If there are things that are purely personal, matters of taste and responses keyed by our quirky individual histories, there are also elements that are aesthetic, but in a more local sense than is commonly understood. Aesthetic in this sense refers to deep feelings that arise in a receptivity to events and circumstances which exceed the limits of the individual; they are familial, social, kinship-based and even racial feelings and are known as such. These feelings fall short of the kind of universality that belong to beauty or truth, but are insistently directed towards others, towards the social commons, they are political in their very essence. Still, there is nothing that does not originate in the personal, and the most purely personal has its own unappeasable protest. The capture and neutralisation of the personal by the aesthetic is a long drawn-out story in which our sympathies are equally divided.