The present volume represents an attempt to reassess the relationship between certain issues in contemporary critical theory and the question of Enlightenment. I take my bearings by reference to claims about the self-canceling nature of Enlightenment rationality as formulated in the opening essay of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment (“The Concept of Enlightenment”), and move conceptually from there to address the ways in which their concerns can be reevaluated in light of an aesthetic critique modeled along lines sketched out in Kant's Critique of Judgment. More broadly, I hope to account for the predominantly “aesthetic” forms in which a critical self-consciousness carried forward from the Enlightenment has survived the critique of enlightened reason that seemed to have reached an impasse in Horkheimer and Adorno's essay.