Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno

by Rei Terada

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674032682
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	04/30/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	701,428
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rei Terada is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis at the University of California, Irvine.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Textual Note
• Pretext

Coleridge among the Spectra
• Purple Haze
• Thoughts and Things
• Contemporary Theories of Derealization and Mistrust

Appearance and Acceptance in Kant
• From Mere to Necessary Appearance
• No Fault
• The Right to a Phenomenal World
• Legalize It

No Right: Phenomenality and Self-Denial in Nietzsche
• Genealogy of Phenomenality
• Stolen Phenomenality
• The Disappearance of Appearance

Court of Appeal, or, Adorno
• Critique of Facticity
• Illusion in Total Illusion
• Circus Colors
• Court of Appeal
• Postscript
• Bibliography
• Index

What People are Saying About This

This original book's contribution is of the best kind: not to provide a set of answers, but to open up a whole new area of questions. This is likely to be an important book for all those interested in rethinking those territories of experience previously disciplined by the idea of "the aesthetic."

Michael Moon

We have "Looked Awry" with Žižek, and now we "Look Away" with Terada--and what do we see? Terada's scintillating study reveals all that is to be gained--intellectually, aesthetically, politically--from tarrying with the apparent. This slender volume is the best of guides to what its author calls "phenomenophilia," a strong inclination to cultivate ephemeral perceptual experience, and the perils and pleasures thereof, as these are anatomized in the writings of Kant, Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Adorno. This work of Terada's helps us imagine how to think more freely, and her accounts of these writers' respective takes on experiences of the fleeting, the glimpsed, the evanescent are themselves queer in the most errant sense of the term.

— Michael Moon, Emory University

Simon Jarvis

This original book's contribution is of the best kind: not to provide a set of answers, but to open up a whole new area of questions. This is likely to be an important book for all those interested in rethinking those territories of experience previously disciplined by the idea of "the aesthetic."
— Simon Jarvis, University of Cambridge

Editorial Reviews

We have "Looked Awry" with Žižek, and now we "Look Away" with Terada—and what do we see? Terada's scintillating study reveals all that is to be gained—intellectually, aesthetically, politically—from tarrying with the apparent. This slender volume is the best of guides to what its author calls "phenomenophilia," a strong inclination to cultivate ephemeral perceptual experience, and the perils and pleasures thereof, as these are anatomized in the writings of Kant, Coleridge, Nietzsche, and Adorno. This work of Terada's helps us imagine how to think more freely, and her accounts of these writers' respective takes on experiences of the fleeting, the glimpsed, the evanescent are themselves queer in the most errant sense of the term.

Michael Moon

This original book's contribution is of the best kind: not to provide a set of answers, but to open up a whole new area of questions. This is likely to be an important book for all those interested in rethinking those territories of experience previously disciplined by the idea of "the aesthetic."

Simon Jarvis