Artworks as Affective Atmospheres: Dufrenne's View of their Aesthetic and Philosophical Significance

Authors

Dimitris ApostolopoulosFollow

Abstract

This article reconstructs and critically evaluates Mikel Dufrenne’s arguments for the claim that our embodied engagement with art is the most fundamental variety of affective experience. I show how, on his account, aesthetic affectivity, or feeling, emerges in aesthetic experience, and identify the central role that aesthetic atmosphere plays in its constitution. I propose an interpretation on which aesthetic feeling, for Dufrenne, is a founded and skilled form of intentional activity that has epistemic (evidence-responsive) and metaphysical (world-disclosive) import. An aesthetic atmosphere, I contend, is an affective and perceptual context that is tied to an artwork and exercises a regulative and normative force over perceivers’ moods, perceptual habits, and cognitive and intentional attitudes. With a view to alternative (topological or thing-like and historicist) interpretations of aesthetic atmospheres, I consider the objections that Dufrenne’s approach is overly subject-centric and overlooks feeling’s dependence on conditions outside consciousness. His account of affectivity’s cosmological character, and his theory of the affective a priori, I contend, largely assuage these worries.

Recommended Citation

Apostolopoulos, D. (2025). Artworks as Affective Atmospheres: Dufrenne's View of their Aesthetic and Philosophical Significance. Duquesne Studies in Phenomenology, 5 (1). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/dsp/vol5/iss1/5