Alongside the tantric philosophy for which Kashmir Shaivism remembers him, Abhinavagupta wrote one of the most influential works in the history of Sanskrit literary theory, a commentary called the Abhinavabharati on the Natyashastra, the foundational treatise on dramatic and aesthetic theory attributed to Bharata. His central contribution there was a fully worked account of rasa, aesthetic flavour or savour, arguing that the emotional experience a spectator has in the theatre is not the ordinary emotion of daily life transferred to the stage but a distinct, generalised, universalised savouring that occurs precisely because the spectator is not personally implicated in the events depicted the way the characters are.
The connection to his tantric philosophy is not incidental. The same vocabulary of a contracted, personally invested state of mind giving way to a wider, less bounded awareness runs through both fields, and later readers of Abhinavagupta, both within Kashmir Shaivism and in the modern academic study of Sanskrit aesthetics, have frequently argued that his theory of aesthetic experience and his theory of spiritual recognition are two applications of a single underlying account of consciousness rather than two separate interests that happened to occupy the same author.
This dual reputation, as the summit figure of a tantric philosophical tradition and as a foundational theorist of Sanskrit dramatic aesthetics, is part of why Abhinavagupta is read today by scholars who would not otherwise cross paths, one group interested in tantra and non-dual philosophy, the other in the history of literary theory, each finding in him the central account their field returns to.