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cHapter 2 heIdegger and Klee: an aTTempT aT a neW BegInnIng hasthechallengeof modernart,thenewthatitexposes,beenaddressed philosophically? to what extent have those who today work out of the tradition defined as moving from Kant to nietzsche through hegel—a tradition that, for the lack of a better word, we call “continental”—managed to take up the questions about art and the image, the questions about painting, posed by that tradition? to what extent has the hermeneutic situation of the present genuinely opened up the question of the relation of word and image in a way that allows the presumed authority of the logos to be interrogated? there are three promises, three outstanding questions, that define the legacy of this tradition and that need to be posed today if the question of the image and the challenge of the work of art is to be pursued. First, does the work of art open up a path of thinking outside of the empire of the metaphysical assumptions that have defined philosophy since its inception? Since Plato, philosophical considerations of the work of art have tended either to regard such works as exiled from thinking or to credit them but only by subordinating their achievement to the authority of philosophy . to ask, as one today must ask, if art marks out a prospect for thinking apart from philosophy as it has long been defined is to risk opening thinking to fundamentally new possibilities that are not defined by philosophy as it has been. So, one would need to ask, What might philosophy become if it took its start and impulse from the experience that art opens? Second, if this experience is to be appreciated, then some cherished philosophical prejudices will need to be overturned. More precisely, since the framework and language that have long defined philosophical approaches to the work of art have been defined by assumptions that conceal the image and denigrate the achievement of the artwork, a new approach and a new vocabulary for thinking and speaking of the work of art are needed. For instance, one must ask how it is that language can let painting show itself without demanding only that it “speak.” a translation 68 | Between word and Image between word and image will always be necessary, but it is no longer possible to be unselfconscious about the shifts and alterations introduced by such translation, in short by moving the image into the domain of the logos. third, art underwent its own revolution that began just at the end of the tradition that ends with nietzsche. this means that if the work of art is to be taken seriously, if the challenge to philosophy that comes from the image as image is to be confronted, then the new forms of painting— abstractions that present images without objects—that now define how art opens the world need to be addressed from the outset. But if that is to happen, then one needs to ask how far one can bridge the gap between traditional forms and modern forms of painting. to what extent has modern art opened something fundamentally new, something that escapes even what art of the past had brought forward? or is it the case that such novel forms of painting represent another evolution in the same possibilities of painting that we have always confronted? ________ the first significant effort to take up the questions posed by this tradition and to move forward to a new philosophical beginning by addressing the originality of the work of art is heidegger’s “the origin of the Work of art.” Completed in 1935 (two years before the Entartete Kunst exhibition ), “the origin of the Work of art” went through three drafts (1933–34) and was not published until 1950 (in Holzwege). it was a text that heidegger criticized very soon after he delivered it as a series of lectures, and yet it was also a text that he drew upon constructively throughout his career. “the origin of the Work of art” was the first significant, but certainly not the last, step in a long series of essays, lectures, and seminars devoted to exploring the possibility of thinking art anew and of beginning philosophy anew on the basis of this possibility.1 i do not intend to take up this text in all of its complexity. i do, however, want to highlight some of its key points and then turn to heidegger’s own criticisms of it in order to ask about its...

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