Expanded aesthetics as a terrain of contemporary subjectivities

Abstract

Aesthetics today is in a process of expansion that includes the philosophy of art and the fields of nature and everyday life. In a broad sense, aesthetics is dedicated to thinking about everything that can significantly touch human sensibility. Our purpose is to discuss the possible yields of an expanded aesthetics, i.e., one that is not limited to any of the three major fields referred to, namely, art, nature, or everyday life. We seek to show that aesthetics can contribute to contemporary reflection on the formation and transformation of a heterogeneous range of subjectivities. We will make the basic historical and conceptual recognition that will allow us to identify the importance of sensibility as an interacting condition of subjectivities in the world. Our approach coincides with Arnold Berleant’s social aesthetics, in terms of the extension of the field of the discipline, the conviction that aesthetic theory has L a estética ampLiada como terreno de subjetividades contemporáneas101 practical consequences and, finally, the conception of aesthetics as a philosophical reflection on sensibility. Likewise, the proposed approach is nourished by the critical impulse of Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetics, who recognizes in sensibility a potential for social transformation. The reflection we propose will situate as a task of current aesthetics the understanding of the aesthetic dimension in the vast context of human life that interacts with the human and non-human world.