Capoeira, ADHD and Aesthetic Movements of Life

In psychological research art and aesthetics are rarely considered central to the perspective of everyday life. Philosophically this relates to an insistent separation of art and life that goes back to Immanuel Kant’s theory of sensation in which aesthetics takes on a double meaning. Thus, on the one hand, aesthetics is a theory of art by which we can reflect on our actual experiences with different material forms of expression (aesthetic judgment); on the other hand, it also refers to a more general theory of sensibility, as the conditions of possibility for subjective experience (transcendental aesthetics).
As an effort to unite these empirical and transcendental aspects of sensation this paper will animate the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and argue that questions of art and aesthetic expressions are forces immanent to the production of sensibility and as such fundamentally related to the conduct of everyday life. In this perspective the question of aesthetic expression cannot be reduced to a function of psychological, social or cultural representation of the lived, but must also be addressed as a field for producing or opening new possibilities for everyday practice.
As a concrete example of an aesthetic approach to everyday life I will take point of departure in my own research exploring the relationship between the expressive movements in the Brazilian martial art, capoeira, and the conduct of children diagnosed with ADHD.