Somaesthetics and Banality: A Reply to Kremer

Abstract

This short paper is an attempt to intersect my reading of Alexander Kremer’s key ideas in his article Pragmatists on the Everyday Aesthetic Experience (2020) with my previous thoughts on banality as an aesthetic quality experienced by the modern subject in her everyday life. My contribution tries to interconnect key theoretical and artistic conceptions of banality (as discussed for example by Charles Baudelaire, Hannah Arendt, Marie Darrieussecq, Edward Keinholz) with Shusterman’s somaesthetics and subsequently to reveal another possibility of rethinking the relationship between aesthetics and ethics.

Keywords

• pragmatism
• somaesthetics
• banality
• everydayness
• insensitivity
• visual art