Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment is widely considered to be the seminal work of modern aesthetics. In recent years it has been the focus of intense interest and debate not only in philosophy but also in literary theory and other disciplines in which the nature of the aesthetic is an issue. The Aesthetic in Kant offers a new reading of Kant's problematic text, drawing on the great volume of recent philosophical work on the text and on the context of eighteenth century aesthetics. Kant's text is used as a basis on which to construct a radical alternative solution to the antinomy of taste, the basic problem of the aesthetic. Immanent in Kant's account is a theory of the aesthetic that, far from establishing its "disinterested" nature, instead makes it symptomatic of what Kant himself describes as the ineradicable human tendency to entertain "fantastic desires.".