The Primitive, the Aesthetic, and the SavageTony C. Brown examines the inescapable yet infinitely troubling figure of the not quite nothing in Enlightenment attempts to think about the aesthetic and the savage. The various texts Brown considersincluding the writings of Addison, Rousseau, Kant, and Defoeturn to exotic figures in order to delimit the aesthetic, and to aesthetics in order to comprehend the savage. In his intriguing exploration Brown discovers that the primitive introduces into the