Brian Dillon, Essayism, 2017

‘Aestheticizing’, we’d learn to say of such love; I hate the word to this day. As if there were anything available, anything left, except aesthetics, except an effort to frame the wreckage in the aftermath, at the last. The refusal of ‘aestheticization’ is a refusal to accept the worst, but dressed up as its opposite. The greatest art is nothing but delicately broached negation. I went looking for writers who would tell me that, time and again.