Espresso ma non troppo. On tempo and slowness in the ritual of coffee

Abstract

In the semiotic and communicational perspective retained for this article, the trinity of the sensitive world is organized around three polarities: aesthesia and synesthesia, in the registry of the sensory expression, esthetic regarding the forms and figures that give body to a sensitive experience, ethics regarding the way of life that is projected or updated in said experience. Applied to the degustation of coffee, their representations and their constitution in ritualized sensitive practice, this approximation shows the strong orientation given by the slowed, even suspended, temporality of the café in the emergence of the values for the subject of the experience. This sensitive utterance places the aesthesis as a first level, not only for creation, but also of negotiation with the flavors; the esthetic as a relational process, with motives and figures that take part in an image of taste that “takes” us, such as we take in the taste of things, under the dominant regime of the consumption experience; and finally, ethics as a relation régime, not only with expressive forms and configurations of taste, but beyond, as a true form of life that is revealed through an ethos of degustation of coffee , explored especially by publicity discourse.