The work and the idea

Abstract

"This book attempts to show that it is through the recognition of what I call the hypersensible, and the work of metaphor, that art comes into its own, and is able to twist free of metaphysical aesthetics, rooted in the ontology of identity and governed by the laws of imitation. By “hypersensible” I mean a dimension that escapes the classical distinction and the space that stretches between the sensible and the supersensible, matter and form, or the image and the original. In a nutshell, the hypersensible designates the excess of the sensible within the sensible, and the genuine matter of art. As such, it escapes any straightforward materialism, as well as any form of idealism, or spiritualism. It could be characterised as hyletics. For reasons that I will clarify later on, I prefer to refer to it as an aesthetics of metaphor, or a metaphoric. Why metaphor? Simply because, twisting free of its own, deeply entrenched metaphysical interpretation, metaphor can be seen as the image or trope, applicable to art in general, which reveals the excess of the sensible in the sensible, or the way in which any given image is virtually more than it actually is. Metaphor is the aesthetic concept that corresponds to difference as the decisive ontological concept. It is the artistic schema of difference. As such, it provides an alternative to the classical concept of mimesis, and to the double imperative of presence and identity that governs it."