Studi di estetica

Lo spazio politico dell’estetica

Leonardo Distaso, Andrea Gatti, Markus Ophälders — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The question of whether aesthetic reflection can contribute to shaping a form of knowledge of reality – and to understanding and guiding the transformation of social reality by imbuing it with a renewed critical perspective – can no longer be postponed, lest intellectual activity be reduced to mere academic self-sufficiency. We are thus compelled to consider whether aesthetic reflection should remain confined to the neutral and abstract realm of spiritual contemplation, or whether it ought to engage with the impulses and potentialities inherited from twentiethcentury thinkers – a century deeply marked by dramatic and catastrophic events. Exploring the relationship between aesthetics and politics, as well as aesthetics and society, can foster a more conscious awareness of the present, including its sensitive and artistic dimensions. This awareness may serve as a key to transformation and change, born of the critical capacity inherent in aesthetic reflection.

Noi, macchine memeficanti. O di come il mondo scompare nei nostri scherzi

Luca Cardone — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, we introduce the concept of the memefying machine. Drawing on Baudrillard's perspective, which sees irony as the only cure for the paralysis of the West caused by the proliferation of simulacra, we argue that memes and memetic games embody a deactivation and incorporation of this subversive irony. This reflection aims to analyze the meme from both aesthetic and political perspectives, showing how it becomes a pathogenic and autoimmune response to the virtual derealization of reality. In this context, the memefying machine reduces every event and the world itself to an ironic miniature, avoiding confronting its impossibility of taking place.

La rivoluzione estetico-democratica della Comune di Parigi

Imma De Pascale — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The article offers an aesthetic-political reflection of the Paris Commune with the aim of outlining the character of the first proletarian revolution that transformed the possibility of an emancipated society into concrete utopia. In the experience of the Commune, politics and art intertwine their emancipatory path. For this reason, the article investigates, in the first paragraph, the ways in which political action acts aesthetically and in a performative sense on social reality and, in a second moment, proposes an analysis of the politics of art operated by the Federation of Artists that claims its social purpose.

The transcendence of the political. Revolutionary doubt in Luigi Nono’s music

Christoph Haffter — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The current debates about the politization of art often suffer from the fact that we take for granted what we understand by politics. I would like to take the controversies about the political in Luigi Nono’s music as an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of this peculiar category. I would like to differentiate first between three paradigmatic conceptions of the political in order to, secondly, examine the political content of Nono’s overtly political music from the 60s and 70s. The assumption that guides me is that the political content articulated in Nono’s works is linked to the idea of the political transcending itself.

Dialettiche della creazione. Per una critica dell’immersività

Manuel Mazzuchini — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Our proposal’s aims are twofold: first, to develop some Adornian reflections as a complement to the category of immersivity; and second, to explore the implications of immersive art within the context of the current ideological debate, particularly in relation to the artistic use of new technologies. We will observe how the concept of ‘immersivity’ can evolve into an aesthetic notion of a qualitatively distinct kind if comprehended in its true sense, as it actually belongs to the very creative nature of art and, in the case of music, to its very form of expression.

Politics of aisthesis and the aestheticisation of politics in the digital world. On technology, aesthetic and the faschosphere

Benedetta Milani — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Today's political conditions – dominated by the global spread of far-right ideologies and governments – make it necessary to reflect on the political dimension not only of art but of aesthetics itself. Using the theories of Walter Benjamin and Vilém Flusser, this article analyses the relationship between aesthetics, technology, and politics, questioning why the digital world has proven to be a fertile ground for the aestheticisation of politics in a late-fascist key. While Flusser shows how technical images program subjects, Benjamin helps us understand how the recursiveness of the digital world favours the spectacularisation and aestheticisation of political discourse. Finally, I will also examine how the aesthetic-artistic gesture becomes a political act capable of activating practices of resistance and outsmarting the pervasive algorithmic infrastructure of the digital world.

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

Marina Montanelli — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

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.

Art’s “double character” and its critical potential against total society in Adorno

Giulia Zerbinati — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The paper analyzes the reciprocal mediation of art and society, to show how Adorno interprets the aesthetic as the last possibility of spontaneous and critical human expression within the reified world of advanced capitalism as dehumanizing “total society”. Art, for Adorno, fits paradigmatically into the dialectic between participation to and divergence from the social totality, as it is marked by a “double character”. On the one hand, art takes place in the material and empirical society, while, on the other, by virtue of its ineliminable reference to the “nonidentical”, it maintains a marginal range of autonomy. Art can thus become immanent critique and, when not politicized and traced back to ideology, one of the last possible forms of opposition and resistance to the (social) existent.

Further steps towards an enactivist pragmatist theory of picture perception

Guido Bitossi — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

How does picture perception work? This paper suggests the outline of an enactivist and pragmatist account of picture perception. After discussing representationalist interpretations of the phenomenon, I claim that picture perception is a form of visuomotor reenactment scaffolded by the picture. In the last part of the paper, I show how this account practically works. This hypothesis might be a theoretical framework for future empirical research.

Catharsis reconsidered: Gadamer and Jauss at the benchmark of a poetical category

Dario Cecchi — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Catharsis is considered according to the interpretations of two contemporary thinkers: H.G. Gadamer and H.R. Jauss. According to Aristotle, it is the “purification” (katharsis) of “pity” (eleos) and “fear” (phobos). Gadamer is unsatisfied with the translations of the words eleos and phobos: for they describe the real involvement to the tragical representation. The spectator discovers the fragility of the human existential condition through the tragical fate of the hero. Jauss emphasizes how the audience find a standpoint from which events can be judged. Catharsis is a sort of reflective detachment. The interpretation of the story foreshadows the reconfiguration of our ethical values. Recognizing oneself through the identification with the other or exploring the distance between the other and oneself: they are different ways of understanding catharsis, integrable with each other as far as they are elements of an identification concerning all forms of storytelling.

The curse of anachronism. Interpreting and perceiving pictures from the past

Alessandro Cavazzana — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

In history of art, anachronism is the experience of the contemporary observer being projected onto a picture of the ancient times, it is the memory of one era being introduced into another era, it is the present informing the past. According to Lucien Febvre, anachronism must be avoided like the plague. It is the (art) historian’s bogey. Nevertheless, reconstructing the past without appealing to our present seems impossible. But how to avoid it? How could the art historians leave the mental universe of their own era to penetrate that of the period they are analyzing? It seems that we have reached a sort of dead end. I suggest calling this impasse the paradox of anachronism. The planning of the paper is as follows: (i) I will examine the underlying methodology of some critics and art historians in relation to the paradox of anachronism, showing which proposition of the paradox they have rejected in order to overcome the impasse; (ii) I will sketch an alternative solution to those examined, which involves resolving the paradox by focusing strictly on pictures as objects that admit a peculiar visual experience, exploiting some arguments from the so-called “history of vision claim” and depiction theories.

Mădălina Diaconu, Aesthetics of weather, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, pp. 249

Kira Meyer — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Lona Gaikis (ed.), The Bloomsbury handbook of Susanne K. Langer, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, pp. 294

Fabiana Grazioli — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Architecture and intimacy. On 2024 Beta architecture biennial of Timişoara

Alessandro Nannini — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

On Diarmuid Costello, Aesthetics after modernism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2024, pp. 320

Diarmuid Costello, Stefano Velotti, Michalle Gal, Espen Hammer, Robert R. Clewis — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000