Aesthetic experiences are basically inconceivable without specific objects. What consequences does this object-relatedness have for the nature of aesthetic experience? To what extent do aesthetic objects also determine how they are experienced? The texts in the book consider their topic on the one hand empirically through examining concrete aesthetic objects from art, popular culture, and religion, but on the other, also by means of historical and theoretical reflections. By examining new adjustments to theory such as post-humanism, actor-network theory, object-oriented rational ontology, and speculative realism, conventional social-constructive explanatory models are transcended in favor of defining the aesthetic as a necessary interplay between object and experience.

Annika Schlitte, Markus Verne, Gregor Wedekind, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz