“Therefore, with respect to beauty and badness [πρὸς κάλλος ἢ πονηρίαν], the imitator [ὀ μιμντὴς] will neither know nor opine rightly about what he imitates . . . the imitator knows nothing worth mentioning about what he imitates; imitation is a kind of play and not serious; and those who take up tragic poetry in iambics and epics are all imitators in the highest possible degree”
—Plato, The Republic
“Sometimes I am delighted by things being as they are, sometimes by their resemblance to something else. Sometimes understanding how things work weakens my desire for metaphor, sometimes the desire is sharpened by understanding how things work.”
—Edward St Aubyn, A Clue to the Exit
This book is about the possibility of extricating the question of art from its Platonic schema, and about the possibility of thinking the event of art outside the metaphysical concept of truth. It is also about the possibility, and indeed the challenge, of thinking metaphor in place of mimesis. Where does the “desire for metaphor” come from? Is metaphor a trope amongst others, or perhaps the trope that encompasses all tropes? Or is it something altogether different—not a mere rhetorical figure, but a clue to “how things work”? Those questions already animated a previous work, devoted to Proust.1 My aim, here, is to extend and problematise further the aesthetics of metaphor tentatively introduced in that book, and raise the question of the philosophical conditions under which such a project is viable and the metaphysical positions that need to be avoided and criticised in the process. Specifically, I wish to raise the question of whether and how, through the question of metaphor, aesthetics can overcome its mimetic paradigm, first articulated by Plato, and avoid the metaphysics of idealism (as well as realism, or empiricism). The title of this book is possibly misleading, however, in that it seems to point to something like a post-metaphysical age, and thus to a linear history that would take us from “metaphysics” (and its concept of mimesis) to a non-metaphysical aesthetics, rooted in metaphor. It would seem to signal the most naïve desire and indeed the most metaphysically overdetermined gesture, which deconstruction has relentlessly warned us against: isn’t it precisely at the moment when one claims to have left “metaphysics” behind that its most constraining and deeply rooted features remain in force? Isn’t aesthetics, the project for which this concept stands, not intrinsically and irreducibly metaphysical? And isn’t the project of a non- or post-metaphysical aesthetics—as opposed to an exploration of its limits, closure, or margins—itself not a contradiction in terms, and thus doomed from the start? Such is the reason why I need to qualify further, and from the start, what I mean here by metaphysics. Firstly, I am not claiming an absolute or indeed necessary identity between philosophy as such and metaphysics, as designating something like the structure of western thought, and underlying our science, art, and culture as a whole. I am not suggesting, therefore, that there is such a thing as Metaphysics, that is, a unitary and entirely homogeneous system of thought, the unfolding of which since Plato would have determined our history, and of which aesthetics would be a moment and a branch. In fact, much of what I will try and do in this book is provide what could still be seen as a metaphysical framework within which to think art—a framework that, for reasons that will become clear later on, I will prefer to describe in ontological terms, developed systematically elsewhere.2 In the same way that, in that earlier book, I argue that key developments in the natural sciences have pushed classical, Aristotelian metaphysics, and its consummation in Hegelian dialectics, out of its “dogmatic sleep,” I argue here that art—not, again, art as such, but a certain conception and practice of art—forces aesthetics out of its dominant paradigm, referred to here as mimesis.
That being said, what I will refer to here as “metaphysics,” and which has its roots in Plato and Aristotle, will be envisaged as the dominant, if not the only, framework within which art emerged as a problem for philosophy, and its role and value were established. I will describe the thought in question as laying the foundations for the idealist metaphysics with which I shall take issue, and the idealist aesthetics I wish to overcome. The problem, I will argue, with the philosophy of art inherited from Platonism and perpetuated through the aesthetic theory of Hegel, and even Adorno, is the systematic subordination of what I will call the event of the work of art, its distinct materiality, and irreducible sensory dimension, to its truth, understood as the truth of the Idea, or the Concept. In other words, the problem lies with the way in which truth is formulated in advance of that event, and thus not allowing it to produce its own truth, or disrupt that of philosophy. The place of art and the artwork’s relation to truth are defined within a conceptual order and hierarchy which varies from one author to the next, but which never calls into question the idea that, when everything is said done, it’s the philosophical concept, and not the artistic percept, which provides the complete or absolute form in which truth is expressed. In that sense, whilst agreeing with Jay Bernstein’s claim regarding the “discordance of art and truth” (as well as the moral good) as the fundamental experience of art in modernity, and thus with the “autonomy” of art (from rationalized truth and morality), I don’t agree with the claim, which Bernstein sees verified (whether rightly or wrongly) in Heidegger, Derrida, and Adorno, that this autonomy is at the same time the “alienation” of art from truth, one that leads to a sense of “loss,” “mourning,” and “grief,” and generates a nostalgia from the moment when art and truth were united or in harmony.3 On the contrary: I shall want to affirm the autonomization of art from what Bernstein calls “cognitive” truth as the chance for art to affirm the truth of art beyond or outside its metaphysical schema, and thus as a cause for celebration, not lament. Equally, I want to dispute the claim, which Bernstein formulates at the end of his provoking book, that philosophy “can only speak its separation, its loss of the capacity cognitively to engage sensuous particularity, if it ever possessed such, aporetically,”4 by raising the possibility of thinking the event of the work of art outside the play of universality and particularity.
The question, then, is one of knowing whether there can be another way, if not a variety of ways, of articulating the connection between art and philosophy, or between the work of art and the philosophical concept. Could that way be that of what the philosophical tradition as well as the theory of art and literature call realism, or naturalism? As an aesthetic and philosophical position, realism is as problematic as idealism, if only because it remains entirely governed by the conceptual schema and oppositions of classical metaphysics: it presupposes that the world that we see is the world that art can and should imitate, for it is the real world. Whether realism is said to be unachievable by art, on the grounds that, as Plato argued, art can only ever produce a simulacrum of reality, or whether, as many painters of the early renaissance argued, art is indeed the best imitator of reality as such, realism sees art as the identical and faithful repetition of a reality that is given as such and in advance, independently of the work itself. As a result, it is only a naïve realism, which produces a naïve form of art. It fails to ask the question of reality itself, its sense, and the manner in which we tend to relate to it. It fails to see that if art exists, it is to reveal a reality that is precisely different from the reality we observe as beings-in-the-world, without being the reality of another, transcendent, and superior world (which is what idealism argues). Art, I will argue, isn’t rooted in the brute, immediate reality of the world, or that of our impressions or perceptions. It is a matter for neither the immediacy of raw sensations and affections, nor the mediacy of the idea, the true and ultimate expression of which would be philosophical. The question, then, is to know how to give art a place that is a matter neither of sense, and thus of the concept, nor of the senses, and thus of a brute impression. How can we make sense of art’s relation to matter without falling either in formalism, which values art by negating it, that is, by extracting from it the Idea that transcends it, nor in brute materialism, which refers us to matter as what we already know, and which therefore also ends up by negating it, but through its identical and impoverished reproduction? The question, then, is one of knowing how to find a way between, or, better said perhaps, outside, the Scylla of idealism and the Charybdis of realism.
Between the immanence of matter and the transcendence of form, there is the space (and the time) of what, for lack of a better world, I suggest we call the hypersensible. Between the impression and the idea there is the work of art, the operation of which, I want to suggest, is metaphorical. But this is the point at which the suspicions of deconstruction surface again, reinforced as it were: already in June of 1978, at a conference entitled “Philosophie et Métaphore,” Derrida wondered about the insistence, and indeed the resurgence of that “very old subject,” and the attempt to revive it, or give it a new youth, as “astonishing” and even “staggering” (sidérante).5 Not just, he goes on to argue, because metaphor is as old a trope as metaphysics itself, used and abused, but also and primarily because it is metaphysical through and through . I will return to the concerns of deconstruction later on, but will eventually argue for a constructivist approach of metaphor (and, more generally, aesthetics). Between ordinary sense perception and thought, or noetic seeing, there is the space of what, following a Proustian clue, I call artistic vision. It is a bodily, incarnate vision. However, in its encounter with the work, the body undergoes a transformation: in art, it is no longer matter that is incorporated, that is, guided towards my body as towards its own end; rather, it is now the body that incorporates itself—and this means expands, dissolves or disorganises itself—in matter. Between seeing in the ordinary, perceptual sense, which phenomenology, from Husserl to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, has been concerned to analyse, and artistic vision, there is a discontinuity: far from extending and confirming my ordinary perception of the world, which is always guided in advance and constantly on the look-out, artistic vision interrupts and disrupts it. This process does not require that art turn away from the world of ordinary objects and towards unusual, more noble or higher objects (freedom, virtue, the divine, etc.) and become, as Kant would say, symbols of such Ideas of reason. On the contrary, art—at least a certain type of art—reveals the possibility of returning to ordinary objects (a piece of fruit, a smile, a hand, the wind, or the rain) so as to bring out their forgotten, overlooked, or exhausted intensity. It is not a matter of objects, but of perspective, and the manner in which, in each instance, the body is called upon and provoked. It is a matter of recognising the fundamental shift or modification that needs to take place for the realm of the hypersensible to be disclosed. In short, the hypersensible designates a certain state of matter, and a certain operation on matter, yet one that differs from our ordinary, practical relation to it, and to which science itself remains ultimately bound. At the same time, the hypersensible designates an aesthetic, or, better said perhaps, aesthesiological state of the subject, a certain affectivity of the body. It could be said to be subjective as well as objective, were “subject” and “object” notions not entirely inadequate to characterise the state of the body and matter at work in the work of art. By envisaging art from the point of view of the hypersensible, philosophy escapes the duality of subject and object, as well as the double pitfall of realism and idealism. If the hypersensible calls for an aesthetics, it is in the double, classical sense of a theory of sensation and art.
The subtitle of the book (“From Mimesis to Metaphor”) is also possibly misleading, and thus requires some preliminary clarification. It signals a structural analogy, but also a radical alternative, between two concepts and radically different views of art. Part I argues that mimesis is the operation that metaphysical aesthetics ascribes to art. It’s an operation that consists in bridging the gap or mediating between the polar opposites that define the space of metaphysics, namely, the sensible and the supersensible, and the series of terms and variations to which that founding distinction led, such as the sensible and sense, the material and the ideal, nature and freedom, or nature and spirit. Despite its many differences, twists and turns, and even bitter disputes, modern aesthetics—from Kant to Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Adorno—remains committed to an essentially Platonic conception not of art per se, but of the space within which art arises as a question for philosophy. The case of Adorno will turn out to be a particularly interesting, limit case, insofar as his aesthetic theory throws mimesis into a state of permanent crisis, yet one that, in the end, he does not manage to extricate himself from, such is his unquestioned commitment to the very terms, concepts, and metaphysical framework that produced the theory in the first place. It is the same Platonic schema, I believe, which governs the various, and at times seemingly opposed aesthetic views of the classical and late Renaissance, and of Neoclassicism, and which connect the discourse on art of Antiquity with the modern era.
Part II introduces metaphor as an altogether different operation, which opens up an altogether different space (and time), one that metaphysics has consistently overlooked, precisely because, since Aristotle, it has not ceased to subject it to its own imperatives. The space (and time) in question unfold outside the founding opposition, and the hierarchy, between the sensible and the supersensible. At the same time, it signals a certain excess of the sensible itself, and within the sensible, one that empiricism and realism fail to grasp. Now although there is a certain structural analogy or symmetry between mimesis and metaphor, it’s not one that’s absolute. In other words, I am not suggesting that, in place of mimesis, we always think metaphorically, and turn metaphor into a grounding concept, and least of all the only artistic schema. What I am suggesting, though, is that it allows us to free a different space of experience, and make sense of a number of artistic and literary practices and works, which resist the alternatives that, since its inception, philosophy has forced on art, and on the sole basis of which it was able to value (or condemn) art. But why metaphor rather than any other trope or literary genre? Why this privilege of the literary to begin with? Why not allegory, the symbol, or metonymy? I’ll return to those questions in some detail in Chapter 1 (‘Intermezzo 1’), when I discuss the connection between neoclassical allegory, the romantic symbol, and mimesis.6 At this early stage, and taking my lead from Proust, let me simply say the following. Metaphor, he says, consists of the ability to recognise something in something else, and see the beauty of an object in a different object. As I’ll return to this definition at length in Part II, the following preliminary remarks should suffice: the definition doesn’t claim that there is such a thing as a beautiful object; nor does it say, as Kant does, that beauty (like truth) consists of the accord or correspondence between an object and a subject from the point of aesthetic judgement, in which the object is seen as purposive and is accompanied by a feeling of pleasure. Rather, the experience of the beautiful involves the presence of a subject, an object, and an additional object=x, and this in such a way that it is precisely in the movement that carries one object into the other that beauty, or truth (Proust equates the two), takes place. If a certain form of judgement is still at work here, if there are grounds for something like a process of recognition, it seems no longer to involve an operation of subsumption of a particular under a universal; the type of judgement that is at work here seems to me to be neither determining nor reflecting: escaping the play of the universal and the particular, it opens onto the world of singularities, and is both connective (and . . . and . . . ) and disjunctive (either . . . or . . . or . . . ). If truth is involved, it’s not one that involves accord, agreement, or correspondence between a subject and an object, but between a subject and a potentially endless and non-synthesizable chain of differences, an excess that our cognitive powers can no longer grasp.
Following the Proustian clue, I suggest that we understand metaphor as the schema—or, better said perhaps, the hypotiposis—of the hypersensible, that is, as the operation that reveals or opens up that space and time, hidden or folded in the space and time of ordinary perception and cognition. Naturally, this means that, whilst a matter of presentation, the hypotiposis in question is neither schematic, where schematism designates the direct mode of presentation of the pure concepts of the understanding, nor symbolic, that is, oriented towards the indirect or analogous presentation of ideas of reason. And that is precisely the reason why metaphor, and not allegory (or the symbol), is the image of the hypersensible. Coleridge famously defined allegory as “the employment of agents and images . . . so as to convey, while we disguise, either moral qualities or conceptions of the mind that are not in themselves objects of the Senses.”7 It is a trope and, more generally, a representation conveying meaning other than the literal: through the representation of figures, characters, or events in narrative, dramatic or pictorial form, the allegory is able to convey abstract ideas or principles, such as charity, faith, greed or envy. Thus, as Fontanier insists, an allegory has two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.8 It conforms to the Kantian definition of the symbol, and to art as the sensible image of a supersensible idea, or the sensuous presentation of sense. In that respect, as I’ll show in greater detail, it is an entirely metaphysical trope, and it is perhaps not a coincidence if the most famous allegory, or its very type, is that of Plato’s cave: as an allegory of the difference between the sensible and the supersensible, and specifically between the illusion of the senses and the truth of Ideas, it is the allegory of allegory itself, the founding muthos of metaphysics, and one that finds its highest artistic expression in neoclassicism. Metaphor, on the other hand, refers to an aesthetic experience, reducible neither to the lived experience of, say, Romanticism (and its theory of the symbolic), nor to the truth experience of idealism (and its theory of allegory), most visible in neoclassical art.
Now there is no doubt that this general programme presents us with a series of difficulties, which will need to be addressed in detail. I have already alluded to the difficulties bound up with the concern to identify mimesis as the paradigm governing metaphysical aesthetics as a whole: how can one make such a claim without losing the specificity of the texts and positions under scrutiny? Can it be made in terms other than vague and general? The programme in question also requires that we rescue metaphor from the damning critical and deconstructive operations which, at the limit of metaphysics, Heidegger, Derrida, and Deleuze, each in his own way, carried out by revealing its connection with the metaphysics of presence and identity. But this, in turn, requires that we wrest metaphor from its classical, Aristotelian schema, as well as from the modern interpretations to which it led, and which only reinforced its metaphysical, idealist framework. In other words, taking my initial clue in Proust, but extending it to Hölderlin’s later work, and to contemporary artists such as de Kooning and Chillida, I need to show that there is a practice of metaphor, and also a rigorous, yet marginalised metaphorology, which exceed the boundaries within which classical poetics and aesthetics have tried to contain it. Specifically, I need to show how, by following Proust, who extends the relatively narrow and mostly psychological conception of metaphor, which he inherits from modern rhetoric and poetics, and rejects its systematic distinction from metonymy as a distinction, derived from the Humean laws of association, between resemblance and contiguity, we are able to develop an ontological, or onto-poetic metaphorology, which challenges virtually every aspect of Aristotle’s definition, and this means of its metaphysical interpretation. In the end, the rehabilitation of metaphor, as indicative of a practice and a space irreducible to that of metaphysics, poetics, and rhetoric, requires a general metaphorology that goes hand in hand with a different ontology. In place of the dualist ontology of classical metaphysics, the challenge is to construct an ontological monism, centred on the concept of difference. In place of the dualism of the sensible and the supersensible, we need to think the monism of the hypersensible. It is at the cost of such a transformation that aesthetics can twist free of mimesis and open onto a different sense of experience, as the examples of Hölderlin and Proust will make clear.
A final word of clarification regarding what may look like a substantial omission. Whilst the meaning of metaphor I seek to present here is drawn from the works of Proust and Hölderlin, and thus initially presented in relation to literature, I go on to show how it can help us understand the visual arts too, and specifically that of the abstract sculptor Eduardo Chillida. But what about painting, to which no specific chapter is devoted? Painting is, in fact, present throughout the book, and central to the aesthetics it seeks to develop: I discuss specific schools and painters of the early and late Renaissance, Neoclassicism, and Romanticism, whose various forms of idealism or naturalism I contrast with the metaphorical dimension of Bacon, de Kooning, and even aspects of Grünewald and Van der Weyden. The historical as well as thematic variety of those examples should also suffice to indicate that the aesthetics of metaphor don’t correspond to a particular epoch of art, nor a particular content, despite the temptation, perhaps, to understand metaphor as “replacing” the symbol as the central figure of Romanticism, in the same way that the latter was born as a reaction against Neoclassicism’s emphasis on allegory. It would be tempting, therefore, to claim that metaphor opens up modernity as such, an age of which we should ask whether it is still ours. But then, the sense of modernity would itself follow from how we understand metaphor, a sense, as we’ll see, which complicates the possibility of the very process of identification, ownness, and the proper. In fact, as we’ll see in connection with the Renaissance painters discussed by Chillida, a single work can be shown to partake of two, if not more, conflicting logics, and exhibit the sort of naturalist or even mannerist commitment dominant in the early or late renaissance and, at the same time, features that escape and exceed such commitments, and open onto the sort of operation for which metaphor stands. Rather than a historically defined theory and aesthetic position, metaphor designates a possibility or a dimension that can be found in works of art throughout history, sometimes in spite of their theoretical and aesthetic commitments.