In Looking Away, Rei Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world.

Focusing on romantic and post-romantic thought after Kant, Terada argues that acceptance of the world “as is” is coerced by canonical epistemology and aesthetics. In guilty evasions of this coercion, post-Kantian thinkers cultivate fleeting, aberrant appearances, perceptual experiences that do not present themselves as facts to be accepted and therefore become images of freedom. This “phenomenophilia,” she suggests, informs romanticism and subsequent philosophical thought with a nascent queer theory.

Through graceful readings of Coleridge’s obsession with perceptual ephemera, or “spectra,” recorded in his Notebooks; of Kant’s efforts in his First and Third Critiques to come to terms with the given world; of Nietzsche’s responses to Kant and his meditations on ephemeral phenomenal experiences; and of Adorno’s interpretations of both Nietzsche and Kant, Terada proposes that the connection between dissatisfaction and ephemeral phenomenality reveals a hitherto-unknown alternative to aesthetics that expresses our right to desire something other than experience “as is,” even those parts of it that really cannot be otherwise.

Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and Textual Note
	Pretext
1	Coleridge among the Spectra
	Purple Haze-Thoughts and Things-Contemporary Theories of Derealization and 
Mistrust
2	Appearance and Acceptance in Kant
	From Mere to Necessary Appearance-No Fault-The Right to a Phenomenal 
World-Legalize It
3	No Right: Phenomenality and Self-Denial in Nietzsche
	Genealogy of Phenomenality-Stolen Phenomenality-The Disappearance of 
Appearance
4	Court of Appeal, or, Adorno
	Critique of Facticity-Illusion in Total Illusion-Circus Colors-Court of Appeal
	Postscript
Bibliography
Index