This essay revives a contentious polemic between Sartre and Lev-Strauss from the early sixties as a way to re-engage the problem of the modernist aesthetic. Through inquiry into the contiguous concepts of habit, labour, desire and need, the argument locates the work of art in a mobile and indeterminate space between regression and engagement, need and desire, repetition and self-transcendence. Freud, Benjamin and Marx bring the essay to a concluding engagement with problems of historical and trans-historical thinking, habit and novelty.