A typical response to the question ‘what is ugliness?’ might be: ‘the opposite of beauty’. I want to reject this binary notion from the outset. As Mark Cousins has argued, ugliness cannot be opposed to beauty in this way, because it does not exist in the register of aesthetics as theorised by Kant, where aesthetic judgements are judgements made exclusively about beauty. ¹ The judgement ‘This is beautiful’, according to Cousins, does not have an opposite: ‘The failure to form a judgement of beauty is just that; it is not an assertion of ugliness.’ ² This is because beauty and ugliness call forth different philosophical subjects: a judgement of beauty requires a subject who is entirely disinterested – that is, an impartial viewer whose pronouncements regarding the beautiful are true for everyone. The subject in relation to the ugly, by contrast, can never be disinterested because he or she is always forced to turn away from the ugly object physically or psychologically – or both. If ugliness cannot be explored in terms of traditional aesthetics on the grounds that it precludes a disinterested universal subject, which other areas of thought might prove helpful?