Conflict and Cosmopolitanism: A Critical Notice of Dominic McIver Lopes’s Aesthetic Injustice (Oxford University Press, 2024)

Dominic McIver Lopes's Aesthetic Injustice (2024) makes an ambitious and important contribution to discussions of the relationship between aesthetics and justice. After briefly summarizing the distinction between aesthetic injustice and weaponized aesthetics which motivates much of the book, we turn our attention to three issues. First, we put critical pressure on Lopes's claim of originality by showing that many earlier scholars and artists had already explored the unjust restriction of aesthetic capacities. Second, we argue that Lopes's cosmopolitanism is a universalizing framework that risks erasing asymmetries between victims and perpetrators and leaves the theory ill-equipped to address oppressive aesthetic cultures. Third, we apply critical scrutiny to Lopes's assumption that aesthetic cultures are "conflict-free zones," drawing on everyday and artistic practices to argue that conflict is a pervasive and sometimes desirable feature of aesthetic life. This, we argue, casts doubt on cosmopolitanism as the foundation for a theory of aesthetic injustice. We conclude by questioning the desirability of a cosmopolitan theory based on the preservation of the value diversity and social autonomy of aesthetic cultures. Please note that in sections III and IV, we discuss gendered and racialized violence.