Abstract
Saint Girons explores the difference between obscurity and clarity in the realm of poetry and painting. For her, the origin of aesthetic sensibility is to be found in the rejection of Descartes’s ‘clear and distinct’ ideas. The very instigation of aesthetic experience must occur in the shadows, or the chiaroscuro of a light-dark relationship. By means of both a philological and a philosophical analysis of the Greek terms asapheia and skotos, she has two objectives: first, to show how the originality of Burke’s theory on darkness lies at the crossroads of poetry and painting and depends on the recognition of a darkness that is properly pictorial; second, to explain how the sublime, after detaching itself from the sphere of the logos, is not a confused category, but one at the very heart of the limits of sensibility, that is, at the heart of a theory of the aesthetic act, a theory that does not merely encapsulate creation and contemplation, but also the movement involved in feeling, passion and emotion.
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Notes
- 1.
See, in particular, the introduction of Françoise Graziani to Tasso’s Discours de l’art poétique, Discours du poème héroïque (Paris: Aubier, 1997). The original, Discorsi dell’arte poetica (ca. 1562–1565, published 1587), was translated as Discourses on the Art of Poetry by Lawrence F. Rhu, in The Genesis of Tasso’s Narrative Theory (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 99–154.
- 2.
Heraclitus, 22 B 93 DK.
- 3.
See Guido Morpurgo Tagliabue, Demetrio: dello stile (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1980).
- 4.
See his Traité du sublime (composed in 1708, published in Paris, 1732).
- 5.
See his An Essay on the Sublime (London, 1747).
- 6.
See my L’acte esthétique. cinq réels, cinq risques de se perdre (Paris: Klincksieck, 2008).
- 7.
See H. Frisk, Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, art. saphês.
- 8.
See A. Ernout and A. Meillet, Dictionnaire Etymologique de la Langue Latine: Histoire des Mots (Paris: Klincksieck, 2002).
- 9.
Corneille, The Cid (1636) act IV, scene III.
- 10.
“ma grande lumière sombre,” from Le Porche du mystère de la deuxième vertu (1912), in Charles Péguy (1873–1914), Œuvres poétiques (Paris: Gallimard, Library of the Pleiade, 1994) 662 (translated into English as The Portal of the Mystery of Hope).
- 11.
“apporte tôt ou tard des souterrains où il creuse en aveugle le morceau fatal à cette architecture élevée à force de tête,” from Diderot, Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature, 1753 (Paris: Flammarion, 2005).
- 12.
“Moi, qui m’occupe plutôt à former des nuages qu’à les dissiper, et à suspendre les jugements qu’à juger,” from Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets (Paris: Flammarion, 2000).
- 13.
Charles Baudelaire, De profundis clamavi, in Les Fleurs du mal.
- 14.
See Le Porche, Introduction, axiom V.
- 15.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 35–36, 47. The original was published as La Poétique de la rêverie (Paris: P.U.F., 1960).
- 16.
Descartes, A Discourse of Method, Part IV, trans. by Paul J. Olscamp in Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, revised ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001), 32.
- 17.
Descartes, Principles, sec. 45, Library of the Pleiade, p. 591.
- 18.
Ibid., sec. 46.
- 19.
See his Le considerazioni sopra un famoso libro franzese intitolato La manière de bien penser dans les ouvrage d’esprit (Bologna, 1703).
- 20.
Dominique Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène, éd. Bossard (Paris: Éditions Bossard, 1920), 181.
- 21.
Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time, trans. Elio Gianturco (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), chap. VII [This text was originally printed in 1709 as De nostri temporis studiorum ratione].
- 22.
Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets, 114.
- 23.
Ibid., 114.
- 24.
Ibid., 123.
- 25.
PE, iv.xiv; Cf. Locke, A Philosophical Essay Concerning Human Understanding [1690], II.7.4.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
PE, ii.iv (and following).
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Preface to the second edition of Enquiry (1759).
- 30.
PE, ii.iii, iv.
- 31.
I borrow this expression from Philippe Heuzé in “Des figures qui dessinent,” in Skhèma et figure chez les Anciens, textes édités par M. S. Silvano, P. Chiron et M.-P. Noël (Paris: rue d’Ulm, 2004), 248.
- 32.
Job IV.13–17 (translated from English), quoted by Burke in PE, iv.iv.
- 33.
Victor Hugo, Les travailleurs de la mer (1866), introd. et notes Marc Eigeldinger (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1980), II.2.5.
- 34.
See his “Die Formen die Räumlichen,” originally published in Nervenartz 3, no. 11 (1930): 142–78. This article has been translated into English in Phenomenological Psychology: Selected Papers, trans. Erling Eng (New York: Basic Books, 1966), 3–37, 31.
- 35.
PE, ii.xvi.
- 36.
See ibid., iv.xv.
- 37.
Plutarch, cited by Adolphe Reinach, Milliet Collection, #51 (Paris, 1921), 51.
- 38.
See C. A. Dufresnoy, L’art de peinture (Paris, 1668; reprint Genève, 1973), 44ff.
- 39.
Louis Marin, Détruire la peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 201.
- 40.
PE, iv.i.
- 41.
Bacon, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (1623), V.6.
- 42.
PE, v.vii (emphasis added).
- 43.
Ibid., v.iii.
- 44.
Ibid.
- 45.
Ibid., v.vii.
- 46.
For Blacklock and Saunderson, see ibid., v.v.
- 47.
Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, I.V.1 (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 331.
- 48.
Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968), 276.
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Girons, B.S. (2012). Burke, the Revenge of Obscurity and the Foundation of the Aesthetic. In: Vermeir, K., Funk Deckard, M. (eds) The Science of Sensibility: Reading Burke's Philosophical Enquiry. International Archives of the History of Ideas / Archives internationales d'histoire des idées, vol 206. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2102-9_15
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