‘Take your unseen heart and make it into art’ Aesthetic Transformation and Emotional Democracy

This article wants to answer three questions: first, why is not only sensibility but visibility important for modern democracy? Second, why is art or aesthetic experience important for both democracy and visibility? And third, how is it possible that aesthetic experience generates effects that conduce to democracy? Answering these questions aims at highlighting an inner connection between democracy, feelings and aesthetics. For a democratic community, on the one hand, cannot exclude feelings from political discourse, but, on the other hand, cannot accept them in their immediate and absolute form. Feelings need ‘transformation’, and the best popular medium for this is aesthetic experience.