The bodies and the embodiment of modernist painting

Abstract

This paper considers the theme of materialism that emerged in the late writings of Paul de Man. Drawing on de Man's late essays and lectures, it outlines materialism as a factor of language that philosophical aesthetics must constantly resist or evade to ensure the stability of the category of the aesthetic. It focuses on de Man's still challenging and provocative antipathy towards the category of the aesthetic manifested in the imagery of bodily mutilation of the late writings. The essay then focuses on how these de Manian themes, summed up by the phrase ‘aesthetic ideology’, have been taken up in the writings on modernism of T. J. Clark. It considers two essays on Paul Cézanne to highlight the iconoclastic role Man's elaboration of materialism plays in them. Clark's ‘Freud's Cézanne’ and ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne’ see in Cézanne's late painting a disruption or disarticulation of humanism and the body as founding principles of the aesthetic and are marked by a suspicion of the claims and espousals of embodiment of modernism's defenders. Given the strength of the ‘critical-linguistic analysis’ of the category of the aesthetic encountered in de Man's late writings, this essay distances itself from the presuppositions of hermeneutical and phenomenological aesthetics.