ABSTRACT
Caravaggio's passion for meaning is soundly set in place, and in its ability of reversal it rejects the meaning which the law institutes by the commission of his painting. Any resort to a Hegelian argument is partly symptomatic of the reversal, or rather, the moving 'back' from the Kantian aesthetic as an act of redesignation. Hegel's crime of truth is found in his crime of the real, executed by the knowable Notion. Caravaggio's work is manifest of Hegel's aufheben. It suppresses its own singularity by dint of a universality that catholicized the suffering of the truth. Caravaggio's metaphysical references inhabit the spaces of reality, where reality is not riddled with the mechanisms of the notion, but is the material reality of the notion. In Caravaggio's mediation, Lenin's materialist conclusion is never concluded because it is regaled with the ability to withhold its dialectical exchange-value.
