ABSTRACT
The art of the Troubadour is art of finding-literally trobar-the word as it springs from its place of origin in Nothing. It is rather an art of "making", and its means are considered traditionally within the frame of rhetoric. The Aristotelian categories reveal not fixed forms of language so much as language in its emergence as the showing forth and originary articulation of being. At stake in courtly song is not psychological or biographical experience-as reflected in the razos and vidas that spring up around the Troubadour poems to introduce and comment on them-so much as an ontological event of language. Nonetheless, it clearly demonstrates Dante's penchant for creating a summa of all genres available to him in the cultural field in which he works. Dante's self-reflectiveness carries with it still a primary relation to transcendence and divinity. There is a reductive reflectiveness that posits the self, taken just for itself, as foundation and as unaware of its intrinsic nullity.
