This essay makes a case for phenomenological aesthetics as vital to genuinely transformative thought. To this end I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of institution as set out in Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the College de France (1954–55) and in The Visible and the Invisible (1964), supported by insights from Roman Ingarden’s 1969 paper “Phenomenological Aesthetics: An Attempt at Defining Its Range,” and an engagement with a contemporary work of art, Kim Jongku’s multimedia installation Mobile Landscape (2009). I argue that the conditions conducive to this transformative thought are challenging; that, counterintuitively, they require willing immersion in pre-critical, pre-objective intercorporeal experiences characterized by a loss of certainty and of one’s bearings. Experiences, in other words, that at first encounter seem far removed from the structures, formats and rigors of interrogation as these are conventionally defined. Nonetheless, I show that it is only when this risky aesthetics is deployed that otherwise unavailable strategies may be discovered for turning around, that is transforming, lived scenarios of the worst kind, scenarios that are experienced as hopelessly entrenched in conflict, threat or harm, and where no attempts at resolution seem to work.