Abstract

This article reconsiders José Ortega y Gasset's notion of the dehumanization of art by relating it to artistic autonomy, the decentring of everyday life, and the preservation of the fictive as a condition of creativity. Dehumanization is understood as a decentring of art from exclusively human parameters, making it possible to reconceive aesthetic activity in bioaesthetic terms as a process of deterritorialization across living forms. Drawing on the bioaesthetic work of Elizabeth Grosz and Carrie Rohman, I argue that creativity and expressive capacity are general features of life, while insisting that aesthetic expressions articulate distinct sensitivities, each with its own mode of appearance. To articulate continuity and difference without reductionism, I turn to Jordi Claramonte's modal aesthetics. From this perspective, fictive distance clarifies the specific sense of artistic practices as activities through which life and sensibility are expanded and diversified within a broader continuum of living forms.