Il mondo allucinato e i compiti politici dell’estetica e dell’arte

Abstract

The article moves from the crisis and critique of some of the ideological discourses of postmodern philosophies, to question the possibility of emancipation. In the conviction that an answer to this question can only come from a profound investigation also of our way of perceiving the world, the text addresses the transformations that have affected the human sensorium from the advent of technical reproducibility and industrial capitalism to the present day. Psychosis, trauma, fetishism, and dreams provide models for thinking about these trans-formations: for thinking about hypersensorialisation, the divarication between image and word, disintegration, and the predominance of synchrony over diachrony. A second pole of this investigation is constituted by the theme of alienation and identifications of contemporary subjects with their digital and social Doppelgänger; by the (materialist, feminist, postcolonial) critique of these same mechanisms of specularisation. The article thus closes with a reflection on the tasks of an intimately political aesthetics and art, on the new “theory of perception” to be thought without which any political revolution will always remain stunted.