Results by title

In this volume fifteen eminent scholars illuminate the broad and often underappreciated variety of the nineteenth‑century Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard’s engagements with literature and the arts.
 
The essays in Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts, contextualized with an insightful introduction by Eric Ziolkowski, explore Kierkegaard’s relationship to literature (poetry, prose, and storytelling), the performing arts (theater, music, opera, and dance), and the visual arts, including film. The collection is rounded out with a comparative section that considers Kierkegaard in juxtaposition with a romantic poet (William Blake), a modern composer (Arnold Schoenberg), and a contemporary singer‑songwriter (Bob Dylan). Kierkegaard was as much an aesthetic thinker as a philosopher, and his philosophical writings are complemented by his literary and music criticism.
 
Kierkegaard, Literature, and the Arts will offer much of interest to scholars concerned with Kierkegaard as well as teachers, performers, and readers in the various aesthetic fields discussed.
 
CONTRIBUTORS: Christopher B. Barnett, Martijn Boven, Anne Margrete Fiskvik, Joakim Garff, Ronald M. Green, Peder Jothen, Ragni Linnet, Jamie A. Lorentzen, Edward F. Mooney, George Pattison, Nils Holger Petersen, Howard Pickett, Marcia C. Robinson, James Rovira
 
 

Emmanuel Levinas’s interview with Françoise Armengaud in 1988 is one of the only statements we have from the philosopher, who became influential in various disciplines through his ethics that focuses on the fine arts specifically. Presented in English for the first time here, this interview brings us Levinas’s understanding of “obliteration” as an uncanny, disruptive, and even “unavailable” concept. Discussing the work of the French sculptor Sacha Sosno, Levinas parses the complex relationship between ethics and aesthetics, examining how they play out in artistic operations and practices. In doing so, he turns away from the “ease and lighthearted casualness of the beautiful” to shed light instead on the processes of material wear and tear and the traces of repair that go into the creation and maintenance of works of art, and which ultimately give them a profound uniqueness of presence. This evocative interview uncovers a hidden thread of aesthetic thinking in Levinas’s work and introduces a new way of looking at artistic practices in general.
 

Before the world knew of the thinker who “philosophizes with a hammer,” there was a young, passionate thinker who was captivated by the two forces found within Greek art: Dionysus and Apollo. In this essay, which was the forerunner to his groundbreaking book The Birth of Tragedy, The Dionysian Vision of the World provides an unparalleled look into the philosophical mind of one of Europe’s greatest and provocative intellects at the beginning of his philosophical interrogation on the subject of art. “While dreaming is the game man plays with reality as an individual, the visual artist (in the larger sense) plays a game with dreaming.” This is the Dionysian vision of the world.

In Unconsolable Contemporary Paul Rabinow continues his explorations of "a philosophic anthropology of the contemporary." Defining the contemporary as a moving ratio in which the modern becomes historical, Rabinow shows how an anthropological ethos of the contemporary can be realized by drawing on the work of art historians, cultural critics, social theorists, and others, thereby inventing a methodology he calls anthropological assemblage. He focuses on the work and persona of German painter Gerhard Richter, demonstrating how reflecting on Richter's work provides rich insights into the practices and stylization of what, following Aby Warburg, one might call "the afterlife of the modern." Rabinow opens with analyses of Richter's recent Birkenau exhibit: both the artwork and its critical framing. He then chronicles Richter's experiments in image-making as well as his subtle inclusion of art historical and critical discourses about the modern. This, Rabinow contends, enables Richter to signal his awareness of the stakes of such theorizing while refusing the positioning of his work by modernist critical theorists. In this innovative work, Rabinow elucidates the ways meaning is created within the contemporary.

In subject and method, Alphonso Lingis’s work has always defied easy categorization, largely owing to the interplay of theory and praxis inherent in his research. Violence and Splendor is a series of reflections grouped into five areas of inquiry: “Spaces Within Spaces,” “Snares for the Eyes,” “The Sacred,” “Violence,” and “Splendor.” “Spaces Within Spaces” explores multiple spaces of our lives—the space of nomads, historical space, geological space, the cosmic space of religious ritual, and the metaphysical habitats of inmates of insane asylums. “Snares for the Eyes” analyzes the inner space of our bodies and the inner spaces of things.
 
“The Sacred” studies the ways death—the death of others and our own death—fascinates and energizes us. It exhibits the glory in violence and sacrilege. The book culminates in “Splendor,” a study of collective performances that create splendor. Concerning itself most immediately with philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, anthropology, and the theory of religion, Violence and Splendor bridges the discourses of continental philosophy and cross-cultural studies. Further drawing insights from both Western and non-Western traditions, it brings such diverse fields as psychology, art and aesthetics, botany, politics, history, zoology, and religious theory into a new and significant dialogue about the nature of humanity.