Aesthetics of the event: reflection and the subject-witness (To the question of the aesthetic turn)

Abstract

The article considers the topological foundations of the unity of the aesthetic attitude to life and aesthetic reflection. The aesthetics of Da-sein combines ontological and symbolic strategies of understanding with a predominant attention to the sensual sources of mastering life and the world, the themes of symbolization and naming. Esthesis is understood in the article in its authentic sense, namely as the energetic source of the aesthetic attitude, or a semantic event that is not reducible to any of its formalized manifestations. It is stressed that this initial fullness opens up the possibility of the emergence of a plurality of meanings and strategies of aesthetics in the space of existence and reflection. The author argues that without the aesthetic, everything that is meaningful and existential mutates and does not even become "human" at all. Life, according to F. Nietzsche’s point ov view, can be justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon, but not so much in the sense of the manifest and observable, but as “self-in-itself-showing-itself” which is not reducible to anything. The aesthetic as a sensual datum is treated in the article as the primary source of contemplation, or as the authentication of reality. The theme of the “wanderings of the aesthetic” in modernity is touched upon, and the specificity of the aesthetic function in the communicative processes of post-modernity is analyzed. The aesthetic is conceptualized in the topological kinship of primary aesthetics, cognition, spiritual experience, “bare life” and testimony-affirmation. The necessity of intro­ducing the terms “top-modern” and “top-mo­der­­nism” is substantiated by addressing the actual figure of the subject-witness and the set of  pro­blems of topological subjectivity.