ABSTRACT
Aesthetic thought, a sensuous affection that touches upon spirit, is a thought that conceives of the image. Doubtless, such a definition is not exhaustive, yet it seems sufficient. What is an image? An image is something that has detached itself from the object, a doubling of the world in the domain of semblance, or a doubling of the world that brings about the domain of semblance as a domain drifting between being and non-being, matter and spirit. The image need not be understood as a copy or a reproduction. The copy, like the image, is ambiguous, but its ambiguity differs from that of the image. The image’s semblance is a shimmering that hovers ambiguously between being and non-being. A copy is ambiguous because its semblance has the effect of denying the fact that a copy, too, is an image. This is why the copy can posit itself as an object: as the object copied and as an object with a consistence of its own, with a consistence that resembles the consistence of beings, of the image carrier, of the extension of the canvas and the density of the frame, if one looks at the case of paintings. Inasmuch as one must distinguish between image and copy, or between two forms of ambiguity, or between two effects of semblance, an image is something that proves to be fleeting, something that appears, flares, shines forth and vanishes, something that turns toward the beholder and away from him, not something that perseveres in its being or that belongs essentially to being. Images exist only as a flight of images. It is as if the image did not present the world but exhibited the relation to the world and thereby distanced the world, loosening its coherence and consistence. The image is a trace of the world. It is as much a form of participation as a sign of solitude. It is both a bond and a rupture that splits the world. Whatever enters or becomes an image, whatever comes into being as an image, raises the question of whether one can say that it was there, to allude to The Death of Empedocles. 1 The absence of images is thus not the contrary of the image, and it is never simply imposed from the outside, as it were. It is for this reason that one can turn to Adorno and speak of ‘aesthetic comportment’ 2 as a ‘gaze’ under which ‘the given is transformed into an image’, or of ‘imageness’ as constitutive of art, detecting even in music an image-like element that characterizes art itself and not merely programme music. If art is the objectification of ‘aesthetic comportment’, then ‘aesthetic thought’ stands for such comportment since the transformation into an image must be considered a sensuous affection touching upon spirit. At the same time, ‘aesthetic thought’ also designates the labour of the concept that refers to ‘aesthetic comportment’ and that feeds off the sensuous and spiritual affection at work in art.
