Art, With and Against Being. Levinas-Deleuze

Abstract

A large fracture line crosses French philosophy and his aesthetics. Giving to art the privilege of overcoming the relationship between subject and object, of being, then, non-subjective and non-objective, French philosophy will follow, in the twentieth century, two opposite directions. In one case, art will lead us to surrender to the being, to fall into the being, like in Levinas; in the other case, it will be a sign of the regaining of the being, of revitalization through the being, like in Bergson or Deleuze. What is interesting is that the divorce starts from the same conceptual ground: the reading of Blanchot, the relationship with the image, the impersonality, the neutrality and the impassibility of the being.