Abstract

Can an explanatory theory of the subject be an appropriate means to understand what it is to live a moment of meaningful form in art - what I shall call ‘the figural experience’? Is not such a theory, in spite of its critical and relativist impulse inexorably inclined to impose a set of pre-conditions that are incompatible with the nature of the experience itself? And vice versa what is the relevance of any "phenomenologism" when it comes to understanding the subjective formation of knowledge? In order to answer these questions I critically refer to several classic phenomenological challenges on Kant’s transcendental idealism (Critique of Pure Reason), in particular Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of perception (Phenomenology of Perception) and the aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne and Jean-Paul Sartre (respectively The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience and The Psychology of Imagination).