Devi cambiare la tua vita

Résumé

This essay examines the theoretical core of Paolo D’Angelo’s aesthetics through the lens of a foundational connection he established between Hegel and Rilke: the idea that the encounter with a work of art demands a transformation of the self. Drawing on Hegel’s appropriation of the mythological figure of Argus and on Rilke’s poetic injunction (“you must change your life”), D’Angelo recasts the aesthetic experience as an ethical event, one that displaces the subject from its position of sovereignty. The essay closes by revisiting the mythological figure of Argos Panoptes and proposing that art, in D’Angelo’s sense, constitutes an anti-Panopticon: not a technology of surveillance and control, but an opening toward freedom and self-transformation.