El nicho atmosférico : sentimientos espaciales y cuasi-cosas

Today’s “affective” and “spatial” turns are increasingly recognizing the key role of the concept of “atmosphere”. As the qualitative-emotional prius of our sensitive experience, spatially poured and forming an affective niche, atmospheres seem in fact to allow the convergence of many studies focusing on the qualitative aspects of our “environment” and of our lived (pre-dimensional) space. Based on the theory of atmospheric perception understood as a pathological first impression and a sentimental communication, the paper draws mainly on Aisthetik (Gernot Böhme) and New Phenomenology (Hermann Schmitz). First, the relationship between perceiver and atmospheres is briefly explored, describing it also through many literary examples: atmospheres can overwhelm us, find us attuned to them, be recognized without being really felt, provoke a resistance that pushes us to change them, be perceived differently over time, trigger an inverse mood, and so on. In its second part, based on an ontological “inflationism”, the paper introduces the notion of “quasi-things” and shows their specific ontological properties. In fact, from an ontological point of view, atmospheres are quasi-things, i.e. entities which, without being complete things, exert on us a more direct and immediate power than that exerted by complete things