Force:A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology: A Fundamental Concept of Aesthetic Anthropology

Preface

 ix why aesthetics? the answer seems obvious: aesthetics exists—and is, in fact, necessary—because the aesthetic exists. It exists because there are objects—such as music, art, architecture, design, fashion , ballet, athletic competition—which we designate as sublime or beautiful and which lend themselves to philosophical reflection. Because there are aesthetic objects, there must be an aesthetic theory that accounts for them. Thus aesthetics must take its rightful place among the other subdisciplines of philosophy, namely, political philosophy, ethics , philosophy of science, and philosophy of culture. Nonetheless, can it not be argued that what we call “art”—such as design, fashion, even athletics—is merely another part of the economy, of the so-called culture industry? Or that what we call “beautiful” is merely a trigger for pleasurable sensations in the brain? Is it even obvious that these objects form a coherent domain that can be called “aesthetic”? Are they not just a group of very different entities? It seems that we must already be convinced of the existence of aesthetic objects and interested in them in order to “do” aesthetics. If we answer the question “Why study aesthetics?” by naming the discipline’s objects, then does aesthetics not merely become the expression of a personal interest whose reputation will rise (or fall) as this interest waxes (or wanes)? But aesthetic objects (and our interest in them) are not what make up aesthetics. It is, rather, aesthetics that makes up the domain of aesthetic objects. Aesthetics constitutes the theory of the aesthetic only because it defines a thing as an “aesthetic” object in the first place. We cannot answer the question “Why be concerned with aesthetics?” with the response “Because the aesthetic exists.” The question really means, Why Pr eface x ‡ Preface be concerned with the aesthetic? What does it mean, and what are the preconditions and the consequences of the fact that aesthetics makes up “the aesthetic”—and hence itself?  what follows will revisit the role played by aesthetics by way of a retelling, that is, a retelling of the “birth” of aesthetics in the eighteenth century, in the period between Baumgarten’s Aesthetics and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. We will see that aesthetics did not expand the range of the legitimate objects of philosophical inquiry. All of these objects existed before aesthetics. Rather, by introducing the category of “the aesthetic,” aesthetics fundamentally redefined these objects. Most important, this account of the historical genesis of aesthetics will show that the introduction of the category of the “aesthetic” required nothing less than a transformation of the fundamental terms of philosophy. The beginning of aesthetics is, in fact, the beginning of modern philosophy. It is aesthetics, then, and more precisely Baumgarten’s Aesthetics, that shaped the concept of the subject: as the agent defined by the totality of his faculties and capacities. By conceiving sensible cognition and representation as the exercise of subjective faculties that are acquired in practice , Baumgarten framed the modern conception of human practices. In doing this, he also framed philosophy as the inquiry into the conditions that enable the success of these practices. That is the reason that aesthetics—defined as the reflection upon the aesthetic—is a central pillar of modern philosophy. In aesthetics, the philosophy of the subject or of the subject’s faculties assures itself of its own possibility. Yet here, in the aesthetic and the reflection on it, the philosophy of the subject also meets its most determined opponent, one who attacks it from the inside. For the aesthetics “in the Baumgartian manner” (Herder), taken as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, faces a different aesthetics, namely, the aesthetics of force. This alternative conception sees the aesthetic not as a study of sensible cognition and representation but as a play of expression—propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised like a faculty in practices, realizes itself. This force does not recognize or represent anything because it is “obscure” and unconscious; this is not a force of the subject but of the human, as Preface ‡ xi distinct from the subject. The aesthetics of force is a science of the nature of humans—of their aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture, acquired by practice, of their practices.  That is the hypothesis I intend to defend in the six chapters of this book. The first chapter, analyzing the rationalist concept of the sensible, recollects the point...