Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Band 56. Heft 1

The essay departs from a detailed discussion of Jakobson’s description of the »poetic function.« It comes to the conclusion that the distinctive feature of poetic language, defined by Jakobson as the production of paradigmatic similarity, cannot be understood as a result of the projection of the paradigmatic axis of language onto its syntagmatic axis. Furthermore, the semantic effect of these similarities does not consist exclusively in a production of ambivalence; frequently, they produce coherence, as can be shown with reference to examples of metaphors, metonymies and allegories. In a second step, the essay turns to a detailed interpretation of the 8th sonnet of Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which examines its intertextual relations to other son- nets of this cycle as well as those to scholastic theology and Platonic philosophy. This interpretation further develops the idea that poetic language produces coherence; for, precisely those lines that at first seem incomprehensible can be understood as implicit propositions and coherencecreating statements. In its concluding section, the paper characterizes the implicit production of coherence as the specific feature of poetic language and discusses the necessity of a hermeneutics of literary texts.

The accessibility of art in Germany underwent a fundamental change over the course of the 18th century. Aristocratic collectors opened their doors to the general public, and new museums were dedicated exclusively to art. This development parallels the concurrent development of aesthetics in philosophy and the conception of the autonomy of art. Its theoretical foundation was provided by Kant in his third critique with such completeness that the standards of beauty he worked out emerge as constitutive elements of the art museum. The Romantic movement reinforced the trend in what proved to be an ambivalent way. The general accessibility of art was well suited to its transgression of boundaries, but it necessitated a new, less contingent mode of demarcation between the work of art and the observer. That became an occasion for »Romanticization« of both the artwork and its audience, demonstrated here by August Wilhelm Schlegel’s conversation on art Die Gemählde. It is further elucidated by Friedrich Schlegel’s Nachricht von den Gemählden in Paris and its echo in two texts published by Kleist: The novella Die Heilige Cäcilie oder die Gewalt der Musik and the essay on Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Mönch am Meer that was drafted by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim and radically modified by Kleist.

The importance of physiognomics for portrait painting is well known. It is less known, how- ever, that this mode of inquiry informed the methodology of art history and other visual sci- ences. The methodology of art history, in turn, affected physiognomics, as can be seen in the studies of Lavater and later developments such as characterology and racial science. The in- terdependence of physiognomics and art history becomes most obvious in the concept of style as it was developed in the late 18th century by Winckelmann. Lavater and later physiognomists drew on his idea that style expresses the spirit of a people, an idea that had itself drawn upon physiognomic concepts. The interference of the two disciplines shaped art history in the 19th and 20th centuries. In the 1920s, 30s and 40s, things developed basically in two directions: physiognomics was reevaluated as a form of visual hermeneutics superior to language, and racial physiognomics was integrated into art history. In this period, art historians such as Wilhelm Pinder, Wilhelm Fraenger and Hans Sedlmayr explicitly developed physiognomic methodologies. After World War II the ties between art history and physiognomics loosened. In our time they seem to be tightening again as physiognomics reveals itself to be a problematic forerunner of visual studies.

In german aesthetics, aethetic experience is the most prominent concept to emphasize sensual properties of objects and events. Thus, artistic objects can be understood as a special case of aesthetic experience. In this paper I argue that a theory of art should be separated from a general theory of aesthetics. In a first part, referring to Arthur C. Danto’s arguments, I claim that there are many artworks for which sensual properties are not constitutive. In a second step, I try to show that even sensual artworks cannot be understood sufficiently with regard to the concept of aesthetic experience. They have a specific structure that seperates them categorically from mere aesthetic objects and events.

Starting from Kant’s conception of critique as »Grenzziehung,« the immanent representation of being, or, the conscious world, is understood as a screening off of its noumenal ground. Materially bound images gain a particular function in the explication of the structure of this immanence. As objects within the phenomenal world they duplicate the world’s phenomenal- ity in the dimension of iconic semblance by (partially) negating their material support. This cleavage between the image’s phenomenality and its materiality makes images into possible catalysts of a critique of natural consciousness, be it individual or collective. Thus, »image critique« can serve as a hinge between a transcendental critique of consciousness and a critique of ideology or spectacle.