Martin Heidegger e la storia dell’arte: i «Quaderni neri»
Michele Dantini
During the 1930s, coinciding with the turning point commonly referred to as “Kehre”, Heidegger repeatedly confronted himself with the Austrian and German art history of the time. Nearly undetected by scholars,- conspicuous traces of this dispute remain both in essays published longtime ago, as The Origin of the Work of Art (1935|1937), and inthe Reflections and Notes contained in Black Notebooks, published only recently. Heidegger does not mention in Black Notebooks names of those art historians he’s discussing with, but his references are often transparent: they allow us to understand the controversial horizon of his topics concerning “artworks” and his stakes, which, for Heidegger, are both artistic, philosophical and political. Heidegger also dwells at length on artists not mentioned elsewhere, such as Friedrich, argues several times with Ernst Jünger, comments unfavorably on NSDAP politics and finally, focusing on relationships between art and religion, develops a reflection on the great Russian literature of the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly Dostoevskij, which sheds new light on his categories of «Heaven» and «Earth». Art history appears to him excessively bent to historicist narratives, unable to grasp, of the artwork, what is nor “history” neither “culture”, but establishes «World». Approximately by the end of the decade, we find also in Black Notebooks a discussion with Benjamin on the theme of «aura» and reproducibility of artworks in the Era of Technique.