The boundaries of reason and the possibilities of the art in the absurd

Abstract

This essay tries to explore the possibilities of the art of the absurd in front of the limitations of theory. Art has the possibility to enrich the experience: return to the polysemy; give reasons to the reason, languages to the language, knowledge to the knowledge, senses to the sense. Exploring these possibilities, as well as debating their boundaries, becomes necessary in a context where the reason turned into an instrumental, identifying and dehumanizing. The reason submit to the praxis and the control, such as Adorno and

Horkheimer stated in Dialectic of Enlightenment. The absurd, such as Camus understood it, is not a renunciation to the reason, but a lucid reason that tests the limits of its own ambitions; this author affirms that an absurd play to be possible needs to be mixed with the thought in its most lucid form. Against the Enlightenment project of the known things, the unitary, the predictable and the identical, that seeks turn the language into data and the individual into specimen, art could open a space to the unexpected, chaotic, contradictory and ridiculous. Opening this space recovers the feeling generated by not having always an

answer, not being able to predict an occurrence or not reach a concluding definition. In this sense it is possible to recall Schelling when he assured that the art begins where the knowledge abandons the man or Nietzsche when he said: “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”