Afterword

The afterword reiterates it is time to risk a border-crossing in our view of art and see it as part of our shared affective becoming-excessive, as a fundamentally non-cognitive zone of self-othering that all animals engage, not just human animals. Art connects us profoundly to other creatures. The aesthetic capacity is animal; it doesn’t just approach animals or hold them in its purview. And if this is the case, then we can anticipate wholly new ways of viewing, inhabiting, and understanding artistic practices. The transporting power of art, the becoming-intense of aesthetics, the felt vibrations of aesthetic forces, and the taste for certain affect-circulating performances all have their “ancestral” lineage in animals’ aesthetic engagements. Bioaesthetics thus reminds us that the world of art includes hordes of other creatural actors and living assemblages—and that these beings have always been artistic.