Absense, or the Extimate Place of Art

In order to think Art in its difference from the arts, I argue, requires that we take seriously its lack of sense. This lack is symptomatic of a historical rupture with the sense of art as technē (know-how), a sense that remains at play when one speaks of the arts. However, if art is not an art, then what is it? In this essay, I argue that art is a thing that makes sense absent. To specify art’s absent sense, its absense, requires both a historical analysis of art’s rupture with technē and the mastery it implies, and an ontological determination of the manner in which it makes of this loss a thing that serves to dumbfound. Art is thus inseparable from stupidity. Through an engagement with the work of Aristotle and Heidegger, Bataille and Balzac, Baudelaire, and Lacan, I suggest that art marks the extimate place of absense.