Looking Away: Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction, Kant to Adorno
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)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)