Benedetto Croce's 'Bréviaire d'esthétique' Republished in French

Éditions Le Félin has republished Benedetto Croce's 'Bréviaire d'esthétique' in French, a work first translated in 1923 that had become unavailable. The edition uses the original translation and is part of a larger project to publish Croce's works, overseen by Gilles A. Tiberghien. In the book, Croce argues against positivism in aesthetics, rejecting the reduction of art to mechanical physiological or psychological processes. He emphasizes intuition as central to the creation and understanding of art, asserting that 'art is vision or intuition.' Through a series of oppositions, Croce defines art as not a physical fact, not useful or moral, and not conceptual knowledge. He maintains that intuition enables logical knowledge of objects, not the reverse. The 'Bréviaire' seeks to establish the autonomy of the image and represents a historical and theoretical milestone in aesthetics, aiming to free the emergence of artworks from a judgment-based aesthetic. Thierry Davila contributed to the publication.