Well burrowed, old mole!

Yesterday I was fasting sortof. While not eating, I was walking around the airport and marveling at a lot of food but without hunger for it. I explained that I was taking an “aesthetic” interest in the food and not an acquisitive one.  A “purely aesthetic interest in it”…what does that mean? Aesthesis is sensing as such—so it could not have meant a visual but also a tactile, a taste, a smell and so on.  I was allowing the food to stimulate me in some sense, but not my desire to consume it. It was then I realized that aesthetic experience is something that acts on the boundaries of our desires, it is not so much that aesthetic experience provokes desire, but that it gives us something to use to recalibrate, to reconstruct our desires.  This is vital in a capitalist world in which one of the main obstacles to autonomy is the pernicious operation whereby people pre-match the bounds of their desire to what the market is willing to offer them at any given time whether it is products services human relationships etc …