From Reverse Perspective to Performative Space: Gadamerian Reflections on Florensky’s Aesthetics

Abstract

In this paper I attempt a parallel reading of certain texts by Pavel Florensky and Hans‑Georg Gadamer, particularly, although not exclusively, Florensky’s seminal essay “Reverse Perspective”, and Gadamer’s main work Truth and Method. I do not thereby seek to establish a problematic historical‑philosophical connection between the two thinkers. I rather analyze some notions and considerations developed by both of them in order to allow the emergence of some common views, or at least of common orientations, in relation to two overarching aesthetic topics: on the one side, what can preliminarily be labelled a critique of modern aesthetics, and on the other an idea of the aesthetic experience as taking place in what I will call a performative space. While, in relation to the first point, both authors seem to adopt a Hegelian reading of modernity, characterized on the one side by an alienated subjectivity, on the other side by the reduction of the world to a collection of dead objects, the second point indicates a possible alternative to this lamentable situation, consisting in the conception of a (performative, space, where acquaintance with objects can only be achieved via participation in events. In this respect, while both authors developed their views in the course of reflection on cultural and artistic phenomena of the past (medieval visual arts and Greek tragedy respectively), they come to results which have been reached autonomously by those aesthetic approaches that are premised on the so‑called performative turn.