Urban Aesthetics and Soma-Politics: On “Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life”

Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life, published in August 2019, is the second book in the series edited by Richard Shusterman “Studies in Somaesthetics. Embodied Perspectives in Philosophy, the Arts and the Human Sciences,” published by Brill Publishers. Bodies in the Streets: The Somaesthetics of City Life, represents a more original and stimulating work, offering a significant contribution in imposing somaesthetics as one of the most open and pluralist fields in contemporary philosophy. The book extends and expands in a fascinating way the sense and scope of somaesthetic research, not limiting itself to inquiries into aesthetic subjects (no matter how broad, articulated, and complex is the concept of “aesthetic” assumed and used). Rather, it broadens the horizon of somaesthetics to cover a variety of phenomena and subjects that range from the study of urban development and life, to ethics and politics, to the philosophical investigation of art, literature, and culture inter- and multi-cultural perspectives. The present contribution offers a reading and an interpretation of this new development of somaesthetics, especially emphasizing the importance of its connection to contemporary developments in radical feminism.