Plasticity and Aesthesia: Towards a Semiotics of Art Encompassing the Sensitive Dynamics

After briefly tracing various intermingled meanings that the notion of plasticity has taken on in aesthetics over the centuries, the paper will focus on the correlation between plasticity and aesthesia from a theoretical point of view in order to rediscover the phenomenality of the work of art, the dynamics involved in its morphology. The painting of Margaret Watts Hughes, dating from the end of the nineteenth century, will offer the cue to observing how complex dynamics are embedded in the work of art. Encouraged by Jean Petitot’s outstanding research into the semiogenesis of meaning in perception, the re-reading of René Thom’s essays on art, and modern art in particular, will contribute to a semiotic understanding of aesthetic perception, in which aesthesia does not stabilise but, as in homoclinic points, swings and vibrates, dodging the possible single channeling of meaning.