The whole work of metaphysics, the entire project of civilization in the West was to separate, at every opportunity, the “human” from the “non-human,” “consciousness” from the “world,” “knowledge” from “power,” “work” from “existence,” “form” from “content,” “art” from “life,” “being” from its “determinations,” “contemplation” from “action,” etc. — we put quotation marks because none of these things exists as such before it’s been separated from its contrary and thereby produced as such. Once this separation is carried out, and each of these unilateralities is produced, an institution will be assigned the task of maintaining them in their separation. The museal institution and its auxiliary, art criticism, for example, guaranteed on the one hand the existence of art as art, and on the other that of the prosaic world as prosaic world. A certain desolation ensued. Aesthetics then arose as an attempt to animate that desolation, to reunify everything the West had separated, but to reunify it externally, as separated.