Espes. The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics is an international interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal of aesthetics.
Thinking about music in the history of culture: A new textbook on the history of musical aesthetics
The book review of Kopčáková, S. (2025) Kapitoly k dejinám hudobnej estetiky pre študentov estetiky I. Starovek – stredovek – renesancia. Prešov: Prešovská univerzita v Prešove, Filozofická fakulta.
Copyright (c) 2026 ESPES The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics
The paper presents the common characteristics and aesthetic implications of two correlated phenomena, celebritization and kitsch, in contemporary society. While celebritization refers to the process of transforming individuals into public figures through intense media attention, kitsch pertains to mass-produced objects and themes often considered unoriginal or aesthetically void. Both phenomena are rooted in contemporary mass culture and are closely linked to commercialization, media, and market values. The study examines how celebritization and kitsch influence aesthetic perception, aesthetic norms, and values in society, particularly through mechanisms of emotional simplification, repetition, and media-driven visibility. At the same time, the research highlights their socially integrative functions: celebritization shapes collective ideals and social aspirations, while kitsch democratizes aesthetic enjoyment, fosters cultural solidarity, and generates accessible emotional engagement across diverse groups. These findings suggest that both phenomena are not only markers of superficiality but also active agents in shaping cultural participation, public taste, and aesthetic sensibilities in modern society.
This article examines the aesthetic dimensions of prolonged Russian aerial terror in Ukrainian rear cities. Moving beyond the dominant paradigm of terror as spectacle, it argues that contemporary Ukrainian experience is shaped by what Tina Polek terms the new abnormal, now solidified into an old abnormal in which disruption becomes a permanent condition of everyday life. Drawing on Arnold Berleant’s theory of negative aesthetics, Kant’s notion of the monstrous, and everyday aesthetics (Saito, Bachelard), the art icle conceptualises civilian life under bombardment as an engaged, embodied, and ethically charged aesthetic condition. It proposes the concept of an anti-sublime to describe how practices of care, repair, and dwelling resist the aesthetic and moral erasure produced by repeated terror. In this framework, meaning arises not from the spectacle of destruction but from the fragile persistence of everyday life under conditions of continuous threat.
Contemporary debates in aesthetics are increasingly challenging the traditional marginalisation of taste as an ‘inferior’ bodily sense, drawing attention to its cognitive, affective and ethical significance. Building on this reassessment, the authors consider the gustatory aesthetics as a critical model for analysing context-dependent forms of proximity, incorporation, and embodied implication. This model is applied to contemporary Ukrainian artistic practices that engage with wartime artefacts, sound, darkness, debris, traces of violence and traumatic experiences. Drawing on the critique of the hierarchy of the senses in the works of Carolyn Korsmeyer and on Nicola Perullo’s understanding of taste as a situational experience, the authors demonstrate how certain Ukrainian artistic practices transform military objects - fragments of missiles, bullet casings, weapons and other remnants of war - into media for aesthetic reflection and memory with an ethical underpinning. Gustatory aesthetics makes it possible to analyse how war-related art can create conditions for bodily intimacy without reducing trauma to a spectacle or transforming violence into an aesthetically consumed object.
Symposium: Once Upon a Time There Was a Minor Sense - New Perspectives on Gustatory Aesthetics
This article investigates taste in the corpus of Jacques Derrida, focusing on its emergence across published works and unpublished seminars. Starting from A Taste for the Secret and Economimesis, and through a close reading of Manger l’autre (1989–1990) and Rhétorique du cannibalisme (1990–1991), it follows the ways in which taste appears as an experience of auto-affection that maintains a structural relation to what exceeds and resists consumption. Rather than presenting taste as a pure alternative to appropriation, the article interprets it as a limit-experience in which contact, incorporation, and knowledge encounter what cannot be fully assimilated. It thus proposes to understand taste as a nonappropriative posture, capable of orienting the relation between aesthetics and ethics without resolving it into a normative synthesis. Approaching the seminars as a theoretical laboratory, the contribution shows how taste operates in Derrida’s thought as a critical instance with respect to any economy of appropriation.
This article explores the phenomenon of the practical aesthetics of taste. The author analyses three culinary works from the perspectives of pragmatic aesthetics (somaesthetics) and the aesthetics of education. The following works are reviewed: Grimod de La Reynière’s the Almanac des gourmands, The Spirit of Culinary Art by von Rumohr, and the Soviet recipe book The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. The work explores the intersection of the aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of taste: from practices of improving the body through nutrition and cultivating attitudes toward food to the ideological normalisation of taste preferences. Furthermore, the article demonstrates how these works anticipated contemporary discussions about food.
This paper explores the relationships between taste and technology in avant-garde gastronomy and contemporary arts. The case of Des Esseintes from Huysmans’s À rebours will be taken as the literary archetype of contemporary hyperaestheticization of creative meals. We propose the term aesthetics of techno-decadence to define a hallmark of today’s food scene: the emotional role of technology as a medium of excess and decline. Rather than celebrating sensationalism, techno-decadence integrates the dark sides of food systems into the hedonistic dimension of sophisticated dining experiences. The glorification of artifice resonates with artistic experimentations designing ultra-tech experiences centred on taste. What emerges is not a triumphant victory over nature but a form of critical hyperbole and sarcastic commentary that recalls the fin de siècle of over a century ago. Within this framework, the traditional marginalisation of taste becomes a site of resistance and ecological awareness.
The senses occupy a paradoxical place in the history of philosophy. They are our primary means of engaging with the world, yet they have frequently been treated as inferior to reason and regarded with suspicion as unreliable sources of knowledge. In this paper I trace the philosophical history of the senses from antiquity to the present, examining how different traditions have understood the relationship between sensation, cognition, and the body. I explore the enduring hierarchy that privileges vision and hearing as ‘cognitive’ or distal senses while relegating taste, smell, and touch to a lower, more bodily status. I also examine a number of historical debates over whether humans possess more than the traditional five senses, considering proposals ranging from speech and sexuality to proprioception, intuition, and extrasensory perception. By bringing together philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives, I argue that the number and status of the senses are not fixed biological facts but reflect broader assumptions about reason, embodiment, knowledge, and cultural values. Rather than treating the senses as passive channels through which information reaches the mind, the chapter invites readers to reconsider them as active participants in human understanding and to question the philosophical commitments that have shaped sensory hierarchies for more than two millennia.
We most often consider taste as a gateway to aesthetic experiences, which marks a difference between it and other senses, which are primarily considered in terms of the access they provide to the world. Here, I examine the epistemic dimensions of taste and their significance to epistemology more broadly. How have our epistemic paradigms relegated taste to a lesser role, and how might taking food itself more seriously change that?
This paper investigates the concept of quality through the lens of cheese tasting and production, arguing that different conceptions of quality entail distinct epistemological and practical consequences. It begins by analysing a dominant classical modern framework in which quality is treated as an objective and static property, revealing the vicious circularity underlying such an approach. Drawing on pragmatist philosophy, particularly William James, the paper reconceives quality as immanent to experience rather than as a property of an independent reality. It then develops the distinction between dynamic and static quality to show how processes of stabilization enable communication and reproducibility while potentially suppressing qualitative variation. Through the case of pasteurization in cheesemaking, this suppression of qualitative variation is framed as a broader ‘pasteurization of thought’ – the point at which a stabilized quality comes to be mistaken for quality as such. Finally, drawing on aesthetic experience, the paper argues that this tension between dynamic and static quality is not to be resolved but managed, and shows how tasting and production practices can keep static quality answerable to the dynamic quality it stabilizes.
Introduction to ESPES The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics thematic symposium titled Once Upon a Time There Was a Minor Sense: New Perspectives on Gustatory Aesthetics.
This paper examines the role of beauty in the history and theory of art, arguing that its marginalization in the late twentieth century has led to a crisis in the relation between art, truth, and action. Drawing on Nietzsche’s conception of life as an aesthetic phenomenon and Plato’s critique of mimetic art, the paper traces the gradual displacement of beauty by rational, institutional, and conceptual frameworks. It further analyzes the emergence of kitsch and the increasing mediation of meaning in contemporary art. Against this development, beauty is reconsidered as a condition of immediacy, singularity, and judgment. The paper concludes that the reintroduction of beauty is essential for restoring the possibility of meaning in art and life. Paradoxically, if beauty is not restored as a constitutive value of art – just as truth is to science and justice to politics – the very distinctions between performance and truth, presentation and reality, pretending and genuine emotional expression, original and fake, true action and its simulation risk collapsing. Beauty, as singular necessity – as exercised and exemplified in art – is the condition for meaning in art, and therefore in life.
This article proposes a reconceptualization of gustatory aesthetics beyond the anthropocentric paradigm that has historically marginalized taste as a ‘minor sense’. Drawing on Eugen Fink’s phenomenology of fundamental human phenomena – death, labor, domination, love, and play – we argue that taste attains its full aesthetic and ontological significance only when these phenomena are gathered together in the event of a festival. Contemporary discourses on the post-anthropocene, flat ontologies, and symbiotechnical alliances provide the framework for extending Fink’s analysis beyond the human. By integrating Fichte’s concept of mutual recognition (Aufforderung) and recent debates in new materialism and posthumanist aesthetics, we develop a model of ‘symbiotechnical taste’ in which human agents enter into cybernetic alliances with non-human actors – artificial intelligence, sensor technologies, microbial cultures, ecological systems – to overcome the limitations of individual gustatory judgment. This model transforms taste from a subjective aesthetic judgment into a relational, co-constitutive practice of world-making, wherein the Finkian festival re-emerges as the event of gathering distributed agencies into a shared gustatory experience.
Non-Human Perception of Aesthetics and the Phenomenonof Overview Effect in Samantha Harvey’s Orbital
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.
Copyright (c) 2025 ESPES The Slovak Journal of Aesthetics
The book review of Diaconu, M. (2024) Aesthetics of Weather. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
A Path Not Taken: Tobias Gottfried Schröer’s Isagoge in Eruditionem Aestheticam for the First Time in Slovak Translation
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.
Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects: Relational Thinking for Global Challenges – A Book Review
The book review of Perullo, N. (2025) Aesthetics without Objects and Subjects: Relational Thinking for Global Challenges. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
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.
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.
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.
In her recent article Overcoming Climate Breakdown Denial and Neglect through the Aesthetics of Nature (2023), philosopher Marta Tafalla argues for the possibility that one can learn about global climate change (GCC) if one listens to animals and stories nature itself tells us. Contrary to Tafalla, I argue that her suggestion is overly optimistic. In my paper, I first demonstrate that Tafalla assumes the link between cause and consequence always corresponds to findings in environmental science, and that this assumption is unfounded. Second, I examine the strategies and narratives employed by antienvironmentalists and demonstrate that they utilise the same narrative structures as Tafalla when telling animal stories. Accordingly, I claim that one can learn about GCC from animals’ stories if and only if one already acknowledges it.
Contaminated Survivals in Inhalaciones territoriales by Ana Laura Cantera
In Inhalaciones territoriales (2022), artist Ana Laura Cantera, in collaboration with Demian Ferrari, explores the urban space of Buenos Aires (Argentine) and Bangalore (India) using a device for the collection of ambient CO2. This work can be interpreted within the context of extinction, stemming from the planetary crisis we are witnessing, involving humans and non-humans alike. In scenes of devastation, the work explores ways to inhale, walk, feel, contaminate, challenging affective repertoires tinted with pessimism, in favor of delving into new affective expressions that advocate for multispecies alliances and solidarities. Drawing on the perspectives of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Vinciane Despret we will delve into the sympoietic landscape of this work, aiming to establish the posthuman coordinates of coexistence and multispecies collaborations as a vigorous response to the Anthropocene.
Contemporary Regimes of Visuality: The Avatar Mountains
In recent decades, academic conceptions of landscape have been progressively shifting away from a representational definition, according to which landscapes are reduced to scopic fictions aligned with the sensitivities of beholders, towards a substantive understanding that highlights their aesthetic, ecological, and socio-political dimensions. This ongoing turn has promoted more holistic and more-than-representational approaches that emphasize the interconnections between the perceptual and the environmental layers of landscape experience. At the same time, mobility practices (especially tourism) driven by the prior circulation of digital images foster a new reduction of places to the “horizons of expectation” shaped by such imagery. Without adopting a technophobic stance, this article examines the risks implicit in modes of landscape consumption that disregard their inherent complexity. Focusing on Zhangjiajie Forest Park in China, it analyses how cinema and digital media have transformed this natural landscape, highlighting both the merits of this remediation—in terms of enhanced visibility and economic development—and its drawbacks, notably the encouragement of unsustainable practices such as overtourism and the aestheticization of natural beauty.
Posthuman Motives in China Miéville’s Fictional Worlds
Our aim in this text is to analyse Miéville’s work, both theoretical and fictional, through the perspective of posthumanist sensitivity, which involves critically reassessing the human condition and embracing perspectives that extend beyond the human and more-than-human. We regard posthumanist thought as transcending the notion of an autonomous, rational subject being the sole ethical and meaningful agent, instead positioning humans within a broader network of life that necessitates interaction and negotiation with other non-human actors and forces. This shift in perspective in Miéville’s work can be observed in relation to Lefebvre’s theme of urban reality. We consider the relationship to the city as a non-human element central to the aesthetics of Miéville’s fictional universes. The foundation for examining his fictional worlds is the assertion that Miéville’s writing stems from a catastrophe of modernity and a subsequent radical rupture with it, suggesting that his thinking emerges post-catastrophe from a broken and fragmented world. In this context, he explores a future not based on any predetermined plan but arising from ongoing struggles – failures and renewals – in the pursuit of a future. Its aim is to challenge our present – specifically, the reader’s present – who may still inhabit a world overly centred on human existence.
The paper focuses on the aesthetic frames of gardening. I propose understanding plant cultivation as an aesthetic framing of divided hospitality and hostility. Following Derrida’s critical reading of Kant’s thoughts on beautiful frames and Austin’s thoughts on performative fails, I argue that the gardener’s performativity delimits the beautiful and cultivated order of his garden from the wild and chaotic ‘outside’ he cannot govern. Progressively, by resisting the ‘outside’ through inner rituals of framing, the gardener encloses himself ‘inside’ his locally performed order of cultivation. Based on my deconstructive revision of gardening genres, I conclude that environmentally engaged aesthetics might overcome the traditional gardener’s cultivation of hostility towards otherness.
This article argues that Nazi concentration camps blurred the line between human and nonhuman by juxtaposing dehumanised prisoners with animals kept in camp zoos and the SS Angora project. Drawing on survivor testimonies, philosophical posthumanism, comic books, and the concept of the "material witness," the study argues that overcoming anthropocentrism is essential for rethinking perspectives on life, memory, and testimony. The Nazi system’s hierarchy of life – caring for rabbits while people starved – demonstrates how domination relies on rigid species boundaries. By treating nonhuman actors, such as trees, animals, and landscapes, as witnesses, the article proposes posthumanist solidarity and shared vulnerability. These challenges inherited notions of humanity and claims that perception should become an ethical act, involving both human and nonhuman agents, in the reconstruction of history.
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.
This article analyses the fourth volume of Love, Death and Robots (2025) to explore how animality can be explored through posthuman aesthetics. Animals have always been historical beings, and their histories are inextricably tied to human activities. By not privileging humans over non-human animals, we can aim for a networked environment with companion species devoid of any binaries. By engaging with Donna Haraway’s theories of companion species, Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of becoming animals, Mitchell and Krause’s concepts of animal consciousness and Skonieczny’s concept of the animal turn, this paper focuses on the connections between different aesthetics, ethics, and politics of different animals. This article thus demonstrates that posthuman aesthetics represented through the animals in Love, Death and Robots challenges traditional humanist aesthetics and evokes an alliance of different realms and ecologies.
Interweaving Ecohorror and Symbiotic Associations
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.
This paper explores the aesthetic experience of landscape through the conceptual triad of space, territory, and Earth. It argues that territory is the semiotic structuration of space, while landscape remains unassimilated, operating as a site of desubjectification and spatial openness. The study examines how deterritorialization and landscapification disrupt dominant spatial regimes, allowing new forms of spatial relation to emerge. The paper contends that access to landscape is essential for the possibility of otherness and spatial transformation, particularly for marginalized groups, and that the experience of landscape grounds the potential for rethinking spatiality beyond institutional constraints.