Abstract

In this essay, I take my cue from the double meaning of the genitive case in the phrase «the time of the aesthetics». My aim here is double. On the one hand, from a genealogical perspective, I show that there is a time that is proper to sense perception, a time of aisthesis, pertaining to the sensorial and corporeal realm, and I argue that this sense of time has been mostly forgotten or marginalized by the dominant philosophical tradition in favor of a chronological, logicist notion of time. On the other hand, I show that renewed attention to the sensorial dimension, particularly in recent decades, qualifies our own time as the time of the aesthetics, that is to say, a time for the re-evaluation of the sensorial and corporeal dimension, and this marks a radical break with a past tradition of disembodied thought.