In the last part of The Truth in Painting named «Restitution», Jacques Derrida polemicizes with historian and art critic Meyer Schapiro, presenting for discussion the pages Heidegger dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings in the conference entitled «The Origin of the Work of Art». The article examines the occurrences of the word «truth» in Derrida’s text and evidences both the power and the limitations of some of the German phenomenologist’s suggestions.

The article raises the problem of the relationship between art and truth, reviewing the interpretations of V. Van Gogh’s famous painting A Pair of Shoes (1886–87) in the works of famous theorists and art critics. Raising the question of what truth is revealed in the artist’s painting, the most important disputes on this topic between M. Heidegger, M. Schapiro, J. Derrida and F. Jameson are briefly discussed. This artist’s painting also caught the attention of the famous Lithuanian philosopher A. (...) Šliogeris, who considered it as a diagnosis of the death of Western visual art itself. Along with the dispute of famous theoreticians about this, an attempt is made to consider the point of view that the death of art itself and the rise of civilisation of technology are revealed in van Gogh’s paintings. (shrink)

This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise the question of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contest increasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum as culture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture, I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ and conclude (...) by taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife between earth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae as an example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflicts of the pervasive efforts of modern conservation. (shrink)

Kerstin Thomas revaluates the famous dispute between Martin Heidegger, Meyer Schapiro, and Jacques Derrida, concerning a painting of shoes by Vincent Van Gogh. The starting point for this dispute was the description and analysis of things and artworks developed in his essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”. In discussing Heidegger’s account, the art historian Meyer Schapiro’s main point of critique concerned Heidegger’s claim that the artwork reveals the truth of equipment in depicting shoes of a peasant woman (...) and thereby showing her world. Schapiro sees a striking paradox in Heidegger’s claim for truth, based on a specific object in a specific artwork while at the same time following a rather metaphysical idea of the artwork. Kerstin Thomas proposes an interpretation, which exceeds the common confrontation of philosophy versus art history by focussing on the respective notion of facticity at stake in the theoretical accounts of both thinkers. Schapiro accuses Heidegger of a lack of concreteness, which he sees as the basis for every truth claim on objects. Thomas understands Schapiro’s objections as motivated by this demand for a facticity, which not only includes the work of art, but also investigator in his concrete historical perspective. Truth claims under such conditions of facticity are always relative to historical knowledge, and open to critical intervention and therefore necessarily contingent. Following Thomas, Schapiro’s critique shows that despite his intention of giving the work of art back its autonomy, Heidegger could be accused of achieving quite the opposite: through the abstraction of the concrete, the factual, and the given to the type, he actually sets the self and the realm of knowledge of the creator as absolute and not the object of his knowledge. Instead, she argues for a revaluation of Schapiro’s position with recognition of the arbitrariness of the artwork, by introducing the notion of factuality as formulated by Quentin Meillassoux. Understood as exchange between artist and object in its concrete material quality as well as with the beholder, the truth of painting could only be shown as radically contingent. Thomas argues that the critical intervention of Derrida who discusses both positions anew is exactly motivated by a recognition of the contingent character of object, artwork and interpretation. His deconstructive analysis can be understood as recognition of the dynamic character of things and hence this could be shown with Meillassoux to be exactly its character of facticity – or factuality. (shrink)

ResumenEl trabajo se propone, por un lado, presentar los argumentos que M. Shapiro y J. M. Schaffer hicieron contra la interpretación heideggeriana del cuadro de van Gogh. Y, por otro, someter a un análisis crítico cada una de las objeciones. La idea central es presentar la polémica que produjo la recepción del texto de Heidegger Der Ursprung des Kusntwerkes y mostrar que dicha recepción se funda en un desconocimiento del pensamiento heideggeriano -tal como sucede en el caso de M. (...) Shapiro- y en una incorrecta descripción de la producción del sentido –tal es el caso de J. M. Schaffer-.Conceptos Clave:Significado, Referente, Obra de Arte, EstéticaThe study aims, on one hand, at submitting the objections that M. Shapiro and J.M: Schaffer made against Heidegger´s interpretation of Van Gogh´s painting, and, on the other hand, at making a critical analysis of every objection. The main idea consists in presenting the controversy created by the reception of Heidegger´s Der Ursprung des Kusntwerkes and showing that said reception is based on the ignorance of Heidegger´s thought – as in the case of M. Shapiro – and on the improper description of the production of meaning – as in the case of J.M. Schaffer.Key concepts:Meaning, Referent, Work of Art, Aesthetics. (shrink)

이 글은 하이데거, 샤피로, 데리다 사이에 있었던 반 고흐의 낡은 구두 그림에 관한 논쟁을 (1) 구두의 임자 문제 (2) 그림의 특정 문제 (3) 예술의 본성 문제로 주제화하고 그 순서대로 세 사람의 주장과 그들 사이의 논쟁을 따라가면서 조명하고 그에 대해 각각 비판적으로 논술하고 평가하며 그 함의를 추출하는 것을 목적으로 한다. 나아가서 세 사람 사이의 가교를 마련할 수 있는 가능성과 필요성을 언급하고 그 현실성을 전망하고자 한다. 첫째, 구두의 임자 문제에 있어서 하이데거는 자신의 존재론적 예술론을 언급하기 위한 대상으로 낡은 구두 그림을 선택했기 때문에 (...) 샤피로와 달리 누구의 구두이든 문제 삼지 않는다. 그러나 나중에 아무런 근거 없이 농부의 것이라고 봄으로써 그 문제에 관한 한 맹목적이 되고 논리적 비일관성을 범한다. 데리다는 구두가 누구의 구두인가는 규명할 수 없다는 입장을 취한다. 둘째, 그림의 특정 문제에 있어서 하이데거는 반 고흐의 구두 연작 가운데 어느 구두 그림을 두고서 해석한 것인지를 밝히지 않고 모호한 입장을 취한다. 반면 샤피로는 반 고흐가 그린 여러 구두 그림들 가운데 어느 하나를 지정한다. 데리다는 하이데거가 그 그림을 그 자체로서 기술하는 것이 관심사가 아니라 예술 작품의 존재론적 진리를 지시하는 것을 목적으로 하기 때문에 어떤 그림을 대상으로 했는지는 아무래도 상관없다고 주장한다. 셋째, 예술의 본성 문제에 있어서 하이데거는 예술을 존재의 진리 정립으로 규정하고 샤피로는 예술을 사실의 재현을 통한 영혼 또는 자아의 표현으로 이해하며 데리다는 예술을 고정된 의미로 환원될 수 없는 기호나 텍스트로 본다. 이 세 가지 입장을 통합할 수 있는 길은 예술을 사실을 재현하거나 표현하는 것이면서도 존재의 진리를 담고 있는 것으로 이해하는 것이다. (shrink)

Logical Positivists had a very lively interest in the revolutionary science of their time, but also in modern art and especially in ‘international style’ architecture. Surprisingly they never published a representative volume or longer statement on art and architecture. But: it is not well known that Otto Neurath, their leading organizer and spokesman, invited the eminent art historian and critic Meyer Schapiro to contribute a volume on art to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Schapiro failed to deliver the promised (...) book. But from the extended correspondence and some material in the Schapiro papers one can describe the general direction the thing would have taken. The correspondence is also very interesting, because it also covers questions of the endangered peace and the approaching war, the academic scene in Europe and in the USA, and surprisingly: Martin Heidegger. Neurath died in 1945, but Schapiro came back to the Heidegger theme in 1968 when he wrote his famous harsh criticism of Heidegger’s programmatic long paper “Das Kunstwerk” where he interprets one of Van Gogh’s shoe-paintings. Schapiro’s short article caused much controversy then. (shrink)

Adapting critical methods from such wide-ranging fields as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, biology, and other sciences, Schapiro appraises fundamental semantic terms such as "organic style," "pictorial style", "field and vehicle," and "form and content"; he elucidates eclipsed intent in a well-known text by Freud on Leonardo da Vinci, in another by Heidegger on Vincent van Gogh.

Some artworks are called sublime because of their capacity to move human imagination in a different way than the experience of beauty. The following discussion explores how Van Gogh’s The Starry Night along with some of his other late landscape paintings accomplish this peculiar movement of imagination thus qualifying as sublime artworks. These artworks constitute examples of the higher aesthetic principles and must be judged according to the cosmological-aesthetic criteria for they manage to generate a transition between ethos and (...) phusis and present them in unity. Here, referring to Heraclitean, Kantian, Nietzschean and Heideggerian metaphysics and aesthetics, I propose that the principles of motion and transition be the new cosmologic-aesthetic categories for the judgment of sublime artworks as well as for the understanding of the world (Weltanschauung) they represent. (shrink)

The focus of this essay is the art of Vincent van Gogh and the way in which van Gogh’s understanding of nature informs his landscape painting. Van Gogh’s descriptions of the relationship between na...

This paper applies Karl Jaspers’ and Martin Heidegger’s accounts of transcendence to their descriptions of Van Gogh’s art. I will contrast Jaspers’ more vertical account of immanent transcendence to Heidegger’s horizontal one. This difference between their separate understandings of transcendence manifests itself in their estimations of the significance of Van Gogh’s art. Using phenomenology to understand Van Gogh’s art in light of immanent transcendence, moreover, illuminates a new understanding of transcendence as the ‘beyond’ that is always already (...) here in the immanent and reveals the ability of an object to point beyond itself. Both of these concepts are at work in Van Gogh’s art as well as modern art in general as the expansion of reality through new sight. Immanent transcendence and Van Gogh’s art are different but interconnected ways of rethinking experience beyond the limits of positivism and the myth of the given. Van Gogh’s art thus embodies a sensible world transformed. In particular, Van Gogh’s landscapes and still life series suggest the inexhaustibility of the things we so often overlook in our everyday experience. (shrink)

In The Truth in Painting , Derrida insists that Heidegger's treatment of “a famous picture by Van Gogh” marks “a moment of pathetic collapse.” While we would agree, we would insist that this example does not render Heidegger's entire philosophy of art suspect. Instead, if his reading of Van Gogh's painting is “derisory and symptomatic,” it is nonetheless “significant,” if only insofar as it provides an indication of Heidegger's underestimation of the plastic arts in favor of the elevation (...) of poetry—an underestimation that may be corrected in light of what we might regard as his true philosophy of art. Our aim, then, is to see (with some help from Derrida) what Heidegger could have seen in looking at Van Gogh's Old Shoes were the work not reduced to an illustration in a presentation whose destination is poetry, not painting. What, in other words, would Van Gogh's painting look like were we to view it in light of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” assuming that the latter does not require insistence on the priority of linguistic work but on the creation of a truth that belongs to the Earth, in the case in point, as the ground of painting? (shrink)

continent. 1.2 (2011): 129-135. Introduction Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei Successions of words are so agreeable. It is about this. —Gertrude Stein Nachoem Wijnberg (1961) is a Dutch poet and novelist. He also a professor of cultural entrepreneurship and management at the Business School of the University of Amsterdam. Since 1989, he has published thirteen volumes of poetry and four novels, which, in my opinion mark a high point in Dutch contemporary literature. His novels even more than his poetry are (...) criticized for being inaccessible, which I generally take to be a compliment. It would be like saying that Fernando Pessoa is inaccessible, which he is not. Neither is Wijnberg. When we think of the combination economist-poet we are immediately reminded of the American poet Wallace Stevens, who, as the story goes, had two stacks of paper on his desk, one for contracts, one for poems. We also know that Stevens wrote on the economy and that questions of economy and insurance surface at multiple points in his poems. The following text is a very preliminary attempt to point at the intersections between poems, novels, business, and poetry in Wijnberg’s work. On the back cover of his novel De opvolging ( The Succession , 2005), Wijnberg states the following: “[This is] a novel for whomever is interested in the workings of a company as much as in the workings of a poem.” Wijnberg thus claims that the way in which a company “works” may be similar to the way in which a poem “works.” The question is the obvious one, what does this similarity consist in? De opvolging tells the story of company in which bosses and company doctors, secretaries, children, clowns, and beggars have tons of meetings, recite poems, perform plays, tell jokes, and succeed each other, climbing up and down in the company’s hierarchy. De opvolging is a novel in which the career of people follows the career of words. It resonates with Gertrude Stein's sentences, "Grammar. What is it. Who was it" (1975, 50). The words in Wijnberg's poems are like he characters in his novel. And if we keep in mind this allegorical reading of De opvolging , which is obviously only one of the possible readings, we may be able to understand some aspects of Wijnberg’s poetry. A repetition is already a pun. Look, that word is trying it again, as if it is afraid that by not doing it it would give up the hope that it will ever be able to do something. A pun is the opposite of the first word coming to the mind of someone who shouts it when he suddenly discovers something. (104) The repetition, the succession of the same word, is already a pun, a joke. The succession of the father by the son after the revolution is a joke. "Look he's trying it again!" The essence of a joke is a repetition. Archimedes’ “Eureka!” is its opposite. Poems can easily become jokes, depending on the way the words follow and repeat each other. In De opvolging , the careers of the bosses, good and bad secretaries, and company doctors easily become jokes, as they are “afraid that by not doing it [they] would give up the hope that [they] will ever be able to do something.” Not only the repetition, but also the distance and difference between the words in a poem, their cause and effect relations can be read as company relations. This becomes clear when we, for example, read the first lines of the poem “Cause, sign” from Het leven van ( The Life Of , 2009). A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate some- thing only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I would be able to say more about it. (49) Upon reading the first two lines we can already conclude that any word may be cause or sign or both. If a sign is also a cause there is no reason to discriminate it, yet to the poet they are still different. This difference only becomes expressible the moment he would have a secretary. Just like in De opvolging , the secretary introduces a distance; not in a company but in a poem. Hence the difference between “good” and “bad” secretaries in a company, where the good secretary of one boss may be the bad secretary of another one. The more we can say about the bosses of the company, or signifiers of the poem, the greater the distance we introduce between them and us. We should take serious the relation between Wijnberg’s novels and poems. Although they operate on different scales, they explain and converse with each other. Another example may be the novel Politiek en liefde ( Politics and Love , 2002), which deals with the relation, precisely, between politics and love. In the novel, Nicolai, a lieutenant in the Dutch army, is sent to Africa on a military mission. Upon leaving a receives a letter from his father. Dear son, Don’t do anything stupid before your father has advised you to do so. Your mother asked me to write a wise letter. I have been looking for wisdom for half a day and haven’t found much. If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave. What I want to say is that you have to return from Africa in good health, and before you know it the world will be your slave [....] Signed with a kiss from your father. (88) The line, “If you borrow a small amount from a bank you become the bank’s slave, but if you borrow a couple of millions and spend them as quickly as possible the bank becomes your slave,” returns as the title of poem in Het leven van: “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” (12-3), which elaborates this theme. So both in the way that these poems are structured and in their subject matter, they refer to the structures of our economy, to the ever-continuing line of CEOs succeeding each other like words, to the distance between them introduced by bureaucracy, and giving and receiving as economical and poetical acts. Poem and economy map onto each other, as in another episode from De opvolging : Edward reads two of the beggar’s poems about presents. Of a holiday nothing remains, except for memories, and if some of them are bad I’d rather forget them all; if I get a present I’d rather get something that’s useful to me for a long time. If I may choose, I choose what I can use longest, long enough to partially forget that this was the present, because it feels bad when nothing is left of it. […] Giving away becomes destruction in the stock destruction economy [ voorraadvernie -tigings-economie ], that is a gift economy [ geschenkeneconomie ], encountering for the first time an economy in which there’s selling and buying on markets. Instead of destroying supplies someone can also quickly say that they aren’t worth anything anymore; if someone wants to take them I’d gladly give him something extra. In a stock destruction economy he is someone who each day wants to work more hours than his colleagues. If around a company there is a gift economy in which someone’s rank is determined and made visible by the gifts someone can give someone else, a company will be more often character- ized by an invisible or unclear system of ranks. (152) Two poems about gifts present two different economical models, described by Wijnberg with the terms “stock destruction economy” and “gift economy.” Here we immediately recall the opposition introduced by George Bataille’s work on the concept of expenditure in The Accursed Share , where a “general economy” would surpass the stock destruction economy based on scarcity (capitalism) and become a gift economy (potlatch) and an egalitarian (communist) society. These claims are made both on the level of the poems and in their discursive explanation. They follow each other and on each other. I would like to finish this introduction to Wijnberg’s writing with a translation from his novel De joden ( The Jews , 1999), which develops the story of Hitler abdicating as chancellor of the Third Reich, appointing philosopher Martin Heidegger as his successor. In a conversation with two Russian actor-spies, sent by Stalin to figure out the situation, philosopher Walter Benjamin describes the abdication scene. Maimon: You were there when Hitler resigned? Benjamin: In the room we’re right now. The desk and the chairs are new. After his resignation Hitler would like to take his furniture to his new house. Martin naturally agrees. It is a sunny day. Martin is very nervous and complains about the heat. Martin is wearing his best dark blue suit, not his professor’s robe. Hitler is wearing his uniform. We enter the room and Hitler gets up and embraces Martin. Martin is not very good at embracing. Hitler shakes his hand. Hitler’s cap is on the desk. The cap has a metal lining. Hitler has strong neck muscles. Hitler says: A man is unclean. He takes a bath. Does he make the bath water unclean? I say: a man is unclean. He steps into a river. A little further a man steps into the river; does he become unclean? Hitler nods. I say: a man is standing in music. Another man hears the music but also sees the first man moving on the beat of the music in a way that he is certain that the music would excite different feelings in him if he wouldn’t to see the first man. Hitler says: a man is clean, listens to music, is suddenly touched and he doesn’t know by what. The conversation ends in the way you know it ends. Hitler picks up his cap from the desk and puts it on Martin’s head. (73-4) Aware of the never ending debate on the question of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi regime, Wijnberg has the audacity to present the arguments of complicity in the religious terminology of cleanliness and uncleanliness, while at the same time recalling overtones of Hitler’s supposed love for Wagner, suggesting a relation between Benjamin and Hitler, and so on. The space of this introduction is to small to treat a novel like De joden , a reading of which together with passages from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political , Jacques Derrida's Of Spirit , Christopher Fynsk's Heidegger: Thought and Historicity , and Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book would be extremely elucidating and potentially open new avenues in thinking Heidegger's emphasis on poetry after the fall of the Nazi empire. But at this point we will have to curb our curiosity and follow the poet himself. The themes of the relation between business and poetry, but also Chinese landscape painting, love, Indian and Japanese poetry, and Western philosophy are analyzed and assimilated in Wijnberg’s work without ever losing the clarity of expression. It may be that, according to Alain Badiou, the “Age of the Poets” is over, but its end (Paul Celan) has exactly brought a new balance between philosophy and poetry, and it is this playful, but nonetheless serious balance that makes one hope that one day Wijnberg’s complete oeuvre might become available to readers across the planet. Tiranë, Albania February 15, 2011 English translations (all of them translated by David Colmer, who is preparing an English collection of Wijnberg’s poems entitled Advanced Payment ): Poetry International Words Without Borders Green Integer Review from Het leven van ( The Life of ) THE LIFE OF KANT, OF HEGEL As if every day he takes a decision that is as good as when he’d been able to think about it all his life. The life of Kant, of Hegel, the days of the life of, select three or four of them. Tell what he has discovered during those days as if he were the last one who knew so little. Give me something that I can cancel against then I can prepare myself for it. The reward is that I may continue with what I’m doing, it doesn’t matter how long it takes. This has nothing to do with everything remaining the same if I say that I no longer want anything else. I wouldn’t be able to say in which one and the other occur in a way that I if I knew something to cancel that one against it wouldn’t be possible now. The stars above my head and being able to say what belongs to what if I’ve let them in. FOLLOWING MY HEART WITHOUT BREAKING THE RULES Observing the rules without observing the rules by going where the rules no longer apply. I could also observe the rules there by applying them to what at great distance may resemble what the rules are about. But why would I do that, not to confuse someone who is seeing me from a great distance? Behind this morning the morning prepares itself when the rules are everything I have. IF I BORROW ENOUGH MONEY THE BANK BECOMES MY SLAVE A bank lends me money, if I don’t pay it back they tell my boss that he has to pay them my salary. But they have to leave me enough to eat and sleep and an umbrella when it’s raining. They can also empty my house, the furniture isn’t worth a lot, but every little helps. Each morning I leave for work, if I don’t start early they’ll soon get someone else, no bank will lend me money when the sun is shining. My boss has given me a cat to raise as a dog. Of course I know that it won’t work out, but I’ve asked for a week—maybe the cat gets lucky, maybe I get lucky. My hands around a cup of coffee, before I leave for work, warm-empty, cold-empty, as if hidden in the mist over a lawn. What I make when there’s no work left for me, I’m ashamed to say how little it is. Once I’m outside I check it, if they watch out of the window they can see me doing it. Suppose it is so much that I’d stay counting for hours, it’s getting dark and I’m still there. They stay watching for a while once they’ve finished their work, but have to go home, I get that, sure, I could also go home and continue counting there. If it’s too little running back immediately won’t help, because nobody’s there anymore, and if I come back tomorrow I may have spent what’s missing tonight. Going somewhere where it’s warm enough to walk around without clothes during daytime, it helps me to know that something’s more there than here. For someone like me there’s work anywhere, it shouldn’t take a week to find work for me there. Three times work and a home close to work, I may choose one and try for a week whether I want to stay there. If at the end of the week I don’t want to stay I’m back on the next day, then it was a week’s holiday. RULES If that’s against a rule, it’s yet another one that I cannot observe, or only so briefly that I cannot re- member it later. Anyways the rules are only there to help me remember what I need in order to do better what I do. In that respect there’s no difference between the rules that I find in a book and the rules that I think of early in the morning. I know that because I’ve made a rule just now nothing has yet to observe it. CAUSE, SIGN A sign lets know what is going to happen, a cause lets it happen. If the sign also lets happen there is no reason to isolate it, because then I would isolate something only because it’s different for me. If I didn’t have to write this down myself, but would have secretaries to whom I could dictate it, I could to say more about it. If something is taken away from me I consider how it would be if the opposite had been taken from me. That is what causes or signifies what is farthest away from what is caused or signified by what has been taken away from me. note: For the translations of “The life of Kant, of Hegel” and “If I borrow enough money the bank becomes my slave” I was able to consult David Colmer’s wonderful translations. (shrink)

In his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger discusses three examples of artworks: a painting by Van Gogh of peasant shoes, a poem about a Roman fountain, and a Greek temple. The new entry on Heidegger’s aesthetics in the Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy, written by Iain Thomson, focuses on this essay, and Van Gogh’s painting in particular. It argues that Heidegger uses Van Gogh’s painting to set art, as the happening of truth, in (...) relation to ‘nothing’, which is a key term in Heidegger’s essays leading up to The Origin of the Work of Art. This paper extends a similar analysis to the Greek temple as a way of offering an exposition of Heidegger’s concerns in the essay. It begins by briefly outlining Thomson’s argument that Heidegger relates Van Gogh’s painting to ‘nothing’, and indicating the way this argument can be extended to the Greek temple. It then discusses three ways in which ‘nothing’ can open up the significance of the temple as a work of art in which truth happens: (1) it is not concerned with objective representation; (2) it depicts the primal strife of earth and world, concealing and unconcealing; (3) it is fundamentally historical. (shrink)

This book is probably the best comprehensive treatment of Heidegger’s philosophy of art currently available in English. A little over a third of the volume deals with the most widely read and discussed of Heidegger’s texts concerning art, the 1936 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The remaining hundred pages or so then go beyond that familiar territory into many other sources, including Heidegger’s lectures on Hölderlin and Nietzsche, his later essays on poetry and language, and his occasional (...) remarks concerning actual paintings and musical and architectural works. Readers who don’t already know will be interested to learn that Heidegger’s comments on contemporary works of art frequently belie his own usual sweeping dismissal of modern art as so much smoothly manipulated technological product. Though he remained preoccupied with what Hölderlin called “the flight of the gods” in modernity and the spiritual “darkening of the world” in the age of technology, Heidegger also expressed admiration for the paintings of Van Gogh, Braque, Klee, and Cézanne, the music of Stravinsky and Carl Orff, the poetry of Rilke, Trakl, Paul Celan, René Char, and Stefan George, and the architecture of Le Corbusier. (shrink)

Heidegger's comments about a pair of shoes painted by van Gogh are read with attention to their historical context.

This article continues a discussion the authors have had with Mats Wahlberg on evolutionary theodicies. We have previously suggested a theodicy where there are token unique goods that could only have been actualized through indeterministic evolution. Wahlberg objects that we cannot appeal to such goods, since given indeterminism, God cannot know that such goods will appear. In this article we respond by arguing that God can know well enough that certain kinds of token goods will appear, without knowing in detail (...) their specific character, or when they will happen. (shrink)

This volume brings Continental philosophical interpretations of Van Gogh into dialogue with one another to explore how for Van Gogh, art places human beings in their world, and yet in other ways displaces them, not allowing them to belong to that world.

This article sketches a strategy for teaching Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Origin”). I illustrate how one can address Heidegger’s Nazi affiliation while simultaneously engaging his philosophy of art on its own terms—goals that often work at cross purposes in the classroom. Like many, I read “Origin” together with Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’s interpretation of a van Gogh still life of shoes, which figures so prominently in “Origin.” My innovation is to pair the Heidegger/Schapiro (...) dispute with Holocaust imagery of victims’ shoes and personal effects. Such imagery serves to introduce historical and political context for the debate and to highlight methodological differences in their conceptions of the meaning, reception, and interpretation of artworks and images more generally. These differences raise big-picture questions about the norms that govern our engagements with art and the theoretical desiderata we want a philosophy of art to satisfy. The dispute between Heidegger and Schapiro, read in conjunction with Holocaust imagery, lends these rather abstract questions a concreteness and urgency that greatly enhances classroom discussion. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue for three interpretative claims about the philosophical strategies and examples employed in the first of Heidegger’s three lectures on ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. I argue that his initial response to a Van Gogh painting is intended to dramatize a confusion rather than to articulate an insight; that his invocation of a poem by C. F. Meyer serves a number of functions overlooked by other commentators; and that Heidegger’s overall approach is best (...) understood in terms of Michael Fried’s conception of modernism in painting. (shrink)

According to the doctrine set out in Book X of the Republic, art is for Plato three degrees far from truth. This doctrine is based on the representative character of art: in his productions, the artist takes sensible things and not the ideas as his model, and ignores the use of the objects that the craftsman produces. In the essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger completely reverses this Platonic hierarchy. The essay seems to be an indirect response (...) to Plato, as it discusses exactly the distinctions Plato draws, between natural object, object of use and work of art. The work of art – even when it imitates an object of use, as in the case of van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes – is for Heidegger the “setting-itself-to-work of truth”, because it shows the primarily ontological character of every work: its fabrication, that is, its historical being. The truth of the work of art lies in its historical character, and the work of art is the happening of truth because, more than any other object, its essence consists precisely in showing the temporal character as the essence of every object, even the natural ones. (shrink)

This dissertation addresses the ontological significance of poetry in the thought of Martin Heidegger. It gives an account of both his earlier and later thinking. The central argument of the dissertation is that poetry, as conceptualised by Heidegger, is beneficial and necessary for the living of an authentic life. The poetry of T. S Eliot features as a sustaining voice throughout the dissertation to validate Heidegger's ideas and also to demonstrate some interesting similarities in their ideas. Chapter one demonstrates how (...) effectively certain concepts from Heidegger's 'Being and Time' can be applied in an analysis of T.S. Eliots celebrated poem 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. The reading involves concepts such as angst, authenticity, inauthenticity, the they and idle talk as they appear in 'Being and Time' and then relates these to aspects of T.S Eliot's poem. Chapter two is an exegesis of Heideggers essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art' in order to understand the meaning of poetry as he describes it. The essay centres on the interpretation of a painting by Vincent van Gogh, and what the experience of the painting reveals to someone authentically engaging with the artwork. Heidegger attempts to establish what the essence of a thing is (the artwork as thing), for the 'origin' of the artwork resides in its 'thingliness'. He creates an important distinction between equipment and the artwork, as well as earth and the world in order to justify the unique, originary position that the artwork occupies. This leads Heidegger to create a new understanding of poetry (which is expanded to encompass all art forms) and to emphasise the importance of the human agent in both the creation and preservation of the artwork. Chapter three is an exploration of language in both the Heidegger of 'Being and Time' and the later Heidegger's thought. The aim is to explore the ontological effect that Heidegger's conception of language has for our existence. He places language within a primordial role arguing that it is not us who speak language, but language that speaks us. This conception has important consequences for our relationship with Being, and the way in which we understand our existence. The final chapter unifies the various themes of the dissertation into a cohesive argument. The chapter begins with a discussion on the meaning of our existence following the later Heidegger. This is nothing less than the guardianship of Being which can only be understood in its relation to our dwelling within the fourfold. In conclusion it is through the measure of the language of poetry that we can realise the possibility of authentic dwelling. (shrink)

This article analyzes the relationship between Van Gogh and two of his doctors, Dr. Rey and Dr. Gachet, whose portraits he painted, by comparing their rapport with the sick painter and vice versa. Van Gogh the patient/artist—presented here as a case study—enables us to examine not only his projections but the counter-projections of his doctors, whether in writing (Dr. Rey) or in painting (Dr. Gachet), and to explore the psychological and ethical tensions these projections give rise to. Van (...) Gogh's portraits of the two doctors offer two contrastive models: estrangement vis-à-vis “doubling” and symbiosis. Whereas Dr. Rey catered for Van Gogh's maternal needs and misunderstood his artistic needs, Dr. Gachet identified with his patient's talent and drew his face (death mask) after his suicide. The central ethical question that arises from the analysis of Van Gogh's relationship with his two doctors is whether we can extend our moral judgments beyond the cultural bounds of a specific historical context. (shrink)

Van Goghs Malerei vollzieht den Wandel vom traditionellen Verständnis des Bildes als Repräsentation zum Bild als einer a-mimetischen, eigengesetzlichen Wirklichkeit, der sich äusserst anregend auf den Expressionismus und auf die abstrakte Malerei ausgewirkt hat. Weniger bekannt ist die Tatsache, dass sein Werk auch zur Entstehung von modernen Dichtungs- und Kunsttheorien beitrug. So wies es Rilke den Weg zur Sachlichkeit des Sagens, Hofmannsthal ermöglichte es ein neues Verständnis von Wirklichkeit, Heidegger unterstützte es bei der Erweiterung und Verwandlung der Metaphysik, während es (...) Jaspers zur Entwicklung seiner künftigen Existenzphilosophie anstiess. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity by Iain D. ThomsonIrene McMullinIain D. Thomson. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. xix + 245. Paper, $27.99.Iain Thomson’s Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity is an exceptional piece of Heidegger scholarship, providing detailed, informative analysis while remaining highly readable.Thomson begins by reprising the argument from his earlier Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge, 2005), namely, that (...) the concept of ontotheology is key to understanding Heidegger’s thought. Ontotheologies comprehend “the intelligible order in terms of both its innermost core [ontology] and its outermost form or ultimate expression [theology]” (10). Thomson examines Heidegger’s claim that these understandings of reality change over time, a history of being comprised of distinct metaphysical “epochs” of intelligibility. Thomson recounts Heidegger’s project as an attempt to overcome ontotheology, particularly its modern and late-modern forms, in which entities appear solely as objects for control or resources for optimization.Doing so requires cultivating a plural realism whereby entities are recognized as richer in intrinsic meaning than we can capture. Thomson shows that Heidegger’s analysis of [End Page 324] art—particularly Van Gogh’s “A Pair of Shoes”—is aimed at demonstrating how art over-flows conceptual boundaries and thereby reveals this plural givenness of meaning. With startling originality, Thomson both explains the use of the three artworks in “Origin of the Work of Art” in terms of Heidegger’s history of being and refutes Shapiro’s famous criticism, arguing that Heidegger is not suggesting that the painting simply represents a peasant woman’s shoes. Rather, it represents both the shoes and a plurality of other possible meaning gestalts suggested by the umbra of “nothingness” that surrounds the shoes—the unformed textures and colors of the background—one of which is the figure of a woman.The work prompts a gestalt shift from shoes to woman, encouraging us to recognize possibilities of meaning in the inchoate forms surrounding the shoes, and thus (Heidegger hopes) realize the inexhaustibility of meaning and the structure of intelligibility itself: namely, the ontological tension between earth and world, revealing and concealing. Any representation is only one of the many conceptual possibilities present, and art helps us accomplish a postmodern “active receptivity” that responds adequately to the inexhaustibility of being as such.The latter half of Thomson’s book engages in “applied Heidegger”: the examination of particular works to demonstrate the fruitfulness of understanding Heidegger in this way. By analyzing U2’s Achtung Baby, Moore’s Watchmen comic series, and (in a particularly informative chapter) Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy qua philosophical fugue, Thomson is able to pursue the implications of what “postmodernity” means for Heidegger and why it should be considered appealing.Thomson’s thought-provoking and informative book should prompt a great deal of discussion. In particular, one can ask whether such a “postmodern” condition represents what Thomson and Heidegger hope it does. Thomson suggests throughout that escaping late-modern optimization and control narratives will encourage us “to approach all things with care, humility, patience, gratitude, and perhaps... awe, reverence, and love” (212). But why should we suppose that recognizing meaning’s excessiveness and multiplicity should produce such positive responses? Is it not equally plausible that it would prompt a kind of desiccated ennui, an inability to care or commit that is rooted in the sense that there is no right answer, no right way to be? One wonders if living with such recognition is even possible, considering the view espoused throughout that intelligibility depends on tension between revealing and concealing. What is the proper place for the view that no framework of intelligibility is right or adequate, but merely captures one facet of possible meaning? Is this compatible with existentialism’s characterization of humanity in terms of the need to commit to projects that delimit a normative horizon through which the world can show up as intelligible?Further, though it seems clear that cultivating a poetic responsivity to the given plurality of meaning will help overcome Western nihilism—i.e. the view that there is no inherent meaning—it is not clear that it will move us beyond... (shrink)

Do abstract paintings still make sense and if so what do they mean? By reducing the paintings to simple square blots as by Cézanne, to lines as by van Gogh and color traces as by Monet their meaning is fundamentally questioned. But by interpreting these compositions as effective forces or rather affective stimuli a new and different meaning becomes apparent. Landscapes are no longer introduced but made real in the aesthetic experience. Therefore aesthetics or rather aisthetics (perception) can be (...) defined as a notion of experience and knowledge. Thus the notion of an image gets a new understanding: it can be described as an "energetic system". (shrink)

In conventional identity politics subjective differences are understood negatively, as gaps to be overcome, as lacks of sameness, as evidence of failed or incomplete unity. In _Alterity Politics _Jeffrey T. Nealon argues instead for a concrete and ethical understanding of community, one that requires response, action, and performance instead of passive resentment and unproductive mourning for a whole that cannot be attained. While discussing the work of others who have refused to thematize difference in terms of the possibility or impossibility (...) of sameness—Levinas, Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Zizek, Jameson, Heidegger, Bakhtin—Nealon argues that ethics is constituted as inexorable affirmative response to different identities, not through an inability to understand or totalize the other. _Alterity Politics_ combines this theoretical itinerary with crucial discussions of specific and diverse sites of literary and cultural production—the work of William S. Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol, Ishmael Reed, Rush Limbaugh, and Vincent Van Gogh—along with analyses of the social formation of subjects as found in identity politics, and in multicultural and whiteness studies. In the process, Nealon takes on a wide variety of issues including white male anger, the ethical questions raised by drug addiction, the nature of literary meaning, and the concept of “becoming-black.” In seeking to build an ethical structure around poststructuralist discourse and to revitalize the applied use of theoretical concepts to notions of performative identity, _Alterity Politics_ marks a decisive intervention in literary theory, cultural studies, twentieth-century philosophy, and performance studies. (shrink)

In _"Masterpiece" Studies_ Kermit Champa offers new ways to interpret modernism that have previously been closed off by the application of the reigning art-historical methodologies to the study of the modernist achievement. He focuses on four separate phenomena—Manet's last Salon painting, _Bar at the Folies-Bergèr_e;_ L'Oeuvre_, Zola's novel about the realist/impressionist movement; Van Gogh's problematic versions of a single painting, _La Berceuse_; and the immanent "series" phenomenon of Monet's work of the period. Champa reveals the importance of music, in (...) particular Wagner's music, as a paradigm for later nineteenth-century French painting. He also shows the crucial significance of the concept of the masterpiece as thematized by Zola in his novel for our understanding of certain aspects of the art of Manet, Monet, and Van Gogh. Employing postformalist methodology, the book explores the conversation between works of art produced in close succession and elaborates an aesthetic context for that conversation. Champa also shows how paintings and fictional representations of paintings can announce their points in common, and it is out of this exploration that he radically redefines what constitutes "context.". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Art's DetourA Clash of Aesthetic TheoriesS. K. Wertz (bio)Both John Dewey1 and Martin Heidegger2 thought that art's audience had to take a detour in order to appreciate or understand a work of art. They wrote about this around the same time (mid-1930s) and independently of one another, so this similar circumstance in the history of aesthetics is unusual since they come from very different philosophical traditions. What was it (...) about the climate of the times that led them to such an idea? Is it still viable today? Both philosophers thought that art's audience is not in a position to immediately appreciate works of art—that we are missing something for a direct appreciation or apprehension—so we must take a detour. Why the detours and what are they? Are the detours similar? And are Dewey and Heidegger right about this? The essay that unfolds below attempts to answer these questions.First a definition is in order so we know what the term "detour" means when I use it. What is a detour? It is a deviation from a direct course or the usual procedure; a roundabout way temporarily replacing part of a route; in other words, a bypass or a roundabout way to some destination. The Little Oxford Dictionary adds a different twist on my characterization: "a course that leaves and rejoins [the] direct route."3 Applying this idea to art, we can say that a detour describes an audience who ordinarily perceives an artwork is a legitimate beginning for an appreciation of it, but that course must be bypassed for another (conception) before it can rejoin the direct route (perception). In other words, perceptions in the aesthetic experience must be aided by conceptions—a decidedly Kantian stance taken by Dewey and Heidegger. Their illustrations make my interpretation plausible.One of Heidegger's examples is Van Gogh's painting of a pair of peasant boots.4 He selects this painting to illustrate his metaphysics, which centers around the notion of "equipment." Peasant boots are equipment in [End Page 100] the sense that they are worn or used; the mere thing (like shoes or boots in a store [exhibited] or a closet [in storage]) disappears in use and becomes equipment. Between equipment and mere things—these two categories of being—are artworks. They are pictorial representations of equipment (in Heidegger's illustration; a pair of shoes as mere things could be a pictorial representation, like an advertisement, but it wouldn't be the same). Through the painted boots, a world comes into focus—a network of meaning. The world Heidegger sees in the Van Gogh painting is captured in the following descriptions: "In the vicinity of the [art]work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be…. The art work let us know what shoes are in truth" (ATCR 233). So the nature of art is still a question about the nature of representation for Heidegger: it is what the shoes disclose to us about human existence. As he says, it is not just merely a pair of shoes portrayed but shoes "from the dark opening of the worn insides … the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth" (ATCR 232). In other words, we see the difficult labor that this particular owner toiled with in her daily chores.In Tralbaut's book, he quotes Heidegger in a caption alongside the painting: "Engraving in the intimate obscurity of the hollow of a boot is the weariness of the steps of work. The rough and solid weight of the clog tells of the slow and obstinate trudge across the fields."5 Heidegger continues in the same vein:In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of... (shrink)

Although we begin with the words of the poet Henry Vaughan, it is the visual artists above all who know and see the mystery of the Creation of all things in light, suffering for their art in its blinding, sacrificial illumination. In modern painting this is particularly true of van Gogh and J.M.W. Turner. But God speaks the Creation into being through an unheard word, and so, too, the greatest of musicians, as most tragically in the case of Beethoven, (...) hear their sublime music only in a profound silence. The Church then needs to see and listen in order, in the words of Heidegger, to learn to "dwell poetically on earth" before God. To dwell thus lies at the heart of its life, liturgically and in its pastoral ministry, as illustrated in the poetry of the English priest and poet, David Scott. This can also be seen as a "letting go" before God and an allowing of a space in which there might be a "letting the unsayable be unsaid" and order found even over the abyss. This is what Vladimir Nabokov has called "the marvel of consciousness" which is truly a seeing in the darkness. The poet, artist and musician can bring us close to the brink of the mystery, and thus the artist is always close to the heart of the church's worship and its ministry of care where words meet silence, and light meets darkness. Such, indeed, is the true marvel of consciousness in the ultimate risk which is the final vocation of the poet and artist, as it was of Christ himself, and all his saints. The church must be ever attentive to the deeply Christocentric ministry of art and the creative power of word and image in the letting the unsayable be unsaid. With the artist we may perhaps stand on Pisgah Height with Moses with a new imaginative perception of the divine Creation. The essay concludes on a personal note, drawing upon the author's own experience in retreat in the desert, with a reminder of the thought of Thomas Merton, a solitary in the community of the Church. (shrink)

In his essay “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida provides us with his most direct and explicit discussion of the phenomenon of religion. One of the important ideas of “Faith and Knowledge” is that faith and knowledge cannot be understood in a simple opposition to each other as if knowledge would not require forms of faith and as if faith would be completely purified of knowledge. In order to get a precise impression of Derrida's interpretation of faith and the holy, this chapter (...) begins with a presentation of these notions in Heidegger. The chapter discusses the question whether it is the case that Heidegger finds in his question of being what phenomenology of religion and theology consider to be characteristic of religious thinking, feeling, and acting. It also discusses with an analysis of abstraction and deracination, which are juxtaposed to the process of indemnification. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dal’'s The Lugubrious Game; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and (...) Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancire, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. (shrink)

Stel dat een inbreker bij jou thuis alleen de lijsten van de kunstwerken zou wegnemen, en niet de werken zelf. Wat zou er veranderen in je omgang met de kunst? Met dat gedachte-experiment opent de Franse filosoof Jacques Derrida het essay Parergon. Parergon betekent bijzaak in het Grieks. Zoals bijvoorbeeld de lijst van het schilderij, of het kader van een opgehangen foto. Ze behoren niet tot het kunstwerk. En toch zijn ze van groot belang voor hoe het werk bekeken wordt. (...) De belangwekkende tekst van Derrida uit 1974 geeft een centrale rol aan de bijzaak van het kader. Met filosofische acrobatie maneuvreert de denker tussen de grote klassiekers van de kunstfilosofie: Plato, Kant, Hegel en Heidegger. Hij gaat op een speelse manier met hun erfenis om. Woorden worden omgedraaid. Passages die op het eerste gezicht bijzaak lijken, maakt hij tot hoofdrolspelers van zijn betoog. Dit boek presenteert Derridas belangrijkste tekst over beeldende kunst voor de eerste keer in Nederlandse vertaling. Het boek is vormgegeven door de spraakmakende ontwerpster Ines Cox. Vertaler Ben Overlaet schreef een nawoord dat de tekst van de nodige filosofische en historische context voorziet. (shrink)

In Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben introduces a particular conception of bearing witness to overcome the problems contained in an account of language that depends on the voice or the letter. From his earlier work, it is clear that his critique of the voice and the letter is not only directed to ancient and medieval metaphysics, but also concerns Heidegger's account of the voice and Derrida's account of the letter and writing. Yet, if Agamben is correct in claiming that bearing witness (...) offers an alternative to Heidegger's voice and Derrida's letter, it is remarkable – a fact unnoticed in the available literature – that Agamben does not discuss how these conceptions of the voice and the letter are intrinsically connected to the problem of testimony for Heidegger as well as Derrida. To show how this lack of attention to bearing witness in Heidegger and Derrida affects Agamben's critique, this article proceeds as follows. First, we interpret Agamben's critique of Heidegger's conception of the voice and Derrida.. (shrink)

Here, for the first time, Christopher Kul-Want brings together twenty-five texts on art written by twenty philosophers. Covering the Enlightenment to postmodernism, these essays draw on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition, and psychoanalytic theory, and each is accompanied by an overview and interpretation. The volume features Martin Heidegger on Van Gogh's shoes and the meaning of the Greek temple; Georges Bataille on Salvador Dalí's _The Lugubrious Game_; Theodor W. Adorno on capitalism and collage; Walter Benjamin and (...) Roland Barthes on the uncanny nature of photography; Sigmund Freud on Leonardo Da Vinci and his interpreters; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva on the paintings of Holbein; Freud's postmodern critic, Gilles Deleuze on the visceral paintings of Francis Bacon; and Giorgio Agamben on the twin traditions of the Duchampian ready-made and Pop Art. Kul-Want elucidates these texts with essays on aesthetics, from Hegel and Nietzsche to Badiou and Rancière, demonstrating how philosophy adopted a new orientation toward aesthetic experience and subjectivity in the wake of Kant's powerful legacy. (shrink)

Last summer I was given the opportunity to work closely with an extensive exhibition of Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings at the National Gallery of Canada. I focused my research for the class on unpacking the significance of an unorthodox painting in the show entitled The Large Plane Trees, which presents Jean François Millet-inspired digging figures in a markedly diminished and experimental way. Looking to the overt spirituality of Van Gogh’s personal writings, Van Gogh’s curious obsession (...) of copying Millet’s agrarian figures, the influence of Ukiyo-e Japanese woodblock prints, and nineteenth-century politics regarding the depicting of the rural and working classes, this paper gives readers a chance to understand a small portion of the pedagogy, and aims of an artist whose aspirations have been wildly misconstrued by popular and academic media. (shrink)

A systematic study of testimony rooted in contemporary continental philosophy and drawing on literary case studies. From analytic epistemology to gender theory, testimony is a major topic in philosophy today. Yet, one distinctive approach to testimony has not been fully appreciated: the recent history of contemporary continental philosophy offers a rich source for another approach to testimony. In this book, Gert-Jan van der Heiden argues that a continental philosophy of testimony can be developed that is guided by those forms of (...) bearing witness that attest to limit experiences of human existence, in which the human is rendered mute, speechless, or robbed of a common understanding. In the first part, Van der Heiden explores this sense of testimony in a reading of several literary texts, ranging from Plato’s literary inventions to those of Kierkegaard, Melville, Soucy, and Mortier. In the second part, based on the orientation offered by the literary experiments, Van der Heiden offers a more systematic account of testimony in which he distinguishes and analyzes four basic elements of testimony. In the third part, he shows what this analysis implies for the question of the truth and the truthfulness of testimony. In his discussion with philosophers such as Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, Agamben, Foucault, Ricoeur, and Badiou, Van der Heiden also provides an overview of how the problem of testimony emerges in a number of thinkers pivotal to twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. “The Voice of Misery is a special book. Van der Heiden has presented an argument that is poised to challenge discourse in analytic philosophy, reshape approaches in continental philosophy, and give new orientation to interdisciplinary research in continental philosophy and literary theory. The book will find a large readership across the discipline of philosophy and in several areas of the humanities.” — Theodore George, author of Tragedies of Spirit: Tracing Finitude in Hegel’s Phenomenology. (shrink)

Animating Luce Irigaray’s oeuvre are two indissociable projects: the disruption of Western metaphysics and the thinking of sexual difference. The intersection of these two projects implies that any attempt to think through the meaning and significance of Irigaray’s notoriously fraught invocation of sexual difference must take seriously the way in which this invocation is itself always already inflected by her disruptive gesture. In this paper, I will attempt to elucidate one moment of this intersection by focusing on her critical engagement (...) with Heidegger. In L’oubli de l’air , Irigaray criticizes Heidegger’s interpretation of the principle of identity as instantiating the same neglect of sexual difference that has been inscribed throughout the history of Western metaphysics. Moreover, Irigaray identifies the vestigial traces of this metaphysical legacy in Heidegger’s commitments to phenomenology. My claim, however, is that if we turn to Derrida’s second Geschlecht essay in order to mediate between Irigaray and Heidegger, the coimplicative nature of their projects comes into focus: on one hand, Derrida identifies within Heidegger’s work an incipient articulation of the very notion of sexuate difference that, on Irigaray’s reading, Heidegger’s work requires but nonetheless elides; on the other hand, Derrida’s rereading of Heidegger’s phenomenological commitments corroborates the philosophical significance of Irigaray’s intervention by recontextualizing the parameters that delimit her invocation of sexuate difference. (shrink)

This volume explores the issues at the center of many historical and contemporary reflections on community and sociality in Continental philosophy. The essays reflect on the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Arendt, Derrida, Badiou, Fanon, Baldwin, Nancy, Agamben and Laruelle. Continental Perspectives on Community brings the different approaches of these thinkers into conversation with each other. It discusses the possibility of how the concept of community can extend beyond the one and beyond any sense of unity and totality. Additionally, the (...) book shows how notion of community in plurality is at the heart of ethical and political reflections on alterity and race, of political philosophical reflections on the exception, and of ontological reflections on what it means for humans to be social. In this way, it offers an important contribution to the examination of how a community can be thought today. This book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on social, political, and cultural issues in Continental philosophy. (shrink)

This paper argues that it is the human search for authentic understanding that gives birth to radical hermeneutics, and not the reverse. Radical hermeneutics in the “contemporary” sense begins with Martin Heidegger’s critical reinterpretation of Immanuel Kant’s answer to the question of “What is the man?” , and continues with his reflection on Being as the foundation of hermeneutics. Hans-Georg Gadamer has developed Heidegger’s thesis into what he termed philosophical hermeneutics, while Jacques Derrida seized Heidegger’s Kehre as the momentum to (...) launch a typically Nietzschean interpretation, that is, to “return” to understanding in its genetic stage. Despite their difference, Gadamer and Derrida believed that authentic understanding is possible only if it is motivated by a creative force that remains loyal to humanness: identity in difference and difference in identity. (shrink)

Ricoeur’s hermeneutics provides us with an important and original account of the meaning and the implications of the “ontological turn” that has taken place in hermeneutics since Heidegger’s work. By means of the pair ontologisation and hermeneutisation, which is borrowed from Jean Grondin, this paper examineshow Ricoeur rethinks the relation between being and language. Distancing itself from Nancy’s critique of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, this paper first shows thatRicoeur’s hermeneutic ontology should not be understood as a “secondary” form of hermeneutics. Rather, it (...) provides us with a critical revision of Heidegger’s “primordial” hermeneutics that is centered on the notion of announcement. Secondly, it shows how, by this revision, Ricoeur does not only develop an alternative to Heidegger’s accounts of announcement and attestation, but also to Derrida’s account of equivocity. (shrink)