La fabbrica dell’intelligibile. Il problema estetico in Claude Lévi-Strauss

The place of aesthetic problems in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s thought has long been neglected or reduced to concerns internal to a theory of art. Far from assigning aesthetics an ornamental function of theory and to aesthetic phenomena a peripheral space of social organisations, Lévi-Strauss sees aesthetic perception as a fundamental condition of human existence and offers precious insights into a more general investigation of its role in the processes of cultural production. The aim of the article is to bring out the unexpressed virtuality of Lévi-Strauss’ aesthetic thought as a model for the current research on aesthetic phenomena. Firstly, by following Lèvi-Strauss’s exhortation to think the aesthetic in terms of a logic of the concrete that produces orders of intelligibility within the sensible; then, by inaugurating a dialogue between the Lévi-Straussian investigation of the logical operations of wild thought with current approaches to the aesthetic functions of cognition within the framework of human evolution.