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Abstract

The present article is an attempt to juxtapose the recentivist aesthetics, with its par excellence metaphysical character, and the aesthetic, post-structuralist thought. The category of “now” makes this kind of a juxtaposition of two, extremely different, although rooted exactly in “now”, ways of approaching a broadly conceived aesthetic problematics. The common denominator of both options turns out to be the Kantian and Lyotardian concept of the sublime, which is, at the same time, connected with the present moment, emphasised in recentivism, and also turns out to be exactly this mode of artistic sensitivity which is characteristic of our modernity. The statements of the recentivist aesthetics, which accentuates formalism and autotelism of beauty and of art, refer then in the same degree to classical art and to various 20th-century artistic currents. It should be added that the above thesis concerns both the creator and the viewer of a work of art. The work of art thought of as pure recens, and deprived of its quo ante and ad quern, enables us to determine the idea of beauty made more metaphysical and more sublime by the recentivist “now”.