Abstract

Approaching this kind of subject implies an exigency of understanding that aims at the conditions of possibility of the status of the modern person. Starting with the Euro- pean Illuminist Age, this is represented by the acknowl- edgment of the other as a person, based on a certain rational conditioning of the community. One should not confine religion to a “black-hole”, by separating it from the political, but should rather try to see the middle-way between the radical solution of atheism, on the one hand, and the legitimating of a political religion, on the other. The second part of this essay is an analysis of the double modern conditioning of art (understood as the expression of the creative faculty): first, of the political aspect of the Modern Age; secondly, of the religious problems connected to politics. Seen as a whole, this area of artistic production implies two types of funda- mental relationships: 1) an analysis of art as the expres- sion of the self and of its status in the world; 2) a direct connection between art and the social and political as- pects of the contemporary age