1. THE MAN WITHOUT CONTENT 13 that he should expatiate on the peculiar properties of the sense of touch with the naivete of a country parson! It must be borne in mind that this is the first book in which Agamben attempts to conceptualize the evolution of aesthetic judgment in modern European thought (this line of research will culminate years later in a study on the role of taste in culture). The historical investigations contained in The Man Without Content show how the person of taste gradually morphed into the disinterested subject of aesthetics, characterized by cynical indifference. As opposed to the original, subversive, traumatic experience of art, which even philosophers saw fit to warn their readers about (think of Plato’s Republic)°, the work of art has gradually lost its effect on the audience. It is of note that the only point where Agamben explicitly cites Musil is dedicated to unpacking the implications of the effect of art upon a vulnerable audience. In one of the drafts of The Man Without Qualities, Ulrich (who at this stage still bears the name ,Anders”), upon stepping into Agathe’s room, full of piano sounds, feels the unstoppable urge to shoot into her piano, to quell the unfathomably, even fearsomely beautiful harmony. As opposed to this raw, unsettling experience of art, which emphasizes the mentally unbalancing nature of the work, modern art focuses on the insanity of the artist, who is progressively excluded from the social realm, sent into the exile of an aesthetic no man’s land. According to the chapter ,Frenhofer and His Double,” the artist becomes either a rhetorician or a terrorist. The rhetorician can believe in meaning, while the terrorist completely undoes it. Terrorist artists include those who choose tactics of radical silence (the purest masterpiece of rhetoric), such as Rimbaud, or who write the unfinishable final work like Mallarmé, or Artaud, who wanted to destroy and recreate the theatre through strange nonworks. But first, let us turn our attention to the Balzacian hero of The Unknown Masterpiece: Frenhofer. The painter works maniacally on a single masterpiece (in the manner of a Pygmalion working on a sculpture of the nonexistent perfect woman). Frenhofer does not observe his own painting in the manner of an artist, Friedrich Nietzsche: On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo. trans. Walter Kaufman, Vintage Books, New York, 1989, 104. Giorgio Agamben: ,,Gusto” In Encyclopedia VI. Einaudi, Torino, 1979; Giorgio Agamben: Gusto. Einaudi, Torino, 2015. Although one could also make the case that the status of taste is ambivalent in Plato’s Republic as well, precisely because of the enchanting and distracting nature of art in general, and poetry in particular: »And we may further grant to those of her defenders who are lovers of poetry and yet not poets the permission to speak in prose in her behalf: let them show not only that she is pleasant but also useful to States and to human life, and we will listen in a kindly spirit; for if this can be proved we shall surely be the gainers — | mean, if there is a use in poetry as well as a delight?” Plato: The Republic. trans. B. Jowett, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1888, 323. It seems that Plato does not wish to hear a defense of poetry in poetic form, perhaps because such a defense would give poetry an unfair advantage against its critics? 10