Touching Difficulty: Sacred Form from Plato to Derrida

Touching Difficulty grounds the fundamental decisions about postmodernism, in both the understanding of singularity and of the sacred, in historical terms borrowed from both the Greek and German traditions. The work presents a philosophical reading of minimalism in art, which has experienced a resurgence because of its simultaneous contestation of the discourses of high modernism and refusal of the multiplications of meanings in postmodernism. The being of beings or forms of forms – the “oneness” variously characterized as the Sun’s light through Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus – is recast here as a movement of aesthetic singularity, or as a way of sustaining our contact with the sacred; the familiar opposition between Heideggerian and Derridean approaches to art after postmodernism is abandoned in favor of aesthetic gestures than sustain our fragile singularity.