Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus , dominated by dialogue as the "novel of ideas" always tends to be: "If one was fundamentally interested in a thing, when one talked about it one could hardly help drawing others in, infecting them with it, and so creating an interest up to then not present or dreamed of. And that was worth a great deal more than catering to one already existent." This moment from Mann's novel, famously based on Adorno's theoretical writings on music, is striking for several reasons. First, it underscores the performativity of the interesting. Judging something interesting is often a first step in actually making it so . Which is why there is an explicitly pedagogical dimension to the interesting. (Not accidentally, the speaker of the quotation is a piano teacher). Second, it highlights how our experience of something as interesting compels us to immediately talk about it. As if there could be no aesthetic experience of the interesting without the talk. For Kant, similarly, it does not seem possible to judge something beautiful without speaking, or at the very least, imagining oneself speaking. Some may think I am overreading certain early moments in the third Critique in making this claim (sections 6 and 7), but I do think the compulsion to literally speak, the compulsion to make one's pleasure public , is fundamental to aesthetic judgment (and therefore, one might argue, to aesthetic experience). Though he doesn't put it as crudely as I just did, Stanley Cavell's reading of