Il sensibile e il virtuale. Dufrenne e l’iniziazione empirica al trascendentale

The article examines Dufrenne's aesthetic position starting with an analysis of the work of the sculptor Baudin on the background of the Cap Ferrat landscape. Cap Ferrat is exposed as a true work of art, not just as a landscape backdrop but as an inappropriable original, a pre-categorical and natural ground, which gives rise to the aesthetic experience. This ground is also called Nature or original irreducible to any form of representation. The work of art brings this ground into manifestation by offering a primary topological space in which the perceptive field opened up by the body reveals the human being as a witness of appearance. The aesthetic experience refers back to the sensible as a pre-categorical place for the joint emergence of subject and world, which is manifested through bodily synaesthesia.