Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno

In Looking Away, Rei Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world.Focusing on romantic and post-romantic thought after Kant, Terada argues that acceptance of the world "as is" is coerced by canonical epistemology and aesthetics. In guilty evasions of this coercion, post-Kantian thinkers cultivate fleeting, aberrant appearances, perceptual experiences that do not present themselves as facts to be accepted and therefore become images of freedom. This "phenomenophilia, " she suggests, informs romanticism and subsequent philosophical thought with a nascent queer theory.Through graceful readings of Coleridge's obsession with perceptual ephemera, or "spectra, " recorded in his Notebooks; of Kant's efforts in his First and Third Critiques to come to terms with the given world; of Nietzsche's responses to Kant and his meditations on ephemeral phenomenal experiences; and of Adorno's interpretations of both Nietzsche and Kant, Terada proposes that the connection between dissatisfaction and ephemeral phenomenality reveals a hitherto-unknown alternative to aesthetics that expresses our right to desire something other than experience "as is, " even those parts of it that really cannot be otherwise.