Mario Perniola - Posthuman

Posthuman

In the 1990s Perniola includes new territories in his philosophical inquiry. In Del sentire (On feeling 1991) the author investigates novel ways of feeling which have nothing to do with previous ones that characterized modern aesthetics from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Perniola claims that sensology has take over since the beginning of the 1960s. This requires an impersonal emotional universe, characterized by anonymous experience, in which everything renders itself as already felt. The only alternative is to turn back to the classical world and, in particular, to ancient Greece. In the volume Il sex appeal dell’inorganico (The Sex Appeal of the Inorganic 1994; English edition, 2004), Perniola brings together philosophy and sexuality. Contemporary sensibility has transformed the relations between things and humans. Sex extends beyond the act and the body. An organic type of sexuality is being replaced by a neutral, inorganic and artificial sexuality indifferent to beauty, age or form. Perniola’s work explores the role of eros, desire, and sexuality in today’s experience of the aesthetic and the impact of technology. His is a train of thought which opens up new perspectives on our contemporary reality. The most surprising feature is Perniola’s ability to combine a rigorous re-interpretation of the philosophical tradition with a meditation on the “sexy”. He addresses uncanny aspects such as sexual intercourse without orgasm, climax or any release of tensions. He deals with orifices and organs, and forms of self-abandonments which go against a mutual pattern of reciprocity. However, drawing on the Kantian tradition, Perniola also argues that spouses are things, because “in wedlock each entrusts his/her entire person to the other in order to acquire full rights on the whole person of the other”. In L’arte e la sua ombra (2000) (Art and Its Shadow, London-New York, Continuum, 2004), Perniola proposes an alternative interpretation of the shadow which has had a long history in philosophy. In the analysis of contemporary art and film, Perniola explores how art continues to survive in spite of the world of mass communication and reproduction. He maintains that the meaning of art is to be found in the shadow created which has been left out by the art establishment, mass communication, market and mass media.