Rereading Cassirer After the Iconic Turn. An Essay in Honor of Federico Vercellone
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54103/2039-9251/32270Keywords:
images, symbols, expression, aesthetics, morphologyAbstract
Written in memory of Federico Vercellone, this essay attempts a reading of Ernst Cassirer that Vercellone announced but never carried out. The argument unfolds in three moments. It first reconstructs Vercellone’s way of thinking about images: that is, as medium through which symbolic and communicative life is articulated, and through which most pressing philosophical questions become intelligible. It then shows how this approach opens onto the reading of Cassirer through the Iconic Turn, whose foundation Vercellone located in Goethe’s morphological tradition. Within this, Horst Bredekamp and John Michael Krois’ philosophy of Verkörperung recasts Cassirer’s thought on a non-linguistic and embodied basis. The essay finally attempts such a reading. Cassirer’s symbolic form is reconsidered as a perceptual-expressive structure in which sensible appearance and meaning originally coincide, and images emerges as a threshold at which expression becomes representation and the form of life passes into the life of forms — the threshold of aesthetic experience itself, where Cassirer’s thought meets Vercellone’s legacy.
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