Abstract

In the first two drafts of The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger introduces a distinction between an art-work and an art-object, the latter no longer being art in the proper sense of the term. An artwork has, in Heidegger's understanding, a verbal meaning: a work 'works', it opens up a world of its own and sets off such a world against what he calls 'earth'. The temple, for example, is the locus of such a strife between earth and world, and it stops being an artwork "when the God [who took it for abode] has fled". At that point, it turns into a mere object, at best a testimony to a bygone age. This analysis leads us to what we call the problem of transition: is the true locus of art not to be situated in the gap between what Heidegger calls artwork (true art) and art-object (the death of art)? An analysis of sections 16 and 47 of Being and Time reveals a similar take in Heidegger on transition — in both cases (the broken equipment, the corpse) he resorts to a 'no longer/not yet' that we compare with the 'still (at work)/already (an object)' in the case of art. In all three examples the moment of transition is a passage from one mode of being to another and as such precludes the possibility of a third position between these two poles. After having shown by way of an analysis of junk and the corpse, how one could make a case for such a 'third' whose status cannot be reduced to that of a mere in-between, we turn again to art and show how Levinas' and Blanchot's analyses of art rest on concepts (the 'il y a', the 'second night' etc.) that disengage art from the ontologising function it had in Heidegger. Art extracts things from the perspective of the world and allows us an oblique glimpse on the materiality of a being without beings. The artwork enframes this being and forces it into a presentation (Darstellung) that Heidegger all too readily dismissed as re-presentation