Carlo De Rita

Abstract

The author asks the question, starting from a reconsideration of the aesthetical regime of kantian sublime and from critical reflection on the ethical (J. F. Lyotard) and technological assumptions (M. Costa) of an aesthetics of sublime, if a possibility is still give today for the art to escape to the anaesthetic regime of the contemporary art system and of the spectacular mediaticity that rules the postmodern aesthetization. If is still given in the art, insofar as it corresponds to the sublime, the possibility to make the work of art the place of subversion of an hegemonic aesthetical regime, where the subject can find himself as hypersensible power of political reconfigurations of sensible. Where the sublime is still (ancora) the time (l’ora) of the aesthetical conflict around the sharing of sensible.

Carlo De Rita is professor of juridical sociology in Seconda Università di Napoli. He is the author of Who’s afraid of Prometheus Challenge? The postmodern Aesthetization of Subjectivity’s political Agency and the artificial, in «Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics», 44, 2003; La Potenza del diritto naturale tra desiderio e paura, in R. Bonito Oliva e A. Trucchio (eds.), Paura e immaginazione, Mimesis, Milano 2007; Desiderio e istituzione. Per un’antropologia politica della soggettività, F. Angeli, Milano 2007; Generazioni future, soggettività post-naturale e dignità umana, in R. Bifulco e A. D’Aloia (eds.), Un diritto per il futuro, Jovene, Napoli 2008.