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33 Chapter 3 Deformation and Recognition: Proust in the “Reversal of Platonism” I. THE ADVENTURES OF DEFORMATION If it is true—as Alfred North Whitehead affirmed—that the entire history of Western philosophy is nothing but a series of footnotes to Plato and, in addition, that the figure most characteristic of this thought is contained in his theory of ideas, i.e., in his conception of εἴδη (the term which is the plural of εἶδος), then the notion of eidos (translated variously as “idea,” “essence,” or “form”) could be, in certain respects, legitimately regarded as the most fundamental concept for philosophical thought. As Ernst Cassirer writes in his text devoted to this issue,1 “in general the profundity and originality of Platonic philosophy consist in the fact that it raises for the first time the philosophical consideration of the sphere of mere ‘being’ to that of ‘form’”:2 that is to say, to the sphere of εἶδος. Thus, if for these reasons eidos can be considered, in certain respects, the most fundamental concept for philosophical thought, what then are the additional reasons with which it could claim a centrality in the specific field of aesthetics? To answer this question, one could draw on a statement by one of the greatest English-speaking painters of the twentieth century, namely Francis Bacon. Bacon, in connection with one of his paintings entitled Jet of Water (1988), declared to David Sylvester, “What I would like those things to be would be an essence, you might say, of landscape and an essence of water. That’s what I would like them to be.”3 How can such a sentence, which sounds so innocuous, cast light on the reasons that bind, in a particular way, the concept of eidos to the field of aesthetics ? Actually, it can cast light on such reasons by suggesting that art is the privileged field which presents the essence of reality itself, or, put otherwise, which offers us its idea. On the other hand, it is well known that Plato employed the equivalent of these Greek terms—namely the word eidos and its cognate idea—to indicate 34 AN UNPRECEDENTED DEFORMATION the “intelligible world,” which he conceived as “true,” in opposition to that of the “visible,” thus placing a heavy burden on art’s possibility (which turns precisely toward the visible) of reaching the world of the ideas. Thus, if according to Bacon art can offer us a privileged access to the essence of things, it is precisely in the name of these same essences that Plato banished art and mimetic poetry from the ideal Republic. Yet here the question about the specific nexus between the Platonic concept of eidos and the field of aesthetics finds its explanation : despite Plato’s condemnation of art in the name of a theory of ideas (or essences), no other theory—Cassirer suggests—has exerted such a strong and enduring influence on art and the philosophical reflection on art (defined in modernity as aesthetics), and this is attested to by Bacon’s own sentence, which employs precisely the term essence. Here is how Cassirer puts it: “Always, wherever one has, over the course of centuries, sought a theory of art and the beautiful—the gaze always returns, as if by mental coercion, to the concept and term ‘Idea.’”4 In addition, Cassirer continues, the fascination produced by the Platonic concept of eidos has historically engaged “not only art theorists, but the great artists themselves.”5 In the twentieth century, however, the adventures that the concept of eidos has undergone in the field of art as well as literature—the adventures of “form”—rather seem to have become, in a manner increasingly more explicit and insistent, the adventures of deformation. And indeed, the “technical manifesto” of the futuristic painters, dated April 11, 1910, immediately underlines that “for the persistence of the image in the retina, the moving objects multiply, become deformed, following one another, like vibrations, in the space which they traverse.”6 A few years later, Georges Braque summarizes this in the following way, “the senses deform, the mind forms.”7 In turn, Francis Bacon characterizes the painting of Pablo Picasso—and implicitly his own too—in terms of “organic form which refers to the human image while being its complete distortion.”8 Moreover, Paul Klee proposes, in a lecture significantly entitled On Modern Art, “to show how it is that the artist frequently arrives at what appears to be such an arbitrary ‘deformation’ [Deformation] of natural forms...

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