THE CADUCITY OF BEAUTY AND AESTHETIC TEMPORALITY Mauro Carbone The italian term caducitfi (caducity) is normally used in order to translate the title of one of Sigmund Freud's writings - the importance of which is directly proportional to its shortness - where the focus is the reference to beautyJ But the same term also indicates - once again directly in the title - the fundamental character, which Oskar Becker assigns to beauty in his best known aesthetic essay, which only recently has been published in Italy) In both cases, however, the German words translated by this term are different. Freud's Vergiinglichkeit, in fact, signifies the short-lived character of everything on earth and thus invests even beauty with an "ephemeral character." From this term Becker - and before him Solger 3 - wants to distinguish the Hinfiilligkeit, which stands more for the "fragility" that in his eyes distinguishes beauty, which is "aul3erst empfindlich gegen jede noch so kleine Veranderung seiner inneren Beschaffenheit, ''4 as well as its reception. Thus, Vergiinglichkeit and Hinfdlligkeit are two different meanings of caducity. It is caducity, which our century has made tragically "irrefutable" even for beauty, and it is significant that Freud becomes aware of this matter of fact just shortly before World War I breaks out. And again caducity is considered by Becker - who writes just a little after Sein und Zeit will be published and who maintains the basic analysis of the Sein zum Tode - as the foundation for the construction of the aesthetic existence. But it is just as significant that Vergiinglichkeit and Hinfiffligkeit at the end become two ways of meaning beauty through caducity, this is to say that the latter - in the one or the other acception - preserves the chiffre of the first. It seems that beauty celebrates caducity and in this sense finds an impossible definition. This is the opposite of a conception, which considers beauty as historically lasting and which induced Hume to oppose the regularity of taste (alias the Standard of Taste) to relativism. And not so many years ago this very I Cf. [Freud 1987]. 2 Cf. [Becker 1994]. 3 For a comparison between Becker and Solger see [Oph~lders 1996] and [Oph~ilders forthcoming]. 4 [Becker 1994], 8. Axiomathes, Nos. 1-2, 1998, pp. 125-129.