Andre Malraux's Aesthetics: The Problematic of Universals

Abstract

The title of this study is justified by Malraux' comment in his Discours prononce a Fondation Maeght, on July 12, 1974, that la beaute impliquait une esthetique, le Musee Imaginaire appelle une problematique.' Stated in a synthetic shortening, this means that the Imaginary Museum is not a tradition, but a new adventure. It ignores the Manichaean dialogue, which is also the logical duality of true and false, the basis of Western logic, as well as ignoring the dualities of aesthetic and moral values. Aesthetics, with its usual components, belongs to the past cultures of the Sacred and the Divine (le Sacre and le Divin). Today, in the world of the Imaginary, the work of artliterature included-is no longer an object proposed for admiration and expecting to take its place in a value-scale. It stands by itself in its singular essence. For us, creators and consumers of culture, art has a problematic existence, and problematic has both meanings: that of being precarious (precaire) and that of existing as an interrogating force. Art is conscious of itself and knows it, participating in a second degree of consciousness which, for our civilization, has become a proxy for eternity: this sort of eternity is the only one possible for the man who knows he is Man, thanks to the double mirror-play of his language. The Imaginary is more than the passage from the Sacred to the Divine; it confers upon itself the problematic status of the Imaginary-what Malraux calls the imaginaire de metamorphose, today's avatar in the historical development of the Imaginary.