Lingering: Pleasure, Desire, and Life in Kant's Critique of Judgment

This article examines a notion of desire that, I claim, is implicit in Immanuel Kant's theorization of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment (1790). After first using Joyce's 1916 novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to bring the issue into focus, I turn in the second section of the article to Kant's third Critique, emphasizing Kant's relationship to the traditional notion of desire. In the third section, I focus on Kant's alternative—his aesthetic—conception of desire and on the role played by "life" in this conception. In the final section of the essay, I look briefly at the relevance of the aesthetic conception of desire to our contemporary understanding of the relationship between desire and pleasure.