{"title":"Fictioning the Landscape","authors":"Simon D. O'Sullivan","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2018.1460114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2018.1460114","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper develops a concept of fictioning when this names, in part, the deliberate imbrication of an apparent reality with other narratives. It focuses on a particular audio-visual example of this kind of art practice, known as the film-essay or what Stewart Home has called called the “docufiction.” The latter operates on a porous border between fact and fiction, but also between fiction and theory and, at times, the personal and political. In particular the paper is concerned with how the docufiction can involve a presentation of landscape, broadly construed, alongside the instantiation of a complex and layered temporality which itself involves the foregrounding of other pasts and possible futures. “Fictioning the landscape” also refers to the way in which these different space-times need to be performed in some way, for example with a journey through or to some other place as in a pilgrimage. The paper proceeds through analysing four case studies of this fictioning: Patrick Keiller’s Robinson trilogy; Justin Barton and Mark Fisher’s On Vanishing Land; Steve Beard and Victoria Halford’s Voodoo Science Park; and the Otolith trilogy by The Otolith Group.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"17 1","pages":"53 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2018.1460114","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60043115","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How to Paint Nothing? Pictorial Depiction of Levinasian il y a in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Interior Paintings","authors":"Harri Mäcklin","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2018.1460112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2018.1460112","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Contemporary phenomenological discussions on relationship between painting and nothingness have mainly employed Sartrean and Heideggerian notions of nothingness. In this paper, I propose another perspective by discussing the possibility of pictorially depicting Levinas’s notion of the nothingness of being, which he develops in his early works in terms of the il y a (“there is”). For Levinas, the il y a intimates itself in moments like insomnia, where the world as a horizon of possibilities slips away and all there is left is an experience of present absence, an enchainment to the night, which renders the insomniac utterly impotent and exposed. The possibility of eliciting an experience of the il y a through artistic means has been extensively discussed in literary theory, but so far there has been hardly any discussion regarding the pictorial depiction of the il y a. In this paper, I suggest that the atmospheric interior paintings of the Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864–1916) exemplify par excellence a painterly rendering of the experience of Levinasian nothingness. Through an analysis of Hammershøi’s compositional techniques, I show how figurative means can bring about an anonymous, non-figurative presence which eludes reification.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"5 1","pages":"15 - 29"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2018.1460112","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42119123","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"When Poetry and Phenomenology Collide","authors":"Jeremy Page","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2018.1460113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2018.1460113","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In recent years several scholars have wrestled with the term “poetic thought,” suggesting in various ways there is something distinctive about the nature of meaning as it occurs/unfolds through poetry. In this paper I suggest, in part following the lead of Simon Jarvis, that one of the most fruitful lines of inquiry for exploring this idea lies in a consideration of poetic works through the lens of Heidegger’s early phenomenology. Specifically, I argue that one of the keys to understanding poetic thought lies in a flaw within Heidegger’s ontological divisions between substances, equipment and Dasein, as presented in Being and Time (1927). Through an analysis of three poems by Frank O'Hara, I argue poetry that examines and represents the physical world presents a problem for Heidegger when he suggests equipment in the world must necessarily “withdraw” in order for us to engage with it authentically. To address this, the term environment-at-hand is introduced to describe the relationship between artists and the surrounding environments used for their work. Poetic thought is here conceived as the point where poetry and phenomenology collide; where poetry reflects and enacts the fact that humans are inherently engaged meaning-makers. In this way poetry does not only show us new ways of looking at the world, which it surely does, but it can help us understand the nature of being itself.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"5 1","pages":"31 - 51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2018.1460113","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42500836","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The World in Ruins: Heidegger, Poussin, Kiefer","authors":"A. Benjamin","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2017.1396696","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396696","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The aim of this paper is to begin to respond to the question of how to engage the presence of catastrophic climate change as a locus of philosophical thought. What has to be thought is the end of the world. Central to that project is Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” and in particular, Heidegger’s thinking of the earth/world relation, both in itself and in terms of the limits it encounters. Heidegger’s use of “examples” of artwork, as well as works by Nicolas Poussin and Anselm Kiefer, are deployed in order to begin to understand the role of art in thinking the end of the world.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"4 1","pages":"101 - 123"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396696","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49629373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Of the Earth: Heidegger’s Philosophy and the Art of Andy Goldsworthy","authors":"T. Keiling","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2017.1396699","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396699","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract One of the most prominent notions in Heidegger’s thinking about art is that of the earth (die Erde). This paper probes the phenomenological potential of Heidegger’s concept by turning to the work of contemporary British artist Andy Goldsworthy. Drawing from Heidegger’s theoretical writings as well as his analysis of a poem by C.F. Meyer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and his 1936–37 seminar on Schiller, I show that Goldsworthy’s sculptural art exemplifies different phenomenal traits of the “earth.” To supplement Heidegger’s discussion, both Husserl’s claim that the earth defines the “spatiality of nature” and the role of the earth in Hegel’s philosophy of nature are taken into account.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"4 1","pages":"125 - 138"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396699","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47035555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Overestimating Philosophy: Lessons from Heidegger’s Black Notebooks","authors":"I. Farin, J. Malpas","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2017.1396701","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396701","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper we discuss Heidegger’s conception of philosophy in the Black Notebooks. In particular, we set out a reading of the Notebooks from the 1930s and early 1940s as exhibiting an extremist view of philosophy, and its concern with being, which accords it an absolute and exclusive priority above and beyond everything else. We argue that such overcompensation for philosophy’s declining fortune involves a willful turning away from the realities of human life, and from the multifarious symbolic and functional worlds in which the meaning of being is articulated, refracted, and lived by individuals. In contrast, we suggest that Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses already contain the basis for a critique of such an inflated notion of philosophy, and that the shift in Heidegger’s thinking in the late 1940s—away from an onto-historical and towards a topological understanding—is a consequence of Heidegger’s own reaction against the extremity of his thinking, and a turning back to the properly human dimensions of thinking and the matters that call for thinking.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"4 1","pages":"183 - 195"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396701","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49034570","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Corrigendum","authors":"","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2017.1405638","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1405638","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"4 1","pages":"196 - 196"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2017.1405638","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49411936","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The “Jewish Question” and the Question of Being: Heidegger before and after 1945","authors":"Donatella Ester di Cesare","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2017.1396698","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396698","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In this paper, I explain why I have chosen the expression “metaphysical anti-Semitism” to characterize Heidegger’s position in the Black Notebooks. In this context, the strong connection between the question of being and the “Jewish question” is important. My thesis is that Heidegger ties Judaism to metaphysics with a Gordian knot. His ontological, theological, and political accusations against the Jews do not derive from common racism, but from this knot. After 1945, Heidegger does not change his position and does not recognize Germany’s guilt. Yet, the Black Notebooks open a new perspective on his political thought.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"31 1","pages":"173 - 182"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396698","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60043054","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Liberation—of Art and Technics: Artistic Responses to Heidegger’s Call for a Dialogue between Technics and Art","authors":"Susanna Lindberg","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2017.1396700","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396700","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This paper is motivated by Heidegger’s invitation to think the essence of technics through a dialogue between technics and art. This dialogue is approached with the help of several artworks belonging to what can be called the “technological turn” in art. First, I draw a schematic picture of notions of instrumentality, rationality, totality, and teleology inherited from classical philosophy of art and technology and challenged by contemporary art. I underline the Romantic claim that art overcomes these features thanks to its freedom and ask, referring to the work of Gilbert Simondon, whether technology could also be liberated from its subordination to utilitarian ends. Second, I look at how certain contemporary works of art attempt to solve some of these problems. Artists who seize technical objects generally seek to make their functioning visible and problematic by distorting, interrupting, or otherwise modifying the technical dispositif—this is when a machine becomes a work of art. I show how this happens in certain works of Rebecca Horn, Jean Tinguely, Anaïs Tondeur, Eduardo Kac, and Tomas Saraceno. In conclusion, I show how art can liberate technology by liberating it from utility and instrumentality and by exposing it as such in its functioning. On the other hand, I argue that technology can liberate art, both through artistic techniques and nonartistic technological processes.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"4 1","pages":"139 - 154"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396700","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60043061","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Disclosing Worldhood or Expressing Life? Heidegger and Henry on the Origin of the Work of Art","authors":"S. DeLay","doi":"10.1080/20539320.2017.1396697","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396697","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What and how is the work of art? This paper considers Heidegger’s venerable question by way of a related one: what exactly is the essence of the painting? En route to critiquing the Heideggerian conception of the work of art as that which discloses a world, I present Michel Henry’s competing aesthetic theory. According to Henry, the artwork’s task is not to disclose the exteriority of the world, but rather to express the interiority of life’s pathos—what he calls transcendental self-affectivity. To clarify Henry’s view, I examine his analysis of the abstract painting of Kandinsky, after which I illustrate the significance of Kandinsky’s abstractionism by showing how the representational paintings of Paul Signac, Andrew Harrison, Alphonse Osbert, and Henry Ossawa Tanner attempt to express the invisibility of subjectivity. I then reveal how Heidegger’s account of the work of art in terms of world disclosure overlooks the work’s task of exalting life. In closing, I accordingly suggest that Henry’s view of painting—which locates its essence in Life rather than the world—not only presents a competing position to the Heideggerian view of the origin of the work of art worthy of our attention, but one that explains how art can contribute to overcoming our age’s nihilism.","PeriodicalId":41067,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology","volume":"4 1","pages":"155 - 171"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2017-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/20539320.2017.1396697","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48914945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}