Abstract

The text discusses the latest research about the phenomenology of the attention in order to enhance the work of Siegfried Kracauer. The task to understand art as a disturbance and interruption of the everyday perception characterizes the central concern of Kracauer's aesthetic philosophy. In the figure of Ginster, the author uses the estrangement as a form of knowledge to show the ambivalent nature of the attention. Attention is not simply a kind of voluntary concentration, it is also a process in which the subject is fascinated and attracted by the object of perception. Thanks to this combination of perception and loss of the self, Kracauer's phenomenological epoché dissolves the subject and respects the nature of the historical reality, which is partly structured and partly amorphous.