French Phenomenology of Art and Metaphysics

This article examines the relationship between French phenomenology of art and metaphysics. More specifically, it highlights four points. Firstly, French phenomenological aesthetics is characterized by a certain ignorance of the renewal of artistic questioning initiated by Anglo-Saxon aesthetics. Secondly, French phenomenology of art is a metaphysics of art, which considers that works of art contain an ontological (cosmophanic or theophanic) revelation. Thirdly, French phenomenology of art is part of the “theological turn of French phenomenology”. Authors tend towards theology or “cosmotheology”. Fourthly, French phenomenology of art, which is a metaphysics of the sensible, possesses the theoretical means to think philosophically about conceptual art.