Art and Philosophy
This link has always been affected by a symptom - that of an oscillation or a pulse.
At its origins there lies the judgment of ostracism that Plato directed against poetry, theater, and music. We must face the fact that in the Republic, the founder of philosophy, clearly a refined connoisseur of all the arts of his time, spares only military music and patriotic song.
At the other extreme, we find a pious devotion to art, a contrite prostration of the concept-regarded as a manifestation of technical nihilism - before the poetic word, which is alone in offering the world up to the latent Openness of its own distress.
But, after all, it is already with the sophist Protagoras that we encounter the designation of artistic apprenticeship as the key to education. An alliance existed between Protagoras and Simonides the poet - a subterfuge that Plato's Socrates tried to thwart, so as to submit its thinkable intensity to his own ends.
An image comes to mind, an analogical matrix of meaning: Historically, philosophy and art are paired up like Lacan's Master and Hysteric. We know that the hysteric comes to the master and says: "Truth speaks through my mouth, I am here. You have knowledge, tell me who I am." Whatever the knowing subtlety of the master's reply, we can also anticipate that the hysteric will let him know that it's not yet it, that her here escapes the master's grasp, that it must all be taken up again and worked through at length in order to please her. In so doing, the hysteric takes charge of the master, "barring" him from mastery and becoming his mistress. Likewise, art is always already there, addressing the thinker with the mute and scintillating question of its identity while through constant invention and metamorphosis it declares its disappointment about everything that the philosopher may have to say about it.
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