Desinterés y terror. El destino nihilista de la estética occidental en el L'uomo senza contenuto

FLEISNER, PAULA

Viso. Cadernos de Estética aplicada

Associaçao Brasileira de Estética

Lugar: Rio de Janeiro; Año: 2010 vol. 4 p. 110 - 120

1981-4062

[REVISTA VISO , indexda en QUALIS/CAPES, Latindex, ERIH Plus, Redib; DOAJ]. Resumen: In the same year when the so-called "last great modern aesthetic treatise" was published (T. W. Adorno´s Aesthetic Theory) young Agamben was writing an important contribution to the debate, much alive in Italy those days, about the relationships between Aesthetics, Politics and the nihilistic fate of western metaphysics. This paper aims at analyzing the theory exposed in Agamben´s first book, L´uomo senza contenuto, as an attempt to read the western Aesthetics program. In this work, Agamben claims that Modernity, the moment when art enters the aesthetic dimension, displaces consideration of human production (the "disturbing" téchne which allows man to bring something from not-being to being) towards a view centered on the spectator who can enjoy beauty with "disinterestedness". This movement, suggests the author, is not natural, but rather indicates a crisis of the general notion of human "making". If one could distinguish, with Aristotle, between póiesis (to make appear or to bring into presence as a mode of knowledge) and praxis (to make something as a product of will, understood as apetite, as a mode of acting), Modernity shows us a continuous superseding of póiesis by praxis, and a scaling reduction of productive activity as work which, as it reduces human beings to their naked biological life, is the lowest dimension of active life. Based on Agamben´s diagnosis, I intend to think here new possibilities of póiesis, and thus a "vita nova" for man.