Chiara Caiazzo

The Covid-19 pandemic determined a radical restructuring of social and political spaces. This change affected artistic production and reception, influencing individual and collective aesthetic experiences. By losing its physical dimension, art has moved to the digital sphere, engaging with alternative possibilities for display and connectivity. This paper examines the spaces unfolded by emergency aesthetics. Alongside reshaping sense perception, emergency aesthetics inspires political intervention by disclosing new conceptual frameworks that help us recognize and withstand present social, ethical, and existential crises.

In the past few decades, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière has elaborated a politicoaesthetic philosophy centered on the idea that the societies we inhabit are organized according to a specific distribution of the sensible which regulates human relations and their places in society. The peculiarity of Rancière’s thought resides in his conception of political space as an aesthetic space: that is, as a sensorium, as a space that is organized and regulated according to specific ways of seeing, saying, and being. Then, ‘the political’ is not an ideological battlefield, but rather a sensible fabric that can be rearranged through practices of dissensus. This article aims at presenting Rancière’s notion of the political to evaluate its emancipatory potential. The focus will be on the impact that this sensible and aesthetic dimension has on marginalized subjectivities, and how it can catalyze alternative processes of subjectivation.

This article navigates Vattimo’s theorizations for a borderless aesthetics. A close examination of two manuscripts where Vattimo develops the critical terms of oscillation and heterotopia will lead to the disclosure of the weakening of aesthetics. Such a process is essential for elaborating an interpretive framework able to provide the tools to rethink the intersection of political and artistic practices in contemporary societies, rife with crises and states of emergency. The weakening of aesthetics concurs with the weakening of truth, no longer identifiable with a static idea of veritas, but, instead, encapsulated in the dynamic frame of alētheia. This radical hermeneutic restructuring attempts to reflect on the broader implications of a borderless aesthetics based on oscillation and oriented heterotopically, perpetually dialoguing with the ecological and political challenges of the present.