Abstract

Sweetness is a vastly complex question, which intertwines a variety of disciplinary fields. Presenting the first stage of a wider and more articulated investigation within the aesthetics of taste, this text attempts to consider sweetness not only as a taste with a significance that overcomes the boundaries of palatability, but also, within these boundaries, as a flavour provided with a peculiar nature. Since there are no systematic aesthetic and philosophical treatments, we use several references from different fields, trying to sketch the first elements of the sweet taste and its peculiarities, its semantic and conceptual richness, its ambivalences and ambiguities. The aim of this article is to explore the potential of a thought not only about sweetness but with it, as an attitude to feeling and thinking that can be characterized as «sweet». A sweet knowledge does not promote stable ontologies based on hierarchical classifications or systematic methodologies. It is not a sugary one and, less than ever, a nauseating feeling; it is rather a whole perception far from any intellectual staticity, intimate and flexible, open and connected to the experience as a participatory flow. The article is composed of two parts: in the first, we propose a critical and aesthetic analysis on the «senses» of sweetness as a taste; in the second, we consider its main metaphors, namely sweet food as a medicine, sweetness of God, sweet taste as incorporation and, finally, as an intimate and corresponding relationship.