L’esthétique concrète de Gaston Bachelard ou la réintégration du sentir dans le penser

The work of Gaston Bachelard is sometimes ignored in the history of French aesthetics. While it is true that the philosopher did not elaborate an accomplished aesthetic theory, his work on imagination and reverie not only shows that he was aware of the theoretical debates of his time, but above all advocates a stance in favor of a «concrete aesthetic», which moves away from the fruitless philosophical disputes of academia and relies directly on the material presence of the work of art, both poetic and visual, to reintegrate feeling into thought. The point, then, is to question this way of reintegrating the aisthesis into the logos through the imagination, thus rediscovering « a unity of the world ». It is in contact with beauty that the subject opens up to the world in a pre-categorical way, and at the same time the world becomes the object of a non-objective experience. This opens the way to a transcendental aestheticity never explicitly theorized, but concretely realized in the philosopher’s works.