Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Eudaimonism and Melancholia in the Archive

Abstract

In its original application to sensory experience, aesthetics dealt with the present, but in archive aesthetics we confront temporalities that extend backward and forward into times we experience both as sensory things here, now, in front of us, and also imaginatively as emissaries from the past to the future of which we form only one moment. To the extent that the aesthetic is also ethical, as I will argue, it ties us into networks of obligation which extend beyond the present moment into the deep past and the deep future. How does ethical obligation operate across this temporal disjuncture, and especially, if, as I will also argue, aesthetics are also always political, how does it relate t..