In this article we will try to elaborate a reflection around aesthetic experience, more specifically a phenomenology of artwork (Soutine/de Kooning), in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought. Even if the French philosopher has not yet dedicated an autonomous work to the aesthetic question, such reflection appears abundantly dispersed and sparse in his various writings. Among others, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud were Falque's artists of choice, their work most closely reflected his underlying philosophical thesis. The preference for the figurative, (...) that which in us resists phenomenology, the incarnation as such, would thus bring the philosophical concept and the artistic intuition closer together. However, between figurative and non-figurative or abstract thought, is there not another possibility of thinking them together, without necessarily having to give primacy to one or the other or opposing them? The idea of an oblique incarnate thought (figuration-abstraction, resistance-deflagration, word-silence), or of the diagonal/oblique impastoed being (presence in absence, metamorphosed transcendental materiality, indirect ontology), might also be a third way of thinking about the great philosophical questions between realism and idealism, immanence and transcendence, visible and invisible, metaphysics and phenomenology. In this sense, the artistic work of Chaïm Soutine and de Kooning may be the aesthetic expression of incarnate thought, as a way of primordial access to being, to the world and to another, in the joining in act of the figurative and the abstract, as if multiple possibilities or dimensions of being inhabited in the same being (the articulation of the in-itself and the outside of the self, madness and normality, dream and reality...). Not by chance both were the subject of a recent joint exhibition, from which we propose this reflection, in dialogue with Emmanuel Falque's thought on finitude, which his most recent book radicalises. Our thesis, based on these two artists, aims to affirm that art, whether figurative or abstract, starts from an inalienable material dimension, that is to say, a sensitive dimension, the impasted (body) being, to the point that we may say that Hors phénomène maintains in itself this possibility of articulation between presence to the self and the outside of the self, distance and proximity, immanence and transcendence, even if here and there one can glimpse in its philosophical project an ontological preference for the figurative. However, in our view, what brings together Falque’s philosophy and the work of both artists is the fact that they are the expression of an embodied thought, whether through conceptual experience (philosophy) or through perceptual experience (aesthetics). (shrink)

Out of what the West now terms contemporary art, some would construct the synthesis and final accomplishment of every civilization, of all the great forms of art that have followed one another, blending and overlapping ever since man has existed and began expressing himself, like a fugue with innumerable developments that always returns to focus on the same theme, headed in the same direction. This evolution, as strangely loaded with analogies as it is rigidly anachronous, has borne, followed and determined (...) without failing, the mutations in our image. Art of the West in particular, in all its principal incarnations from ancient mythologies all the way to Rodin, from the Romanesque pilgrimage down to Daumier and Picasso—moving through culminating points of extreme harmony or tension: Rembrandt, Goya, Soutine—is presented as the great figure of a God in human appearance. Around this figure has been formed an entire world in which the real has continually been re-invented as art renewed its statements of it. Did this God and this world lose soul and memory on the day when the photographer's lens, a disastrously incorruptible witness, indicated the limits of very strict anthropomorphism? (shrink)