Honors Theses

Beauty Against Smoothness: Aesthetic Resistance in the Age of Neoliberalism

Advisor

Trip Glazer, Ph.D.

Department

Philosophy

Publication Date

4-22-2026

Document Type

Honors Thesis

Abstract

Neoliberalism reshapes not only social, political, and economic life but also the conditions of perception, judgment, and affect. Drawing on Byung-Chul Han’s notion of the “smooth,” this thesis examines the polished, frictionless aesthetic that structures contemporary experience—one that privileges immediacy, ease, and self-referential affirmation, rendering otherness and ethical encounter increasingly difficult to perceive. Against Han’s largely diagnostic account, I argue that beauty persists as a form of resistance: it demands slow, receptive, and non-instrumental attention, interrupting the self-enclosed logic of neoliberal perception.

Engaging the aesthetic theories of Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and Simone Weil, I develop an account of beauty as a disciplined mode of attention grounded in wholeness, proportion, and radiance. Beauty, in this sense, calls for disinterested engagement and cultivates capacities for reflection, ethical discernment, and receptivity to alterity. In doing so, it disrupts the neoliberal emphasis on immediacy and optimization, reorienting perception toward patience, wonder, and moral awareness.

Rather than functioning as mere opposition or stylistic alternative, beauty operates from within perception itself. It preserves the conditions for ethical and political judgment by rendering visible what neoliberal smoothness tends to flatten or obscure. Aesthetic experience thus emerges as a counter-formation: not decorative or merely pleasurable, but a practice that reclaims perceptual space, sustains attention beyond utility, and restores the possibility of ethical, political, and relational engagement.

Permission Statement

This item is protected by copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code) and may only be used for noncommercial, educational, and scholarly purposes.

Keywords

Undergraduate research

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