2025-12-30
Michaela Fišerová
This article introduces the aesthetics of posthumanism as a genuine trend in philosophical aesthetics that emerged in the early decades of the 21st century. Engaging with an innovative imagination of the cohabitation of various life forms, the aesthetics of posthumanism rethinks interspecies encounters across both cultural and natural environments, prompting us to consider ethically motivated images of environmental awareness and creative adaptation. Building on phenomenological, deconstructive, and schizoanalytic methodological insights, this article aims to highlight a turning point in contemporary aesthetic research that questions our anthropocentric, speciesist prejudices and presents them as obsolete in a world shaped by the global environmental crisis. To address the complexity of this topic, the article presents contributions that map various approaches to the ‘posthuman situation’ in the artistic and philosophical imagination of contemporary human identity. The first set of referred texts targets the multifaceted – environmental, social, and technological – disaster caused by the speciest, self-centred humanism of the modern era, and the subsequent rupture of posthumanist art from it. This aesthetic perspective gives rise to resistance through posthumanist engagement. The second set of references addresses various problems related to anthropocentrist aesthetics. By introducing thinkers who articulate distinct viewpoints on the politics of aesthetic imagination, this article presents two contrasting approaches to contemporary visuality: while one group welcomes the environmentally caring approach of post-anthropocentrism, the other advocates preserving the anthropocentric one.
2025-12-30
Panda Prasenjit, Udbhas Kumar Bhoi
Samantha Harvey’s Orbital stages a representation of aesthetic perception under posthuman, postterrestrial, and post-anthropocentric conditions of outer space. The experiences represented in Orbital are read alongside the cognitive and non-human sensorial phenomenon known as the overview effect. By placing these experiential shifts alongside their literary representation, this paper examines how spaceflight affects and dismantles the anthropocentric perception of aesthetics. Arguing that the overview effect, as represented in Orbital represents a posthuman perception of aesthetics and that the suggested concept of the postbody conceptualises these shifting forms of subjective aesthetic experience, emerging from the convergence of shifting perception in non-human spaces.
2025-12-30
Moumita Sahu, Mallika Ghosh Sarbadhikary
Sundarbans portray a world that is non-anthropocentrically hybridised with frequent human-wild engagements as part of daily survival. Amitav Ghosh aptly highlights the (multi-layered) dual character of Sundarbans, surfacing the perilous yet intimate bond between the human and the natural world, evoking ecological horror as well as awareness among the anthropocentric realm. The paper focuses on the islander’s struggle to survive in the complexities of such landscapes in the backdrop of region’s rich socio-cultural history as depicted in his ecological texts – The Hungry Tide, Gun Island and Jungle Nama that simultaneously overlap ecohorror with symbiotic interfaces. Using posthumanist ecohorror as a theoretical framework for study, the paper argues how Ghosh’s illustrations of different environmental catastrophes and conflicts in the frame of region’s cultural belief systems form a posthuman aesthetic that enables to live symbiotically despite oppressive political establishment and precarious circumstances.
2025-12-30
Vincenzo Cerulli
The book review of Perullo, N. (2025) Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects: Relational Thinking for Global Challenges. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
2025-12-30
Adam Lovasz, Mark Horvath
The ongoing collapse of the Earth System’s functionality is fundamentally reshaping our thinking about nature and the conditions of existence on Earth. As an era of ontological destabilisation, the Anthropocene can be described as a dark ecology that radically deforms our sensibilities, guiding multidisciplinary attempts to grasp a new naturecultural regime. Anthropocene aesthetics is an encounter with the more-than-human forces of the Earth System that goes beyond traditional art forms and aesthetic strategies. In our essay, we explore contemporary aesthetic approaches to the Anthropocene, highlighting the posthuman aspect of Anthropocene aesthetics. In our view, the defining aesthetic trends of the Anthropocene are determined by the post-anthropocentric or posthuman turn. Posthuman art is not about nonhumans creating art without us. Rather, it foregrounds the naturecultural forces that define and shape life on our planet.
2025-12-30
Tereza Hadravová
This paper examines contemporary artistic critiques of anthropocentrism by focusing on two claims: (1) that aesthetic experience can temporarily displace human perceptual frameworks, and (2) that such displacement carries ethical value. I draw on a selection of Czech, Slovak, and international artworks that seek a nonhuman standpoint. I situate these practices within a longer debate about the limits and significance of entering into alien perspectives – ranging from David Hume’s remarks on ancient artworks that espouse moral outlooks radically different from our own to Thomas Nagel’s scepticism about the very possibility to adopt nonhuman points of view. I argue that, although aesthetic experience may prompt a departure from the human perspective, we should neither pursue nor valorise that departure. The connection between more-than-human ethics and more-than-human aesthetics, I suggest, does not proceed via empathy into a nonhuman perspective.
2025-12-30
Adrián Kvokačka
The book review of Tobias Gottfried Schröer: Úvod do estetickej náuky (1842). Komentovaný preklad estetického kompendia. Edited and translated by Slávka Kopčáková and Slavka Oriňáková. Prešov: Prešovská univerzita v Prešove, 2024. ISBN 978-80-555-3366-7.
2025-12-30
Jiří Klouda
The text creates space for mutual interpretation and reinterpretation of the aesthetics of philosopher Gernot Böhme and the phenomenal morphology of biologist Adolf Portmann. Both of these ambitious projects aim to radically reform their disciplines (aesthetics and biology) by breaking away from the subject-centric and logocentric foundations of modern anthropology. Using Böhme’s concept of atmosphere, we develop Portmann’s notion of self-manifestation and the unaddressed phenomenon of living beings. In doing so, we remove Portmann’s categories from their scientific context and limit Böhme’s dynamic model of things to living beings. Finally, based on the phenomenology of the living outlined above, we formulate an ethics of relation to living beings.
2025-07-28
Zuzana Križalkovičová
Bridges, traditionally conceived as architectural structures, are examined in this study as complex aesthetic phenomena with distinct and significant ontological and epistemological dimensions. Drawing from Karen Barad’s intra–active realism and the rhizomatic ontology of Deleuze and Guattari, the research deconstructs the subject–object dichotomy and conceptualizes bridges as liminal entities with the capacity to form new relationships and meanings. Analyses of Kafka’s short story The Bridge and multimedia interventions by Svetlana Volic posit the bridge as a performative space that transcends its original utilitarian function to emerge as a dynamic platform for posthumanist inquiry. The study offers an alternative perspective on understanding space, subjectivity and the relationships between human and non–human actors.
2025-07-28
Natália Prostredná
Book review of Dytrtová, K. (2024) Galerijní animace, tělo a prostor. Ústí nad Labem: Fakulta umění a designu Univerzity Jana Evangelisty Purkyně. ISBN 978-80-7561-468-1. ISBN 978-80-7561-444-5.
2025-07-28
Barbora Kundračíková
In the last few decades, we have observed an increased interest in photography as an object of study of the everyday, as well as of the formation of everyday habits and aesthetics. It is no longer understood strictly as an artistic entity, a document, or a personal commodity, but – under the impression of a material turn – it is experiencing a substantial renaissance as a complex tool for learning about the socio-cultural parameters of a given community or space-time with a specific aesthetics. The photographic history, rather than the history of photography, involves a series of tools and methodological procedures that make the photographic image not only a source of banal information but is understood as a saturated structure. Institutional practice becomes one of the key themes, with the archive establishing itself alongside collections. Or rather, and this is what the text focuses on, the photo album – is a complex tool on the borderline between active and passive perception, personal and shared experience, image, and text. How does this medium work in the context of contemporary art practice? What means does it have at its disposal when the author turns his attention to the problem of “everyday”? And can we truly talk about specific aesthetic attributes?
2025-07-28
Jana Hudáková, Slávka Kopčáková
The present study chronologically surveys innovative processes in aesthetic education and the impact of music educators who, after the political and cultural changes in Slovakia in 1989, embarked on the path of developing the concept of polyaesthetic education in line with the ideas of its founder, Wolfgang Roscher, and those of the Salzburg School (Mozarteum), Austria. The aim of the study is to clarify how the ideas of 1990s’ polyaesthetic education were applied to the aesthetic education subjects, primarily music education. Theoretical foundations, their adaptation to the Slovak educational environment, and analytical insights into Juraj Hatrík’s (1941–2021) creative work advancing the theory and practice of polyaesthetic education are presented in the section on his projects and music workshops. Hatrík’s projects, due to their originality and authentic affinity to a child’s spiritual world, managed to abandon the space of integrative music pedagogy and consistently followed the principles of polyaesthesis.
2025-07-28
Sanna Hirvonen
Both food and the sense of touch mainly were ignored throughout the history of Western philosophy. Times have changed, and finally, research is done on touch and on food even in Ango-American aesthetics. This paper brings the topics together by looking into the importance of touch in our aesthetic experiences of and around food. Once one turns away from the exalted realm of art and other exceptional experiences, it is evident that cooking and eating can provide important aesthetic pleasures in our everyday lives. I will argue that touch plays a fundamental role in three different, aesthetically important dimensions around eating. The first one is sensory and concerns the pleasures of the mouthfeel of food. The second is cognitive and relates to touch being a source of information about what is eaten. The third is the role of touch in the actions of cooking and having a meal.
2025-07-28
Tony Chackal
Touch has recently gained attention in aesthetics. Carolyn Korsmeyer argues that touchable artefacts offer valuable aesthetic encounters with genuineness, rarity, and connection to the past. She employs Walter Benjamin’s argument that a unique work has an authenticity and aura that copies cannot have. Yet Benjamin undermines his own argument in another essay on the aesthetic value of collecting books, surely products of mechanical reproduction. This reintroduces questions concerning whether copies can have auras and if they involve a sense of touch relevant to aesthetic appreciation. I argue that vinyl records are copies that can have auras and better demonstrate the aesthetic value of touch because they require it, unlike Korsmeyer’s examples. Records can have auras in three senses: collections can be unique, they can have cult value, and records in play have a ‘surrounding glow’. The aesthetic value of touch, aura, and connection to the past is revealed by situating records within a practice of collecting and the material relationship between collector and collection.