Philosophy and the Politics of Beauty

Foregrounding beauty’s functioning as a category, an experiential quality, and a value, this chapter considers the intricate everyday and artistic politics embodied in the experiences beauty enables; in the cultural categories marking these experiences; and in the ways these experiences feed into social and material relationships. A Doris Salcedo sculpture employs beauty’s narrative, affective, and imaginative solicitations in a political homage to a forgotten, destroyed person. A Kara Walker drawing and a Wangechi Mutu collage engage the beautiful in a manner that critically explores the norms and conceptual binaries governing cultural existence and rethinks beauty’s cultural mediations of factors of race, gender, and coloniality. Signaling beauty’s intersubjective and public dimensions and its connections with social difference, the chapter indicates how beauty constitutes a site of change as well as of enduring normative attachment. Activating the ambivalent and relational nature of the aesthetic and its ties to cultural dualities, beauty functions as a relational operation that uproots conceptual oppositions as it shapes (and is shaped by) racial and gender positions. Pointing in ending to the role of new technologies of beauty and address, the chapter highlights the implications for a conception of cultural agency through a Remedios Varo painting.