Still Life as Anthropotechnics (On the Material “Vanitas Vanitatis”)

Abstract

This article is devoted to the allegorical still life of the Baroque era. There is carried out its analysis mainly on the material of the type “Vanitas Vanitatis”, which is a kind of peak of this genre. Using the theoretical constructions of W. Benjamin and G. Deleuze, the author analyzes the still life as a genre that has its own logic, topology, temporality, collapsing into a plot, and a very peculiar “syntax”. In addition, the article outlines the contours of the “life world” that makes this unique artistic phenomenon possible. The author considers still life as a kind of theater of things. The things depicted in it coexist in various ways, sometimes attracting each other, interlocking and forming constellations (eros), sometimes, on the contrary, lining up in opposition, the elements of which reject and simultaneously activate each other (agon), but never in the form of separate objects. An old still life should not only be viewed, but also read and solved. It is a complex text, the semantic unit of which is a thing filled with new conventional meanings. This is what makes it possible to talk about a still life as an allegory. The article reveals that allegory is not just one of the ways of signification, but is a tool of cognition that allows you to see something familiar and usual in the most unexpected perspective, expanding the scope of what is viewed in culture. This fully applies to the old still life, which manifests not only the finest nuances of the Baroque world with its emerging disturbing temporality, but also the mood of the there-being of Self from hope to melancholy. The specificity of this text lies in the representation of a still life in the perspective of philosophical anthropology, that is, from the point of view of its proportionality to a certain type of person. The result of the analysis carried out is the conclusion that the main condition for the possibility of an allegorical still life is the desolate, devoid of self-identity, but demanding existence and capable of becoming an event Self in a world that is rapidly losing its sacred and symbolic shells.