Posthuman Aesthetics : Perception and Relationality, Mapping the Field Through the Lens of Critical Posthumanism

Abstract

Critical posthumanism offers the tools to overcome the epistemological limits of humanism. These are the limits of an epistemology of domination over otherness, particularly non-human alterities that, from the humanist standpoint, end up occupying an ancillary position with regard to the human-animal. As such, aesthetics needs to be rethought beyond these limits, rebutting an idea that matches with a transcendental notion of beauty, conceiving it as an ideal form. Rather, the viewpoint of critical posthumanism permits an alignment with a notion of aesthetics that pertains a field of relationality and perception. By drawing from these two axes, this article proposes a map of a posthuman aesthetics that aims to signal the ways in which matter becomes an intimate and active part of creative processes: a monstrous muse that, from a platonic inspiration for the human soul, becomes the carnal copula of an embodied mind. The ecological relation between human and non-human otherness is one of reciprocal contamination and co-determination: a relation in which art represents a faithful and heretical ostentation, a vibrant stratification. Moving from a mere creative and mono-directional process to a field of cosmological relationality and perceptive processuality, a posthuman aesthetics is, then, the becoming of such a plural contamination, allowing different forms of individuation and processes of subjectivation.