This course aims to explore our attainment of pleasure from dealing with strange or monstrous types of art. It draws on current paradigms of scientific humanities and cultural studies: the notion of evidential semiotics defined by Carlo Ginzburg and that of short circuits by Slavoj Zizek. It enlarges on our capacity of devising strategies or searching for means that would enable us to regain meaning, understanding and harmony. As opposed to experimental schemes devised in neuroaesthetics, which quantify our instant ratings of specific audial and visual inputs, the neuro-evolutionary semiotic approach dissolves the presumed binary opposition between strong and lowly arousal emotions. On the one hand, the semiotic approach values our lowly arousal emotions as a useful point of departure that constantly feeds back on our intelligence, and on the other, it allows us some freedom and flexibility to revise our perceptions and judgments of certain details. To ensure fruitful dialogues between theories and applications, the instructor draws on depictions of faces, landscapes and artistic agents found in narratives, films and paintings.