The monograph ('Monadless Windows. Aesthetics from Heidegger to Rancière') follows the development of aesthetics in key thinkers of 20^th century philosophy, such as M. Heidegger, T. W. Adorno, and G. Deleuze. It argues that the central trait of this development is the encounter with an artwork in which a philosopher identifies thought. The artwork thinks and therefore it bears implications for the philosophical understanding of being and the world. But in order for philosophy to be able to grasp the thought of art it has to renounce the classical notion of representation. Art does not represent the world; it expresses being, which remains hidden in the representational constitution of the world. In the first part of the book, contemporary approaches such as A. Badiou’s ontology and J. Rancière’s aesthetics form the ground for a critical assessment of the aesthetical heritage of the 20^th century and for rethinking the notion of representation beyond the alternative between imitation and expression of being. The second part explores the notion of the world in contemporary philosophy through readings of Leibniz’s multitude of possible worlds, on the one hand, and the fictional worlds of modernist literature (S. Mallarmé, M. Proust), on the other. The third and final part addresses different ways in which philosophy reads specific artworks and how it identifies their political dimension.