Exploring the Work of Edward S. Casey by Cruz-Pierre Azucena; Landes Donald A.;

Author:Cruz-Pierre, Azucena; Landes, Donald A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2019-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

A trace of beauty

If Eros is thus a unified yet ambiguous phenomenon that cannot be purified or divided into separate manifestations, how can we come to a more unified account of it? Perhaps the object of Eros should be the point of departure. The object of art and Eros is beauty, or the beautiful. A definition of beauty poses severe problems, as the most famous Kantian conception of the beautiful as an object of “disinterested satisfaction” shows, since this description only makes sense when we enter into the Kantian conceptual framework.10 Plato, in contrast, determines the beautiful as the object of love and as that which we want to “have.” It might be implied here that a more direct determination of the beautiful is impossible. Levinas also stays away from a direct definition of beauty, but points out that beauty involves an element of the unintentional or, in his own words, there is “a splendor that spreads unbeknown to the radiating being—which is perhaps the definition of beauty.”11 Perhaps the evasive attraction of beauty stems from its character as situated between the spiritual and the material; this character cannot be captured by the all-too-familiar scheme of matter and form.

If we follow Plato’s account of Eros in the Phædrus, our bodily nature is that which makes erotic love possible (since erotic love is inspired by our noticing a manifestation of beauty in the Other), but it is also that which makes an ultimate fulfillment of erotic desire impossible (since, as incarnate beings, we do not reach beauty itself). Similarly for Levinas, erotic desire presupposes that we are embodied beings, yet our desire reaches beyond corporeality. On the one hand, our bodily nature as needy and partly hedonistic beings endows love with its precarious position between need and desire, thus making pure love impossible. On the other hand, erotic love is only possible for an incarnate being, that is, for an essentially vulnerable being.

In the realm of art, an equivalent ambiguity and paradox occur. The ambiguity of the work of art is linked to its materiality, which corresponds to corporeality in the erotic relation. In the case of art, that which enables an artwork to exist is at the same time that which limits it. A work of art is not a pure idea; it has a body. What Plato says about every logos, namely, that it has a body (Phædr, 264c), holds for every work in general. Levinas thus appears justified when he points out that statues or sculptures are the paradigmatic artworks.12 While it seems more accurate to speak about the materiality of a work of art rather than its “body,” the term “body” captures two essential features of the work of art. Firstly, the work has a capacity to rest in itself; secondly, it speaks to our senses. These two characteristics constitute the work as a work (rather than as, for example, a philosophical idea), and at the same time, they impose limitations. The work’s independence or ability to

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