Umane vestigia (Nancy su Hegel e una fanciulla che segue le Muse)

Jean-Luc Nancy is credited with one of the most original interpretations of the aesthetic issue in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Nancy focused in particular on the page in which Hegel presents the transition from art to philosophy by describing the gait and gaze of a girl: the “young lady” who is “succeeding the Muses”. Re-reading the philosopher’s contribution in the light of his more general interpretation of Hegel’s dialectics, this essay suggests that the image of that young girl carrying the basket of the “beautiful fruit broken off from the tree” (i.e. classical art) should not only be seen as a transitional figure, towards an art now considered in its plural and irreducible forms – that is, finally emancipated from religion. - That image should rather be understood as an effective representation of the unavoidability of aesthetic “vestiges” in the philosophical discourse itself.