Aesthetics of the Mind after Mallarmé

"Work as such doesn't concern me. What intrigues me, excites me, vexes me is the power of doing works. That's why nothing looked to me more coarse and negligible than the poet reduced to be being a poet." - Paul Valéry. Valéry's note, evidently directed against Mallarmé, gives track for the present volume, which is devoted to focus the idea of poeisis like building that is subjected to precise conditions, like putting into practice resources of a particular kind, like playing with transparent images. Within such a horizon, artistic doing appears to be the place where mind develops its own powers and states its knowing strategies. Thus operating, it defines again ab imis, the notion of art in the variety of its patterns, its forms, and its figures.