Art’s Claim to Truth

The outcome of recent philosophical hermeneutics has been the “recovery of the truth claim of art,” to use Gadamer’s expression. This recovery, in itself, is fundamentally polemical toward a large part of the twentieth century’s philosophical aesthetics, whose inclination has been to redefine art by excluding its theoretical or practical bearing or, at best, by assigning to art a position of subordination according to which, even though art belongs to the field of truth, it is the task of other activities to take cognizance of the truth that art represents, by including it into a perspective that is vaster, more comprehensive, and therefore “truer.” If the latter attitude can be exemplified by Lukacs’s aesthetics (in all its phases, though with different tonalities), the former is shared by many theoretical trends that have made recourse against Hegel to the Kantian lesson of the Critique of Judgment and have attempted to define the specificity of art by bringing it back to an autonomous dimension of consciousness, cut off from any dimension that would have to do with truth and action. Neo-Kantianism is much more widespread than is generally believed because of the vast influence Cassirer has exercised upon American aesthetics, specifically on the work of Susanne Langer, who has brought it together in a kind of synthesis with Morris’s semiotics. The meaning of the neo-Kantian presence lies in its defining aesthetic experience solely in reference to the dimension of consciousness, so that the reference to consciousness’s other becomes totally unnecessary. The realm of things that can belong to the sphere of experience is not determined by the things themselves, but, rather, by the “attitude” of the subject. Anything can be the focus of aesthetic analysis (as is visible in the history of taste and of the sociology of art) as long as consciousness performs what Gadamer calls an “aesthetic differentiation” with respect to it. As is well known, these are the principles by means of which Gadamer develops his critique of “aesthetic consciousness” in Truth and Method.¹ Aesthetic consciousness, insofar as it constitutes the aesthetic quality of its objects with an attitude of contemplation, never really encounters anything other than itself. The museum understood as a social institution is only a correlation of aesthetic consciousness, its most significant incarnation. In the museum, too, objects are presented in the condition of absolute abstraction of the purely aesthetic stage. In other words, they are withdrawn from their concrete historical links (i.e., their religious, social, political, or everyday “uses”) by means of an activity that situates all of them at the same level of the objects of a “taste,” which in turn has become absolute and total.

Nevertheless, it may be observed that art history has often drawn from these kinds of activities a vital impulse for further developments. This was the case of the “importation” into Europe of African art at the turn of the century. Here, too, it was not a matter of works of art in the sense in which we understand that word. Instead, it had to do with objects that had had a religious or social function that once cut off from their own context became the object of a purely aesthetic contemplation. A valid objection to the aesthetic consciousness would be to point out the stimulating function these objects have had for European philosophical culture during the first decades of the twentieth century precisely on account of their uncanniness. This would show that cutting off certain products from their own original environment and collocation in order to set them into another world, where they have an essentially different function, may be the principle of a new history rather than a mummification, as the critique of aesthetic consciousness would have it.

In reality, the example of the driving force exerted on European art by the discovery of African art in our century (which is merely an example among many) does not demonstrate at all the legitimacy of “aesthetic consciousness” but rather serves to caution us about the possible equivocal meaning implicit in its critique. During the first decade of the twentieth century many European painters did not receive and elaborate the suggestions of African art with the attitude of aesthetic consciousness. The latter attitude is a more typical characteristic of the collector who pays an almost ritual attention to the object and who has no intention of becoming a producer or of continuing the process of development. The example of African art tells us something else of equal importance: it is not possible to escape from the abstractions of aesthetic consciousness by replacing it with what Gadamer calls “historical consciousness.” Here we encounter the second largely diffused stance in nineteenth-century aesthetics: historicism, taken in its various nuances so as to include the most trivial sociological approach, often opposed to the aestheticism of pure contemplation. But a viable alternative to the leveling performed by the museum by means of “aesthetic differentiation,” of the violent colonialist act of abstracting the artwork from its own world, is not to be found in a naïve historicism that believes itself capable of reading a classical work in its own truth solely by means of a punctual and exact reconstruction of the historical conditions in which it was produced and enjoyed (in Truth and Method, Gadamer gives the example of the performance of a music from the past with the instruments of the epoch). The historicist attitude would merely substitute one abstraction for another: in this view we would no longer cut off the artwork from its world in order to place it into our own; rather, we would attempt to place ourselves into the world of the artwork, thus forgetting that we belong concretely to our present history. As is well known, these are two attitudes that Hegel discusses and criticizes in depth in his Lectures on Aesthetics. So we cannot replace the attitude of aesthetic consciousness, which puts all its objects at the level of an “aesthetic quality” that is only recognizable by our taste, with a historical consciousness that is deemed to be more capable of bearing the truth. At first sight, the historicist attitude would seem to be capable of claiming adherence to the truth of things because it does not consider artworks as abstract supports of aesthetic quality but rather as the productions of an epoch, of a society, of a concretely situated individual. On the contrary, the historical consciousness that dominates Hegelian historicism and the late-nineteenth-century historicism of Dilthey does position the historical productions of an epoch in their own context, but it does so without in turn letting itself be implicated. Paradoxically, it affirms the historicity of everything it encounters except itself. This is a well known objection that has been often raised against Hegel’s historicism. In fact, it is only from the viewpoint of the end of history that it would seem possible to assign to every past event its exact collocation and truth. But historical consciousness takes on the peculiar character of a fixed schema on which events, epochs, and figures of universal history are projected in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century historicism that explicitly rejects Hegel’s outcomes, too. In fact, historical consciousness has its own historicity only inasmuch as it is historiography, that is to say, the neutrally objective representation and contemplation of those contents.

The critique of historical consciousness’s limits already delineates in some way the sense in which hermeneutics speaks of an experience of truth in the realm of art, and more generally what it means by truth. The experience of truth that takes place in art should not be understood as the recognition of the thing’s aesthetic quality (summed up in the judgment: this thing is beautiful) or as the encounter with a historical production as historicism construes it. The rejection of the historicist attitude on the part of hermeneutics deserves to be discussed in more depth. It seems indeed that the thing (artwork, historical document, and so on) represents by virtue of its own concreteness an encounter with the other, namely the “thing itself,” which interpretation theory has attempted to ground and secure against any attempt by the subject to reflexively fold upon itself. However, for historicism, as is sufficiently visible in Dilthey, the encounter with the thing is still thought on the model of empiricism or, in Heidegger’s language, of metaphysics. Dilthey had in mind the model of the natural sciences and wanted to accomplish for historical consciousness what Kant had for Newtonian physics. Thus he was interested in seeking out the conditions of possibility (the a priori structures) that ground the objective validity of historiographical knowledge. These conditions can be reduced to one—as seems evident above all in the beautiful pages Dilthey wrote on the subject of autobiography²—namely, the historicity of existence in its historiographical nature. The historicity of existence may be reduced to the fact that our existence only gives itself as a continuous construction and reconstruction of its own past. It is everyday existence as such that is historiographical: the continuity of meaning, having the same structural basis of historiography, makes up the spiritual life of every human being. Whether or not one accepts Dilthey’s hypothesis of reducing historicity to historiography, it still remains true that Dilthey is concerned above all with historical knowledge as objectively valid knowledge. This implies that the historian suspend, as it were, his own historicity from his own consciousness in order to let the thing itself (its historical content) appear in what is most characteristically its own, thereby assuming a purely contemplative posture. Hermeneutics would object that such an attempt to be objective, modeled as it is on the methodological ideal of the modern natural sciences, lets what is most characteristic of history escape from its view, not only the historicity of the “object” but also the historicity of the knowing subject.

But is not hermeneutic experience a matter of securing the encounter with the other? Is not the defense of the truth claim of aesthetic experience a reference to the effect that in enjoying the artwork we truly encounter “something” rather than the phantasm of (our) taste?

The demand to liberate aesthetics for an encounter with something other (i.e., the thing itself) in contemporary aesthetics was forcefully raised by Adorno. Indeed, for him what distinguishes a genuine experience of the work of art from the pure enjoyment of Kitsch and of ideologically charged products of entertainment in mass culture is precisely the irreducible alterity of the work over the subject’s taste and expectations, which are always already compromised by the manipulations of the mass media. However, Adorno seems to bring the encounter with the thing itself back to a sort of mythical “use value” of the artwork, juxtaposed to an equally mythical “exchange value.” Or at least so it appears in the Introduction to the Sociology of Music where Adorno juxtaposes the adequate listening of the expert, who likes the music because of its structural characters, to the inauthentic or ideological listening of those who like the performance only because they identify with the group of amateurs who enjoy a specific musical genre.³ In other words, the pop song has no structural consistence that could justify its aesthetic evaluation. The success met by a song—if and when it happens—comes from the fact that it comes to constitute a site of recognition for vast groups, for reasons that may have to do either with its capacity to represent a certain taste or with the manipulation of the market by the channels of distribution. The radical example of the aesthetic experience of the mass that does not encounter “the thing itself” but rather the tastes of the consumers (those who enjoy it), would be another typical case of substitution of exchange value for use value. For Adorno, this substitution shows the self-assertion in the field of art or in what pretends to be art of the universal commodification of capitalist society.

Inasmuch as he remains bound to the formulation of the Introduction to the Sociology of Music, Adorno’s thesis regarding adequate listening as structural listening (typical of the expert who knows how to read musical notes) brings the exigency of defending in aesthetics the encounter with “the thing itself” back to weak theoretical argumentations: above all an adequate structural listening may be justified only by virtue of its identifying a supposed “use value” of the work with its given organized and recognizable form. The thesis that this is the use value, that is, the primary value of the artwork, in opposition to other functions of the artistic product (be they emotional, psychological, or “gastronomic”) has a precise historical and cultural collocation, namely, the distinctive mark of a group or society—the educated bourgeoisie that spent evenings playing music in private salons, which no longer exists under late capitalism—and therefore it is entirely reducible to exchange value. The exclusive appreciation of the structure is exhibition, recognition, and enjoyment of a distinctive mark of the group, too. (A similar mark is probably found in the entire asceticism permeating Adorno’s aesthetics, up to its latest formulation.) In comparison with the most recent Aesthetic Theory, the reduction of the supposed use value of the work, understood as a structure to its “exchange value,” seems to be valid, even though Adorno’s insistence on the work as a social construct is not based on the idea that an approach is adequate only insofar as it is directed to the structure, but rather on the idea that the truth of the work may be given only through its collocation within a certain language and its techniques. There is no relation of the work to the history of Spirit, understood as the yet to be realized history of freedom, other than through the relation of the work to the history of the specific technical language in which it is formulated. What is encountered in the work is, once again, never the thing itself but the “truth content,” namely a spiritual content, which is therefore historical in the larger sense of the taste of a group, of a class, of an epoch, too.

It seems difficult to speak of an experience of truth in relation to art without always recognizing and heightening the work’s belonging to a historical world. The opposition of use value to exchange value, or the identification of the structural approach as the sole adequate approach in opposition to the purely gastronomic or ideological enjoyment of art, fails because there is no encounter with the work of art that is not an encounter with its own belonging to a social and historical world.

The exigency of recognizing aesthetic experience as an encounter with the thing itself cannot be satisfied on the basis of Adorno’s categories, since even in his work they do not survive as alternative categories. In its defense of the truth claim of aesthetic experience, hermeneutics starts by recognizing that the kind of distinction made by Adorno between use value and exchange value makes no sense because these two values coincide completely. An encounter with a work of art can never signify encountering it as it is mythically in-itself, outside of the social mediations of which it is both an outcome and an active agency. It is a lesson that can be found unequivocally stated in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, as long as one reads it with “hermeneutic” attention as, for example, Gadamer does in some beautiful pages of Truth and Method,⁴ where the Kantian notion of “reflecting judgment” as the judgment of taste is revealed to be deeply bound to sociality. The Kantian judgment of taste awaits the consensus of all, though it does not lay claim to a universality that could be compared to the determined judgments of science. True, in its expectation of a shared agreement the aesthetic judgment appeals to the universal function of the cognitive faculties exactly like the determined judgment. But it remains also true that in matters of taste there are no irrefutable demonstrations. In the pages of Truth and Method just recalled, Gadamer is concerned with showing that the field of action of the reflecting judgment is extended beyond the borders of the beautiful of nature and art, to comprise questions that embrace both the moral life and concrete historical existence.⁵ These are all fields where it is not enough to subsume a particular under a general concept, but that necessitate, rather, a “productive integration,” which is precisely the work of the reflective judgment. For me, it is important to underscore that, even thought the Kantian judgment of taste is not reduced to passively following the canons that are empirically established by fashion, it is exercised with a view to a sort of ideal community that is always still in the process of constituting itself. From this perspective, in the light of the outcomes of twentieth-century philosophical hermeneutics, it is clear that philosophical discourse falls within the domain of the reflecting judgment, strictly understood. This view calls for the revision of the rigid separation between the “productive” activity of what appears to be proper to art and the purely reflexive activity that seems to be proper to philosophy and criticism.

What is interesting here is that the classical Kantian doctrine of aesthetic judgment, understood as reflecting judgment, points toward the reduction of aesthetic experience to sociality. To formulate an aesthetic judgment does not signify recognizing given qualities of the object but rather discovering, revealing, and heightening the fact of its belonging to a community, even if an ideal community. However, its ideal character is rooted in what the community to which we belong factually is. In other words, if we look more closely, the ideal is precisely the ideal that this community makes of itself. The two notions of verisimilitude and necessity that hold the chain of tragic events in Aristotle’s Poetics may be legitimately read in this sense, too. What tragedy exposes to us is the course of human events, in its factual unfolding and in its having to be ideal. These two elements cannot be disjoined, otherwise tragic catharsis would never occur.⁶

According to Kant, whenever I enjoy the beauty of an object of nature or of art I am actually enjoying the right—that is, harmonious—functioning of the knowing faculties. However, the awareness that this functioning is “right” (approximately stated) always already comprises its communality for all human beings. What is pleasing in aesthetic experience is neither the object nor the individual’s subjectivity, but rather its very communicability. If I aesthetically like something, it is because my knowing faculties operate as those of others, thereby guaranteeing every possible communication, including the objective universality of theoretical judgments.

Hence, Kant’s theory of aesthetic judgment serves to confirm that if we are to defend the truth claim of aesthetic experience against aesthetic consciousness, we cannot suppose as possible an objective encounter with the artistic product, in the sense in which Adorno, for example, in his sociology of music speaks of an adequate listening insofar as it is directed to the musical work. If there is truth in aesthetic experience, it must be given within and through the mediations that always constitute such experience, rather than in a mythical immediacy that will not resist under critical scrutiny. An experience of truth, characterized in this way, is comprehensible only if we refer to the meanings that experience and truth take up in the reflection of hermeneutics. Here experience is understood neither as the stamping of the image of the thing on the tabula rasa of consciousness nor as the correspondence of the statement to a given state of affairs. There is an experience of truth when the person who undergoes the experience is truly changed as a result of it. Experience is thus understood in the sense illustrated by its resonance in the German word Erfahrung, which comprises a reference to fahren, to undertake a voyage, involving the accumulation of new knowledge, and above all a process of modification of the physiognomy of the subject, on whom the experiences and the encounters leave their mark. The fact that there is an experience of truth in art signifies above all that the encounter with the work and its earlier production are events that modify those who are involved in them. Thus art is an experience of truth because it is truly experience, namely an event in which something really happens. In Truth and Method Gadamer describes all this complex story of the happening of truth (let us not forget that Heidegger was the first to speak forcefully of the “happening” of truth) by making recourse to the notion of play as well as the “fusion of horizons,” (Horizontverschmelzung) after having extended the model of aesthetic experience to historical experience in general. What occurs in the fusion of horizons and in aesthetic experience has as its model the dialogue. In dialogue, understanding each other is never merely to transmit to the other one’s own viewpoint or to passively receive from the other her viewpoint. Instead, it is the birth of a novum, a common horizon in which the two interlocutors recognize each other not as they were before but as discovered anew, enriched and deepened in their being. In this sense, the model of dialogue entails a dialectical, Hegelian aspect: the novum that dialogue gives rise to is also elaboration, corroboration, return to itself of what already was. The experience of truth that is realized in this manner is placed under the sign of continuity: the other standing before me in a dialogue, just like the thing I encounter, initially is present as an agent of discontinuity, as the breakdown of an equilibrium. A dialogue is above all a kind of reckoning with this novelty, that is, with the alterity of the other, in order to reestablish the continuity he has interrupted. The situation of misunderstanding from which every interpretation starts, according to Schleiermacher, can perhaps be understood as the pure and simple otherness of the interlocutor, who insofar as he is other disturbs the equilibrium, produces a modification, thereby forcing one to readjust the equilibrium.⁷

The possibility that the other, or something new, will present itself is safeguarded only by its belonging to a domain that always already mediates it with whatever it enters into relation. If there were no communality between the two interlocutors, or between the observer and the artwork (and in general between the reader and any kind of text), dialogue would not even begin. The mediation, which takes place in the fusion of horizons, is in part always already given in the universal medium of language. This theory of language as universal medium of experience, whose theoretical foundation is in Heidegger’s philosophy, has enabled Gadamer to resolve the problem of pre-understanding that is required by every process of interpretation. It would be beyond our task here to discuss the grounds and consequences of the fact that the universal medium of experience is precisely language. Instead, it is important to underscore that the continuity of hermeneutic experience is corroborated and more emphatically stressed, since the mediation of the fusion of horizons always already presupposes another mediation, that of language.

What is the meaning of this for the question regarding the truth of aesthetic experience? The question now is whether or not aesthetic experience, understood in terms of continuity, is not in danger of being thought as the pure and simple recovery of “aesthetic consciousness” from the critique of which hermeneutic reflection started. In this regard, I find illuminating the pages of Truth and Method that Gadamer devotes to tragedy, in the analysis of which he takes up many Aristotelian elements. Precisely by arguing polemically against the detached attitude of aesthetic consciousness, which is capable of enjoying tragedy only as a spectacle and as a perfect representation, Gadamer points out that the effect of tragedy upon the spectator is the “deepening of his continuity with himself…. In the event of tragedy the spectator meets himself once again, insofar as what he meets there is precisely his own world as he already knows it in its own religious or historical tradition.”⁸ We are not far away from the social and historical implications of the Kantian notion of taste as “common sense,” recalled by Gadamer in the pages on Kant just mentioned. For Gadamer, the recovery of the self that happens in tragedy is diametrically opposed to the attitude of aesthetic consciousness, whose only preoccupation is to verify the product’s abstract characters and formal qualities. However, if we stand by the definition of the experience of truth as an experience in which the subject comes out truly modified, then the recovery and deepening of continuity of the self with itself appears more akin to the fixed ahistorical nature of “aesthetic consciousness” than it is to the becoming other characteristic of every encounter with truth. Hermeneutics does start from the defense of the notion of truth as an experience that truly modifies the person who undergoes it. But the adoption of the model of dialogue seems to recall the Hegelian dialectics as a movement in which the conclusion finds what was already there at the outset, though more enriched and more deepened. Thus, the self-continuity that for Truth and Method is the dominant value of every hermeneutic experience, in the end seems to frustrate the notion of truth as becoming other, which had seemed most productive in resolving the aporias of empiricism and scientism.

To be sure, a lot of pages of Truth and Method point beyond the thesis that the “human condition” and its limits (meaning an encounter of the self with what he already was rather than a becoming other) are found at the bottom of aesthetic experience as hermeneutic experience, especially where Gadamer adopts play as the model of hermeneutic experience. Indeed, it is characteristic of play that it transcends the individual players, so that the players are expropriated as a result in a sense that goes back to Heidegger’s notion of Ereignis (event) as expropriation (Ent-eignen) and trans-propriation (Ueber-eignen).⁹ This means that despite his emphasizing continuity, in the end, there is a discontinuity/misidentification pole in Gadamer, too, which at least leaves open the tension between the two extreme poles of hermeneutic experience.¹⁰

Nevertheless, the danger of surpassing, and sublating into continuity the elements of novelty and becoming is quite real. It would seem that precisely against this danger we should raise the model of aesthetic experience, especially the characters that have been underscored and exalted by the avant-garde of the twentieth century. From the perspective that twentieth-century avant-garde intended to represent, of the break of continuity with tradition as well as with every Bildung understood as harmonious construction of unified totalities, that is, the formation of art works and subjects, the recovery of man in his own original dimension that Gadamer finds exemplified and still binding in the Aristotelian theory of tragedy appears to be bound up with a type of aesthetic experience that is no longer ours. The avant-garde (whose necessary, and therefore nonfortuitous relevance for the history of art has been shown by Adorno) did not want to be true in the sense of going back—on the part of art, of the artist, of the consumer—to a dimension of truth that is always available, albeit forgotten or covered up. On the contrary, it is understood in its own truth as the capacity to make something happen by means of scandals generated by linguistic innovations or by political and ideological engagements of various sorts. The happening of truth signifies producing differences, distances, discontinuities: to grasp this merely as a moment that has to be reabsorbed in the reconstruction of a continuity signifies taking up, once again, at least implicitly the model of Hegelian dialectics as the only possible conception of truth. We must recognize in this model of continuity that is always being reconstituted anew—and therefore in the immediate character of every return of the self to itself—the aestheticist limits that Kierkegaard saw embodied in the figure of the seducer. On the other hand, in the differences he continually produces as well as in the lacerations with which he pays for his curiosity for novelties, the seducer truly experiences a becoming other that is irreducible to the model of continuity.

The problem Jürgen Habermas posed to Gadamer with respect to the origin and meaning of the discontinuity that hermeneutics assumes as the datum from which to start (which is what Habermas ultimately expects, given his Hegelian and Marxist perspective), is not resolved by recognizing the historically given rifts at the root or at a specific moment of our European civilization, at the beginning of the Reformation when the question of hermeneutics was thematically addressed for the first time.¹¹ These rifts can be identified only in the light of a model of continuity, like the classical and Hegelian ideal of the Greek polis. The weight given to the notion of application in Truth and Method clearly shows that such a model of continuity is dominant not only in the Hegelian-Marxist objections to hermeneutics but also in the work of Gadamer. Gadamer calls application a sort of “lived interpretation,” above all of the texts that stand as the models for the historical existence of a given society: for example, the Bible or, at a different level, the codes of law. If, on the one hand, application is productive inasmuch as it evinces the constitutive aspect of mediation with the present that every interpretation of texts, even the most remote, necessarily possesses. On the other hand, it runs the risk of leading to the idea that a nonhistoricist and nonaestheticist model of interpretation presupposes the texts’ applicability to the present situation, or at least the attempt to reconstruct their conditions of applicability. It seems to me that from this point of view the notion of application always involves a possible proximity, which is tributary to the ideal of continuity. What we think we can “apply” is never truly distant. Nevertheless, in its proximity it loses all the density of meanings, be they aesthetic or auratic, that constitute its wealth as an eminent, high model of experience (an argument in need of elaboration with respect to the concept of the classic).

It is important to underscore that if hermeneutics has provided philosophy with the conceptual tools to rethink aesthetic experience as a genuine experience of truth, by virtue of its idea of truth as an encounter with the other hermeneutics, it is precisely the fidelity to the data of aesthetic experience as it has appeared in the light of the concrete unfoldings of the arts of our century that can enable hermeneutic reflection to abstain from falling into the logic of continuity and identity. Today it is precisely art that presents itself as the privileged site of the negation of identity, and therefore of the event of truth. This thesis can be illustrated in many ways, among which I shall elucidate what follows:

(a) The crisis of representation, which may be considered emblematic of twentieth-century aesthetics, ranging from nonfigurative painting to the dissolution of narrativity in literature, is one of the most imposing forms of identity’s negation, understood above all as the capacity to identify the artistic products themselves and the subject who produces them or to whom they are destined.

(b) This crisis does not allow itself to be absorbed by resorting to perspectives that are intended to restore in some ways the mastery of identity, whether it is understood as the mastery of the structure or of the subject who is its correlate. For example, art cannot be described in terms of the Lacanian imaginary¹² in order to then observe that the play of identification and misidentification that occurs within its bounds functions, analogously to the psychoanalytical cure, as a means for reestablishing the borders between the real and the imaginary (somehow repeating what has traditionally been attributed to as the function of Aristotelian catharsis). It is a given that in much of contemporary art the crisis of representation is accompanied by a renewed capacity for phantasmagoria (it is a term used in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics, though he sees it merely as an element of the situation of crisis that the avant-garde intends to overcome, rather than a phenomenon that could fall within such an overcoming). Such a capacity for phantasmagoria, deeply bound as it is with the tools of the technical reproducibility of the arts, above all of cinema, constitutes the basis for a new “explosion” of the imaginary that aesthetics cannot reabsorb into the models of continuity and identity. Rather, aesthetics must recognize it as the announcement of what may well originally constitute every aesthetic experience as an experience of truth, that is to say, alienation, becoming other, or the play of identification. All these are characteristics of aesthetic experience identified by Plato in the sections of the Republic dedicated to dramatic art, which he wanted to exclude from his ideal state precisely on account of them. Today art is the site of the happening of truth because in it more than in any other site, the subject is subjected to an expropriating summoning, forced, as it were, to undertake an analysis without the guide of any model of recomposition, deprived of the analyst-father who will guarantee that nothing bad will happen there.