Disfiction. Aesthetic disinterestedness and the mental attitudes of imagining and entertaining

Disinterestedness is often treated as the hallmark of aesthetic experience, but this paper argues for a narrower claim: disinterestedness, understood as indifference to existence, individuates an important kind of aesthetic experience rather than the genus. Building on a Waltonian taxonomy of representational arts, I argue that the familiar fiction/nonfiction divide is incomplete. Nonfictions prescribe belief and thereby implicate interest in actual existence; fictions prescribe imagining and implicate interest in fictional existence. A third category is needed, that of disfictions, which prescribe the attitude of entertaining a representational content without any commitment to the question of which world, if any, contains what is represented. Their distinctive mode of engagement releases audiences from questions about actuality versus fictionality and foregrounds the work's appearance, configuration, and history of making. I then argue that the disinterested attitude characteristic of disfictions modulates affect in a distinctive way: emotions such as fear can be savored without being tethered to welfare-directed appraisal in any determinate world. Finally, I sketch how this attitude can be extended beyond representational art via “disfictionalisation”: the deliberate detachment of perceptual content from belief in nonrepresentational arts and even in ordinary objects and nature.