Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant situate aesthetic objects in a public sphere, organized around the figure of the general observer. However, what these thinkers took to be a universal forum for aesthetic meaning making and a generally accessible faculty of taste are in fact sites of fundamental exclusions. Should philosophy, hence, give up on the notion of the public as a field of aesthetic production and reception? This essay approaches this question from the perspective of Diamela Eltit’s novel E. Luminata (1983). Published during the Pinochet dictatorship, Eltit’s text literalizes the notion of enlightenment through the image of an advertisement sign that casts its projections over the people gathered in a public square in Santiago de Chile. The sign endows the Chilean people with an identity in the global marketplace, construing them as a colonial after-effect, and heralding society’s total governance by a neoliberal world system. However, through strategies such as counterstatements, the text also makes visible an alternative form of aesthetic agency. Eltit’s later novel The Fourth World (1988) develops this approach further by countering a relentless global process of accumulation with critical figurations of race, taste, sexuality, and nation. By juxtaposing Enlightenment constructions of taste and the public with aesthetic readings of crucial aspects of Eltit’s two novels, this essay argues for the importance of aesthetic publicness and agency and signals ways in which we can construct these notions on new terms.

Monique ROELOFS Monique Roelofs is Professor of Philosophy of Art and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on the relation between aesthetics and politics, with a special focus on the dynamics of race, gender, nation, coloniality, and the global. She is the author of Arts of Address: Being Alive to Language and The World (Columbia UP, 2020) and The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (2014). Roelofs is currently completing a monograph on the turn to the public in Latin American and Latinx aesthetics and a second book-length investigation on the aesthetics of address. She recently coedited the collection Black Art and Aesthetics: Relationalities, Interiorities, Reckonings (Bloomsbury, 2024).