
Wealth and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998.
Porter, James I. The Birth of Dionysus: An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2000.
Pothen, Philip. Nietzsche and the Fate of Art. Lincolnshire: Ashgate, 2002.
Putnam, Hilary. The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2002.
Rajan, Tillottama. Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism. Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1980.
Ray, Robert B. How a Film Theory Got Lost: And Other Mysteries in Cultural Studies.
Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2001.
Reginster, Bernard. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2006.
Reik, Theodor. The Haunting Melody: Psychoanalytic Experiences in Life and Music
[1953]. New York: Grove, 1960.
Rethy, Robert. “Schein in Nietzsche’s Philosophy.” In Nietzsche and Modern
German Thought, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson. New York: Routledge, 1991, 59–
87.
Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies. In Selected Poetry, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell.
New York: Vintage, 1984.
Roberts, Tyler T. Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1998.
Sallis, John. Crossings: Nietzsche and the Space of Tragedy. Chicago: U of Chicago P,
1991.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Baudelaire [1946]. Trans. Martin Turnell. New York: New Directions,
1967.
Scarry, Elaine. Dreaming by the Book: Imagining under Authorial Instruction. New
York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001.
Schiller, Friedrich. Werke I [Nationalausgabe]. Weimar: Böhlaus, 1943.
Schmitt, Carl. The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy [1926]. Trans. Ellen Kennedy.
Cambridge: MIT P, 1985.
Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation [1818–1859]. Trans.
E. F. J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1958.
Schwenger, Peter. Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1999.
Searle, John. “How to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is.’” In The Is-Ought Question: A Collection
of Papers on the Central Problem in Moral Philosophy, ed. W. D. Hudson.
London: Macmillan, 1969, 120–134.
Sebald, W. G. Austerlitz. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Modern Library, 2001.
Sedgwick, Eve. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990.

216 bibliography
Seel, Martin. Aesthetics of Appearing [2000]. Trans. John Farrell. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 2005.
Sextus Empiricus. The Skeptic Way: Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Ed.
and trans. Benson Mates. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Shelley, Mary. “On Ghosts” [1824]. In The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T.
Bennett and Charles E. Robinson. New York: Oxford UP, 1990, 334–340.
Silverman, Kaja. World Spectators. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2000.
Sloterdijk, Peter. Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche’s Materialism [1986]. Trans. Jamie
Owen Daniel. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical
Theory. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
Smith, John H. The Spirit and the Letter: Traces of Rhetoric in Hegel’s Philosophy of
Bildung. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.
Soll, Ivan. “Nietzsche on the Illusions of Everyday Experience.” In Nietzsche’s
Postmoralism: Essays on Nietzsche’s Prelude to Philosophy’s Future, ed. Richard
Schacht. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001, 7–33.
Stephens, G. Lynn, and George Graham. When Self-Consciousness Breaks: Alien
Voices and Inserted Thoughts. Cambridge: MIT P, 2000.
Strawson, P. F. The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
[1966]. London: Routledge, 1989.
Sullivan, Michael, and John T. Lysaker. “Between Impotence and Illusion: Adorno’s
Art of Theory and Practice.” New German Critique 57 (1992): 87–122.
Terada, Rei. “Thinking for Oneself: Realism and Defiance in Arendt.” ELH 71
(2004): 839–865.
Tiffany, Daniel. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: U of California
P, 2000.
Vaihinger, Hans. The Philosophy of As If: A System of the Theoretical, Practical, and
Religious Fictions of Mankind. Trans. C. K. Ogden. 2nd ed. London: Lund
Humphries, 1935.
Vallins, David. “The Feeling of Knowledge: Insight and Delusion in Coleridge.”
ELH 64 (1997): 157–187.
Villa, Dana. Socratic Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
Vogler, Candace. “Sex and Talk.” In Intimacy, ed. Lauren Berlant. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 2000, 48–85.
Wang, Orrin N. C. “Ghost Theory.” Studies in Romanticism 46 (2007): 203–225.
Warner, Michael. The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
Wellmer, Albrecht. “Adorno’s Aesthetic Redemption of Modernity.” Telos 62
(1984–85): 89–116.
Winnicott, D. W. “Communicating and Not Communicating.” In The
Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of
Emotional Development. New York: International Universities P, 1965.
———. Playing and Reality. New York: Basic Books, 1971.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. 3rd ed. Trans. G. E. M.
Anscombe. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

ibliography 217
Wordsworth, William. Guide to the Lakes [1810]. Ed. Ernest de Sélincourt. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1977.
———. The Prelude [1805]. In The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth.
New York: Norton, 1979.
ÒiÓek, Slavoj. “The Spectre of Ideology.” In Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj ÒiÓek.
London: Verso, 1994, 1–33.
———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
Zuidervaart, Lambert. Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory: The Redemption of Illusion. Cambridge:
MIT P, 1991.