14 I. THE DESTRUCTION OF ÁESTHETICS but rather through the eyes of an interested viewer. He sees a flesh and blood person on the canvas, and proves incapable of noticing the „nothingness” of the figure. The deranged painter sees the work as containing the ,,promise of happiness”, and thereby loses the ability to be a disinterested aesthetic observer. This inability to maintain an enlightened, rationally informed distance from the artwork results in its destruction by the mad painter, as discovered by the young Poussin who visits Frenhofer. The monomaniacal search for reality (a flesh and blood body) results in a canvas that has been repainted to the point of defacement, with the notable exception of a perfectly finished toe peeking out from underneath the paint layers. It must be added that the fascination Balzac’s short story has held for commentators” stems in large part from the lack of any real narrative explanation for its ending (Frenhofer’s final, suicidal double gesture: the burning of his canvases and himself also). In Frenhofer’s character, we can discover both the crazy artist and the misunderstood genius.” One could interpret events as indicating that Frenhofer did not in fact destroy, but rather completed his unknown masterpiece, in the context of a performative act far ahead of his time. Those (like Poussin) who, following a classical painting doctrine, judge Frenhofer’s (for them) formless and incomprehensible modern masterpiece, are bound to misunderstand. Frenhofer’s example shows that - for the artist - art is an inherently unsettling experience. Differently put, the artist and their work is in itself „the most uncanny thing.” Art is a constant risk and a danger, which can even put our lives in jeopardy. The work, the act of creation is, for the artist, an experience of the limit, tending towards the furthest extremity to which a human can reach. In art the search for happiness can indeed result in the catastrophe of a lifetime. Another example of the insane, or intensely interested, artist for Agamben is Artaud. Which comes as hardly a surprise, given that the title of the chapter where Agamben deals with the Frenhofer example („Frenhofer and His Double”) explicitly references Artaud’s collection of essays, The Theatre and Its Double. In the Preface of the latter work, Artaud speaks of how the concepts of life and theatre have diverged from one another during the course of modernity. Artaud is quick to point out that this was not always so: „unlike our idea of art, which is inert and disinterested, a genuine culture conceives of art as something magical and violently egotistical, that is, self-interested.”? Artaud is fully aware of the fact that real art is dangerous, subversive and even destructive, and — as he envisions in , Theater and the plaque” — can even lead to complete social collapse. Artists, if they seek to remain true to the task of artistic creation, cannot immunize Louis Marin: ,Les secrets des noms et des corps” In: Lectures Traversières. Albin Michel, Paris, 1992. Georges Didi-Huberman: Le peinture incarnée. Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1985. This is why the novella became so important for Picasso, who viewed himself as a Frenhofer. 35 Antonin Artaud: ,Preface: Theatre and Culture” In: Antonin Artaud: Collected Works Volume 4. trans. Victor Corti, John Calder, London, 1999, 4.