This book provides a presentation of the concept of “atmosphere” in the realm of aesthetics. An “atmosphere” is meant to be an emotional space. Such idea of “atmosphere” has been more and more subsumed by human and social sciences in the last twenty years, thereby becoming a technical notion. In many fields of the Humanities, affective life has been reassessed as a proper tool to understand the human being, and is now considered crucial. In this context, the link between atmospheres (...) and aesthetics becomes decisive. Nowadays, aesthetics is no longer only a theory of art, but has recovered its original vocation: to be a general theory of perception conceived of as an ordinary experience of pre-logical character. In its four parts, this volume discusses whether atmospheres could take the prominent and paradigmatic position previously held by art in order to make sense of such sensible experience of the world. (shrink)

Moving from a phenomenological theory of the lived body, the text outlines its constitutive role in human experience but especially in aesthetic perception. Against every reductionist and introjectionist objectification of the lived experience, every explanatory hypothesis of associationist and projectivist type, a pathic aesthetics ‒ that emphasizes the affective involvement that the perceiver feels unable to critically react to or mitigate the intrusiveness of ‒ is an adequate investigation of the felt body as sounding board of outside atmospheres and Stimmungen. (...) By means of its specific dynamics and lived “isles”, in fact the felt body feels what happens in the surrounding area without drawing on the five senses and the perceptual body schema. Felt-bodily isles turn out exactly to be both a tool for sensing the affective radiation provoked by atmospheres and quasi-things, and “places” that, communicating with each other and with our consciousness, are themselves quasi-things. (shrink)

Through an atmospherological approach, primarily inspired by the Aisthetik and the New Phenomenology, the paper investigates the relationship between atmosphere and lived space, defines what kind of perception the atmospheric one is and examines the space we experience in the lifeworld and to which plane geometry turns out to be completely blind. Sketching briefly the history of lived space, we assume that atmospheres function as affordances that permeate the lived space, i.e. as ecological invites or meanings that are ontologically rooted (...) in things and quasi-things. (shrink)

Is there really an atmospheric turn? The concept of “atmosphere” as a qualitative-emotional prius of sensory experience seems today to have encouraged the convergence of many interdisciplinary studies focused on the qualitative aspects of our “surroundings”. Based on the neo-phenomenological theory of atmospheric perception as a first pathivc impression and a felt-bodily communication, this paper explores and synthesises the relationship between atmospheres and expressive qualities. It thus clarifies the key features of a general “pathic” aesthetics. It considers perceivers as beings (...) who are touched by atmospheric feelings in emotional and tactile ways. These are widespread and vary in their modulation of lived space. They are also ontologically rooted in things and quasi-things of the lifeworld. By realising how they expose themselves to what happens, perceivers turn out not to be “subjects of something” but rather “subjects to something”: that is, human beings who are only “sovereign” when they are free, at least in their daily experience, from the dogma of rational and methodological autonomy imposed by Western Modernity. (shrink)

This paper aims to examine the very unstable concept of the “uncanny” from an atmospherological point of view. Its official theoretical “sanction” is due to Heidegger, who considered it the latent but fundamental ground of any being-in-the-world, and especially to Freud, who described it as the feeling that arises when something familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar. Freud claimed to be inspired in this conception by Schelling's definition of unheimlich, which I try to explain to better understand what an uncanny atmosphere is. (...) It seems characterized by elements such as ontological ambiguity-vagueness and paranoid subjectification, alien corporeality and unpredictable situations. The paper ends with a brief analysis of the specific uncanny of houses, both in terms of their transformation from a secure interior to an uncanny place and in terms of the anxiety about materially inheriting a house and thus cohabiting with the past. In the perspective adopted here, the uncanny shows that we are not at home within our own body because we always coexist with an external-foreign and in this sense “monstrous” presence. (shrink)

A neo-phenomenological and atmospherological approach, mainly based on a first-person perspective, seems perfectly entitled to consider subjective and collective well-being as the starting point for a philosophical reflection. The question is, however, whether and how well-being, also as an atmosphere, can be really investigated and verified. The paper examines many traditional roblems hindering the research and suggests to analyze well-being from a pathic-atmospheric point of view. It therefore focuses especially on the idea of “flow”, wonders how much our well-being depends (...) on the felt-bodily resonances triggered by atmospheric situations, considers the probable parallels between the aesthetic-phenomenologic notion of “atmosphere” and the sociological one of “climate”, finally, underlines the need of an atmospheric competence that is able to partly immunize against today’s widespread manipulative atmospherization. (shrink)

Quasi things come and go and we cannot wonder where they've been (starting from the wind) -- Quasi-things assault and resist us: feelings as atmospheres -- Quasi things are felt (though not localized): the isles of the felt-body -- Quasi-things are proofs of existence: pain as the genesis of the subject -- Quasi-things affect us (also indirectly): vicarious shame -- Quasi-things communicate with us: from the gaze to the portrait (and back) -- Quasi-things are the more effective the vaguer they (...) are: twilightness. (shrink)

1 Segmentando In psicologia da tempo si parla dell’“effetto atmosfera” eventualmente creato da certi sillogismi, segnatamente da quelli che “sentiamo” come maggiormente persuasivi del tutto indipendentemente dalla loro validità logica. Da due premesse particolari e affermative (alcuni A sono B, alcuni B sono C), ad esempio, molti sono indotti, appunto in virtù di questo effetto “atmosferico”, a trarre un’affermazione altrettanto particolare e affermativa ancorché erronea (alcuni A sono C), la...

The boom in new theories of resonance is most certainly due to an intellectual atmosphere closely linked to the so-called “affective turn” in the humanities. The paper compares some theories of resonance or responsivity such as Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenological-psychopathological analysis of resonance and Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenology of responsivity with a sociological research on resonance by which Hartmut Rosa aims at contrasting the capitalist dictatorship of the growth-acceleration-innovation triad and the resulting loss of bodily resonance in the modern age, and above (...) all with Hermann Schmitz’s phenomenology idea of felt-bodily communication. My aim is to show that by providing a neophenomenological approach to atmospheric perception – viewed as an affective and pre-reflexive bodily communication triggered by a spatial feeling whose sounding board is our Leib – a pathic aesthetics can assign both a diagnostic and a therapeutic value to the concept of resonance. This furthermore means that a sociology also attentive to the bodily and pre-linguistic dimension and a phenomenology also attentive to situative and historical-collective dimensions, both being able to focus on the pathicity of everyday life, may find an unexpected but promising point of contact. (shrink)

Through an approach primarily inspired by the Aisthetik and the Neue Phänomenologie I define the atmospheric perception as the first pathic impression and investigate the relationship between this kind of perception and the expressive qualities of our lifeworld. Pathic aesthetics therefore ceases to be just a theory of works of art. It considers the perceiver as a being first of all emotionally and felt-bodily touched by atmospheric feelings widespread in her space but these atmospheric feelings are also affordances, ontologically rooted (...) in things and quasi-things of her lifeworld. By exploring how she unintentionally exposes herself to what happens in this lifeworld, man turns out to be not a “subject of something” but rather a “subject to something”: a human being who is “sovereign” to the extent she is free from the claim of rational autonomy imposed by the western Modernity. (shrink)

The paper investigates the kind of collective feeling – or, better, atmosphere – that is generated by the situation of protracted emergency. After asking whether ours is in general an age marked by (media) emergency, what are the structural char-acteristics distinguishing short-term emergency from protracted emergency and to what extent we can speak of an effectively shared collective feeling of “emer-gency”, the analysis focuses on the atmospheric properties of this collective affec-tive situation and shows what are the possible resources to (...) escape from it (at least in part). Irreducible to the classic phenomenological intentionality, the at-mosphere of protracted emergency (whose case study here is that of the COVID 19 pandemic, which is also related to the “terror from the air” theorised by Sloterdijk) proves to be a chaotic situation that establishes with those who experi-ence it a very particular felt-bodily communication, based essentially on narrow-ness and hypochondria. It is an invisible atmosphere of which it is fairly easy to identify the markers on the phenomenal level, whereas it is largely impossible to anticipate the long-term (affective, social, cognitive) effects. (shrink)

The paper addresses the issue of dwelling as a powerful way of cultivating atmospheric feelings without the risk of suffering their disturbing aggressiveness, and deals with inclusiveness or immersivity that true dwelling arouses. To avoid the widespread trend to consider every space a dwelling place, it proposes that only a really “lived” place, in so far it radiates a specific and particularly intense-authoritative atmosphere (in kinetic, synesthetic, felt-bodily sense) affecting the perceivers and finding in their body its precise sounding board, (...) makes dwelling in the proper sense possible. Just as there are different types of atmosphere (prototypical, derivative, spurious), there are therefore different types of dwelling and inclusiveness. However, contrary to the today’s projectivistconstructionist explanation and globalized orientation, for a “pathic aesthetics” only a lifewordly qualitative-emotional experience based on an atmosphere of intimacy-familiarity really turns a house into a home. (shrink)