Agamben and the Signature of Astrology by Paul Colilli

Author:Paul Colilli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-03-18T16:00:00+00:00

We turn again to the figure of the angel who offers a story that is in many ways emblematic of the emptying of the symbol at the expense of the rationalized sign. As the Middle Ages was gradually coming to an end angels were no longer perceived as real entities, and at best they were thought to be allegorical constructs. Aristotelian philosophy played an important role in this regard, as direct thought reduced both indirect thought and the symbolic imagination to a shell of what they once were. Transcendence has a marginalized role in Aristotle’s thought, that is to say, the intellect extracts the idea from res, but it does not lead it back to its transcendental dimension. In Scholastic writings angels are divested of their function as mediators and are reduced to “virtues” that are part of the natural order. They are given as products of logic and no longer as living entities. The move toward perceptual and sensorial realism ends up privileging the signifier over the signified to the point whereby the latter is completely emptied. This has implications as far as aesthetic creation is concerned, because Aristotle pivots his poetics on the logic of imitation, with artistic production operating as an imitator of nature. Evdokimov comments on the consequences of this aesthetic ideology: “If the icon of Christ is inspired by the Sacred Face, made so to speak from God’s own hand, Western art will more and more be the representation, made solely by the hands of man, of a human model. A ‘religious’ picture represents man and implies God-Man, the icon represents the hypostasis and shows God in man.”[80] The gradual move toward any expression of artistic or cultural production that is completely autonomous finds its origins in the deactivation of the hypostatic epiphany, which was purported to be contained in the signifying structures of the artifact. For example, in the Christian catacombs we find what we could term a “pure sign,” one that signals redemption by means of cipher-signs such as 1) everything referring to water (Noah’s ark, Jonas, Moses, the fish, the anchor, or to 2) bread and wine, or, finally to 3) images of salvation. The images present in the catacombs essentially indicate the act of salvation. There is very little care given to artistic form, technique or style, and to any variety of theological depth:

Everything converges toward the same message which is that there is no eternal life outside of Christ and his sacraments. Everything is reduced to a single sign and everything is joy, because the resurrection of the dead is inscribed on the sarcophagi (“eaters of flesh”). The absence of any art here signals the decisive moment of the destiny of this art: its apex, still close in time, being the high creation of Antiquity, is no longer relevant and functional for the moment; it renounces itself, it goes through its own death, it submerges itself in the waters of baptism, signified and represented by the graffiti in the catacombs,

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.