Arts of Address

Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social life. Drawing on a wide array of theoretical and artistic sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, she illuminates its significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it.

Monique Roelofs is professor of philosophy at Hampshire College and Karl Loewenstein Fellow and visiting professor of political science at Amherst College. She is the author of The Cultural Promise of the Aesthetic (2014).

Ellen Rooney, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence, Brown University:
There is at present no systematic work that investigates the question of address as a concept in the global way Monique Roelofs pursues in this patient, lucid, and orderly book. Arts of Address demonstrates that explicit theorizations of address in the western philosophical tradition have historically been understated, partial, localized, or overlooked. Roelofs’s book seeks to correct these oversights and gaps in the critical canon’s conceptualization of address with clarity and comprehensiveness.

Mariana Ortega, author of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self:
In a text that is as much an art of address as it is about address, Monique Roelofs brilliantly intertwines the aesthetic, social identities, ways of life, as well as the pleasures and threats of art objects, with a theoretically robust analysis of address that yields a critical political aesthetics that allows for the possibility of perceiving new worlds.

Alicia Borinsky, author of One Way Tickets: Writers and the Culture of Exile:
Arts of Address unfolds a wondrous interconnectivity joining theory, art, and literature. It shows us how the examination of scenes of address may answer questions about their daily impact as it guides us to philosophical abstraction. I enjoy its fast paced rhythm of analysis and, above all, the freedom with which it traverses a world of rough edges and transnational implications.