The Aesthetic Subject in Contemporary Continental Philosophy and Literature: Thinking the Body-Thought

Art makes its mark upon our flesh. It ravishes our eyes, invades our ears, and stirs our viscera; it commandeers our powers of attention and unsettles our body with its strangenesses. The event of art is thus an encounter both with a sensuous object and with ourselves, exposing us as subjects strangely susceptible to being moved.

The twenty-first-century European thinkers elucidated here describe a theory of the aesthetic subject: Irigaray articulates the basic outlines of a subject ill at ease with itself. Badiou, Nancy, and Perniola theorize art as an event of deformation that befalls an aesthetic subject fundamentally invested in form. Rancière and Sloterdijk explore the figuration of the body (and its limits) in contexts closer to everyday experience and our life within modern history and politics. This study brings together feminist, psychoanalytic, and phenomenological inheritances to describe the operations of the real in art and aesthetic life.

Robert Hughes is associate professor of English at The Ohio State University. He is author of Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Beyond of Language (2010) and has published a number of essays on figures in contemporary continental thought. He is also a translator of contemporary French and German philosophy, most recently Peter Sloterdijk’s Making the Heavens Speak: Religion as Poetry (2023), and he is co-editor of After Lacan: Clinical Practice and the Subject of the Unconscious (2002).