ABSTRACT
But I want as well to suggest a historical dimension for this argument. Aesthetics, and also literature, develop and designate themselves as such concurrently with what is called Romanticism. Kantian critical philosophy grants aesthetics its ultimate significance: as guarantee of the continuity between perception and cognition, between aesthetic and rational judgment. Such is ‘the main tenet and the major crux of all critical philosophies and “Romantic” literatures’.3 Literary criticism and interpretation at their most effective today remain ‘Romantic’ in this sense, as de Man in The Resistance to Theory showed in some detail in regard to the typical and exemplary critical assumptions of the Prague linguistic circle, Michael Riffaterre, and Hans Robert Jauss and the Konstanz School.4 Those versions of structural aesthetics focus on the reader’s mode of perception. Their crucial critical premise is that ‘it is not sufficient for a poetic significance to be latent or erased, but that it must be manifest, actualized in a way that allows the analyst to point to a specific, determined textual feature’ (HI p. 33). This stress on ‘actualization’ of poetic meaning in a textual element perceptible to the analyst or reader, the insistence that such actualization is part of the very nature of poetic signification, marks poetics and literary criticism as an aesthetics. The fundamental assumption of such a poetics is ‘that the articulation of the sign with its signification occurs by means of a structure that is itself phenomenally realized’ (HI, p. 34). With this guiding assumption, a process of signification is assimilated to semantic cognition and to perception or phenomenal intuition. Aesthetics-the aesthetic premise-thereby fulfils its deepest vocation: to confirm the phenomenality of language. Language, as poetry or literature, is understood as art: as human making, and as symbolic, involving the non-arbitrary connection between form and meaning. The ultimate function of aesthetics is to ensure the validity of language and of texts as a mode of knowledge. These are rather considerable stakes.
