A few quotations and provocations for further thinking about Kant’s aesthetic theory:

In a world in which everything is made to be sold for profit and engineered to appeal to what a consumer is preshaped to desire, how can there not be a philosophically as well as historically meaningful uncertainty at the heart of the aesthetic evaluations through which we process pleasures?

— Sianne Ngai, Theory of the Gimmick p. 23

Detachment, disinterestedness, indifference—aesthetic theory has so often presented these as the only way to recognize the work of art for what it is, autonomous, that one ends up forgetting that they really mean disinvestment, detachment, indifference, in other words, the refusal to invest oneself and take things seriously.

—Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, p. 34

Moving from aesthetic judgment to interpretation is vital for scholars. But it is not vital for the critic. The move is a move because these activities are not the same kind of thing. The role of criticism is not that it interprets but that it alerts us to what we should be interpreting.

— V. Joshua Adams, Chicago Review

Plus, a short clip that speaks to the metaphor we discussed last week, of theory as a lens, from John Carpenter’s They Live (1988)— likely a vision that would be congenial to Eagleton!