In a way distinct from artistic acts, aesthetic acts play a vital role in creation, as well as in knowledge and dialogue. They poetize, musicalize, cultivate, and choreograph the world — in short, they reshape it by inventing imaginative universals. We are all, to a greater or lesser extent, aesthetic actors venturing to lose ourselves in the Otherness to which we expose ourselves and on the basis of which we build new types of "realities." In a single gesture, aesthetic acts safeguard the world, create bonds between human beings, and free the latter from the dual trap of narcissism and melancholy.

Baldine Saint Girons is a professor of Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Philosophy at Université Paris X Nanterre. Her many published works include Les Monstres du sublime. Hugo, le génie et la montagne (2005), Le sublime de l'Antiquité à nos jours (2005), and Les Marges de la nuit. Pour une autre histoire de la peinture (2006).