The conception of disinterested pleasure is not only central to Kant’s theory of beauty but also highly influential in contemporary philosophical discourse about beauty. However, it remains unclear, what exactly disinterested pleasure is and what role it plays in experiences of beauty. This volume sheds new light on the conception of disinterested pleasure from the perspectives of both Kant scholarship and contemporary aesthetics. In the first part, the focus is on Kant’s theory of beauty as grounded on the conception of (...) disinterested pleasure. In the second part, disinterested pleasure is investigated in the light of contemporary debates on beauty. The third part is dedicated to the relation of theories of disinterested pleasure to the meta-aesthetical debate between realism and anti-realism. The volume clarifies the meaning, role, and implications of one of the most influential conceptions in traditional as well as contemporary approaches to beauty. (shrink)

The qualities of great works of art, their profundity, their insight into the human condition, are epitomised in Brakhage's films, which are, I argue, from the beginning related to and inseparable from a philosophical attitude toward existence. His films emerge out of an authentic 'existential' mode of attunement, a mind-set wherein the potential for human transcendence is framed and filmed within its intractable relationship to death, the most extreme possibility of non-existence. Brakhage not only views existence in a philosophical manner, (...) beyond this, he engages in philosophical inquiry in a fundamental way through the medium of film. The films arise from and respond to what Karl Jaspers views as the ultimate source of philosophy, namely, 'the will to authentic communication,' which embraces 'wonder leading to knowledge, doubt leading to certainty, forsakenness leading to the self.' This amounts to the philosophical struggle to arrive at a sense of metaphysical coherence and existential familiarity, i.e., the precarious undertsanding of belonging to the world in communion with others. This essay seeks to elucidate and detail, through a series of interpretive gestures, the philosophical themes present to Brakhage's silent films by way of a reading that emerges from the phenomenological-ontological tradition in philosophy. In doing so, I hope to interpret Brakhage's filmic art as conveying a legitimate source of human understanding, which contributes to our interpreting and discoursing about the world and our lives in new and revelatory ways. (shrink)

This article considers the effectiveness of queer environmental ethics in the Anthropocene, a word increasingly used to describe the anthropogenic destruction of ecosystems that marks our current geological era. Taking as my subject the contemporary ecosexuality movement popularised by performance artists Annie Sprinkle and her co-collaborator and partner Elizabeth Stephens, I explore the ethics behind ecosexuals’ encounters with the natural environment. Stephens and Sprinkle's performances, captured in their documentary Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013), make clear ecosexuality's concurrent (...) urgency and playfulness, which is embodied in a theatrical environmental sensibility that I call eco-camp. Eco-camp is a mode of florid performance, spectacle and ostentatious sex-positivity that champions new forms of relationality between humans and other earthly inhabitants. Drawing from diverse theoretical perspectives, including Mikhail Bakhtin's (1968) carnivalesque, Chris Cuomo's (1998) ethics of flourishing and Cynthia Willett's (Willett et al., 2012; Willett, 2014) theorisation of feminist humour, I argue that ecosexuality's campy ecological ethics provide an alternative to the didacticism and moralism that characterise much contemporary environmentalism. In the spirit of carnival, the tragi-comic and, at times, parodic tone of ecosexuality generates an affective dissonance that spurs us to feel the full effects of our discordance with nature. (shrink)

"The concluding chapter, penned by C. E. Emmer, both revisits and greatly expands upon disputations within the contested territory of kitsch as term and tool in cultural turf-war arsenals. Focusing on debates surrounding two visual responses to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Dennis Madalone's 2003 music video for the patriotic anthem 'America We Stand As One' and Jenny Ryan's 'plushie' sculpture, 'Soft 9/11,' Emmer utilizes these debates to reveal the coexisting and competing attitudes towards ostensibly kitschy objects and (...) the contentiousness of deploying kitsch as a term in these debates. The buzzing activity of the internet provides much of the raw material for his arguments. Through his close reading of both the works themselves and the public response to them, Emmer once more focuses attention on the competing and overlapping attitudes towards kitsch and the way in which it and its semantic cousins remain a viable and valuable resource with which to police the borders that surround the artworld. Ultimately, his contribution further grounds a wider premise operative in this collection--namely, that a simple and rigid dichotomy of kitsch and (high) art does not and indeed cannot capture the elusive and mercurial nature of kitsch." --from the editor's introduction. (shrink)

<P>While there are many books on the romantics, and many books on Heidegger, there has been no book exploring the connection between the two. Pol Vandevelde’s new study forges this important link. </P> <P>Vandevelde begins by analyzing two models that have addressed the interaction between literature and philosophy: early German romanticism (especially Schlegel and Novalis), and Heidegger’s work with poetry in the 1930s. Both models offer an alternative to the paradigm of mimesis, as exemplified by Aristotle’s and Plato’s discussion of (...) poetry, and both German romanticism and Heidegger owe a deep debt to Plato. The study goes on to defend the view that Heidegger was influenced by romanticism. The author’s project is thus both historical, showing the specificity of the romantic and Heideggerean works, and systematic, defending aspects of their alternative mode of thinking while also pointing to their weaknesses. </P>. (shrink)

The article is an investigation into theatricality from various standpoints in order to focus on different views on theatricality considered as partially emancipated from theatre and to verify if and to what extent each of them can apply to installation artworks as environments and intermedial devices. Ultimately the article propounds the idea of a paradoxical anti-theatrical theatricality of installation art, grasped in its very connection to site-specificity, critically engaging Martin Heidegger’s insights regarding the «Gestell» and the «work-being» of the work (...) of art, as a general theoretical basis through which a particular focus of ‘specificity’ of installation is endorsed. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough grounded in different philosophical traditions, Alexander Nehamas and Hans-Georg Gadamer each return to Plato's idea of the beautiful, to kalon, in order to reclaim the relevance of beauty for our understanding of art today. Their appeal to Plato challenges the reign of aesthetics that both see inaugurated by Kant's aesthetic theory. Nehamas criticizes the Kantian notion of “disinterest” as a “pleasure bereft of desire” in order to reassert the passionate longing that draws us toward art. Gadamer criticizes Kant's analysis (...) for the way it divides the aesthetic from the cognitive, thereby alienating art and beauty from any claim to knowledge or truth. So Nehamas emphasizes the import of Platonic erōs to a phenomenological account of our experience of beauty. Love, so understood, elides any easy distinction between the sensual and spiritual, between the desire to possess and the passion to know—just as beauty cannot be captured in distinctions between what is and what appears. Gadamer draws out precisely the ontological dimension of the beautiful as self-presentation. In so doing he revives the intimacy of beauty and truth, alētheia, as the movement into unconcealment by which something comes forth into its presence. In the end, I suggest appropriating Nehamas's phenomenological analysis of the erotic to Gadamer's ontological understanding of the alethic in order to renew the relation of erōs and kalon into an account that recalls this Platonic legacy for a contemporary hermeneutics of art. (shrink)

What is kitsch? The varieties of phenomena which can fall under the name are bewildering. Here, I focus on what has been called “traditional kitsch,” and argue that it often turns on the emotional effect specifically captured by Edmund Burke’s concept of “beauty” from his 1757 'A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful.' Burkean beauty also serves to distinguish “traditional kitsch” from other phenomena also often called “kitsch”—namely, entertainment. Although I argue that Burkean beauty in domestic decoration allows for (...) us to see “traditional kitsch” as resting on natural and even healthy impulses, I also argue that an all-too-common political function of traditional kitsch directs it to dangerous ends. (shrink)

My research into Virtual Reality technology and its central property of immersion has indicated that immersion in Virtual Reality (VR) electronic systems is a significant key to the understanding of contemporary culture as well as considerable aspects of previous culture as detected in the histories of philosophy and the visual arts. The fundamental change in aesthetic perception engendered by immersion, a perception which is connected to the ideal of total-immersion in virtual space, identifies certain shifts in ontology which are relevant (...) to a better understanding of the human being. This understanding was achieved through a broad inquiry into the histories of Virtual Reality, philosophy, and the visual arts and has lead to the formulation of an aesthetic theory of immersive consciousness indicative of immersive culture. The primary subject of this discourse is immersion then: an experience which will be identified within the dissertation as the indispensable characteristic of Virtual Reality. The understanding of immersion arrived at here will be used to fashion a synchronous theory of art particularly informed by encounters and concepts of immersion into virtuality. To sufficiently address this subject in a scholarly fashion, I have researched, found and accumulated aesthetic and philosophic examples of immersive tendencies, as found within the histories of art and philosophy, which subsequently contributed towards the articulation of what I have come to call immersive consciousness. As a result of formulating such an immersive consciousness, a good deal of the basis for the questioning of the Western ontological tradition has been found in the Western tradition itself when we look with new eyes and ask new uncertain questions. Moreover, this immersive consciousness will be used to propose some abstract questions encircling today's electronic-based culture. Through the structuring of the argument within the thesis - and overtly within the conclusion - I have articulated a non-teleological creative strategy which provides the basis for an unconstraining integration of noologies (ways of semblancing the thinking process). This strategy provides a means of exemplifying - and for honoring - various methods of thinking. This structuring strategy is consistent with the 'hacker ethic' as defined by Steven Levy, as a demand that access to computers - and anything which might teach us something about the way the world works - should be unlimited and total. To follow this strategy, this dissertation has set out to understand how topical conceptions of virtual immersion connect to pre-existing systems of thought as revealed in art as they have extended out of antecedent ontological self-understandings, historical human self-understandings which have evidenced themselves in the elaboration of technological objectives. To do this I have forged a certain rhizomatic paternity/maternity for Virtual Reality within this dissertation by joining choice immersive examples of simulacra technology into mental connections with the relevant examples culled from the histories of art, architecture, information-technology, sex, myth, space, consciousness and philosophy. (shrink)

Inspired by the eminently successful physical theories and informed by commonplace experiences such as seeing a cat upon looking at a cat, conscious experience is thought of as a measurement or photocopy of given stimulus. Conscious experience, unlike a photocopy, is symbolic—like language—in that the relation between conscious experience and physical stimulus is analogous to that of the word "cat" and its meaning, i.e., arbitrary and yet systematic. We present arguments against the photocopy model and arguments for a symbolic conception (...) of conscious experience. Learning and the corresponding plasticity of the brain make a strong case for the symbolic conception of conscious experience, while many extra-ordinary conscious experiences argue against the formalisation of consciousness as a measuring device. The notions of place-value notation and grammar, which organise quantitative measurements and conscious experiences in the medium of numbers and language, respectively, are suggested as model systems for putting together a comprehensive theory of conscious experience. (shrink)

Mikhail Epstein's essay “Inventive Thinking in the Humanities,” also published in the January 2017 issue of Common Knowledge, argues that the humanities are in crisis because humanist academics have “turned away from human beings and focused on texts.” Expanding on this point while concentrating on a single humanities field, literary studies, this response to Epstein makes the case that fear and awe of the sciences have resulted in the exclusion of subjectivity from literary criticism, even though regarding the critic as (...) anything but a subjective human being responding to the creative work of other subjective human beings makes very limited sense. Avenues of resistance to impersonal criticism have emerged from time to time, and this essay explores several, including those of Susan Sontag, Stanley Fish, Jane Tompkins, Rivka Eifermann, Harold Bloom, and Stephen Greenblatt. None, however, is seen as having had a decisive impact on the academic mainstream. This essay concludes by examining the possibility that literary works are best responded to not in criticism but in other literary works. (shrink)

Summary This article explores the relations among three forms of representations (artistic, mental, and neural) and immersion, considered as an altered state of consciousness, in the context of literary reading. We first define immersive reading as an intensification of our embodied experience of literary representation, in accordance to neuropsychological studies about embodied cognition. We further consider the style of interpretation demanded by such immersive reading and its ethical and ecological underpinnings.

Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Harold Bloom, and Theodor Adorno this article proposes the re-imageination of international law as a ‘pure means’ of representation rather than a means of exercising control over the world.

SUMMARYTo be Marxist at the turn of the twentieth century was highly contested. During this crisis of Marxism, identity politics were acute, exemplified by the private and public debate between Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. With Bernstein's celebrated turn away from the Marxist theory of his day, the grounds for being Marxist were at stake. Was it possible to criticise Marx's analysis of industrial capitalism, his account of historical change and his hard-nosed class politics, and yet still be in a (...) position to carry his name forward? Moreover, the springing-up of another identity, Revisionist, suggested that being Marxist was ambiguous. If one accepted Bernstein's and the Revisionists' point that Marxists had become too orthodox, leaving Revisionists as the true heirs of Marx's critical socialist spirit, then the Marxist identity was so open as to be meaningless. In this article, I contend that the name-calling of this period, the Revisionismusstreit, should be seen as creative. In contrast to politico-ideological perceptions of the Streit, which construe the clash of Marxist and Revisionist as representative of foundational Social Democratic party political realities, I highlight the manner in which being Marxist—the veneration of Marx's and Friedrich Engels's word into a Marxology of sorts by Marxists and Revisionists alike—held a certain epistemic value in its own right. (shrink)

In theories of interpretation, the artwork's “surface” is frequently cast as something to be looked past in our quest for meaning. As such, the “surface” has also understandably been the focus of several polemics against the excesses of interpretive criticism – in film scholarship and beyond. This article explores what role concepts of the “surface” and “surface meaning” might fruitfully play in the interpretation of fiction films by thinking about a particular kind of expression-by-implication available to the medium: irony. An (...) under-theorised phenomenon, filmic irony could seem to require interpretation in order to grasp meanings that reside precisely elsewhere than the “surface”. Yet, can we even distinguish between a “surface meaning” and an “implied” meaning in a non-linguistic medium like film? This article addresses such questions by exploring the possibility of separating the explicit and implicit, as well as interpretation and comprehension, in a medium whose very capacity for ironic expression h... (shrink)

Ever since the time of Hegel, there has been a growing philosophization of art in which artists increasingly make works where visual/formal concerns are supplanted by philosophical questions concerning the definition of art itself. At the same time, however, an equally vociferous defence of art against its subsumption by philosophy has been made by theorists such as Nietzsche, Sontag and Barthes who have sought to rescue the sensuous immediacy of art from the abstractness of philosophical thought by advocating a more (...) spontaneous and less rationalistic response to works of art. While it may seem paradoxical that two such diametrically opposing conceptualizations of the relation between art and philosophy should coexist, it is argued that they are in fact two sides of the one coin and reflect the fundamentally contradictory nature of the project of art in modernity. Furthermore, both conceptualizations are one-sided insofar as they fail to grasp the essentially antinomous nature of the relationship between the two in which art is inescapably dependent upon philosophy at the same time as it is irreducible to it. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este artículo problematizo el protagonismo del comprender en Ser y tiempo, para demostrar que la modificación conceptual que hace Nancy de la relación como remisión a la estructura relacional "ser-a" es el elemento clave para su transformación de la ontología heideggeriana en una ontología de los cuerpos. Para realizarlo, primero evalúo las implicaciones de la interpretación del lenguaje como dóxa en Heidegger. Luego, a partir de Nancy desarrollo la noción de sentido como transitividad del ser, soportada en la (...) estructura "ser-a". En tercer lugar, expongo otra noción de mundo correspondiente a la aperturidad ontológica sin ser apriorística, que atenta contra la preeminencia ontológica del humano y enfatiza la fundamentalidad del ser-con. Finalmente, resalto dos consecuencias de este cambio metodológico: la transformación de la existencia en creación de mundo en lugar de comprensión y de la comunidad como régimen ontológico singular-plural. ABSTRACT In this paper, I problematize the prominence of understanding in Being and Time. In order to demonstrate that the conceptual modification that Nancy does of the relation as "reference" to the relational structure "being-to" is the key element to transform the Heideggerian ontology into an ontology of bodies. To do it, first, I evaluate the implications of the interpretation of language as doxa in the first Heidegger. Then, departing from Nancy, I develop the notion of sense as transitivity of being, supported by the structure "being-to". In third place, I expose another notion of the world, corresponding to the ontological opening without being aprioristic; which works against the ontological preeminence of the human and emphasizes the fundamentality of being-with. Finally, I explain two consequences of this methodological change: the transformation of the existence as creation, instead of comprehension, and of the community as a singular-plural ontological regime. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 17, Issue 1, Page 3-12, March 2012.

Judith Butler argues that every category of personal identity, such as gender, the body, nationality, sexuality, or ethnicity, is predicated in part on a crisis between what that identity affirms and what it excludes. How this crisis manifests itself in everyday life is key to understanding how identities are reinforced, negotiated, subverted, or rejected on both social and individual levels. In this paper I consider three films directed by Kurosawa Kiyoshi between 2001 and 2006, arguing that they are especially competent (...) in not only representing ontological tensions of this kind within their narratives, but also in manifesting these tensions so that they are made viscerally available to the viewer as affect. To understand how this is achieved, I draw on the work of Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others, to articulate how a stylistic system, or aesthetic, is developed across these films, and what techniques contribute to its production. I find that key components... (shrink)

Tolstoy was a frame of reference in the work of Lukács twice, during 1914–16 and 1935–6 respectively. His first-time encounter with Tolstoy was presented in the chapter of The Theory of the Novel involving both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, but the former was given more credit and reckoned as the prophet of a new world. It was not until the 1930s that Lukács’ taste changed, and his top priority went to Tolstoy instead. Yet, with due respect to the vicissitudes of his (...) life throughout the 1910s until the 1930s, Lukács remained faithful to his philosophy of history in terms of aesthetic judgment. His preference for the grand artworks was not new as his admiration for Homer showed, but his belief in the resurrection of grand art as realism was rooted in a new and false illusion. Still, his essays on Tolstoy of the 1930s are rich in aesthetic analysis, such as the different aspects of temporality. (shrink)

Both Richard Rorty and Siegfried Kracauer considered the question of self-redemption in an ideologically shelterless age; both thinkers realized that the spontaneous state of daily life is beguilin...

This article argues for the use of the queer kenotic theology of Marcella Althaus-Reid as a theological framework for analysing two stories of ambivalence and risk emerging from an ecclesial practice committed to hospitality. Following Natalie Wigg-Stevenson in envisioning theology not as proclamation but as conversation, the article is an example of what theology can look like when ethnographic material is juxtaposed with systematic theology. The empirical material is created using ethnography as a research strategy in the ecclesial practice of (...) the Lutheran church of Our Lady, Trondheim, Norway. In 2007, this church reopened as an ‘open church’ for people who live with different kinds of marginalization. As the sacred medieval space encounters the messy and chaotic lives of people, a powerful displacement of space, practices and bodies occur. The article concludes by discussing how the empirical material feeds back to kenotic theology and queer theology. (shrink)

Against the background of Gadamer's hermeneutics of trust, for which the primary concern of the hermeneutical enterprise is the matter under discussion, the Sache, this essay raises the question of Gadamer's treatment of irony. Gadamer and Gadamerians have criticized the hermeneutics of suspicion—a hermeneutics that always looks under the surface of what is said to see what is hidden. This would seem to make irony a problematic aspect of texts and discourse for a Gadamerian hermeneutics. Nowhere in Gadamer's corpus can (...) we find an extensive discussion of irony, but Gadamer does raise the question of irony in a provocative way in several important junctures. This essay contrasts Gadamer's treatment of irony to that of Leo Strauss and Jacques Derrida. It explores why for Gadamer irony does not call for a hermeneutics of suspicion. (shrink)

This text seeks to rethink the relationship between literature and the gendered construction of national boundaries. It does so by proposing a reconsideration of the terms singularity, difference and literariness while analysing two talked-about and best-selling postcolonial novels, Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee and Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk.

The semantically ambiguous nature of the sign and aspects of non-classicality of elementary matter as described by quantum theory show remarkable coherent analogy. We focus on how the ambiguous nature of the image, text and art work bears functional resemblance to the dynamics of contextuality, entanglement, superposition, collapse and decoherence as these phenomena are known in quantum theory. These quantumlike properties in linguistic signs have previously been identified in formal descritions of e.g. concept combinations and mental lexicon representations and have (...) been reported on in the literature. In this approach the informationalized, communicated, mediatized conceptual configuration—of e.g. the art work—in the personal reflected mind behaves like a quantum state function in a higher dimensional complex space, in which it is time and again contextually collapsed and further cognitively entangled. The observer–consumer of signs becomes the empowered ‘produmer’ creating the cognitive outcome of the interaction, while loosing most of any ‘classical givenness’ of the sign. These quantum-like descriptions are now developed here in four example aesthetic signs; the installation Mist room by Ann Veronica Janssens, the installation Sections of a happy moment by David Claerbout, the photograph The Falling Man by Richard Drew and the documentary Huicholes. The Last Peyote Guardians by Vilchez and Stefani. Our present work develops further the use of a previously developed quantum model for concept representation in natural language. In our present approach of the aesthetic sign, we extend to individual—idiosyncratic—observer contexts instead of socially shared group contexts, and as such also include multiple idiosyncratic creation of meaning and experience. This irreducible superposition emerges as the core feature of the aesthetic sign and is most critically embedded in the ‘no-interpretation’ interpretation of the documentary signal. (shrink)

What does it mean for a text to be transparent? If in order to be considered such, as the Oxford English Dictionary among others tells us, a thing must either be ‘easily seen’ or else ‘easily seen through’, what does this contradiction embedded into the term mean for the reader of transparent things? Vladimir Nabokov engages precisely this line of inquiry in the candidly named 1972 Transparent Things, his penultimate text before his death in 1977. In doing so, Nabokov also (...) articulates a particular understanding of and attraction to transparency which has permeated his body of works since at least the 1920s and which, in this emphatic iteration, serves to complicate the notion of any stability in the roles of ‘authors’ and ‘readers’; to dismantle the dichotomous logic of the categories of ‘surface’ and ‘depth’; and finally to advocate for that which appears as ‘surface’ as the space where writing, reading and criticism is at its most fluid, inventive and kaleidoscopic. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

In his work titled ‘Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca’, Wassily Kandisky translates two postures of the German Expressionist choreographer Gret Palucca from photographs into line drawings. The drawings are a study, but they are neither pictorial, nor straightforwardly representational. Staging an encounter between Dance Curves and Hannah Arendt’s investigation into thinking as both an interrupted and interruptive activity, this essay argues for a poetics of appearance as it is constituted by nonconforming acts of critique. Negotiating conflicts that shape (...) a politics of recognition for criticism which deliberately or implicitly refutes utility, I articulate a process of appearance of meaning with differential relation to modernist concerns for interpretation, dissenting from rationalist and objectivist traditions that have dominated theatre and performance criticism since the Enlightenment. What happens when I disavow the drawings from the images, remove them from the source? Perhaps in such a place, we might find critique as a process of deliberately mishandled translation, as an occupation of an idea shifted elsewhere, as a displacement of meaning. Appearance shapes itself around slippages of attention that depart from the work of performance. In this essay, I turn to how these slippages fold outwards from the encounter, to the political nexus between performance and its world. In Arendt, I locate a means through which forms of thinking rendered as criticism constitute a resistant poetics to normative modes of paying attention, operating beyond what Bojana Kunst calls ‘the ready-made possibilities of discourse’ under neoliberalism, that is, the ‘pre-established models of criticality and reflexivity’ to which art and artistic subjectivity often partake. (shrink)

This dissertation explores and analyzes interpretive skepticism in literary theory. It argues that traditional interpretive theories and debates often harbor unacknowledged forms of skeptical thinking and arguments. As these forms of skepticism are seldom recognized as skepticism, the problem tends to remain hidden and unresolved. The dissertation further argues that interpretive skepticism is (i) the result of a philosophical confusion, and (ii) practically harmful when used in order to regulate interpretive practice. Accordingly, a central purpose of the dissertation is to (...) offer an analysis and taxonomy of what interpretive skepticism is. Only once we are in a position to understand and recognize it in its many guises will we be able to criticize and challenge it. The first part of the dissertation thus aims at identifying a specific structure of skeptical reasoning within the theory of literary interpretation. In articulating this taxonomy and analysis, the study builds on the American philosopher Stanley Cavell’s reinterpretation of epistemological skepticism in terms of tragedy, avoidance and repudiation of grammatical criteria. The second part of the study explores, in greater detail, interpretive skepticism within New Criticism. It centers on analyses of two classics within interpretive theory: “The Intentional Fallacy” by Monroe C. Beardsley (and W.K. Wimsatt) and “The Heresy of Paraphrase” by Cleanth Brooks. The study argues that Beardsley becomes both a so-called “skeptical twin” about literary interpretation and a straightforward literary other-minds skeptic with regard to authorial intentions. Brooks, for his part, becomes a straightforward skeptic about poetic interpretation and a “skeptical twin” about poetic meaning. Both theorists are investigated in comparison with Cavell’s explorations of the themes of intention, overinterpretation, fraudulence, modernism, and aesthetic judgment in art, literature and criticism. Despite these skeptical findings, the study also argues that there are important similarities between Cavell’s non-skeptical approach to literature and criticism, and New Critical “close reading.” The dissertation concludes with a chapter that leaves the confines of the New Critical idiom to explore interpretive skepticism within the tradition of so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Through readings of Susan Sontag, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Cora Diamond, it argues that suspicious or paranoid hermeneutics is not skeptical in itself but can become so through the skeptical temptations of dogmatism, authoritarianism, and fraudulence. (shrink)

In paper the boundaries of funniness in musical-dramatic art are researched. Musical performance goes out from the semiotic space of the original genre into a field of meanings and signs, which are unstabled, opened, containing and suggesting many interpretations, including ironic ones. It is argued in contemporary aesthetics, on the one hand, that the art cannot exist without a discourse interpreting it. On the other hand, there is a demand to avoid the interpretation, which at the same time legitimizes the (...) aesthetic effect and castrates an object of art. Provocation is used for solving the problems of observing the object of art in a new way and understanding of modern reality, and it’s not complete without irony and self-irony. Wit, irony, comicalness are transformed as fitting into the style of the absurd and deconstructing the border between the funny and serious. The purpose of such provocations is to introduce the viewer into a position of uncertainty and aesthetic shock. Such stupor inevitably orients the spectator to a meeting with an object of art and allows for a new understanding of oneself. The paper considers organicity of the elements of laughter culture and comic devices for the music and drama theater is considered. (shrink)

The book is an attempt to explore the affinities between contemporary critical theories and modernist and postmodernist American poetry. The analysis focuses on poststructuralist theories, notorious for their tendency to destabilize generic boundaries between literary, philosophical and critical discourses. The main argument and the structure of the book derive from Jacques Derrida’s essay “Che cos’è la poesia” [What is poetry?] in which the philosopher postulates the impossibility of defining poetry by comparing a poem to a hedgehog – prickly, solitary, untamed, (...) fragile and protective, rolling itself up into a ball at the first sign of danger or when in the hands of the reader-intruder. The metaphor captures thus the fragility of the relationship between poetry and the world. The book examines this relationship as exemplified by the erinaceous poetics of high modernists and their postmodernist followers In the study I employ also other oststructuralist theories, such as the notion of the text and the pleasure of the text formulated by Roland Barthes, the heories of metaphor as seen by Paul Ricoeur or Paul de Man, and gender-sensitive theories of Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray. (shrink)

The article will attempt to show that Velasquez's Las Meninas can be viewed as an allegorical enactment of some of the current debates and controversies in the philosophy of cognition and self-representation. I will focus on two very different philosophical trajectories, to which the allegory of the painting can be linked. The first, analytic, trajectory relates Las Meninas to the notion of representation and self-representation in the work of philosophers David Rosenthal, Robert Van Gulick, Uriah Kriegel and Bruce Mangan, and (...) neurologists Bernie Baars and Rodolfo Llinas. The second, continental, trajectory begins by relating to the painting Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological 'embodied self-representation'. This trajectory, which can be further linked to John Ziman's 'second person view' of reality, proceeds to relate Las Meninas to Lacan's 'object gaze' and the 'unbearable fragility of representation', ending with Bataille's (non)concept of 'sovereignty' as essential yet non-representable losses in representation. I will conclude by suggesting that the evolution of the cognitive state experienced by an observer of Las Meninas can be viewed as an 'ontogenetic' recapitulation of the more 'phylogenic' progression of the philosophical history of representation and self-representation alluded to by the canvas. (shrink)

When Susan Sontag addresses the problem of pornography and relates it to Hegel, she is not merely describing a path in European philosophy aimed to construct a new language, but she is also committing this aim to the importance of re-reading culture. The fashion in which pornography describes reality is meaningful when we are trying to approach Hegel in his aim to construct a post-religious language that finally will make ready-to-hand life as life. Politics, and society, being two essential elements (...) to understand reality, become singularly interesting when analyzed through the gaze of Sontag in combination of Hegel’s philosophy. The conservative morals that reign over what we understand as pornography, and the cultural moment of Europe since the most progressive moments of the 19 th century, describe a fatalist landscape for the future of society and politics. Yet, the learnings from Hegel remain meaningful. In this paper I examine how a post-religious philosophy, aimed long ago by Hegel’s contribution to philosophy, can serve to the understanding of a post-pornographic society: a society that is able to learn from the contributions of Frankfurt’s school with regards to an efficient cultural tissue, and defeat the old religious morals that are inserted in the backbone of politics and philosophy still today. (shrink)

In this brief paper, I explain the pedagogical importance of the distinction between direct and indirect assessment methods.

This monograph sets out from the idea of an obscure and perverted relationship between environmentalism, understood as a 21 st century green and popular movement, and pornography, understood as a traditionalist and conservative art form. Both sides seem to come together in the interest of what has been called the Anthropocene. Somehow the same groups that rely on a fierce defense of the planet and demand a collective awareness of the risk the entire humanity faces do not do it any (...) longer on behalf of an unknown future or revolutionary goal, but for the conservation of a still image of Earth: a positive conviction on how the future is going to look like. This aporia is dissolved into an oxymoron when environmentalist practices are put at work. (shrink)