Felt-bodily communication: a neophenomenological approach to embodied affects (Sensibilia 10-2016)

According to the pathic aesthetics the atmospheric perception should be understood as the first affective-synaestehtic impression of the expressive qualities (or affordances) ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things of the surrounding space. Through its specific dynamics, whose poles are narrowness and vastness, the felt (and not physical) body appears as the precise sounding board (also) of these atmospheric feelings widespread in the (lived) space. The paper a) retraces the neophenomenological theory (Hermann Schmitz) of the ubiquitous communication (incorporation/excorporation) that the felt body constantly generates with the outside world, and b) suggests the thesis that atmospheres are a great example of extended emotions, that is, of embodied affects exactly generated by one of the many forms of felt-bodily communication.