A New Taste for Life? Value Ecologies and the Aesthetics of the Outside

This chapter probes the idea that, amidst planetary processes of anaesthetisation, the task is not to save a modern notion of aesthetics whose general values have never prevented worlds from enduring the slow violence that have depleted much of the earth’s ability to make itself felt. The task might well be to gamble on what Félix Guattari called “a new aesthetic paradigm,” to step outside so as to affirm, in the outlaw edges of that which we have and might still continue to call aesthetics, the possibility of becoming sensitive to the immanent creation of values elaborated in divergent practices of thinking and feeling that insist and persist amidst the disaster. Values that might, just perhaps, inspire in us the thoughts, feelings and beliefs that may be required to cultivate speculative methodologies of life and death, unruly ways of inhabiting the earth otherwise.