To summarize a central claim of the preceding chapter, it is my contention that the contemporary critique of the Enlightenment originates from within the Enlightenment itself and must be understood as a consequence or continuation of the Enlightenment, and not as a rejection of its critical program. More specifically, recent critiques of the Enlightenment – many of which profess to have “overcome” the Enlightenment model of reason – represent protracted developments of the problem that Kant broached in the theory of reflective aesthetic judgment, in which the separation of fact and value deemed necessary for the Enlightenment program fails to account for the “free particulars” of pleasure and pain, which escape the control of cognition and morality. Not at all surprisingly, then, post-Enlightenment thought as manifested in an impressively wide range of figures, from Nietzsche to Barthes and Žižek, has found substantial energy in the power of pleasure to trouble our existing frameworks and routines. When faced with the problem of the non-closure of the system of critical philosophy, Kant reasoned that there must be a form of knowledge, modeled in the judgments we make about the beautiful and the sublime, that remain rational while refusing to subsume particulars under pre-existing categories or rules.