Environmental changes on a vast scale have motivated philosophers to consider problems related to intergenerational justice and future generations of people, nonhumans, and the earth they inhabit. How should the field of aesthetics respond? The aim of this special issue of “Studi di Estetica” is to create space for scholars to bring temporality and intergenerational aesthetics more deeply into the field. The articles here are focused on temporality in art, nature, modified environments and relationships between them. In this introductory essay, (...) I explore, first, how temporality features in the phenomena of aesthetic experience of environment, in living and nonliving things, creatures, situations, places, settings, and processes. Second, I address how the resources of the aesthetic subject (senses, imagination, emotions, and knowledge) grapple with environmental temporality and the future. To conclude the essay, I sketch out what it means to show “aesthetic concern” for future generations by drawing on ideas from environmental virtue aesthetics. (shrink)

This paper explores the aesthetic aspects at play in the preservation efforts in the Bosc de Tosca to gain insight into the role of aesthetics in preservation of natural heritage. The preservation of landscapes entails a complex balancing between aesthetics and sustainability, as preservationist decisions based primarily on appearance may be at odds with pressing environmental concerns. If the area to be preserved is a constantly evolving and lived landscape, the interventions enacted on the place may affect the current appearance (...) and the way in which the area is lived now and in the future. By resorting to the issues discussed in intergenerational aesthetics, this paper aims to show how including the potential aesthetic experience and values of future generations may help in making more aesthetically and environmentally sustainable decisions. The paper begins with a description of the Bosc de Tosca and its surroundings, its metaphysical status, and a description of the preservation approaches at play in the area. It then presents the main stakes of intergenerational aesthetics. It ends by discussing specific aspects of the preservation of the Bosc de Tosca area and aesthetic interventions to show the complex relationship between aesthetics and sustainability and how intergenerational aesthetics can contribute to both theory and practice of preservation taking into account environmental concerns. (shrink)

Jean Painlevé’s films blend aesthetic concerns and scientific realism operating a micro-turn within the broader cinematographic turn that occurred in the sciences in the 20th century. By engaging with his films on the octopus, an animal studied to illuminate human consciousness and firmly grounded in the popular imagina-tion through literature and the arts, this article demonstrates how Painlevé em-braced a politics of life organised around the concept of a missed encounter be-tween life forms.

This contribution proposes to reflect on a different way of considering the link be-tween temporality and nature, between aiôn and physis, in dialogue with the words and works of the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone. The basic idea is the following: we will not be able to essentially determine our cognitive and experien-tial relationship with nature, until we are able to know, experience and represent the time inscribed in being itself. The philosophical tradition has developed its conception of temporality mainly along (...) two lines: a “cosmic” line, of a physical, objective temporality, and a “phenomenological” one, of a temporality as an in-ternal articulation of human consciousness. Through the archaeological and conceptual excavation carried out by Penone, we will ask ourselves what it does mean to take care of the “subjective time of things”. (shrink)

It is provocative, but not uncommon, to compare the work of art to a plant. Art is inseparable from the aim to pass on knowledge to future generations, just as plants strive to reproduce. This paper forwards the art-plant hypothesis that views works of art and plants not only as structurally similar, but teleologically united. We look to two models of art to test this hypothesis: earthworks of the land art movement, and the ancient Greek concept of craft or techne. (...) Plant grafting serves as an example artform that is instructive for crafting a more sustainable world. We approach plant grafting as a sustainable technology in an age of genetic monopolization, and as a powerful metaphor for our common roots and responsibility to create a better world. (shrink)

In present times, the notion of beauty finds itself in a strange situation. On one side, it has undergone a sort of new renaissance since the last decades of the XX century, thanks to the works of several philosophers and aestheticians. On the other side, it is a common loci both in aesthetics and art history that beauty has disappeared from modern and contemporary art, especially when visual arts and instrumental music are concerned. One of the most effective arguments in (...) sup-port of this thesis maintains that there is no connection between normative and descriptive judgments of beauty. I am going to argue that such connection exists, and that it lies in the intermediate role played by the properties of harmony and appropriateness, which belong to the aesthetic as well as to the non-aesthetic realm. This will help us to free the notion of beauty from the charges of ambiguity and abuse, and to restore its relevance in XX and XXI centuries arts. (shrink)

My work aims to focus on the intersections between aesthetics, intergenerational values, and climate change while exploring some core questions. How do aesthetic values interact with the construction of social and intergenerational values? Can the aesthetic experience of art have any influence on our attitudes toward the environment? These questions are related to the broader question: is the aesthetic experience of art connected to the aesthetic experience of nature? The thesis underlying this paper is that aesthetic appreciation of nature and (...) art mutually influence each other. To prove this claim, I propose a Deweyan and pluralistic approach to environmental aesthetics that interacts with the fields of neuroaesthetics and intergenerational thinking. The key concept on which my proposal rests is the Deweyan connection between aesthetics and experience. (shrink)

One extreme example of intergenerational environmental change is given by nuclear waste. The radiation from a typical nuclear waste assembly will remain fatal for humans for millennia, creating the problem of communicating a warning about hazardous repositories to people so far in the future that we cannot assume any common ground with them in terms of languages and cultural contexts. This poses limitations to solutions proposed in the context of semiotics. The need for communicating danger and for keeping future people (...) away from certain sites may be tackled from a more sensorial and aesthetic perspective. Given the size of nuclear waste repositories, and the problem of keeping people at a distance, the dimension at which the problem must be tackled is environmental. This work argues for an exploration of what environmental aesthetics, despite and perhaps thanks to all the ongoing definitional and conceptual debates in the discipline, has to offer. (shrink)

One key aspect of Phenomenology, i.e. the relationship between consciousness and phenomena, has been described, with regard to when this relationship be-gins to arise, as a co-emergence of the subject and the world. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the theme of emergence may also be found in the philosophy of Mikel Dufrenne. First of all, strictly speaking, what emerges is what manifests itself and exerts influence due to the merging of some proper-ties, although what emerges cannot (...) be reduced to these properties. This dy-namic may be clearly seen in aesthetics, where affective or expressive qualities manifest themselves. Secondly, and more broadly, what emerges is that which begins to take shape from an indistinct, latent background. Hence, the plane of “presence” – a cognitive prereflective dimension of symbiosis with the world – may be understood as a place of originary co-emergence. (shrink)

The first organic robots built by Tuft and Vermont University researchers pose questions to philosophy and give it a new task. The xenobots embody what phi-losophers had attempted to define as teleology. This paper addresses the way te-los can be redefined, once liberated from the suspicion of vitalism. While Darwin-ism, through a theory of evolution based on the environment, has contributed to the elimination of telos, here a new view of biology is described, which shows how evolution can be fully (...) explained through the notion of feedback, or inner re-sistance in a system, as preliminary condition for natural selection to work. (shrink)

The concepts of “improvisation” and “emergency” share interesting semantic traits. Both have a neutral meaning, according to which “improvisation” means an action developed as it is done, and “emergency” means the “surfacing” of so-mething. However, in a negative sense, “improvised” means “poorly done or exe-cuted” and “emergency” is an “accident,” a “problem” to be solved. In this contri-bution, I offer some ideas for elaborating this connection between improvisation and emergency in relation to the aesthetic realm of art.

Emergency and exception are central concepts in Schmitt’s theory of decisionism. The present article explores the distinction between the two by focusing on their emergence, i.e. the process by which in times of crisis a potentially alternative or-der comes into existence and becomes visible. The primary aim of the comparison is to provide a more detailed and less conventional account of Schmitt’s excep-tionalist decisionism. In order to achieve this aim, three relevant questions must be raised: How does the sovereign succeed (...) in gaining acceptance, by exploiting what situation, and by convincing whom? Based on the different answers provid-ed by Schmitt over the years, it is possible to distinguish three different phases of his thought: the sovereign decisionism of the early 1920s, the concrete-order thinking of the 1930s, and the jurisprudential institutionalism advanced from 1950s onwards. (shrink)

Emergency has two areas of meaning the one derived from the Anglism emergen-cy, the other that includes all meanings connectable to what emerges. COVID19 emergency is exemplary of both areas. A semiotics of emergence observes the process of explosion, veridification and normalization of phenomena that burst into cultural systems. The analysis of social discourses on the pandemic has pro-vided elements to identify semantic oppositions, through which we have outlined a system of meaning relations.

Therapist’s and client’s experience in the session are emerging from the field forc-es in play; these forces are the intrinsic tensions of the emerging field. We propose an understanding of the therapeutic process as a field phenomenon: the process of change is made by the forces already active in the field and the therapist has just to let them move on without interfering, or sometimes to support them. Psy-chopathology is then the emerging absence, and therapy becomes the art of presence.

The paper investigates the kind of collective feeling – or, better, atmosphere – that is generated by the situation of protracted emergency. After asking whether ours is in general an age marked by (media) emergency, what are the structural char-acteristics distinguishing short-term emergency from protracted emergency and to what extent we can speak of an effectively shared collective feeling of “emer-gency”, the analysis focuses on the atmospheric properties of this collective affec-tive situation and shows what are the possible resources to (...) escape from it (at least in part). Irreducible to the classic phenomenological intentionality, the at-mosphere of protracted emergency (whose case study here is that of the COVID 19 pandemic, which is also related to the “terror from the air” theorised by Sloterdijk) proves to be a chaotic situation that establishes with those who experi-ence it a very particular felt-bodily communication, based essentially on narrow-ness and hypochondria. It is an invisible atmosphere of which it is fairly easy to identify the markers on the phenomenal level, whereas it is largely impossible to anticipate the long-term (affective, social, cognitive) effects. (shrink)

Following Erika Fischer-Lichte’s notion of emergence as an unexpected phenome-non that questions the notion of agency, our aim is to investigate how dance emerges through movements that are spontaneous and yet learnt while not being reducible to a motor expertise. Through Hermann Schmitz’ theory of the felt body, and notions such as “kinaesthetic attention”, grace and “pure” presence, we will show how dance movements emerge from the mutual “affective” influence be-tween dancers and the surroundings thanks to dancers’ “pathic” state between (...) awareness and unconsciousness, laîcher prise and restraint. (shrink)

The essay analyzes the Italian regulation related to the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on the state of emergency and derogations to the rule of law. The most rel-evant aspects to be considered are: the instability due to the excess of norms, to their obscurity and to the continuous change of procedures; the adoption of soft law; the separation between the law itself and the “force of law”, as laid out by Giorgio Agamben. In order to explain the institutionalization of (...) the emergency as a new form of sovereignty, Schmitt’s concept of exception will be called to action. (shrink)

Emergent phenomena can be weak or strong. The former reflect epistemic limits and are ontologically innocent. The latter instantiate properties and powers not had by their components, and they are genuine, novel entities of the world. In this paper, I first show that this view rests upon two metaphysical assumptions: the Eleatic principle, and a power-based view of causation. Then, I suggest that these assumptions should be discussed, rather than passively accepted, and this for three reasons at least: British Emergentism (...) did not require them; they pave the way to relevant objections against the autonomy of emergent phenomena; they provide a too narrow metaphysical frame for emergence. (shrink)

What have been the geographical consequences of the restrictive policies due to the Covid-19 pandemic? Has there been a transformation of ordinary spaces into spaces of exception, by virtue of a sanitary emergency and the policies adopted to contrast it? These topics have been only partially debated: the object of analysis that this article intends to focus on is precisely the link that seems to connect the emergency condition deriving from the Covid-19 pandemic and the creation of spaces of emergency (...) or exception deriving from “social distancing” policies, from generalized closures, from restrictive policies, from State control that has poured into a control of everyday places and a redefinition of individual and collective borders and geographies. Starting from the philosophical-political reflections proposed by Carl Schmitt, Clinton L. Rossiter and Giorgio Agamben about the “state of exception” – which according to some authors would define the current reality, while according to others it would not coincide with what has been experi-enced in recent years –, in this contribution a consequentiality between the politi-cal and geographical plan is proposed, trying to catch a glimpse the signs of the Italian political reality in the pandemic period in the light of the theories on the state of exception and the related geographical consequences, linking the theo-retical and practical dimensions, experienced and perceived. (shrink)

Emergentist theories have never represented a "school" with an identifiable orthodoxy, however it is possible to isolate four basic traits, that characterize most emergent property theories. A property can be said to be "emergent" in the first place, if it is a natural property (and not a "supernatural" one), then if it supervenes on subvenient properties, if it is irreducible (i.e. it cannot be deduced from the mere knowledge of the subvenient properties), and if it displays downward causation (i.e. it (...) is capable of producing effects on the level from which it emerges). A theoretical interpretation of these four principles shows that there is never any basis for assuming that the behavior of the parts exhausts the potentialities of the wholes, those parts refer to. The "emergent" character of a property stands out as expression of the fundamentally "holistic" character of entities, which express their properties in forms essentially dependent on their relations. The relational essence of the properties coincides with their intrinsically emergent character. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate some important trends in contemporary naturalist aesthetics in relation to two decisive issues. Firstly, it is important to explicitly clarify what kind of naturalism is at stake within the debate, more specifically whether an account of the topic involves forms of physical reductionism, emergentism, and/or continuistic views of art and culture with nature. Secondly, we argue that it is necessary to define what conception of art is assumed as paradigmatic: whether this conception deals with basically (...) autonomist approaches to art, assuming aesthetic experience to coincide with the disinterested contemplation of formal features, independently of cognitive, practical, and ethical implications, or whether the arts are considered an enhancement of the features of human expe- rience and developments of other human behaviours. The second part of the paper will investigate some recent developments in current neuroaesthetics and fresh enactivist proposals in the aesthetic field which display a tendency toward a non-reductive naturalism, views of the arts as continuous with other modes of behav- iour and more conscious attitudes about the risks of scientism within scientific in- vestigations. Generally speaking, we espouse an idea of culture as the natural development of human organic experience that involves new emerging properties depending on the re-organization of already existing natural resources and favour continuistic and emergentist views as more suited to dealing with specific prob- lems in the field of the arts and as better responding to the criticism of irrelevancy directed against the latter, compared to reductive naturalist approaches. (shrink)

In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines his transcendental empiricism as an “apodictic” aesthetics, by which he means a science not simply of the sensible, but of the being of the sensible. Yet, to the extent that the sensibility which is at stake in the Transcendental Aesthetics is a sensibility without sensation, Kantian aesthetics is not apodictic. Sensation is the only contact we have with the being of the sensible, namely that which is exterior with respect to the interior of representation. (...) But transcendental idealism is a subjectivism. Indeed, if one connects what Heidegger considers to be the greatest achievement of Kant’s Copernican revolution with the achievement that Kant held highest in this regard, then the two main precepts of Kant’s subjective phenomenalism fall into place. The first is that we cannot feel outside of us – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as transcendental idealism; the second is that we can feel inside – this amounts to non-sensuous sensibility as empirical realism. The aim of this article is to show how Kant's treatment of sensation prevented him from refuting Berkeley’s idealism. (shrink)

Contemporary debate explores and enhances the relationship between philosophy and translation from various perspectives and cultural traditions. Nevertheless, there seems to be a lack of reflection on the aesthetic significance of the relation- ship between philosophy and translation and the specificity of the translation of philosophical texts. After attempting to explore the reasons for this, the paper aims at showing how philosophy reveals the aesthetic side of conceptual production when it is confronted with the problem of translation, both as a (...) translation of experience into concepts and as a translation practice of conceptual language. (shrink)

A specific interest and attention to translation and to the relation between signs, natural languages, and thought spread out not only from the so called “linguistic turn” in the 20th century, but also from the cross-cultural dimension that gained prominency in the last decades. Interlinguistic translation can thus be considered and analyzed as a particular and fruitful field of study for philosophy, because in that experience we have to face the intimate relationship that intertwine form and content, the contingency of (...) expression and the ideal aspiration to a shared, universal truth. The case of Chinese language and thought provide further material to explore, in order to raise more questions about the links among grammar, morphology, system of writing, and the meanings that those structures intrinsecally brings and convey. Re-considering Hegel’s ideas about alphabetical and non-alphabetical writing, and through a peculiar case study of a poem by Wang Wei, we can learn to appreciate in a new way the alterity of Chinese characters and language. Finally, the act of translation can be seen as a model of ethical understanding, in order take into account the Other, without enclosing it into the frames that have been shaped with our own categories. (shrink)

Through an unedited comparison between Gadamer and Benjamin, a brief reflection on the hermeneutic practice of translation is proposed here, which assumes, as a driver, the affinity between the figurative act of portraying and the linguistic act of translating. Just as the portrait is representation, interpretation and translation of the expressive sense of a single face, from the side of reality to that of the image, so the translation is representation, interpretation and translation of the expressive sense of a single (...) poetic composition from the side of the original language to that of the hosting language. Both the portrait and the translation have an aesthetic and ethical status: "aesthetic", since they exhibit the true mimetic po- tency of the image and the word; "ethical", since this potency is expressed in the maximum welcoming openness towards the object, whose individual expression, in order to be understood and recreated by the painter and the translator, must first of all be respected, safeguarded, guarded and preserved in its unproducible and irreducible otherness. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to investigate a peculiar acoustic feature of translation – its echoicity. In the first step, I will revisit the story of Echo, the mythological character who repeats the words of the other and distorts its meaning. Moving from this figure, the article will pose the question of how the mechanism of repetition is structured in translation. This will be done through an analysis of the passages from Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator”, in which (...) translation is explicitly described as an echo, involved in a chain of multiple resonances. It will be showed that Benjamin’s text as well, especially its terminology, acts through the same multiple resonances. In the last part of the paper, the problem of contradiction will be introduced, making reverberate some concepts and points from Hegelian philosophy, in order to argue the contradictory process of echoing the voice of the other in translation. (shrink)

This paper aims to investigate the intersections between Hegel’s aesthetics lec- tures and translation theory and praxis, with reference to the French-Italian translation project Hegel Art Net. Against the background of the historical recon- struction that sees Hegel repeatedly confronted with the fruition and production of translations, we intend to examine the hermeneutic, philological and political challenges that a translator of the aesthetics Nachschriften encounters today, following the “philological turn” of the 1990s and the publication of new sources documenting Hegel’s (...) Berlin lectures on the philosophy of art. (shrink)

In this article I outline a conception of translation as a human practice that is dia- lectical, reasonable and not entirely governed by rules. In my contribution I use a concept of dialectics that is general and broad, not connected in a strict way to a single thinker or a single paradigm of dialectical thinking, and that is aimed to emphasize that a translation work is always characterized by dualities, by the simulta- neous presence of different or even opposite dimensions (...) that a good translator must take into account and be aware of. Following a stimulating insight offered by the Italian historian of philosophy and translator Franco Volpi, I attempt to investigate the particular form of reasonableness that a good translator must have and that can be understood in terms of sensitivity, tactfulness, know-how and respect for the otherness of the translated text. On this basis, following the suggestions offered by such different thinkers as Quine, Davidson, Benjamin and Gadamer about the partial indeterminacy and incompleteness of every translation and about the role played by interpretive components, I finally propose to understand translation as a human practice that, while necessarily relying on the possession of certain norms, methods or techniques, at the same time cannot be simply reduced to a mechanical application of rules. This leads me, in the final section of my article, to take into account Wittgenstein’s so-called rule-following paradox and to see if, how and to what extent it also applies to the specific case of translation. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger never devoted a self-standing volume to translation. Nevertheless, his occasional brief remarks on translation contain an implicit resemantization of the concept. Translation is an activity that helps us to think – a jump over a ditch, a crossing of the translating subjectivity to another shore. The effort of the translator is an attempt to say what has thus far remained unthought but in the custody of the inherited word, especially the Greek word. While Heidegger focuses on translation as (...) the way in which our philosophical tradition proceeds and has built itself up, he does not seem to be completely aware of the fact that his own move, his own strategy for dismantling that same tradition, cannot be but another translation. (shrink)

The term “translation” has three meanings: the practice of the translator, the textual outcome of this practice, and the relationship it creates between texts and languages. In this article, I would like to draw attention to this third aspect, translation as a relation. To do so, I will first propose a historical overview of the first two meanings, as well as of the normative or descriptive aims associated to them. Secondly, I identify three motives for thinking about translation that are (...) primarily concerned with its relational dimension: the lack of a language to speak about the relationship between languages, i.e. about what’s incomparable and what gets subtracted. I conclude this article with the hypothesis that translation as a relation constitutes a refuge event for the plurality of languages. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to address the problem of the relationship between translation and art by relying on F. Hölderlin’s and W. Benjamin’s theories of trans- lation. These theories, which at first appear to be opposed, are actually very close since they discuss both art and translation as marked by a linguistic and theoretical renunciation. In the first section, I demonstrate in what sense this relationship is fundamental for an aesthetic consideration of translation. The second section discusses the (...) two main reasons for the divergence between art and translation, focusing especially on the philosophical limitations of Hölderlin’s theory as indicated in Benjamin’s The task of the translator. In the third section, I deal with the commonalities of the two theories, which are both marked by the notion of lin- guistic failure. I argue that Benjamin’s juvenile essay On language as such can be approached from a confrontation with Hölderlin’s lyric Patmos. In the fourth and last section, I conclude that the concept of the linguistic renunciation can mark both Hölderlin’s and Benjamin’s theories of translation. I finally argue that renun- ciation can be attributed to both art and translation, which are therefore inti- mately related critical activities. (shrink)