Comunidade impossível, exumação das formas e “presença corrosiva”

Abstract

An overview into John Updike’s novel makes tangible the dark face of American abstraction, unravelling a predatory ethos that raises to stardom and, ipso facto, annihilates its emblematic artist. It lends political virulence to Danto’s critique of Greenberg’s formalist aesthetics, exhuming the “pure form” that insulates art. However, this “purity” goes back to dark beliefs of colonial formation, bolstered by white, Protestant supremacy. Undermining the grounds of sociability, of “being-with”, it reenacts the “impossible community”, which urges Nancy to bethink its negativity as “inoperative”, space of relationship with the other. Against the form’s rationality, Sonia Gomes revokes an exclusionary and illegitimate order subtracting the space of difference, of Afro-descendant memories and histories, to configure an image out of gesture, rather haptic than visual, imploding the insidious unity of design.