Felt-Bodily Resonances. Towards a Pathic Aesthetics

Moving from a (new)phenomenological theory of the lived body (Leib), the text outlines its constitutive (pre-reflective) role in human experience but especialy in aesthetic perception. Against every reductionist and introjectionist objectification of the lived experience, every explanatory hypothesis of associationist and projectivist type, a pathic aesthetics ‒ that emphasizes the affective involvement that the perceiver feels unable to critically react to or mitigate the intrusiveness of ‒ is an adequate investigation of the felt body as sounding board of outside atmospheres and Stimmungen. By means of its specific dynamics and lived “isles”, in fact the felt body feels what happens in the surrounding area without drawing on the five senses and the perceptual body schema. Felt-bodily isles turn out exactly to be both a tool for sensing the affective radiation provoked by atmospheres and quasi-things, and “places” that, communicating with each other and with our consciousness, are themselves quasi-things.