ABSTRACT
This chapter urges an abandonment of the search for a theory of art or of the arts as well as an abandonment of “theory” as it came to be defined under the influence of the “fog from France,” literary and cultural theory that used art to elaborate on one or another privileged interpretive rubric: Marxism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and the like. Rejecting, along with French fog, the Teutonic dogmatism that dominates traditional aesthetics, it draws on writings from Juliette Lichtenstein and Michael Baxandal to argue for an engagement with artworks in their individual specificity. What Lichtenstein calls la pensée artistique or “artistic thinking” follows Valery’s suggestion that we think the way we bang into something, the way “we stumble on something which resists us, which hurts and disconcerts us.” This “artistic thinking” is what I call “thinking with images,” a special achievement of an embodied enactive cognition that uses the skills it has refined for engaging artworks where we find them in the world.
