“What place for the body in aesthetic experience?”
Agnès Lontrade will give an introductory talk on the history of the conceptualization of the body and the appearance of the notion of pleasure and eroticism in art and philosophy. It was in the eighteenth century that the first traces of a somatic foundation for bodily aesthetic pleasure emerged, but it was only in the twentieth century that it became possible to consider the body as a source of jouissance and to break the taboos surrounding erotism and somatic pleasure. Plato, Kant, Nietzche, Bourdieu, Santayana, Dewey, Marcuse and Shusterman will be mobilized in this study which will investigate the body via Jauss’ questions: “how can aesthetic jouissance be distinguished from jouissance in general?” (Little apology of aesthetic experience).