Philosopher Monique Roelofs offers a digital object that is part open letter, part analysis of address, and part excerpt from her 2014 book The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic, introducing us to her theory of aesthetic relationality. Created specifically for this Library Stack Collection, Roelofs’s morphing, experimental thing addresses the reader directly, encouraging us to “think for ourselves and take responsibility for gathering the tools we need in order to do that thinking.” In her metamorphosing gesture toward further streams of address, Roelofs brings together aesthetic experience with interpersonal modes of relation in an effort to speak to and in the gaps left by centuries of aesthetic theories that both draw on and produce intersecting differences of race, class, gender, coloniality, and sexuality. She maps her thinking through the work of artists and writers such as Julio Cortázar, Clarice Lispector, Nagisa Oshima, Kara Walker, Zanele Muholi, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Gayatri Spivak, and Judith Butler, among others. (GH)

This entry is included in Library Stack as part of the collection Address Not Found