Kant and Tolstoy

1. Kant and Tolstoy Art as Judgment about a Form Or Art as Infectious Emotion

2. Vermeer: Woman in Blue

3. Vermeer: Woman Reading a Letter

5. Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ” vs. A Medieval Cruxifix

7. Kant’s Aesthetic of Communicable Pleasure • Disinterested Interest—An Appeal to Taste • A Public Sentiment—We Share a Judgment • Purposiveness without a Concept of Purpose—”The Rose is without a Why”—Beauty • Expression of Feeling rather than of a Concept—Form not Subject

8. Tolstoy’s Aesthetic of Communicating Feeling • By means of perception, I can feel the same feelings as another who expresses them. • Art infects us with feeling. • Almost all of life involves the activity of art—jokes, lullabies, mimicry, clothing, utensils, religious icons, stories, speeches etc. • Not beauty but human communion through feeling. • Art is dangerous—better that all art be banished than all art is tolerated.

9. Four Versions of the Annunciation • Fra Angelico ?? • Leonardo DaVinci • Sandro Bottecelli • El Greco

14. From Figurative to Abstract • Vermeer • Turner • Klee • Abstract Expressionist Artist • O’Keefe

20. Self Portrait by Rembrandt • The power of the canvas to emulate a gaze. • The mystery of the artist who, through a painting, gazes from outside at his own gazing from within. • Who is looking at whom, as Rembrandt’s “persona,” his painted likeness, looks out from the canvas?

22. The Place of the Sublime? • That which overwhelms our capacity to respond • Not strictly aesthetic for Kant, since the sublime undermines contemplative judgment and so the beautiful • The genre of Horror is that of the sublime

27. Horror in Persona and SWF • Horror is the excitation of our sense of the uncanny, (german unheimlich—”not at homeness”) • In the uncanny we find either a) we have become “other” to ourselves, totally outside of who we are; or b) the “other” outside ourselves has possessed us from within • The familiar is made absolutely unfamiliar, or the unfamiliar is made absolutely familiar.

28. Persona • The word Persona suggests a mask, that one’s identity is a play act, a role. • The horror of flickering lights on a screen becoming a world we are absorbed in. For Bergman, simply viewing a film is horror. • The viewer struggles to determine who is real and who is not in the film. • The two characters are in a struggle about being possessed and being dispossessed. But the viewer ends up implicated in this struggle. We do not know with which figure we should empathize. • Elisabet possesses Alma, even as Elisabet finds herself dispossessed of her life.

29. SWF • Ally is possessed by Hedra, as Hedra adopts Ally’s styles of clothing, hair and gesture. Hedra even finds a boyfriend who looks like Ally’s boyfriend. • Conversation in no way works as it did in Persona—to unveil or hide deep secrets that threaten to undo the lives of the two participants. • The possession of Ally come “from without.” Ally is never overwhelmed from within. The possession is not uncanny but consumptive. Ally’s life is being enjoyed by, eaten up by Hedra • The viewer never questions with whom to have empathy. The film is about Ally’s struggle with Hedra, the outsider. The outsider never violates Ally from within.