(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Italian philosopher Mario Perniola died on 9. January 2018, at the age of 76 years, after one year of illness. Perniola became very important for the teaching of visual arts theory and practice at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in the 1980 – 90s, where many of his texts were published in Danish by the Publishers of Visual Arts in compendia and small print. Mario Perniola last visited Copenhagen in November 2015, where he gave two lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts schools – one about the situation of the visual arts after the 2015 Art Biennale in Venice and another about aesthetics.
The lecture on aesthetics was about receptivity and empathy and was entitled «Complimentary. Ancient and new forms of hospitality» and was since published in the journal Ágalma No. 31, Rome, April 2016. The lecture on art – "Who is an 'artist'? Three other-
swers »- will be published in the issue of Visual Archiving published by the Publishers of Visual Arts on the occasion of Perniola's passing.
Current and historical. Mario Perniola wrote and published many books in these two areas, art theory and aesthetics. The angle of incidence could be as current as i Il sex appeal dell'inorganico ("The Inorganic Sex Appeal") of 1994, which in many ways prejudiced the theories that have circulated in the wake of queer and transesthetics and which relate to the critical potential of the body. The point of departure could also be historical, as in Perniola's many interpretations of the Baroque counter-Reformation's theological and political self-understanding. His last major work, L'estetica contemporanea ("The Aesthetics of the Contemporary"), dates from 2011 and contains a comprehensive treatment of all problem areas within the aesthetic thinking of the Western country, with crucial outlets for philosophy in Asia.
Large parts of another of Perniola's main works, The company of simulators from 1980, was translated into Danish with the title Glare and published by the publisher Sjakalen in Aarhus in 1982. Many other of Perniola's texts have also been translated into Danish over time.
The Italian's thoughts have been used and explored by such diverse Danish thinkers as the visual artist Pia Arke and the philosopher Peter Borum. In June 2017, Else Marie Bukdahl published the book The Recurrent Actuality of the Baroque at the Danish publisher Controluce: A section in this book is entitled «Mario Perniola. The new image theory of the Baroque »and is precisely devoted to Perniola's work with the interpretation of the element in the composition and understanding of contemporary images that can be inscribed in the aesthetics of the counter – Reformation Baroque.
Transverse. Perniola had its international breakthrough in the second half of the 1970s when the newly started art center Beaubourg in Paris launched its theory magazine Sleepers («Crossings, transitions, intersections»). Together with the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, he created a different approach to cultural studies: symbolic exchange, simulation, implosion, seduction, ceremony, archive, decoration and documentation all became analytical grips and topics that enabled precisely cross-cutting perceptions of world phenomena and of the human forms of practice.
The skewed or different angle of current topics continued to characterize Perniola's and Baudrillard's analyzes. This could be seen during the Gulf War in 1991, where both presented actual, albeit very different, media analyzes centered on the event's images and the event's impact, respectively. In this connection, Mario Perniola was interviewed by Jørgen Langdalen and Francesco Bentivegna for the Oslo magazine Samtiden 4/1992.
Diverse. It is not possible to establish any simple genre designation for Perniola's philosophical writing: tightly composed monographs alternate with anthologies, and sometimes the monograph is also so searching in its subject matter that it can only be understood when the whole book is read to the end; or behind, as when one says that «the time of this book is now ripe». This was the case with the book on the sex appeal of the inorganic, whose reach only finally dawned on me when Perniola's daughter Ivelise in 2013 organized a seminar in Rome on «situationist films and images», in which Mario himself participated with an excellent overview of situationist theory which has since been published in several languages. I was going to talk about the "revolt against gender or the revolt of the sexes" caused by feminist slogans and graffiti in the Egyptian uprisings, by Femen's declamatory use of the female body, and by Pussy Riot's parody gesture and sound. During the discussion, orthodox situationist supporters such as Anselm Jappe felt that my examples had nothing to do with situationist happenings, while Mario himself held back sphinx-like: He could see that in these female rebels we were dealing with an application of bodily possibilities beyond that. seductive and appealing, which at the same time maintained something mineral or neutral in the alloys and explosions the spectator amazed witnessed during the aforementioned happenings, with their many layers of interpretive possibilities. They were in a way beyond intention and will: purely designating, furious and contemplative in the midst of the handcuffs of the uprisings.
A category theory is particularly useful for understanding extracategorical phenomena – such as art and the sense of life.
Applicable category theory. In addition to anthologies and monographs as well as a few pamphlets on Italian politics, Mario Perniola has also authored two history books: on the Italian aesthetics of the post-war period, and on contemporary aesthetics in general – the West and the Orient. The Italian aesthetic Perniola has been working on occasionally for the past 20 years, and its final version was released in April 2017. A first issue was published in the Norwegian magazine Agora 2/3, 2001 in Gry Solbraa's excellent translation and editing. It was precisely seeking and aiming to divert aesthetic affairs also from literary and political writings. The situation is completely different with the former L'estetica contemporanea from 2011: It follows basic categories based on aesthetic thinking and practice. Perniola writes: "This extensive and multifaceted activity finds its roots in four conceptual fields, each of which can be identified as belonging to the concepts of life, form, cognition and action, respectively." Each concept then has a chapter in the book, and we are also told that they can be traced back in pairs to two basic books: Immanuel Kants Criticism of judgment and GWF Hegels Lectures on aesthetics («Lectures on the Philosophy of Art»). It gradually turns out that categories in particular are suitable for showing the gaps and transition problems between them, as was already the case with Leibniz's monads. Not least when the reader finally arrives at Japanese and Chinese thinking, it is clear that within the aesthetic branch of philosophy, a category theory is especially useful for understanding the phenomena that are extracategorical, such as art and the sense of life.
