In view of the avant-garde experiments of the early 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno famously argued that politics had somehow made its way into the autonomous work of art, penetrating even more deeply those works that present themselves as ostensibly distant from the political sphere. Inverting Adorno’s observation, our panel proposes to approach the presence of aesthetics in unsuspected realms of human existence. Kant’s “Analytic of the Beautiful”, developed in Chapters 1-22 of the Critique of Judgmentoffers the starting point for our investigations into these “aesthetic obtrusions”. Engaging with Kant’s reflections on disinterestedness, the sensus communis, the relationship between the beautiful and the good, and the nature of purposiveness, our panel tackles issues central to the Analytic of the Beautiful. But while grounded in Kantian aesthetics, the papers in our panel examine these matters in divergent contexts through a wide range of literary texts. Grappling with the appearance of the aesthetic in unlikely places, we apply Kant and read him in light of three different domains of inquiry—money, murder, and futurity.

Our panel consists of three papers: “Money is Beautiful: Aesthetic Underpinnings of Contemporary Capitalism” (Pedro Erber), “The Art of Murder: Thomas De Quincey’s Kantian Perversions” (Taran Kang), and “Afrofuturism, Planetarity, and Aesthetics at the End of the World” (Arina Rotaru).

Brazilian nineteenth-century novelist Machado de Assis—whose intellectual curiosity about economic matters went well beyond a casual interest—once told the story of a passionate coin collector, who loved money “all the way to the point of aesthetic contemplation.” Aesthetic contemplation, as Kant argues in the Analytic of the Beautiful, is called “disinterested” precisely insofar as it is removed from the realm of wants or desires, and therefore from the regime of possession. Money, on the other hand, is at the center of this regime, and thus supposedly removed from the sphere of aesthetics. Under such circumstances, what would it mean to love money “to the point of aesthetic contemplation”? Taking Machado de Assis’s short story as a starting point, Pedro Erber argues that this mode of aesthetic, contemplative, and to some extent “disinterested” relationship with money is indeed a fundamental aspect of contemporary neoliberal capitalism. In dialogue with contemporary theorists of neoliberalism such as Wendy Brown, Joseph Vogl, and Martijn Konings, his paper discusses the aesthetic underpinnings of capitalism; it suggests that a theoretical approach to the current stage of capitalist society has much to learn from Kant’s discussion of the structure of aesthetic judgment.

Reading Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Artswith reference to Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful, Taran Kang’s paper looks at a moment in which aesthetics obtrudes beyond its seemingly proper confines. What is a proper aesthetic object according to Kant? Can an act of evil—such as murder—be such an object, and can it ever merit the accolade of beauty? Central to De Quincey’s aestheticizing of murder is the distinction he draws between the aesthetic and the moral, a distinction that he claims to derive from German philosophy. With an attentiveness both to the explicit references to Kant in On Murderand to those moments in the text where the shadow of Kant’s aesthetics can be discerned, this paper shows how the idea of “disinterestedness”, so crucial to aesthetic judgment on Kant’s reading, is redeployed by De Quincey so as to justify our taking aesthetic pleasure in acts of criminality. Is De Quincey’s work to be understood as a satire on Kantian aesthetics? A reductio ad absurdum? A simple misreading of Kant? A deliberate misreading? Or is it, perhaps, a lucid extrapolation and justification? This paper argues that a juxtaposition of Kant and De Quincey opens the way to a reconsideration of the relationship between the moral and the aesthetic—and the sometimes unsettling intersections between them.

Arina Rotaru’s paper explores the propensity of Afrofuturism towards “planetary imaginings” that produce an alterity anchored in a critique of the human. It argues that Afrofuturism—a movement that retrieves the erased humanity of black people and their ancestors by staging scenarios for survival in alternate universes—generates an aesthetics that translates Kant’s reflections into alter spaces. In such spaces, at the end of the world as we know it, beauty and the capacity for aesthetic judgment take on new dimensions. An examination of the works of Kodwo Eshun and Daniel Kojo Schradeilluminates the afterlives of Kantian aesthetics in the context of an emergent posthumanism.In Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction, the reconfiguration of blackness and historicity facilitates a rethinking of questions raised by Kant about the beautiful, the good, and the nature of purposiveness. Noting the racist tropes about Africans in Kant’s anthropological writings and the connections he draws between blackness and the sublime in his earlier forays into aesthetics, this paper uncovers the tensions lying beneath the surface of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful even as it draws on it to deepen our understanding of Afrofuturist art and literature.

All three papers in our panel strive to be attentive to the complexities of Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful; but they also seek to take its insights in new and sometimes startling directions. Our interventions are meant to illuminate Kantian aesthetics as well as the works explored in relation to it. Pressing on the limits of Kant’s categories, we hope to test the bounds of the aesthetic and to elucidate the extent to which it can or cannot be delimited.