The history of the reception of Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" (over 530 books, articles, and dissertations, including its first and definitive full-length commentary by von Herrmann ( Heideggers Philosophie der Kunst: Eine systematische Interpretation der Holzwege-Abhandlung "Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes" (1980)) and extending all the way into the present decade with a collective commentary by Espinet and Keiling (Heideggers Ursprung des Kunstwerkes: Ein kooperativer Kommentar (2011)), has consistently recognized the stakes of the essay as vastly exceeding the domain of aesthetics. In recent years, authors such as William Desmond and Krzysztof Ziarek have sought to inscribe its problematic within the broader critique of the modern Subject and calculative rationality in conversation with the perspectives of Adorno and Benjamin. However, surprisingly few scholars have attempted to interpret the essay from the point of view of Heidegger's sustained engagement with his main opponent in questions of subjectivity and rationality, Emmanuel Kant, and even fewer---from that of space and time as conditions of the possibility of experience and their transformation in Heidegger's thinking throughout the 1930s.

However, hints suggesting the centrality and validity of such an approach could already be found in contributions by Emmanuel Martineau, Dominique Janicaud, and Sven-Olov Wallenstein : indeed, the striking resemblance between Martineau's criteria of space, time, and object (in his comparison of the different versions of the essay) with the conditions of the possibility of experience in Kant's "Transcendental Aesthetics" could not be reasonably overlooked. It is this resemblance which had initially prompted our inquiry into the relationship between "The Origin of the Work of Art" and Heidegger's critique of Kant's analysis of experience as objectivity conditioned by space and time throughout the 1930s. In order to gain an accurate sense of how "The Origin of the Work of Art" might constitute a key aspect---if not the linchpin---of this critique, we have deemed it indispensable to reconstruct the progression of this critique from Heidegger's four studies of Kant (1927/28, 1929, 1931, 1935) to Sein und Zeit , and to Beitrage zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Having thus traced the major stages of Heidegger's reflection upon space, time, and object throughout the decade of 1927--1938 in the first three chapters of the dissertation, we were finally in a position to both pose and attempt to answer the question of how "The Origin of the Work of Art" might re-define these notions so as to offer a model of the experience of appropriation which would outstrip not only that of calculative rationality and the Kantian Subject, but also that of Dasein of the epoch of Sein und Zeit.

Chapter 1, "Experience as Objectification (Vergegenstandlichun g) : Space, Time, and the Subject in Heidegger's Turn (and Returns) to Kant," will trace the rise of the problematic of space and time in relation to the question of the experience of being through Heidegger's sustained studies of Kant beginning with the 1927/28 course Phanomenologische Interpretation von Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft (GA 25) and ending with the 1935/36 course Die Frage nach dem Ding. Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsatzen (GA 41). This genealogy will serve to demonstrate the legitimacy and necessity of evaluating the proper spatiality and temporality of the work of art in the three elaborations of the Kunstwerkaufsatz in terms of their contribution to Heidegger's development of an alternative to Kant's interpretation of space and time as conditions of objectivity.

Chapter 2, "Existence as Signification (Besinnung) : Dasein as the Measure of Space and Time in Sein und Zeit," will approach Sein und Zeit as Heidegger's initial constructive response to Kant's subjectivization of space and time as pure forms of the intuition. Focusing on §22--24 and §69--72, it will acknowledge the departure of Heidegger's fundamental analytic of Dasein from the transcendental aesthetic of Kant, while insisting upon the fact that in Sein und Zeit both space and time remain essentially Dasein-commensurate (daseinsmassig). Having thus outlined space and time as possibilities of Dasein, it will draw upon §24 and §83 in order to anticipate Heidegger's trajectory beyond Being and Time towards space and time as possibilities of beyng. (Abstract shortened by ProQuest.).