Between the Death of Art and the Hour of the Assassins

Algunos impasses pos-hegelianos de la estética filosófica

Abstract

The relationship between art and philosophy has always been conceived through a special analysis of the tension between poetics and politics. The exile of poets from Plato’s Republic, Kant’s founding of the community on the judgment of taste, and the aesthetic education of man that Schiller proposed with reformist intentions, are three emblematic examples of a recursive device that strives to analyze philosophically an irreducible tension between the poetics of politics (i.e., styles of articulating that which is shared), and the politics of poetics (that is, forms of intervention of artistic creation).
The Hegelian assimilation of art to a «thing of the past» simply represents one more episode in a long history of misunderstandings, exclusions and violent appropriations, but it also constitutes an essential moment for contemporary aesthetic reflection, in the sense that it attempts to resolve this essential tension.
Clearly, and despite Hegel’s diagnosis, art will continue to proliferate, thus forcing philosophy to confront, again and again, the tension that so tragically defines aesthetic thinking.
Far from the scandalous interpretations of Hegelian thought that revolve around such concepts as «obituary» or «funeral prayer», the works of Benjamin and Adorno, Heidegger and Sartre, Bataille and Blanchot, Deleuze and Rancière, propose a series of incommensurable readings of Hegel’s diagnosis (polarized with respect to the concepts of criticism and effectiveness) that restores to art its real (in)significance for mankind.