“Beauty is therefore an event, a process, rather than a condition or a state. The flower is not beautiful in itself; rather, beauty happens when I encounter the flower. Beauty is fleeting, and it is always imbued with otherness. For although the feeling of beauty is “subjective,” I cannot experience it at will. I can only find beauty when the object solicits me, or arouses my sense of beauty, in a certain way. Also, beauty does not survive the moment of the encounter in which it is created. It cannot be recovered once it is gone. It can only be born afresh in another event, another encounter. A subject does not cognize the beauty of an object. Rather, the object lures the subject while remaining indifferent to it; and the subject feels the object, without knowing it or possessing it or even caring about it. The object touches me, but for my part I cannot grasp it or lay hold of it, or make it last. I cannot dispel its otherness, its alien splendor. If I could, I would no longer find it beautiful; I would, alas, merely find it useful.“
-Steven Shaviro, “Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics”