Abstract
Recent debates about aesthetics are characterized by a partly intentional, but also partly involuntary, vagueness. Whether it be aestheticisation or anesthetisation, articisation or desartification: what is upheld or deplored under one and the
same label in fact designates rather different things. The paper makes a suggestion as to how the field could be reorganized. Taking heed of what political theory discusses as the “political difference” between “politics” and “the political”, the aim is
to examine what would be gained by working with an “aesthetic difference” that does not straightforwardly equate “the aesthetic” with “art”, and “the aesthetic” with the totality of sensuous-aisthetic processes. An aesthetic thinking would then
amount to a thinking that does justice to these inner polarities and remains faithful to the ambiguity of its objects.