Abstract

The dissertation focuses on similarities and differences between the heterogeneous aesthetic output of "postmodern" German artist Anselm Kiefer and the methodologically mixed existential and aesthetic theories of late "modern" German philosopher Martin Heidegger. Through analyses of notions of modernism, postmodernism, modernity, phenomenology, hermeneutics, subjectivity, "undecidability," the body, appropriation, the political function of culture, technology, scientific rationality, and death as they appear in the works of Anselm Kiefer and Martin Heidegger, I present an account of twentieth century art and theory which suggests that there is no real break between modernism and postmodernism. Instead of representing a radical separation from the first half of the twentieth century, postmodernism, an interdisciplinary field uniting multiple forms of art and theory since the late 1950s, is in reality an intensified and protracted stage of modernist decadence: a decadence which remains fixated on death in relation to both art and science