You admit, consequently, the notion of the temporal transcendence of the work of art?

Yes, but then it is perhaps necessary to introduce a component which is not accentuated by Kant, even if it is present in a subterranean way, namely the connection with a public, the connection with an amateur, in the strong sense of the word, for it is on the side of the receiver of the work of art that there is revealed another historicity, that of reception. It is perhaps the historicity of the reception that we can best decipher, in favor of the constitution of permanences across their historicity: as if the work of art created for itself a temporally open and indefinite public.  But then what is there between the two?  Answer: monstration, the fact that a work of art aims, beyond the intentionality of its author, and insofar as it is a work of art, to be shared, therefore first of all to be shown.  One can then return one by one to the arts in order to show in what way each exhibits its « monstravity, » its capacity to be shared between the creator and his public.  There would then  certainly be the need to distinguish, as Henri Gouhier has done,  between the arts of one time and the arts of two times, those where the existence of the work coincides with its creation -- painting and sculpture, for example -- and those where the existence of the work requires a second time, which is that of its recreation: theatrical representation, musical execution, choreographic realization beginning with the writing of a libretto, of a score, of a script.  One could then ask what is the status of a ballet, or of a musical score when they are not played, while awaiting their performance.  It is perhaps here, in this indefinite capacity to be reincarnated, and in a way each time historically different, but substantially and essentially founding, that the profound signified of the libretto or of the score occupies the status of the sempiternal.

The question that one can ask basically is this:  where is the work of art? What is its ontological place, where does it exist?  When there is no reception, when  it sleeps during decades, the work exists, but where?

I would say that it exists only in its capacity for « monstration »

With respect to your thesis on communicability, one establishes from the point of view of ‘monstration’ or of reception that all the great works of art have been incommunicable in a certain way or have not been received at the beginning. . .

Yes, this is a temporal turning point that has to be introduced, which is the lag in reception; and there is doubtless something specific in the work of art: its prophetic character, in the sense that, breaking with the values of utility and commercial values, the transcendence of the work of art is affirmed in opposition to the utility that itself is exhausted in the historical.  It is the capacity to transcend immediate utility that characterises the work of art in this capacity for multiple and indefinite reinscription.  One could say that in the arts of two times the moment of the sempiternal is in the hiding place (retrait) of the libretto and the script, but the temporal test is in monstration.  The capacity for a ‘monstration’ renewed endlessly, as being always other although the same, constitutes the link between the sempiternal and the historic; perhaps here is the most pregnant temporal mark of the work of art. 

In short, you admit that all « monstration » supposes an interpretation and that art is essentailly indebted to a hermeneutic on the side of reception, but perhaps also on the side of creation?

The problem is to know whether there can be a creation which is not an anticipation of its own reception.  This is the problem posed by the intimate journal, in particular Samuel Pepys’ diary, which was intended for himself; doubtless this is an extreme and dubious case, since the work was preserved in order to become public.  Does this mean that the idea of the unrecognized genius is not also a limit case and as it were the negative of a deceived expectation or an expectation of something different?  There is a kind of “Nachtraglichkeit,” like an  “after-effect” which ultimately marks the victory of ‘monstration’ over the unrecognized. To be sure, if an artist remained totally unrecognized, we would not know him!  Only those enter into the common glory who ultimately, later on, have been re-cognized.  And that delayed re-cognition is another way, besides, of vanquishing temporality on the level of its unfolding.  A rupture of the sequence results from this retrospective anticipation which effects that it is in a future anterior that the creation will have been temporally received; it will have been true that this work had the destiny of monstration and therefore of encounter and recognition.