Balkan Journal of Philosophy

Volume 8, Issue 2, 2016

Sylvia Borissova
Pages 159-164

The Play of the Possible and the Real in Aesthetic Heterotopia

This paper is focused on clarifying the concept and the phenomenon of aesthetic heterotopia. The paper takes as its starting point the cultural phenomenon of heterotopia itself and then reveals its aesthetical component in order to find the “topos” of aesthetic heterotopia in contemporary culture. Thus, the main task of the paper will be exploring the boundaries and the relations between possibility and reality in aesthetic heterotopia through W. T. Anderson’s central figure of the postmodern ironist as the only type of worldview with future. In this context, some important issues of contemporary philosophical aesthetics will be discussed, such as: what is the mechanism of creating new aesthetic heterotopias, and what is it based on? Why can the field of classical aesthetics not cover such a cultural phenomenon? Why can non-classical aesthetics also be called process aesthetics, and what do aesthetic heterotopias and the field of process philosophy have in common? And last but not least: what moral attitudes do plenty of aesthetic heterotopias encourage?