Rapture "At a Distance": Searching for Pathic-Atmospheric Aesthetics

The paper proposes a rethinking of the role of aesthetics as a theory of sensory experience as it is encountered in the lifeworld (and only secondarily in relation to art). Accordingly, pathic and atmospheric (bottom-up) aesthetics, which centers on the ability to expose oneself to intense experiences without attempting to control them and conceives feelings as atmospheric powers that permeate a particular space without being reduced to projections of the perceiver’s moods, should replace the idealistic (top-down) approach. Classical aesthetics, predominantly idealistic (in a broad sense, from Schelling to Adorno), was focused, in fact, exclusively on art as a miraculous experience of a truth (sacred, ontological, and even utopian-political) accessible only to a bourgeois class whose paradigm is detached contemplation. On the contrary, today it seems preferable to recognize in art one of the many ways (certainly the most sophisticated) of generating emotions that the pervasive “aesthetic economy” of our times relies on. However, even the reinterpretation of aesthetics and its fundamental concepts in pathic and atmospheric terms—if it is to avoid reductionism and the numerous, partial attempts to define in what sense and when a work of art is atmospheric—must not reduce art (in all its historical-symbolic complexity) to the atmospheres it evokes, nor reduce atmospheres (in their multifaceted, extra-artistic manifestation) merely to the works of art that might generate them. Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology • Vol. 5 • 2025 For this reason, the atmospherological proposal, especially inspired by Hermann Schmitz’s New Phenomenology and Gernot Böhme’s Aisthetics, suggests that the experience of art could be considered a way of experiencing atmospheric feelings present in space—feelings that, in themselves, are even potentially destructive—under safe conditions (analogous to dwelling, garden art, etc.). It also questions the controversial possibility of intentionally generating atmospheres. In fact, atmospheric feelings can only be intentionally generated by the artistic subject within certain limits, and are more often condensed only occasionally in places, people, and objects (including works of art). The experience of art as exposure to intense feelings within the boundaries of a safe space, that is, as a form of resonance of the felt body according to a complex dynamic between the poles of contraction and expansion, also invites an unprecedented comparison with the experience of law. Aesthetics (both of art and of everyday sensory experience) and law, freed from their more formalistic definitions, reveal themselves to be two realms ultimately founded on being affected by atmospheric feelings that cannot be resisted (anger and shame in the case of justice), and that only a civilizing process of “cultivation” allows one to experience without excessive trauma. The comparison between the two domains is extended then to the way in which, respectively, taste and norms exert an authority (also atmospheric in nature) over a community and claim, with varying results, to apply even to groups more distant from the original core. Ultimately, it raises the question of whether, in the aesthetic-artistic domain, there can ever be the claim to absolute validity that sometimes drives a certain legal “fundamentalism” and proposes to conceive the emergence of a certain aesthetic taste as a feeling that, although not possessing an absolutely binding force, at least carries an authority from which it is far from easy to escape.