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THE END OF ART: ASKING TOO MUCH, ASKING TOO LITTLE The “end of art” puts Hegel immediately in mind, and his well known proclamation : for us art, on the side of its highest destiny, is now a thing of the past (VA, I, 24, also 23; HA, I, 11, also 9–10). What exactly he means is still disputed . One reason the thesis is controversial, I think, is that in modernity art has been asked to bear a special burden different to other epochs. I will point to a paradoxical position: Too much has been asked of art, with the result that too little, or almost nothing, is now being asked of art. And too little is now asked, because too much was asked—asked in the wrong way. My title also echoes, while altering, another thinker’s words for whom the end of art was important. My original here is Heidegger: the end of philosophy and the task of thinking. Heidegger claimed that the end of metaphysics is in cybernetics, and looked to another beginning in which the thinker would be in dialogue with the poet. The renewal of thinking is bound up with the continued life of art, in the figure of the poet. I find difficulties with Heidegger ’s claims about the end of metaphysics,1 and, as we say, ambiguities in the high place offered by him to art. There seem to be a plurality of ends, or if you prefer, different “deaths” at stake: the end of art, the death of God, the end of philosophy. We are more 265 8 Art and the Impossible Burden of Transcendence On the End of Art and the Task of Metaphysics 1. I refer again to BB, chapter 1; also “Being, Dialectic and Determination: On the Sources of Metaphysical Thinking,” The Review of Metaphysics, 48 (June 1995): 731–69; and “Neither Deconstruction or Reconstruction: Metaphysics and the Intimate Strangeness of Being.” familiar with the Hegelian claim of the end of art, and the Nietzschean death of God, but of late the end of philosophy has returned to haunt us. I say returned since, of course, the theme haunted Hegel’s time and his aftermath. Our century is not original regarding this provocative theme. For instance, we might see Marx and Kierkegaard as claiming this end: Kierkegaard to make way for religious faith; Marx to clear the path for revolutionary praxis which also will pierce the heart of religion with another stake, the stake of dialectical subversion. It is significant that the death of one is followed or accompanied by the death of another, as if for one to continue the others must continue also, or for one to be re-born the others must also come to life in a new way. Or perhaps each must be rooted in a shared milieu, rich enough in metaphysical and spiritual resources, to nourish the extreme demands each, at its best, makes of the human being. We now seem to lack such a milieu, and the wings of creative venturing which can be birthed there. Heidegger’s proclamation of the poet’s task in the wake of the alleged completion of metaphysics can be seen to ask for a being born again: metaphysics may die into cybernetics, but thinking asks to be reborn beyond calculative mind, and in dialogue with the naming of the holy, said to be the poet’s vocation. Heidegger’s poet is not a post-Kantian aesthete, a specialist of aesthetic experience. The poet is sacerdotal. If the thinker thinks being, the poet names the holy. One might say: the poet serves to mediate the blessing of being, the thinker remains attentive to the communication of being. Heidegger sees himself as freeing thought from the prison-house of “theory,” but his invocation of the poet as the namer of the holy places us back in the neighborhood of the religious festival, hence closer to the meaning resonating in the ancient word, theo\ria. Heidegger may be right to recall us to this different sense of thinking; but I find questionable the implication that the history of metaphysics is the stifling of this thinking. There is an unmistakable rupture between the premodern and the modern sense of “theory,” which tells against any monolinear totalizing of the history of metaphysics. My point takes shape: something extraordinary is being asked of the poet. He is to partner the thinker in one of the most ultimate of enterprises. Heidegger is not...

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