The public does not desire horror, yet enjoys it in art and suffers it in life. When we deal with the monstrous marriage of the abject and the sublime, the consequent thrill of enjoyment is never appeased, always problematic, often unresolved and finally borders on physiological if not pathological narcissism. The public is well acquainted with this 'rhetoric of effects'; rhetoric of extreme effects, which transforms the spectator into voyeur or victim, into an apathetic torturer, whenever cruelty is shown without (...) respite. A look of horror greets the enjoyment of extremes and enjoyment to the extreme as well; the Eighteenth Century teaches us that lesson. The century of good taste elaborates a sense of the limits, since representing horror means choosing not so much to domesticate it as to render it more enjoyable. It is a game of limits that are not limits anymore, as we can allude to an infinity that often shows the features of the sublime. (shrink)

From picture to photography and back. Tableau vivants, in their gestural synthetic dimension, represent for Diderot the apex of expression that the image can make explicit. Nothing closer to Wall’s poetics. His works show outstanding attention to detail: from scenic design to protagonists’ costumes, from light to actors’ action. And the result is exactly what Diderot saw in the eyes of people observing Chardin’s art: imagination at work.

Contemporary theatre allows for a script, a scenario, that is exclusively visual. If action is no longer supported by dialogue, this does not mean that it will disappear. It will undoubtedly return in gestural exchange and in a temporality that is expansive or contracted and condensed. Action becomes an opaque enigma. The interpretation of performative action is a journey that the spectator undertakes in a foreign country, where we are forced to learn a new language. It remains to be seen (...) what the reaction and the work of interpretation of the spectator would be when confronted with an action knowingly deprived of any meaningful anchor or referent. Would it merely be confusion? Confusion and an interpretative effort that often comes to an end by a harsh defeat: the aesthetic of the performative represents a moment of rupture in the process of rethinking of the traditional relationship between artist and spectator. (shrink)

During the Eighteenth Century – from Bonnet to Robinet, from Maupertuis to Diderot, and up to Buffon – several new topics of discussion were developed concerning materialism, the critique to finalism, the idea of nature as continuous metamorphosis , the advocacy of providentialism, or, to the contrary, of the role of chaos. As a result, scales, prototypes and types have been employed as interpretative hypotheses influencing the main choices and lines of research. In this regard, however, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire's work (...) deeply modified the morphological metaphors. The teratologist's eye combined to the mineralogist's perspective established the priority of the material visibility of the living, based on the analysis of its structure rather than of its physiology. The single framework of organistion , on which base every being is formed is thus taken as the condition as well as the limit within which every possible variation in shape is fully justified. (shrink)

The application of financial market criteria to the art world has profoundly changed the reception of works of art. It is channelled through a private circuit of auction houses, galleries and collections, which monopolise the modalities of exhibition to the public and arbitrarily select works and artists, often conforming the taste of the spectators essentially to market criteria. This phenomenon is particularly important in the case of photography, which still remains, especially in some countries, on the fringes of the cultural (...) system of museums and large exhibition spaces. (shrink)

L’esthétique et la bonne table ont beaucoup de choses en commun. Le xviii e siècle hésite entre besoins physiques et raffinements du goût, entre la faim et l’appétit. Les théories de Dubos, de Voltaire et de Diderot sont ici examinées à la lumière des traités français de la « nouvelle cuisine » du siècle des Lumières, qui doivent beaucoup aux principes du bon goût. La cuisine bourgeoise qui s’est progressivement imposée est moins raffinée que que la cuisine aristocratique, mais le (...) cuisinier y est considéré à la fois comme un artiste qui joue avec les saveurs et comme un savant qui sait mélanger les éléments chimiques pour obtenir des mélanges nouveaux et surprenants. Un voyage de la philosophie à la table et retour. (shrink)

Art, evading the principle of utility, opens up to error. A profitable mistake if it is not stubborn. The artist cautiously accesses the logic of the production of nature which is characterized by continuous mutability. Therefore, “the history of man’s errors does him as much honour as the history of his discoveries”. Recalling the thought of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos, who debates the importance of mistakes that painters and poets can make against their own rules, the essay investigates Denis Diderot’s thought, (...) outlining a difference between amateur and connaisseur. If the connaisseur can make a mistake, the amateur, vulnerable and fascinated, just needs to have an active and curious attention that will allow him/her to be absorbed in the work of art. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 9th century, anatomists aimed at detaching themselves from a mere classifying and descriptive approach to establish a philosophic science studying form patterns and relationships. Organic forms were part of a research program, grounded on how their components were related from a structuralist perspective, as it is for Étienne and Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, founders of teratology. The monster was a subject freed from superstition and subjected to the gaze of the philosopher of nature who, in analyzing (...) it, found the same laws that nature employed in shaping any normal individual. (shrink)

Nature doesn’t seem reducible to rigid systems and classifications. Although resorting to metaphors may give rise to contradictions, it allows the elaboration of explanatory models which help us to organize thought and to find orientation in the natural world. Giving form through metaphors stands for seeking the way by which mankind looks for both solutions and new configurations to face nature’s enigmas. The creation of morphological and/or evolutionary metaphors framed in a schematic way what Hugo called “man’s groping in the (...) universe of nature”. Circles, arrows, spirals, scales, etc. stood for research directions: for example, scale became metaphor of an “animal universe” that – as it was thought to be in the Eighteenth Century – organized itself in a bottom-up scale. The circle referred to “metamorphosis” , which reminds us of Goethe’s thinking. Metaphors are never an aim in themselves: they always determine a way of thinking as well as choices and research directions. Such a use of the linguistic image deeply influences the very notion of metaphor as figures of speech . If, on the one hand, metaphor shows unknown structures of nature, on the other it rediscovers its own ‘naturalness’. Starting from the deep interconnection between functional and formal tasks in morphological discussion, metaphor turned from “figure” to “figuration”, Gestaltung , and in doing so it revealed a dynamic structure able to make us understand new links and directions in the sense of a metamorphic nature. Far from limiting itself to a historical retrospection, the methodological significance of having recourse to metaphor profoundly informs the most recent questions in the scientific field and notably in life sciences, in the very moment in which it leads and encourages a renewed dialogue between sciences and philosophy. (shrink)

The work defines three aspects of Souriau’s animal aesthetics by stressing their relevance in the context of early and contemporary ethology: in (1), the concept «biological nature» which is interpreted by Souriau as a realm of appearances and as intrinsically aesthetic; in (2), the concept of animal sensibility, which makes it possible to reframe animals’ artistic behaviours and the sense by which such phenomena establish a meaningful relationship with the environment; in (3), the concept of form, in the description of (...) natural appearances, is presented as it enters into the process of institution that, accordingly to Souriau’s interpretation of biological nature, encompasses non-human animals and humans. All three definitions will allow us a), to present Souriau’s critique of anthropomorphism and his proposal of an «healthy» zoomorphism; b) to reformulate animals’ sensibility in a non-reductionistic fashion; and finally, c) to address the issue with the supposedly sole communicative function of animal artistic behaviors. (shrink)

From picture to photography and back. Tableau vivants, in their gestural synthetic dimension, represent for Diderot the apex of expression that the image can make explicit. Nothing closer to Wall’s poetics. His works show outstanding attention to detail: from scenic design to protagonists’ costumes, from light to actors’ action. And the result is exactly what Diderot saw in the eyes of people observing Chardin’s art: imagination at work.