Abstract

A most interesting attempt to weld together a Marxist and a semiotic approach to art. The Marxist insistence upon the historicity of consciousness and the categories in which it expresses itself is accompanied by a systematic semiotically oriented reflection upon the epistemological conditions of meaning. The principal target of della Volpe's project is the Crocean theme that there is something supra-rational conveyed by a work of art, some cosmic feeling or some ineffable content, accessible only to intuition. Della Volpe's position, on the contrary, is rationalist, though with a very specific twist.