• Korean Association for Visual Culture
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• v.35
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• pp.5-33
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• 2019

This paper examines the problems of the concept of 'analogon' which occupies an important place in Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of imagination and his 'aesthetic of the unreal', focusing on Michel Dufrenne's objection to the concept. In the Imaginary (1940), Sartre offers a phenomenological account of the imaginative experience and his theory of imagination provides the basis for his account of experience of art. Sartre distinguishes the imagining consciousness from the realizing consciousness of perception. The work of art, for Sartre, is transformed into an irreal thing ("The work of art is irreality."), i.e. it appears only as aesthetic object, and only under the condition that the spectator's consciousness changes into an imagining consciousness. Some claim that Sartre underemphasizes the function of materiality in artworks. Mikel Dufrenne, in his The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (1953), criticizes Sartre's thesis of irreality. Dufrenne argues that the aesthetic object is the work of art accomplished by aesthetic perception, the meaning of the aesthetic object is given as a whole in the sensuous and does not refer to something that lies outside the object as with imagination or irreality. An affective a priori is the condition of possibility for the occurrence of aesthetic experience.