Heidegger’s paper ‘Art and Space’ (1969, Man and world 6. Bloomington: Indiana university Press) is the place where he gives his fullest discussion of a major art medium which is somewhat neglected in aesthetics, namely sculpture. The structure of argument in ‘Art and Space’ is cryptic even by Heidegger’s standards. The small amount of literature tends to focus on the paper’s role within Heidegger’s own oeuvre as an expression of changes in his understanding of space. This is ironic; for Heidegger’s (...) main thematic in the essay is the way in which space is overcome in the creation of sculpture. Of course, by virtue of its three-dimensional character, sculpture seems to be a spatial medium, par excellence. The counter-intuitive character of Heidegger’s position requires, accordingly, that his argumentative strategy be scrutinized very closely. In this paper, therefore, I will examine closely the structure of Heidegger’s argument, with the aim of understanding, rectifying, and then developing his most important insights. My ultimate aim is to show the subtle, but radical points which are at issue in Heidegger’s arguments, and to develop them much further in the clarification of sculpture’s key philosophical significance. (shrink)

Drawing on Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art and Art and Space, this article explores how people experience Harpa, a world‐renown work of architectural art. Following partners from Henning Larsen Architects, the firm responsible for supervising the design process with the artist Olafur Eliasson, I trace the impact of spatial experience from architectural experts to people struggling to articulate their encounter, unpacking links between Harpa and the quiet transformation of tourists, the stacking of stones, and the performance of (...) art in a space that is widely regarded as a work of art in its own right. Folding Heidegger through Harpa, the text explores art as a non‐representational way of approaching phenomena that evade other forms of understanding, opening a space of revelation: an immeasurable distance in which the transcendent interconnectedness world and earth step forward. (shrink)

E-Co-Affectivity is a philosophical investigation of affectivity in various forms of life: photosynthesis and growth in plants, touch and trauma in bird feathers, the ontogenesis of human life through the placenta, the bare interface of human skin, and the porous materiality of soil. Combining biology, phenomenology, Ancient Greek thought, new materialisms, environmental philosophy, and affect studies, Marjolein Oele thinks through concrete, living places that show the receptive, responsive power of living beings to be affected and to affect. She focuses on (...) these localized interfaces to explain how affectivity emerges in places that are always evolving, creative, porous, and fluid. Every interface is material, but is also "more" than its current materiality in co-creating place, time, and being. After extensively describing the effects of the milieu and community within which each example of affectivity takes place, in the final chapter Oele adds a prescriptive, ethical lens that formulates a new epoch beyond the Anthropocene, one that is sensitive to the larger ecological, communal concerns at stake. (shrink)

Original and critical essays by leading scholars on the question of the human in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger.

In this article, the idea of space colonization is critically examined by drawing from Martin Heidegger’s topological philosophy of technology and dwelling. Heidegger’s ideas from his 1966 interview with German journal Der Spiegel are examined in light of his relevant philosophical texts to interpret his claims concerning The Blue Marble image. This article defends the view that Heidegger does not take a moral stance against space colonization as such; rather, he elucidates the existential grounds of our relation to modern technology, (...) and the sense of unsettledness that stems from the lack of an appropriate relation to place. (shrink)

During the past few decades, everyday aesthetics has established itself as a new branch of philosophical aesthetics alongside the more traditional philosophy of art. The Paths from Philosophy of Art to Everyday Aesthetics explores the intimate relations between these two branches of contemporary aesthetics. The essays collected in this volume discuss a wide range of topics from aesthetic intimacy to the nature of modernity and the essence of everydayness, which play important roles both in the philosophy of art and everyday (...) aesthetics. With these essays, the writers and editors of this volume wish to commemorate professor Arto Haapala on his 60th birthday. -/- This collection of articles is intended for scholars and students working in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy, and art studies. (shrink)

A Touch of Doubt traces the theme of touch in the evolution of skepticism through Platonism, German idealism, Continental philosophy and psychoanalysis. Haptic Scepticism, the field of ethics emerging from this study, explores the grasp-ability of contradiction. Contradiction is a haptic marvel. We can cup it in our palms, press it against our lips, dip our toes into its coolness, and, if we are not careful, we may even burn ourselves on its surface.

The paper discusses the possibility of applying Heidegger’s considerations on art to the problematic and multifaceted field of contemporary art. The questions of origin and essence, which we are accustomed to refer to the metaphysical tradition, take on new significance by connecting art not to beauty, but to truth. In this epochal change of position, we can find the identity of contemporary art, which reveals itself not by offering edifying meanings, but by indicating a horizon of comprehensibility in which we (...) are involved. Starting from the innovative status of the Dasein as a projecting being-in-the-world, the horizon of comprehensibility of contemporary art outlines a context in which there is no subjectivity using a work, but in which an encounter happens. In its intrinsic and sometimes complacent contradictoriness, contemporary art, especially installations and performances, always manifests its identity as a struggle between truth and untruth, as an event that has no steady ground, and no unique or ascertained origin or monolithic essence, and which is nevertheless expressive and meaningful. The quality of being an event implies that contemporary art is not something objectifiable, representable, or categorizable, but is something that happens. What happens cannot become a substantial foundation, because it remains perpetually a happening, which affects us with its different languages and perspectives. The poetic matrix of contemporary art indicates the uniqueness and unrepeatability of each work of art, which shows us how the un-originality and un-essentiality of art is the main pathway to arrive at an experience of the world that each time is like the first time. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty states in his Institution and Passivity lectures that he wants to "consider criticism itself as a symbolic form" as opposed to doing "a philosophy of symbolic form." This statement seems counterintuitive for Merleau-Ponty, who has been called "the philosopher of the sensible." In this book, Kaushik investigates this question, arguing that Merleau-Ponty has raised the stakes of his ontology such that it is no longer a matter of finding a solution to the difference between "the real and the fictive" (...) but rather, of constellating and matrixing them. This ontological matrix amounts to a psychoanalysis of the philosophy of identity. Kaushik argues that philosophies of reflection, in which reflection seeks to coincide with its origins, are in fact uncritical because they miss the form of differentiation that limits them. His analyses of the matrices between space-imagination, light-dark, awake-asleep, repression-expression, etc., subvert these philosophies and reveal the symbolic form in terms of its lack of precise origin or destination. Drawing from recently published course materials of Merleau-Ponty's, and attentive to his reliance on literary phrases for phenomenological insights, Kaushik brings out the living force of Merleau-Ponty's thought and develops his radical insight of the primacy of the symbolic form, even in an ontology that claims to be about the sensible and its elements. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s concept of freedom is exceptional in contemporary political theory. First, it is positive, which puts it into opposition to the both current versions of its negative counterpart, the liberal, and the republican concepts of freedom. In particular, a comparison between Arendt’s and Pettit’s approaches allows establishing some striking points of antagonistic logical mirroring. Based on this, the notion of “schools of thought” is introduced, which plays an essential role in the subsequent discussion of Arendtian realism. Second, although Arendt’s (...) theory of freedom shares features that are common to the major continental thinkers, like Martin Heidegger, Gilles Deleuze, or Alain Badiou, her solution to the problem of freedom aligns her closer to the liberals. Third, I argue that one should consider this logical irregularity as evidence in favor of her political realism, rather than a trivial inconsistency. This realism is the genuinely exceptional part of her legacy, which may guide us eventually, with modifications applied, to a paradigm shift in the current political philosophy. Finally, I present an evaluation of her solution to the problem of freedom, and a brief follow-up to some seemingly-out-of-place Arendtian notions, such as “excellence” and “elite.” Although in the final analysis, her solution seems to be artificial, it opens up a new promising area of research related to the notion of “benevolent excellence.”. (shrink)

Is there a dominant global image—call it a world picture—that links the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring? Or is there any single image that captures and perhaps even motivated the widely noticed synergy and infectious mimicry between Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park?

This dissertation begins by asking, what is the body, and how does one develop an understanding of the body? In this study, I aim to rework the notions of discursive practices and material phenomena, seeking to examine the relationship between the two in light of the work of art, so conceived within the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, in an attempt to deal with the question: “what is the body?” This dissertation avoids reifying certain normative descriptions of the body or constraining (...) the matter of the body as strictly the effect of discursive power. I attempt a phenomenological observation about subjectivity and our capacity for meaning-making, which avoids a reduction to both materialism and discourse. My own approach to the topic seeks to gain an existential-ontological understanding of the body through the lens of disclosive affectivity, specifically when experiencing the work of art. I take as a starting premise that the situated nature of being human is fundamentally corporeal, in a way that is not reducible to either materialism or idealism. This dissertation also aims to see whether it is possible to maintain that bodies change the quality of the space they inhabit and, in turn, to see how space affects the corporeal nature of an entity. In the course of this study, the matter of the body will unfold as more than an instantiation of materiality and more than an effect of language, for it exists and emerges, in its totality, as a kind of liminal space, one that is irreducible to certain categories of thought and analysis, as the experiences of what we will come to call the “lived-body,” which is the situation of the person asking the question of the body, is the very basis and possibility of questioning. This dissertation will demonstrate how it is that Martin Heidegger’s post-metaphysical conceptions of truth, especially those emerging out of a focus on the work of art, provide a means to conceive of the body beyond the matter/language binary prominent in much post-structuralist literature on materiality. In going a step further than being, by taking “being human” as the central concept in Heidegger, I aim to more fully understand corporeality through the lens of later Heidegger’s writings on the fourfold, art and space, and dwelling. There are numerous approaches to aesthetics and philosophy of art from which one can appropriate when inquiring into the nature of the body; an entity, I argue, that is constituted at the point of overlap between materiality and discourse. With a broad understanding of what encompasses objects of art, I see art as a means and a conduit for the perpetual reconstitution of the becoming self, as well as a way to make sense of the self. The work of art is powerful because it “un-conceals” and reveals truths in non-conceptual, non-verbal ways: art shows, it does not tell. When we think about what it means to be human, to be situated as a material person also capable of thoughts and emotions, this dissertation seeks to know how we develop, shed, change, alter, and deepen a sense of self and what is true. Art fulfills this role in its ideological function and its affective effect. The other contention is that this affectivity is possible only based on a very particular way of expressing what it means to be a material being, and I think this requires a shift from embodiment and body to flesh. Flesh is that part of ourselves that situates us as an individual and as an entity enmeshed in the world, porous to experience and affected by what we encounter. This dissertation draws a connection between flesh and the lived-body. We will see that art is born of the flesh, and the body is, in turn, affected by aesthetic experiences. Thus, art is a way to understand the mutually dependent ideas of world, flesh, and lived-body. The significance of this study, an inquiry into the nature of the body from an existential-ontological approach, is that it reaches for a type of relationality and ontological structure that bears on the social order, to set a foundation for how to approach issues of ethics and justice. (shrink)

Ph.D. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2012.

Diego Bubbio, Ingo Farin and Glenda Satne have advanced a range of comments, questions and challenges relating to the ideas and arguments set out in the new edition of my Place and Experience (2018). Rather than address each of my interlocutors separately, my responses here are organized around four main topics: the relation between space and place, including the nature of space; the relation between place and subjectivity, and the foundational role of place; the relation between place and conceptuality; and (...) the relation between place and normativity. (shrink)

Drawing on a range of sources in philosophy and literature, but with particular reference to the work of Heidegger, makes a compelling case for the importance of place in philosophical discourse.

Este artigo argumenta, começando pela justaposição de Heidegger ao lado dos geógrafos Ratzel e Vidal de la Blanche, e do etologista von Uexküll, realizada por Giorgio Agamben, em seu ensaio The Open, que a estética da morada , que encontramos no último Heidegger, tem que ser entendida em termos da centralidade para o pensamento de Heidegger de um conceito que também é central para o pensamento geográfico-cultural , nomeadamente, o conceito de lugar ou ‘espaço geográfico’. A centralidade dada ao ‘geográfico’ (...) no pensamento de Heidegger é freqüentemente tomada como diretamente conectada, como ela é entendida por Agamben, com o problemático engajamento de Heidegger com os nazistas nos anos 1930; e Agamben apresenta a posição heideggeriana como paralela a de von Uexküll quanto a isso. Porém, não apenas a maneira pela qual Agamben faz essa conexão é altamente enganosa, mas ela também não atenta para qualquer real consideração para o que pode estar em questão na ênfase no ‘geográfico’ em Heidegger. Há, de fato, razão para pensar que o papel desempenhado pelos conceitos de lugar e espaço no pensamento de Heidegger vai de encontro às associações que Agamben e outros supõem. Este artigo é então uma exploração do ‘geográfico’ tal como ele aparece em Heidegger e das associações políticas que podem ser pensadas como acompanhando-o, bem como da relação de Heidegger com uma certa linha da tradição geográfica exemplificada por Ratzel e Vidal de la Blanche.Beginning with Giorgio Agamben’s juxtaposition, in his essay The Open, of Heidegger alongside the geographers Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche, and the ethologist, von Uexküll, this paper argues that the aesthetics of dwelling that we find in later Heidegger has to be understood in terms of the centrality to Heidegger’s thinking of a concept that is also central to cultural-geographic thought , namely, the concept of place or ‘geographic space’. The centrality given to the ‘geographic’ in Heidegger’s thinking is often taken to be directly connected, as it is taken to be by Agamben, with Heidegger’s problematic engagement with Nazi in the 1930s, and Agamben presents Heidegger’s position as parallelling that of von Uexküll in this regard. Yet not only is the manner in which Agamben makes this connection highly misleading, but it also neglects any real consideration of what might be at issue in the emphasis on the ‘geographical’ in Heidegger. There is, indeed, reason to think that the role played by the concepts of place and space in Heidegger’s thought actually runs counter to the associations that Agamben and others assume. This paper is thus an exploration of the ‘geographical’ as it appears in Heidegger, and of the political associations that might be thought to accompany it, as well as of Heidegger’s relation to a certain strand within the geographical tradition exemplified by Ratzel and Vidal de la Blanche. (shrink)

This article proposes a direction—inspired by a reading of Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture— in which thinking enriched by artistic experience can unfold an alternative mode of being-in-the-world. Heidegger points out that, in contrast to a scientific understanding of space as an empty container, the special character of space in sculpture is characterized by a clearing-away (Räumen), which presupposes and points to an open, receptive attitude toward experience that is necessary for dwelling to take place. From Heidegger this article proceeds to (...) reflect on artworks by Eduardo Chillida and Janet Echelman. These offer concrete examples of how a thinking of sculpture can apply to different notions of place. While Chillida’s sculptures present a sense of place as rooted and embedded in the landscape, Echelman’s artworks explore an expanded notion of place through a multisensory sense of immersion. Applying Heidegger’s meditations on Räumen, it turns out that the differences between these artworks are of greatest significance in illustrating the breadth of the experiential space that they share: an openness to dwelling and a receptivity toward being-in-the-world. In this way, Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture are unfolded in a contemporary context and the potential of sculpture for a thinking of experience is established. (shrink)

While the groundbreaking insights that contemporary theorists have formulated with regards to space---as a multiplicity without essence, as an active event, and as inseparable from subjectivity, power, Otherness and time---have ostensibly purged it of its traditional understanding as absolute, a specific visuality characteristic of Cartesian perspectivalism remains privileged in its theorization which force it to remain so. While the complexity of space cannot be recovered from an abstract contemplation of its visual geometry in a way that reflects these contemporary concerns, (...) there have unfortunately been relatively few attempts to imagine space away from the visual in a way that challenges its traditional absoluteness. To this end, it is argued that because sound and music contain implicit and explicit spatialities, the sonic represents a rich and unexplored area from which to imagine a radical non-visual space that discursively organizes space according to a different economy through which to challenge its assumed visuality. And yet, even when space has been approached through sound, there is a tendency to exteriorize sound into an object or a set of practices that robs it of its defining quality---its own "soundfulness". By breaking down those factors that are considered salient to how space is conceived today along sonic rather than visual lines, the argument is made that the "soundfulness" of sound's physical properties gives it a complex texture of excess that is corporealized within the body and forwards the philosophical possibility of unfolding the spatiality of sound according to vectors beyond the visible in a way that, while reflecting contemporary concerns, prevents its return to absoluteness. To take seriously this "soundfulness" thus allows us to recuperate the sonic as a philosophical and political way of experiencing and knowing the world, including that of space. The arguments, as well as being drawn from the insights of contemporary spatial theory, the physics of sound, the phenomenology of listening, rhizomatic and feminist theory, quantum mechanics and musicology, will be explained through an understanding of space as sound and exemplified in The Disintegration Loops, a post-minimalist musical piece by sonic artist William Basinski. (shrink)

Ziarek's claim concerning a more poetic thought appearing in the later Heidegger is echoed by Janet Donohoe. In her essay The Place of Tradition: Heidegger and Benjamin on Technology and Art she argues that notwithstanding the many differences between Heidegger and Benjamin, they share a commitment to a thinking which returns them to a more original poiesis at the root of the philosophical tradition. Both react to a crisis in the European tradition of thought and both see the expression of (...) this crisis in modem technological society. This essay, then, focuses on the paradoxical character of the tradition as elaborated in their respective texts, in order to understand how they can see an artistic or poetic thinking as an alternative to the technological paradigm of our present societies. The reflection on these topics brings out the thinking of a notion of place as central to both Heidegger's and Benjamin's critique of calculative rationality. (shrink)

Abstract The role of actual works of art with philosophical writing is often reduced to the status of example or illustration. As such the materiality of art work is rarely discussed let alone deployed as the basis of philosophical reflection. In this paper works by Francesco Mosca, and Bernini are used to question Heidegger's writings on sculpture. What such an approach opens up is the possibility that art may set the measure for philosophy.

Fugue and chaos are used in their contemporary meaning. Elements of the fugue, albeit a ‎small number of universals, will be demonstrated in the area of visual and verbal colors. ‎Chaos dominates the internet, fashion, and everyday life. The visual and verbal colors are ‎differentiated and their communicative potential is indicated alongside the diachronic changes. The prototypes of colors are the interface between visual and verbal colors.‎.