Page - 30 - in Limina - Grazer theologische Perspektiven, Volume 4:2

28 | www.limina-graz.eu Alessandro De Cesaris | The Taste of Truth at the same time shows a direct connection to the feeling of pleasure (Kant 2000, 57). In this way, according to Agamben, taste – here understood as an extended faculty that goes well beyond the physical sense – is the key to comprehend the connection between cognition and ethics (cf. Agamben 2015, 12). 4.2 Taste and social structure This close connection between cognition and ethics describes a very pecu- liar kind of knowledge, one that structurally changes the subject. Extended to a new, broader level of awareness, taste acquires a paradoxical nature: it is at the same time utterly subjective and objective, singular and universal, unrepeatable and intersubjectively sharable. Kant’s paradoxical definition of beauty is closely connected to the medial extension of the experience of taste to the social and intersubjective dimension: the judgment of taste consists of «a relation of the representation of the object to the subject» (Kant 2000, 97). This relation expresses the “mixture” of subjective and objective that we have already seen in the physiological and aesthetical analysis of taste experience. The universality of the judgment of taste is not based on a concept – since the experience of taste is utterly singular – but on an expectation that is structurally impossible to confirm. Even though in the experience of taste as an extended symbolic form the object is not “consummated” as in the actual experience of taste, the inherently singu- lar structure of taste remains. Pierre Bourdieu has provided one of the most famous analyses of taste as a means of social distinction (cf. Bourdieu 1979). According to Bourdieu, taste is a habitus, namely a scheme that has a radical influence on the subject’s own structure and behaviour. In particular, two elements of the notion of habitus are important here: the first is that habitus is not a skill that can be externally “applied” to the subject, but rather a form of subjectivation it- self (cf. De Cesaris 2021). The second is that the notion of habitus is closely connected to the notion of repetition. Thanks to taste, the subject shapes and reshapes its own constitution. It chooses the objects that constitute its habitat, it creates its own environment in a circular process: the environ- ment influences its taste, and its new taste contributes to the modification A pivotal role in the constitution of the social space