In its extensive meaning, ‘biopoetics’ is a meta-discursive structure intent at signalling, in the History of Arts, every possible intersection between the symbolical order of fictional forms and the organic one of bios. At least four levels of this intersection can be found: the biological existence of the author, the theoretical structure of the organic in the author’s poetics, the fictional representation of the organic in the single work, the bearing of the organic on the aesthetic response of the work’s audience.
Until now, basically only ‘bioaesthetics’ has been attempted, which means that descriptions have regarded the mechanisms for which the aisthesis obeys to biologically determined conditions. What is still lacking are eminently ‘biopoetical’ models. A model which aims at reporting in an appreciable way the omnipresence of bios in every procedure of formal shaping needs to investigate every structure – the psychological, ideological and technical ones – in which an anthropological foundation acts as a producer of meaning. If this reasoning is accepted, then the aesthetic culture of the German 18th Century cannot but become a privileged model of reference for an analysis of this kind, as the one proposed in this issue of “Prospero”.
