pure artistic subjectivity

...just came across this quote while gathering more information about the self-referential context, I like it-

more to post soon...

In Agamben's analysis, the artist who seeks absolute essence must by necessity turn to the absolute essence of the work, which means the dismissal of any content. But when the work turns out to be void of content, it reveals itself as pure inessence:

If the artist now seeks his certainty in a particular content or faith, he is lying, because he knows that pure artistic subjectivity is the essence of everything; but if he seeks his reality in pure artistic subjectivity, he finds himself in the paradoxical condition of having to find his own essence precisely in the inessential, his content. His condition, then, is that of a radical split; and outside of this split, everything is a lie.

The result, Agamben concludes, is that the artist is the man without content, with "no other identity than a perpetual emerging out of the nothingness of expression and no other ground than this incomprehensible station on this side of himself."

Philosopher Giorgio Agamben