Aesthetic desire and distaste prime everyday life in surprising ways. The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic casts much-needed light on the complex mix of meanings our aesthetic activities weave into cultural existence. Anchoring aesthetic experience in our relationships with persons, places, and things, Monique Roelofs explores aesthetic life as a multimodal, socially embedded, corporeal endeavor. Highlighting notions of relationality, address, and promising, this compelling study shows these concepts at work in visions of beauty, ugliness, detail, nation, ignorance, and (...) cultural boundary. Unexpected aesthetic pleasures and pains crop up in sites where passion, perception, rationality, and imagination go together but also are in conflict. Bonds between aesthetics and politics are forged and reforged. Cross-disciplinary in outlook, and engaging the work of theorists and artists ranging from David Hume to Theodor W. Adorno, Frantz Fanon, Clarice Lispector, and Barbara Johnson, The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic lays open the interpretive web that gives aesthetic agency its vast reach. (shrink)

Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social life. She shows how address props up finely hewn modalities of relationality, agency, and normativity. Address exceeds a one-on-one pairing of cultural productions with their audiences. As ardently energizing tiny slippages and snippets as fueling larger impulses in the society, it activates and reaestheticizes registers of race, gender, class, coloniality, and cosmopolitanism. In readings of (...) writers and artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Under the banner of a unified concept of address, Hume, Kant, and Foucault strike up conversations with Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Fanon, Anzaldúa, and Butler. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address's significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it. (shrink)

Address figures prominently in contemporary feminism, yet calls for further theorizing. Modes of address are forms of signification we direct at people, objects, and places, and they at us. Address constitutes a vital dimension of our corporeal interactions with persons and the material world. Our relationships are in motion as we adopt modes of address toward one another or fail to do so. Clarifying address through examples from Gloria Anzaldúa, this essay reveals its importance in María Lugones's writings. The essay (...) thereby highlights underexplored aspects of Lugones's texts, identifies continuities between Lugones's philosophy and feminist work that comprehends address as a carrier of aesthetic and political meanings, and illuminates the resources of a remarkably fruitful concept. Address, in Lugones, is the centerpiece of a quotidian cultural politics. Principal concepts she introduces recruit address. Yet, by foregrounding address, the essay also brings into view unforeseen obstructions in the paths of address that Lugones champions, and an enlarged playing field that we can activate to realize desirable frames of address and derail objectionable structures. Avenues open up for further development of Lugones's insights and for inquiries into address. (shrink)

In the closing episode of Diamela Eltit's 1988 novella The Fourth World, the city of Santiago de Chile—including its inhabitants—goes up for sale. Eltit's investigation of the specter of all‐out commodification illuminates the entwinements of aesthetics and race under finance capitalism. Published at the tail end of the Pinochet dictatorship, the novel makes a poignant contribution to the debate over the “lettered city” in Latin America. Briefly situating The Fourth World in this context and placing it in conversation with current (...) lines of reflection on social identity and the notion of the aesthetic, this article analyzes the novel's implications for a philosophical understanding of the aesthetics–race relation: one, the work attests to an expansive conception of racial identity; two, it comprehends aesthetic agency as a much‐needed and potentially critical site of transformed racial existence; and, three, it calls for multimodal forms of address to counter neoliberal rationality. The article brings out these points through a close reading of passages and by highlighting the novel's decolonial feminist aesthetic. In ending, the article takes note of the new notions of creativity and political participation that arise. (shrink)

Critical accounts of race have drastically changed the landscapes of the social, the political, and the intimate. Philosophical perspectives on racial identity and difference hold out transformative possibilities for aesthetics. Revealing the entanglement of analytical concepts and day-to-day life with racial meaning, such approaches challenge the field of aesthetics to encounter its methodologies with a fresh look. How can aesthetics rethink itself by rethinking race and empire? What shape do aesthetic themes take in light of the historical, spatial, imaginative, affective, (...) sensory, and sexual registers of racial subjectivity and the pervasiveness of racist and neocolonial constellations? How do art and the aesthetic reflect, or critically engage, racialization? What forms and idioms enable us to articulate the racial ethics and politics that shape our various conscious and unconscious aesthetic projects? (shrink)

Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. A philosophical question arises about the nature of gendered embodied experience and materiality: How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through a reading of Claudia Llosa's film The Milk of Sorrow ( La teta asustada ) (2009). The film, we show, reworks racial, (...) gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism and its attendant figuration of resistance by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young Indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who, in encounter with popular culture and the global marketplace, renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her young town and country. We signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination. (shrink)

Following exhibits in Basel and Frankfurt, Kara Walker’s show A Black Hole is Everything a Star Longs to Be: Drawings 1992–2020 is on display in the De Pont Mus.

What is it to experience the sardonic quality of Mingus' music, the nostalgia of a street-scene, the evanescence of a light installation, or the flowingness of Virginia Woolf's prose? Aesthetic experiences make artworks what they are for us--expressive, enlightening, enjoyable. They ground aesthetic value. How can we best account for them? ;The traditional view of aesthetic perception describes a mode of disinterested contemplation, free from the cognitive and utilitarian strictures conditioning ordinary awareness. Philosophers have challenged this view on analytical, marxist, (...) feminist, pragmatist, and postmodernist grounds. Through interrelation and contextualization requirements, aestheticians have attempted to salvage the notion of an aesthetically appropriate mode of appreciation . But the nature of this kind of appreciation depends on the nature of the small-scale experiential states that form its substance, namely, the experiences of aesthetic properties. ;These experiences are peculiar. Conceptually complexer than pure sensations, and phenomenally richer than sheer imaginings and cognitions, aesthetic experiences exhibit significant parallels and differences with other states of mind. They display a rocky distribution over various sense modalities, a selective sensitivity to contextual factors, and a striking interconnectedness among themselves. Current analyses in terms of cognition, imagination, metaphorical understanding, nonaesthetic sensation, and counterfactual perception have trouble accommodating their coherence and stability. With the assistence of theoretical work on categorization, perception, and qualia , I propose to locate a more fine-grained attitude at the basis of aesthetic experience, involving perceptually driven conceptualizations, arising through processes of progressive phenomenal differentiation. I substantiate this proposal by considering a number of pertinent phenomena in aesthetics, namely the role of imaginings in pictorial and musical perception; the function of artistic categories, and the experience of seeing objects in depictions. ;This view, call it the conceptualizations view, allows us to identify the distinctive artistic functioning of aesthetic experience--its role as an intermediary between different domains of artistic meaning--while respecting its variety and its relations with other forms of mentation. Thus we can clarify its formative role within the aesthetic sphere at large, and, most importantly, its connection with value. (shrink)

I analyze the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector's novella, The Hour of the Star, in terms of the entwinements of beauty with economic mobility and abandonment, . . . with constructions of cultural citizenship and liminality.

Black Art and Aesthetics comprises essays, poems, interviews, and over 50 images from artists and writers: GerShun Avilez, Angela Y. Davis, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Theaster Gates, Aracelis Girmay, Jeremy Matthew Glick, Deborah Goffe, James B. Haile III, Vijay Iyer, Isaac Julien, Benjamin Krusling, Daphne Lamothe, George E. Lewis, Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, Meleko Mokgosi, Wangechi Mutu, Fumi Okiji, Nell Painter, Mickaella Perina, Kevin Quashie, Claudia Rankine, Claudia Schmuckli, Evie Shockley, Paul C. Taylor, Kara Walker, Simone White, and Mabel O. Wilson. The (...) stellar contributors practice Black aesthetics by engaging intersectionally with class, queer sexuality, female embodiment, dance vocabularies, coloniality, Afrodiasporic music, Black post-soul art, Afropessimism, and more. Black aesthetics thus restores aesthetics to its full potential by encompassing all forms of sensation and imagination in art, culture, design, everyday life, and nature and by creating new ways of reckoning with experience, identity, and resistance. Highlighting wide-ranging forms of Black aesthetics across the arts, culture, and theory, Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings provides an unprecedented view of a field enjoying a global resurgence. Black aesthetics materializes in communities of artists, activists, theorists, and others who critique racial inequities, create new forms of interiority and relationality, uncover affective histories, and develop strategies for social justice. (shrink)

White on White/Black on Black is a unique contribution to the philosophy of race. The text explores how 14 philosophers, 7 white and 7 black, philosophically understand the dynamics of the process of racialization.

Monique Roelofs’s The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic is groundbreaking in its nuanced account of the potential and limitations of the aesthetic for creating a more just, humane world. Particularly timely are Roelofs’s analyses of the ways in which racial and gender stereotypes are reinforced and the operations of what she calls “racialized aesthetic nationalism,” the tendencies of aesthetic values to shore up schisms along racial, ethnic, and national lines. I raise questions, however, about the appropriateness of (...) aesthetic criticism that stresses sins of omission, the desirability of insisting that the broad nexus of social relations always be kept in view, and the danger that foregrounding minority group membership and gender will reduce individuals in marked categories to mere exemplifications of such status. (shrink)

The central claim of Monique Roelofs’s wide-ranging examination of the aesthetic is that it “hold[s] out the promise of a shared culture... people and objects [connected] in flourishing collective and material bonds”. Roelofs acknowledges Kant’s and Hume’s commitment to shared human faculties that allow judgements of taste “to attain intersubjective validity”; but her argument quickly develops from this “promise” to one with social and political consequences—of a harmonious and egalitarian society—and to radically different theoretical formulations and conclusions. (...) Roelofs then also starts from a now familiar “everyday aesthetics” position—although it is not explicitly... (shrink)

This essay is an introduction to the cluster on Latina feminism published in Hypatia (Spring 2016), Vo. 31 (2), which features essays on various areas of Latina feminisms as well as discussions on the intersection of Latina feminisms and the work of thinkers such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Simone de Beauvoir, Enrique Dussell, Immanuel Kant, Édouard Glissant, Walter Mignolo, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Contributors to the cluster include Stephanie Rivera Berruz, Cynthia M. Paccacerqua, Andrea J. Pitts, Monique Roelofs, Susan C. (...) Méndez, Gabriela Veronelli, and Elena Flores Ruiz. (shrink)

Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...) body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. Foreward by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Authors include Noel Carroll, Gregory Velazco Y Trianosky, Monique Roelofs, Whitney Davis, Eleanor Heartney, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Phoebe M. Farris, Mary Devereaux, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Karina L. Cespedes-Cortes and Paul C. Taylor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Stephen Davies, Jane Duran, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Keith Lehrer, Allen Douglas, Cynthia Freeland, Eva Kit Wah Man, Mary Bittner Wiseman, and Peg Brand's essay, "ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty.". (shrink)

This symposium on Monique Deveaux’s Poverty, Solidarity, and Poor-Led Social Movements includes commentaries by Sally Matthews, Renante D. Pilapil, Violetta Igneski, and Wouter Peeters, with a reply from Deveaux. The book makes the case that normative thinking about poverty should engage closely with the aims, insights, and actions of poor-led organizations and social movements. Challenging conventional framings of poverty by moral philosophers, Deveaux argues that chronic poverty is centrally about the subordination and dispossession of the poor – not mere (...) needs scarcity. To exclude people living in poverty from shaping antipoverty solutions is therefore to perpetuate their social-political domination and epistemic oppression. Deveaux’s book explains what a political reframing of poverty looks like from the vantage point of several poor-led organizations and social movements, using concrete examples from across the globe, and argues for political responsibility for solidarity with those movements. (shrink)

If moral status depends on the capacity for consciousness, what kind of consciousness matters exactly? Two popular answers are that any kind of consciousness matters (Broad Sentientism), and that what matters is the capacity for pleasure and suffering (Narrow Sentientism). I argue that the broad answer is too broad, while the narrow answer is likely too narrow, as Chalmers has recently argued by appeal to ‘philosophical Vulcans’. I defend a middle position, Motivational Sentientism, on which what matters is motivating consciousness: (...) any kind of consciousness which presents its subject with reasons for action. (shrink)

I explore some surprising convergences between apparently opposite theories of consciousness—panpsychism and eliminativism. I outline what a ‘Dennettian panpsychism’ might look like, and consider some of the challenging but fertile questions it raises about determinacy, holism, and subjecthood.What unites constitutive panpsychism and the multiple drafts model is that both present the unitary consciousness we can report as resting atop a multiplicity of independent processes; both reject as misguided the search for a definite threshold between processing that is truly conscious and (...) that which is merely preconscious. What divides them is that Dennett regards it as unreasonable to posit inaccessible consciousness, but reasonable to doubt or deny the existence of consciousness, while panpsychists think the opposite. (shrink)

Increasing privacy concerns are arising from expanding use of aggregated personal information in health practices. Conversely, in light of the promising benefits of data driven healthcare, privacy...

This book explores a neglected philosophical question: How do groups of interacting minds relate to singular minds? Could several of us, by organizing ourselves the right way, constitute a single conscious mind that contains our minds as parts? And could each of us have been, all along, a group of mental parts in close cooperation? Scientific progress seems to be slowly revealing that all the different physical objects around us are, at root, just a matter of the right parts put (...) together in the right ways: How far could the same be true of minds? This book argues that we are too used to seeing the mind as an indivisible unity and that understanding our place in nature requires being willing to see minds as composite systems, simultaneously one conscious whole and many conscious parts. In thinking through the implications of such a shift of perspective, the book relates the question of mental combination to a range of different theories of the mind (in particular panpsychism, functionalism, and Neo-Lockeanism about personal identity) and identifies, clarifies, and addresses a wide array of philosophical objections (concerning personal identity, the unity of consciousness, the privacy of experience, and other issues) that have been raised against the idea of composite minds. The result is an account of the metaphysics of composition and consciousness that can illuminate many different debates in philosophy of mind, concerning split brains, collective intentionality, and the combination problem, among others. (shrink)

The unity of consciousness has so far been studied only as a relation holding among the many experiences of a single subject. I investigate whether this relation could hold between the experiences of distinct subjects, considering three major arguments against the possibility of such ‘between-subjects unity’. The first argument, based on the popular idea that unity implies subsumption by a composite experience, can be deflected by allowing for limited forms of ‘experience-sharing’, in which the same token experience belongs to more (...) than one subject. The second argument, based on the phenomenological claim that unified experiences have interdependent phenomenal characters, I show to rest on an equivocation. Finally, the third argument accuses between-subjects unity of being unimaginable, or more broadly a formal possibility corresponding to nothing we can make sense of. I argue that the familiar experience of perceptual co-presentation gives us an adequate phenomenological grasp on what between-subjects unity might be like. (shrink)

I analyse six different senses in which a conscious mind can be said to be either 'bounded' or 'unbounded', and evaluate how well they might capture what people mean when they say either that human consciousness is necessarily bounded, that it introspectively appears bounded, or that mystical and psychedelic experiences remove its apparent boundedness. I then argue that, although human consciousness is certainly bounded in one important sense (informational boundedness), this does not entail that it is phenomenally bounded, in the (...) sense of being divided into separate fields of experience. In fact, if panpsychists are right that consciousness is fundamental and nature is uniform, it is likely that human consciousness is phenomenally unbounded: the whole universe is likely to be a single field of consciousness, with each of us being an informationally dense region of it. I close by noting some ways that this claim of phenomenal unboundedness ('continuism') impacts debates among panpsychists about how to solve the combination problem. (shrink)

This paper responds to two arguments that have been offered against the positing of ‘i-desires’, imaginative counterparts of desire supposedly involved in fiction, pretence, and mindreading. The Introspection Argument asks why, if there are both i-desires and desires, the distinction is so unfamiliar and hard to draw, unlike the relatively clear distinctions between perception and mental imagery, or belief and belief-like imagining. The Accountability Argument asks how it can make sense to treat merely imaginative states as revealing of someone’s psychology, (...) the way we do with responses to fiction. I argue that carefully considering the relationship between other states and their imaginative counterparts sheds light on how we should expect i-desires to differ from desires, and suggests that we may often be in states that are _indeterminate_, in limbo between the two categories. This indeterminacy explains why the distinction is often hard to draw, and why these states can be revealing about us even without (determinately) being real desires. (shrink)

I discuss the apparent discrepancy between the qualitative diversity of consciousness and the relative qualitative homogeneity of the brain's basic constituents, a discrepancy that has been raised as a problem for identity theorists by Maxwell and Lockwood (as one element of the ‘grain problem’), and more recently as a problem for panpsychists (under the heading of ‘the palette problem’). The challenge posed to panpsychists by this discrepancy is to make sense of how a relatively small ‘palette’ of basic qualities could (...) give rise to the bewildering diversity of qualities we, and presumably other creatures, experience. I argue that panpsychists can meet this challenge, though it requires taking contentious stands on certain phenomenological questions, in particular on whether any familiar qualities are actual examples of ‘phenomenal blending’, and whether any other familiar qualities have a positive ‘phenomenologically simple character’. Moreover, it requires accepting an eventual theory most elements of which are in a certain explicable sense unimaginable, though not for that reason inconceivable. Nevertheless, I conclude that there are no conclusive reasons to reject such a theory, and so philosophers whose prior commitments motivate them to adopt it can do so without major theoretical cost. (shrink)

This book, now open-access from OUP, develops a normative theory of political responsibility for solidarity with poor populations by engaging closely with empirical studies of poor-led social movements in the Global South. Monique Deveaux rejects familiar ethical framings of problems of poverty and inequality by arguing that normative thinking about antipoverty remedies needs to engage closely with the aims, insights, and actions of “pro-poor,” poor-led social movements. Defending the idea of a political responsibility for solidarity, nonpoor outsiders—individuals, institutions, and (...) states—can help to advance a transformative anti-poverty agenda only by supporting the efforts of these movements. (shrink)

Galileo’s Error is a superlative work of public philosophy, particularly as a way of introducing modern academic panpsychism to a broader audience. In this commentary, I reflect on an issue that is prominent, though often with different background concerns, in both academic and popular discourse: what it means to be ‘scientific’ or ‘unscientific’. Panpsychism is not itself a scientific hypothesis, but neither is it (as critics sometimes claim) in conflict with science. Indeed, Goff argues, and I agree, that panpsychism is (...) an eminently scientific worldview, in the sense of a way of viewing reality that accords with and embraces what science reveals. But what exactly it means to ‘accord with and embrace’ science is disputed; this paper tries to untangle some of the threads. (shrink)

I analyse the meaning of a popular idiom among consciousness researchers, in which an individual's consciousness is described as a 'field'. I consider some of the contexts where this idea appears, in particular discussions of attention and the unity of consciousness. In neither case, I argue, do authors provide the resources to cash out all the implications of field-talk: in particular, they do not give sense to the idea of conscious elements being arrayed along multiple dimensions. I suggest ways to (...) extend and generalize the attentional construal of 'field-talk' to provide a genuine multiplicity of dimensions, through the notions of attentional proximity and causal proximity: the degree to which two experiential elements are disposed to bring one another into attention when attended, or to interact in other distinctively mental ways. I conclude that if consciousness is a field, it is one organized by attentional and/or causal proximity. (shrink)

This thesis explores the possibility of composite consciousness: phenomenally conscious states belonging to a composite being in virtue of the consciousness of, and relations among, its parts. We have no trouble accepting that a composite being has physical properties entirely in virtue of the physical properties of, and relations among, its parts. But a long­standing intuition holds that consciousness is different: my consciousness cannot be understood as a complex of interacting component consciousnesses belonging to parts of me. I ask why: (...) what is it about consciousness that makes us think it so different from matter? And should we accept this apparent difference? (shrink)

Social isolation has serious repercussions for people and communities across the globe, yet knowledge about this phenomenon has remained rather limited – until now. The first multidisciplinary study to explore this issue, Social Isolation in Modern Society integrates relevant research traditions in the social sciences and brings together sociological theories of social networks and psychological theories of feelings of loneliness. Both traditions are embedded in research, with the results of a large-scale international study being used to describe the extent, nature (...) and divergent manifestations of social isolation. With a new approach to social inequality, this empirically based study includes concrete policy recommendations, and presents a clear insight into personal, social and socio-economic causes and the consequences of social isolation. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 49, Issue 2, Page 314-336, June 2021.