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• 1 • This book addresses the operative force of exotic figures in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Taking the aesthetic as both object and modality of inquiry (something to think about and to think with), I will show how the exotic, and especially the savage, play a critical role in thinking on and with concepts like the sublime and the beautiful. My concern, then, is not (or at least not immediately) with the appearance of various savages and other exotics as objects of aestheticization—a level of analysis that too readily assumes the aesthetic (what it is and how one knows it) to be settled in advance. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theorists struggled to articulate their putative object. As Voltaire put it, if you ask les philosophes what beauty is, they will respond with an unintelligible discourse (“ils vous répondront par du galimatias”).1 I will suggest that the aesthetic’s resistance to coherent exposition follows from the terms in which the aesthetic must be thought. Eighteenth-century aesthetic theory unfolds within a problematic that generates the central, unavoidable problem of conceiving a passage between two incommensurable orders, one atemporal (the almost nothing, or primitive), the other temporal (the occurrence of an aesthetic experience or the existence of savage populations). It is in the context of this problematic that we must look to discover the significance of the exotic figures that line eighteenthcentury aesthetic thought, but also, as we shall see, to understand the role played by aesthetic concepts in producing knowledge of the exotic—and above all, the savage. The particular form the problematic of concern to us takes, the form I would characterize as an Enlightenment problematic, is that of thinking the temporal and the non-, pre-, or atemporal on the same plane. This is what generates the problem or aporie that Louis Althusser finds, for example, in Montesquieu’s typology of governments as formulated in De l’esprit des lois (1748): “how ever to think history in a category attached in essence to pure atemporal models [à de purs modèles intemporels].” We • INTRODUCTION • An Enlightenment Problematic should not miss the Kantian reference: with pure, Althusser points to what is not given by experience. The problem as Althusser locates it in Montesquieu is how to think the historical existence of a category of government that, determined by “la typologie pure,” includes the essential attribute of being nonexperiential, nontemporal. I would suggest that the same problem orders eighteenth-century debates over the relation of mind and body, the existence of immortal souls in a world beyond theism, thepossibilityofinnateideas,and—mostimportantformypurposes—the development of human capacities, whether societal or cognitive. Clearly, the problematic does not produce one problem among others. It generates a structuring problem, a problem that orders thinking. We are not dealing with something static that preexists a type of thought that the thought may subsequently discover and resolve; the model is not that of a subject who comes to an object that he or she then submits to controlled analysis. The problem presents, precisely, an aporia rather than a contradiction. One cannot think through the problem in its own terms, yet those are the only terms available. Or this, at least, is the case where neither God nor History provide a convincing third term by which to manage a higher-level reconciliation.2 We have as yet no detailed account of what I am calling an Enlightenment problematic, or, as it turns out, of the primitive as a concept or category , which proves to be quite different from the well-known discourse of primitivism.3 The purpose of this Introduction will therefore be less to say what I will and will not do (the Preface should have made that much clear), than to give the necessary context for what I will be doing. I will elaborate on the problematic, and, insofar as my three main terms (primitive , aesthetic, savage) prove to be thought through it, I will then need to establish the scope and significance of each term, though for reasons of space and coherence I reserve the detailed exposition of my three terms for Part 1, “Primitive, Aesthetic, Savage.” Here, my primary concern will be to set up the problematic, to explain what it is and how it relates most broadly to aesthetics. I will first establish the particular provenance of eighteenth-century aesthetics to show how it includes the problem of thinking the atemporal and temporal together. I will then address the appearance of exotic figures in attempts...

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