Looking Away

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 &quote;as is&quote; 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 &quote;phenomenophilia,&quote; she suggests, informs romanticism and subsequent philosophical thought with a nascent queer theory.Through graceful readings of Coleridge's obsession with perceptual ephemera, or &quote;spectra,&quote; 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 &quote;as is,&quote; even those parts of it that really cannot be otherwise.