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Mikel Dufrenne: Depth of Aesthetic Object (Part 2)


(Southern Federal University)

(Murmansk State Technical University (MSTU))

The article sets as its task the consideration of the topic of depth in the work of the famous French phenomenologist and aesthetician Mikel Dufrenne. Consideration reveals that M. Dufrenne focuses on the idea of the depth of the aesthetic object, but also touches the subject of the depth of subjectivity due to the fact that the aesthetic object itself is a “delegate of subjectivity”. If the depth in a person is connected with his inner life, projectivity, sensitivity, then an aesthetic object is endowed with all of these.
The intensity of the person’s own being, which is not reduced to a plane, helps reveal the inner content in an object. When there are superficial people, there are superficial things, they have no inner, they do not express anything. The antiquity and mystery of the aesthetic object are not considered by Dufrenne as manifestations of the depth of the aesthetic object, to such he refers the
strangeness, that raises surprising oddity, and the difficulty of perception, which requires not mental comprehension, but sense. The aesthetic object is sensual, because it is necessarily corporeal, although it is enveloped in an aura of meaning. Debating with J.-P. Sartre, Dufrenne writes that in imagination we go to the real through the unreal. The depth of a piece of work is also the openness
of the potencies. It belongs not only and not so much to the artist, as to the viewer of the work of art, since it is he who, meeting in an aesthetic object with a certain affective quality, is able to survive it and open up to it.
“Affective a priori”, originally characteristic of a man, gives him the opportunity to correctly emotionally respond to the depth of the aesthetic object, by way of the feeling join the deep universal content. At the same time the depth of the self-comprehensible feeling is a kind of knowledge for Dufrenne. This is the pre-experimental knowledge-experience. The authors of the article come to the conclusion that, according to Dufrenne, the immediacy of aesthetic experience gives a direct access to peoples’ unity of unique and universally significant, unrepeatable and common to all mankind.
phenomenology, subjectivity, aesthetic experience, aesthetic object, fiction, depth of sentiment, depth of aesthetic object, concealed, far-away, the difficult, affective a priori

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