ABSTRACT
This chapter will explore the fourfold structure of beholding that Husserl assigns to visual representation – addressing the work’s material basis, the work’s representational meaning, its aesthetic significance, and its presentational context (for example, such things as the frame). Section I offers a sustained analysis of how Husserl develops and entwines this fourfold structure especially in relation to his focus on (what we shall call) the phenomenological subject. Section II concentrates on what is at the heart of Husserl’s account of pictorial representation, namely the role played by resemblance and ‘nonanalogizing’ features. In Section III, attention is paid to Husserl’s understanding of the ‘unreality’ of the image object and the importance of the frame and, more significantly, the aforementioned nonanalogizing features in declaring this unreality. We then turn in Section IV to the specific relation between the image object and aesthetic consciousness. Special consideration is given here to his notions of ‘plastic form’ and the ‘double halo’ of retention that is at issue in works of art. In the Conclusion, we offer a critical review of Husserl’s key ideas and a significant development of some of them.
