Aesthetics After Metaphysics: From Mimesis to Metaphor

208 Pages·2012·5.332 MB·English

by  Miguel de Beistegui

Aesthetics After Metaphysics
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From Mimesis to Metaphor
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Aesthetics After Metaphysics
From Mimesis to Metaphor
Miguel de Beistegui
NEW YORK LONDON
First published 2012
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the UK
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© 2012 Taylor & Francis
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beistegui, Miguel de, 1966–
Aesthetics after metaphysics : from mimesis to metaphor / by Miguel de
Beistegui.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in contemporary philosophy ; 40)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 175) and index.
1. Aesthetics. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Metaphor. I. Title.
BH39.B38285 2012
111'.85—dc23
2012006184
ISBN13: 978-0-415-53962-3 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-10272-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by IBT Global.
Printed and bound in the United States of America on sustainably sourced
paper by IBT Global.
For John Sallis
Contents
List of Figures xi
Introduction 1
PART I
Towards the Hypersensible
1 Aesthetics and Metaphysics I: The Mimetic Schema 11
2 Aesthetics and Metaphysics II: From Kant to Adorno 29
3 Aesthetics at the Limit of Metaphysics: Intimations of the
Hypersensible 58
PART II
The Aesthetics of Metaphor
4 Metaphor Beyond Metaphysics? 87
5 Literature: Proust, Hölderlin 102
6 Sculpture: Chillida 129
Conclusion 171
Appendix 173
Notes 175
Index 197
Figures
6.1 Harri IV/Stone IV, 1993 (granit). 132
6.2 Lurra 81/Earth 81, 1983 (terracota). 135
6.3 Peine del viento/Combing the Wind, 1976 (steel). 137
6.4 Gravitación/Gravity, 1987. 139
6.5 Lo profundo es el aire XII/How Deep is the Air XII, 1990
(granit). 145
6.6 Elogio de la luz XII/In Praise of Light XII, 1969 (alabster). 147
6.7 Espacio para todos los hombres/A Space for all Men, 1995. 151
6.8 Sin título X/Untitled X, 1968 (alabaster). 152
6.9 Elogio del horizonte/In Praise of the Horizon, 1989 (concrete). 156
6.10 Hokusai, 1991. 159
6.11 Homenaje a Hokusai/In Honour of Hokusai, 1992
(corten steel). 159
6.12 Locmariaquer, 1989 (corten steel). 160
6.13 Escuchando a la piedra/Listening to Stone, 1996 (granit). 167
6.14 Música callada/Tacit Music, 1955 (forged iron). 168
6.15 Música de las esferas/Music of the Spheres, 1953 (iron). 169
6.16 Berlin en la Forja/Berlin at the Forge, 1999 (steel). 170
All fi gures reproduced with the kind permission of the Chillida Foundation
and family.
Introduction
“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 men-
tioning 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 some-
thing altogether diff erent—not a mere rhetorical fi gure, 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 aesthet-
ics 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.
Specifi cally, I wish to raise the question of whether and how, through the
question of metaphor, aesthetics can overcome its mimetic paradigm, fi rst
articulated by Plato, and avoid the metaphysics of idealism (as well as real-
ism, 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 meta-
physically 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