Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis
<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/site/images/apierno/screenshot-2023-12-06-alle-14.44.53.png" alt="" width="310" height="400" /></p> <p><strong>What landscape for the green economy?</strong></p> <p>Landscape is not something merely ‘natural’. Alongside its material, orographic and morphological components, the landscape is also shaped as an anthropic product, the outcome of an articulated interaction involving settlement needs, urban development, resource exploitation, productive activities, and, more recently, environmental constraints, territorial valorisation, and attention (more or less marked) to biodiversity. These different practices often present instances that are not only difficult to harmonise, but sometimes distinctly conflicting and irreconcilable... <strong><a href="https://journals.fupress.net/call-for-paper/what-landscape-for-the-green-economy/"><span style="text-decoration: underline;">read more</span></a>...</strong></p> <p><strong>The submission deadline is 15 June 2024. </strong></p> <hr /> <p>Founded in 2008 by Fabrizio Desideri and Giovanni Matteucci, «Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico» is a peer-reviewed Open Access Journal whose focal aim is to promote interdisciplinary and transcultural research and debate in Aesthetics and the arts. Transcending traditional subject boundaries and understanding the notion of "aesthetic" as a pervasive component of human cultures and life forms, Aisthesis innovatively integrates a major focus on the intersection between aesthetics and the contemporary sciences (biology, psychology, neurosciences) with an in-depth interest in the history of the discipline, its leading classics and great metaphysical questions.</p> <div>Editor-in-Chief</div> <div id="group"><strong>Fabrizio Desideri</strong>, Università di Firenze, Italy</div> <p>ISSN 2035-8466 (online) <strong>Aisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico </strong>is indexed in:</p> <div><img src="https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/site/images/apierno/Classe_A21.png" width="146" height="44" /><img src="https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/site/images/apierno/DOAJ_logo.jpg" /><img src="https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/site/images/apierno/ebsco.png" width="128" height="47" /><img src="https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/site/images/apierno/logo_Ulrichs1.png" width="154" height="35" /><img src="https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/site/images/apierno/web-science_1_cus.png" /><img src="https://oajournals.fupress.net/public/site/images/apierno/Scopus_type_logo3.jpg" width="110" height="34" /></div>Firenze University Pressen-USAisthesis. Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico2035-8466<p>Authors retain the copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <strong>Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC-BY-4.0</a>)</strong> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in Aisthesis.</p> <p><a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" rel="license"><img src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png" alt="Creative Commons License"></a><br>This work is licensed under a <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" rel="license">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License</a></p>From allegory to figure and back again
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14634
<p class="p1">The aim of the article is to clarify the basic perspective that <em>Immagini cristiane e cultura antica</em> adopted to read the relationship between early Christian iconographic production – the main subject of the book – and the development of the forms of later figurative art, as well as the path leading to modern aesthetics.<br />For this purpose, the article compares the positions of Auerbach – that had an explicit influence on the book – with those of Benjamin, regarding the different ways in which the two Berliner authors interpreted the meaning and the function of allegory. In Auerbach, allegory is understood as the past of the <em>figura</em> whose logic, according to <em>Immagini cristiane e cultura antica</em>, underlies not only the Christian literary production of the first centuries, but also the figurative one. In Benjamin, conversely, allegory is understood as the future of the <em>figura</em>, followed to the definitive crisis of Christian messianism.</p>Daniele Guastini
Copyright (c) 2023 Daniele Guastini
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2024-02-062024-02-06162819010.36253/Aisthesis-14634The secularizing nature of Christian choice for images
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14707
<p class="p1">Daniele Guastini’s book <em>Immagini cristiane e cultura antica </em>is one of the most significant contributions to the current debate on the role of Christian images. The choice of images made by Christianity since the third century – this is the main thesis of the work – represents one of the generative moments of the long-lasting process of secularization that came to characterize Western culture. This essay aims to discuss this thesis, contextualizing it both from a theological point of view and in relation to its philosophical and cultural-historical significance. I then dwell on two questions more directly related to the interpretation of the Christian image in the first millennium: the relationship that the iconographic practice of the Christian origins has with the Jewish and pagan context, and the role that the interpretation of the “Byzantine turn” plays in the overall structure of the Guastini’s book.</p>Graziano Lingua
Copyright (c) 2023 Graziano Lingua
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2024-02-062024-02-06162919810.36253/Aisthesis-14707Imitation and Expression. Inauthenticity in music according to Giacinto Scelsi
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14296
<p class="p1">This article focuses on the consequences of a little-known work by Giacinto Scelsi, <em>Rotativa</em> (1930), for the concepts of imitation and expression in music. Critical of the mechanization of art peculiar to the Futurism of his time, the Italian composer allows us to think, against the pseudo-photographic reproduction of objects by sound forms, the limits of musical imitation by revealing, from the historicity of his own piece, the inauthenticity of a certain modernism.</p>Quentin Gailhac
Copyright (c) 2023 Quentin Gailhac
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2024-02-062024-02-061629910710.36253/Aisthesis-14296Back and forth around critique. Some notes on Horst Bredekamp, between history and theory
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14438
<p class="p1">This paper sets forth some hypotheses on Horst Bredekamp’s research. Bredekamp’s <em>Bildwissenschaft</em> has a peculiar thought dynamic that was initially developed in his art historiographical efforts. These show a relevant entanglement of present interest and past issues, research method and research object. I will show this with a focus on his research on the <em>Kunstkammer</em>. This dynamic developed later in Bredekamp’s research on the image act in a theoretical way. It is transformed here in the attempt to develop a thought which is not overcome by, and does not destroy, the energy which lies at the core of the image act. The peculiar connections between these dimensions are discussed as the effects of the problematic urges that the different developments of his method and theory try to address always anew. It will be shown that a hidden, vital core of his work is a striving towards critique.</p>Davide Mogetta
Copyright (c) 2023 Davide Mogetta
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2024-02-062024-02-0616210911910.36253/Aisthesis-14438Mathematical beauty: On the aesthetic qualities of formal language
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14790
<p class="p1">The paper proposes a reflection on mathematical beauty, considering the possibility of aesthetic qualities for formal language. Through a concise overview of the way this question is understood by some famous scientists and mathematicians, we turn our attention to Gian-Carlo Rota’s theoretical proposal: his reflections as a mathematician and philosopher offer a perspective, of phenomenological matrix, fruitful for looking at the question. Rota’s contribution allows us to focus on the role of competence, acquired through effort, sedimentation and habit of repetition, in cultivating the potential to recognise the aesthetic quality of formal language. Finally, we draw on some contributions from <em>Gestalt</em> theory, closely connected to twentieth-century phenomenology for chronological and conceptual reasons, applying the idea of <em>gestalt wholeness</em> to the mathematical product and proposing some reflections that may help to clarify some of the dynamics underlying the attribution of qualities of beauty to formulas or the detection of its lack.</p>Deborah De Rosa
Copyright (c) 2023 Deborah De Rosa
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2024-02-062024-02-0616212113110.36253/Aisthesis-14790Bernard Stiegler’s postfoundational aesthetics and gestural apparatuses for a memory to come
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14746
<p class="p1">This article explores Bernard Stiegler’s philosophical approach to culture in dialogue with Oliver Marchart’s postfoundational framework and conflictual aesthetics. Through the exposition of two different cases of gestural devices, it exposes Stiegler’s potential postfoundational aesthetics as an attempt to establish the necessary conditions for re-thinking the grounded-ungrounded existing relationship between humans, technical objects, and the composition of potential realities to grasp from an autopoietic relationship. These artistic and cultural examples are considered critical concepts that enhance and interrupt the philosophical discourse. The article argues that Stiegler’s aesthetics is committed to the capacity that art, as a technology of the spirit, can contribute as agency in shaping public power, even when these agents are not directly in conflict and develop lesser and fragile performative technics through which a memory becomes present again.</p>Luis Guerra Miranda
Copyright (c) 2023 Luis Guerra Miranda
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2024-02-062024-02-0616213314610.36253/Aisthesis-14746Note e recensioni
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/15144
AAVV AAVV
Copyright (c) 2023 AAVV AAVV
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2024-02-062024-02-0616214715210.36253/Aisthesis-15144Foreword. Europe at war: almost eighty years later
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/15140
Fabrizio DesideriAndrea MecacciFrancesco Valagussa
Copyright (c) 2024 Fabrizio Desideri, Andrea Mecacci, Francesco Valagussa
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2024-02-062024-02-0616235A vertiginous polemology. Around the motif of war in Roger Caillois
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14808
<p class="p1">The essay is dedicated to war considered through the reflections of Roger Caillois and in particular through certain motifs – feast, sacred, vertigo – that allow us to grasp its ‘metaphysical’ intention, i.e. capable of looking at war as the point of chiasmatic reversibility of life and death.</p>Luigi Azzariti-Fumaroli
Copyright (c) 2023 Luigi Azzariti-Fumaroli
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2024-02-062024-02-0616271410.36253/Aisthesis-14808L’art de mettre à part. Autour d’un affect guerrier
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/15141
<p class="p1">This article explores a certain type of affect that accompanied the post-1945 European dream: the feeling that an impassable distance separates us from worlds at war. Starting with the interplay between protected spaces and devastated territories, the article seeks to trace the operations that give life to this affect of distance. How does this distance play a part in our ways of being at war? And what kind of agentivity is at work, which makes it possible not to feel involved? Drawing on Martha Rosler’s montages of images and a fragment of Simone Weil, the article unravels the tortuous mechanisms that allow us to be at war, while at the same time setting war apart.</p>Déborah Brosteaux
Copyright (c) 2023 Déborah Brosteaux
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2024-02-062024-02-06162152710.36253/Aisthesis-15141Some aspects of Pólemos and catastrophe according to Ernst Jünger and Simone Weil
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14428
<p class="p1">The present paper analyses the relationship between the figures of the <em>Arbeiter</em> and the <em>Krieger</em>, described by Ernst Jünger, and their metaphysical context, that is, the becoming in which the catastrophe of war takes place. The analysis is conducted through a theoretical comparison with Simone Weil’s thought, in which war is considered as an extreme case of <em>malheur</em>, i.e., the manifestation of divinity as pure grace devoid of power. Two useful paradigms are thus outlined to explain the condition of the human being in the becoming: the paradigm of dominion (Jünger) and the paradigm of waiting (Weil). In the second part of the paper, those two options are associated with two art pieces, in order to visually represent the characteristics of dominion and waiting, showing the dramatic issue of the choice for dominion in the face of the catastrophe produced by technology.</p>Antonio Dall'Igna
Copyright (c) 2023 Antonio Dall'Igna
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2024-02-062024-02-06162293910.36253/Aisthesis-14428War, image, art: From vision to judgement
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14461
<p class="p1">There are excellent research papers in the field of visual studies that examine the relationship between war and images. This paper has other and additional aims. The first is to examine not so much how war is transferred from the ground to image production, but how war, as intrusion of the real, forces a general reflection on image techniques. The second is to examine whether there is an instance of art that is somehow different from the instance of the mere image, which is always related to something that manifests itself in war, and which, especially on the occasion of a war, invites a broader reflection on existence, judgement and the world. The paths taken for these investigations are rooted in the idea that a (political) theory of art cannot be reduced to an internal classification of image theory, since it investigates aspects that go beyond the definition of the image itself.</p>Alessio Fransoni
Copyright (c) 2023 Alessio Fransoni
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2024-02-062024-02-06162415410.36253/Aisthesis-14461«Lay it into the open wounds». Art at war in Maria Kulikovska’s performative sculpture
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14455
<p class="p1">The paper addresses the work of Ukrainian artist Maria Kulikovska, who resorts to military equipment as artistic materials and to destruction as an artistic method. In the first section, I contextualize Kulikovska’s performative sculpture within art history, claiming that it can be regarded as Destruction Art. In the second section, I turn to Catherine Malabou’s concept of “destructive plasticity” as a philosophical tool of an aesthetics of war, which offers a sound theoretical framework to further understand the implications of Kulikovska’s artistic activity. In the third section, I focus on the main material adopted by Kulikovska, ballistic soap, showing how the artist materially deconstructs inherited dichotomies that keep informing our understanding of wars. By considering the artistic practice of a feminist artist (M. Kulikovska) through the lens of feminist scholarship (K. Stiles, C. Malabou, J. Butler), the paper investigates the relations between war and the arts from a situated perspective.</p>Alice Iacobone
Copyright (c) 2023 Alice Iacobone
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2024-02-062024-02-06162556610.36253/Aisthesis-14455“Warfare is a specialised variety of hunting”
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14759
<p class="p1">The Ukrainian war pervades – as a token for deciphering the ruins of our present – the lines of this interview. That deciphering implies both refusing to be subjected to the devastation of the cities as an inevitable fate and trying to unfold the possibilities of rediscovering a «poetry of the city» (Fabrizio Desideri). We risk falling into incontrollable mistakes and mystifications if we hide from ourselves life’s violence. Philosophically speaking, the most beautiful victory is the one in which we defeat ourselves (Plato). But the role of art, the only human activity able to tear off the masque to violence (Giorgio Colli) is irreplaceable: from Greek tragedy to contemporary cinema.</p>Maria Filomena MolderRobert Vinten
Copyright (c) 2023 Maria Filomena Molder
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2024-02-062024-02-06162677210.36253/Aisthesis-14759The war behind this war
https://oajournals.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/14453
<p class="p1">This article intends to read the profound dynamics that characterise the current war in the light of certain classical philosophical categories such as the relationship established by Hegel between substance and subject, the difference between the concept of substance and the concept of function as it was discussed by Cassirer, and finally the binomial power over life and right of death reread by Foucault in a biopolitical key. In the light of these polarities, it is in fact possible to identify two opposing worldviews – on which depend two completely different ways of understanding the function of the state, the weight to be ascribed to rights, and even two different ways of conceiving and conducting war – that do not necessarily coincide with the two opposing sides in the field.</p>Francesco Valagussa
Copyright (c) 2023 Francesco Valagussa
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2024-02-062024-02-06162738010.36253/Aisthesis-14453