Jeff Wall's sympathies for the beautiful are well known. Wall's position appears indefensible from any number of theoretical and politically progressive perspectives: the beautiful and the critical are believed to stand in irreconcilable opposition; yet the beautiful can enter into substitutive relationships with the critical. Indeed, the former has been known to emerge from the latter and vice versa, each taking shape on the coat-tails of the other. With greater and greater frequency since the early 1990s, in Wall's corpus the beautiful assumes critical form after the fact; all the while the beautiful is acknowledged as possessing a certain obstinacy that prohibits any simple reduction to terms other than its own. Grounded in a suture that we shall call the aesthetic, the beautiful is a deeply unstable and excessive quality, a point which ably introduces the rhetorical problems implicit to Wall's work. Following the hand-over of responsibilities implicit to the counter-intuitive drift of my epigraph, I treat the aesthetic as a philosophical problem particular to every system of thought, practice, politics and depiction. As Paul de Man reminds us, the category of the aesthetic 'is not something one can be for or against', nor can it be simply brushed off.2 The aesthetic is an a priori of system as such, one to be sought out through reading, and potentially opened up for an outside that is otherwise closed-off or against which the system in question is braced even if oriented toward the beautiful. As an interpretative tactic we take as our departure an angle that grabs hold of the beautiful and more, one that treats the aesthetic as a very curious contract in which the hand-over of the political serves primarily as a blindfold to the phenomenal: memory. Take two of Wall's photographs with lives somewhat independent of an exhibition history; these are pictures with a pre-history that make certain claims about the goings-on in his studio: Diagonal Composition (1993) (Fig. 61), and A sapling held by a post (1999) (Fig. 62). In the mid to late 1990s, I remember seeing a test-print of Diagonal Composition a couple of times; more recently in 2005, I saw A sapling held by a post tacked on a wall near the door. If memory serves, both were approximately 11 x 14 c-prints; neither was framed. One cannot make too much of these prints on paper; no doubt, they figure among a number of such proofs that have populated the studio over the years, but with their nachtraglich-like gesture, these things make an impression. With very public lives outside of the day-in and day-out routines of the studio, I take them to be more or less open secrets. Leaving aside for now the problem of inscription or memory power toward which this essay arcs, the complex of questions raised by such fortuitous encounters with pictures now destroyed, forgotten or filed-away brings up the fact that both of these studio prints need to be distinguished from the 1. Paul de Man, Seminar on 'Aesthetic Theory from Kant to Hegel', Yale University, Fall Semester, 1982. Unpublished photocopy, compiled from the notes of Roger Blood, Cathy Caruth and Suzanne Roos.