Continental Philosophy and Aesthetics

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

The idea of 'art as research' and 'research as art' have risen over the past two decades as important critical focuses for the philosophy of media, aesthetics, and art. Of particular interest is how the methodologies of art and science might be merged to create better conceptual understanding of art-based research. The book deconstructs and displaces the terminology that typically accompanies the question of the relationship between art and scientific truth. Identifying artistic practices as modes of thought that do no make use of language in a way that can easily be translated into scientific discourse, the text advocates for a genuine aesthetic mode of thought beyond 'linguistic turn', a way of thinking that cannot be substituted by any other disciplinary system.

Przysługujący widmom wywrotowy, niemalże rewolucyjny potencjał został odsunięty oraz zagubiony poprzez pozbycie się tej kontrowersyjnej kategorii z terytorium metafizyki i zbyt pośpieszne odesłanie jej do przestrzeni badań nad literaturą, sprowadzając ją jedynie do roli użytecznego, bezpiecznego narzędzia interpretacji.

Książka Andrzeja Marca odzyskuje niepokojący charakter widmontologii i ponownie wprowadza widma do myśli metafizycznej. Czym nawiedzona i przeniknięta jest tradycyjna metafizyka, co właściwie ją dręczy, nie daje spokoju oraz nieustannie podmywa jej stabilność?

Kategoria widma Derridy posłużyła Marcowi przede wszystkim do rozważań nad charakterem współczesności i przeobrażeń, jakie dokonały się w obrębie myśli ponowoczesnej. Współczesna kultura, zdaniem Marca, stała się miejscem powstawania widm, nieustannie powracających z przeszłości. Uznając, że nie jesteśmy już w stanie tworzyć utopijnych wizji przyszłości, autor stara się zdać sprawę z widmowego charakteru współczesnej kultury, analizując m. in. strategie vintage, retro, nurt no future w kulturze lat 70. czy nurt fantastyki naukowej w literaturze.

The aim of this paper is to consider in detail the role that music, more specifically, the music of Brahms, played in Wittgenstein’s thought. To this end, the author studies Wittgenstein’s impressions on classical and modern music. Special attention is given to Wittgenstein’s comparison between the works of Brahms and others composers’ works such as Mendelssohn’s or Bruckner’s. In addition, the author reflects on the function that classical music could play as a means to express values or ethical principles.

Part I sets out the most essential features of
Husserl’s understanding of aesthetic consciousness, namely, its status as mode of valuing
grounded in the realm of sensory and/or phantasy appearance, which involves the
disinterested appreciation of such appearances. A number of comparisons and contrasts are
made with Kant’s aesthetics (with which Husserl’s has some affinity). We then move on to
discussion of the varieties of aesthetic object that Husserl identifies. Part II addresses those
arising from ‘external perception’ most notably the aesthetic consciousness of nature, and
Part III discusses the aesthetics of phantasy as such, and of the spatial arts, and of the
symbolically presented arts of literature and music. In Part IV, we address the interesting
general significance that Husserl assigns to the aesthetic and beauty, and in Conclusion, we
offer a critical review of his theory overall and a further development of one of its most
interesting points.

In section 2 of Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) Immanuel Kant refers to the Iroquois sachem declaring that what pleased him in Paris were cook-shops, not palaces. For Kant the sachem seems to be a barbarian ensnared by his appetite and incapable of disinterested pleasure. This essay, however, argues first that Kant, extracting this episode from " The History of New France " (1744) written by French Jesuit missionary Charlevoix, tacitly advocates the idea of the noble savage, thereby giving the Iroquois sachem the function of criticizing a luxurious civilization. Second, the essay shows that in the " General Remark on the Exposition of Aesthetic Reflective Judgments " Kant evaluates positively a castaway Crusoe as a person who withdraws from civilized society , conscious of the fact that society is far from being a moral ideal. The Iroquois sachem and the castaway Crusoe are examples that anticipate section 83 in the second part of his Critique of the Power of Judgment, which focuses on the role of the faculty of taste in the process of civilization, thereby incorporating into his whole system the theory of taste as expounded in the first part. Keywords disinterestedness of taste – process of civilization – noble savage – critique of luxury

In the essay ‘Psyche: Invention of the Other’, Derrida outlines the paradoxical relation between invention, qua invention of the new, and the ‘statutory context’ which provides the conditions for its emergence. No invention can occur outside of a contextual framework governed by a more-or-less explicit set of rules and conventions, and yet no invention can have been programmable or predictable within this context. As such it must suspend and retroactively modify that which will have made it possible. This constitutes an aporia, where the inventor must – at once – work with and without the guidance of rules. Classically, the motif of genius has been invoked as a means of evading this aporia: genius obfuscates the problem by appealing to a mystificatory natural or divine agency. However, my argument in this paper is that, rather than being the solution to the aporia, genius in fact names the aporetic structure as such. I will show, through appealing to Ann Jefferson’s 2015 book Genius in France, that this structure is evidenced in the polyvalence of the word genius itself, where among its (apparently unconnected) significations are: genius of the language, genius loci, genius of the nation as well as the more conventional sense of exceptional creative ability. Typically this has been seen as evidence of its incoherence but what Jefferson’s study allows us to see is that it designates a dynamic structure, where collective genius (of language, place, etc.) provides the conditions for individual genius, which in turn transforms that collective context in what Bernard Stiegler (following Simondon) would call a ‘transductive’ relation. Finally, I will demonstrate that all of this is consistent with Derrida’s own account of genius in the late text Geneses, Genealogies, Genres and Genius, where the question of genius is mapped on the structure of the gift.

This essay deals with the “Information” exhibition of 1970 at MoMA, one of the more significant exhibitions of Conceptual and related art of the period. The role of the curator as a type of artist is discussed, as is the importance of Marshall McLuhan’s writing to the exhibition.

Soil biodiversity plays a key role in the sustainability of agriculture systems and indicates the level of health of soil, especially when considering the richness of microorganisms that are involved in biological control of soilborne diseases. Cultural practices may produce changes in soil microflora, which can be quantified through the isolation of target microorganisms. Rhizosphere soil samples were taken from an assay with different crop rotations and tillage systems, and populations of Trichoderma spp., Gliocladium spp. and actinomycetes were quantified in order to select the general and selective culture media that better reflect the changes of these microbial populations in soil. The most efficient medium for the isolation of Trichoderma spp. and Gliocladium spp. was potato dextrose agar modified by the addition of chloramphenicol, streptomycin and rose bengal, and for actinomycetes was Küster medium, with cycloheximide and sodium propionate.

Due to the increasing acceptance that we are now living in an age of radical environmental catastrophe, various innovative ecological-philosophical-artistic texts are being published, dispersed and discussed in attempting to transform our consciousness into ecological selves immersed in the ecological thought. In this essay, I present James Joyce's final exasperating work Finnegans Wake as a supreme text of experimentation and dissidence and how it both links and articulates in dazzling new ways the contemporary ecological thought. Joyce's art offers us ways and visions to constantly realign and transform our relationship to each other and all animate and inanimate things, and incorporates and interpenetrates all human and natural history and experience in this "timecoloured place" propelling us into the reality of the present which is the ecological thought. It is without a doubt one of the most difficult and impenetrable 'novels' ever written, but I propose that is only now that we are ready to enter this 'book of the dark' and understand it within a present-orientated Chthulucene (Donna Haraway's neologism) rather than an Anthropocene epoch. I argue that Joyce's 'explosition' demands the reader's participation as an endlessly experimental, dissident, problematic, destabilising and subversively joyous work of art, and as a philosophical vision for multispecies storytelling and entangling encounters. The final part of this essay demonstrates briefly that there is a profound ecological thought at the heart of the book via at least two aspects: i) ‘Wrunes’—in the ruins, recycling and renewal of human history and the natural world; and ii) ‘Explosition’—in the experience of interpenetration and entanglement of language and of animate and inanimate things and beings.

The book is structured into three parts with the purpose of giving prominence to both the concepts and methods of practice-based studies. The first part consists of five chapters which illustrate what is meant by practice-based theorizing. The second part, which consists of a further six chapters, highlights the key concepts with which to describe and interpret situated practices. The third part of the book comprises four chapters which contain methodological reflections on how to conduct empirical research in workplaces using a practice-based approach.

This article approaches the relation between art and truth (can art express truth?) on how it was first set up in the Western world by Plato, who sketches a possible horizon to the development of the question. Aim to highlight his relevance to the early theoretical discussion regarding what art is, its function, concept and how can it be understood. It should be noted that this approach is built in a hermeneutic-phenomenological perspective starting with the contributions from Martin Heidegger's thinking.

Centered on The Andrew Project (2010–13) by artist Shaan Syed, this article is a theoretical meditation on the politics and ethics of the name, drawing, the portrait, anonymity, and the signature, as these bear on a shared sense of loss and its impossible commemoration. I invoke the figure of the urban stranger and passerby to argue for an aesthetics and ethics of social anonymity that does not rely on or demand identification and that thereby remains open to the risk, surprise, and pleasure of shared existence. In doing so, I theorize intimacy as that which remains unnameable in the “commerce” of our everyday lives.

The concept of soft power occupies a prominent place in International Relations, foreign policy, and security studies. Primarily developed by Joseph S. Nye, the concept is typically drawn upon to emphasize the more intangible dimensions of power in a field long dominated by overtly material (i.e. military) power. Recently, some scholars have reframed soft power — specifically the key notion of attraction — as a narrative and linguistic process. This literature, however, has downplayed some of the other deep-seated underpinnings of soft power, which this article argues lie in the dynamics of affect. Building upon the International Relations affect and aesthetics literatures, this article develops the concept of soft power as rooted in the political dynamics of emotion and introduces the concept of affective investment. The attraction of soft power stems not only from its cultural influence or narrative construction, but more fundamentally from audiences’ affective investments in the images of identity that it produces. The empirical import of these ideas is offered in an analysis of the construction of American attraction in the war on terror.

Political theorists have traditionally grappled with laughter by posing a simple, normative question: 'What role, if any, should laughter play in the polis?'. However, the outsized presence of laughter in contemporary politics has rendered this question increasingly obsolete. What good does determining laughter's role in the polis do when the polis itself is to a large extent shaped by laughter? The present essay argues that Kant's aesthetic investigations of laughter in the Critique of Judgment and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View offer a much needed alternative to the normative discourse. Kant theorizes laughter as an intensely dialectical experience-at once an aesthetic judgment and an affect. Laughter in Kant enacts dissensus: it disrupts and transforms sensus communis, or the ways subjects see and hear the world in common that organize and structure a political community. The essay illustrates the advantages of a Kantian conception of the politics of laughter over the normative discourse by examining Dave Chappelle's controversial 2019 stand-up comedy special Sticks & Stones. It concludes that the dissensus enacted by laughter, while not necessarily democratic, provides a privileged opening for democratic politics.

Contrary to the assumed invariance of human nature, one may ask: are emotions culturally determined and, therefore, relative to historical periods and civilisational differences that make the emotion-based aesthetic theories to be cultural variants? A plea for discerning 'a new primary emotion. .. that was not recognised by traditional Indian aesthetic doctrines' (Dehejia 2000a: 3) seems to imply this, if one wants to appreciate modern Indian painting in particular, and perhaps modern Indian literature too. This sort of plea highlights the bewilderment of those who are caught in between tradition and modernity, between indigenous and alien, between availability and non-availability of appropriate śāstra, a theory, to appreciate anything that is modern, including the modern art. Rather than fi nding the 'tranquil smile of the Buddha, the majesty of Durgā, the loving tenderness of Pārvatī, the radiance of Naṭarāja' (ibid.: 4), what one now fi nds is the fragmented human image in place of the 'celestial and semi-divine beings' placed in the 'sensuous and lyrical surroundings' that used to defi ne the traditional Indian art. What one now fi nds in modern Indian painting is 'the unmistakable stigmata of despair, not just a state of psychological depression but of an utter and hopeless sense of darkness and hopelessness' (ibid.). How do we engage with this new mode of representation? One's subjective likes and dislikes should hardly matter. The issue involved here cuts deep into the very structuring of aesthetic experience, transcending subjective likes and dislikes, and elevating superfi cial enjoyment which is nothing else but amusement, to the one which is truly aesthetic.

(Post-print allowed by the publisher included OR ask for a copy) This paper examines and critiques Heidegger’s repudiation of aesthetics in his essay ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and claims that his alternative approach to artworks in the essay must be understood as a theory of aesthetics and, more particularly, of aesthetic use, which delineates the inseparability of senses and sensations. The paper analyses Heidegger’s explicit remarks on aesthetics in the epilogue, discusses his criticism of the aesthetic thing-interpretation at the beginning of the essay and concludes with some critical observations on Heidegger’s own aesthetics. While critical of Heidegger’s separation of the equipment from the artwork, the paper claims that Heidegger’s significant contribution to the field of aesthetics must be sought in his focus on the attenuation of the subjective element in aesthetic experience.

Japan is very often seen as a country of ambiguities and contradictions. The latest technology meets tradition here. In the popular culture of the West, Japan is also perceived as a disturbingly sensual country. This article is an attempt to combine elements such as Western technology and eastern sexuality based on the work of contemporary artist Mari Katayama. A number of proposals are presented how to interpret Katayama's work as a reinterpretation of sociosexual and bodily as well as corporeal norms of the past and present, and of the West and of the East.

Italian Futurism praised violence as a means of leaving behind imitations of the past in order to project itself most efficiently into the future.
ISIS overcomes the postmodern, pessimistic futurism of “cyberpunk” and links itself to the optimistic attitude that was common in Italian Futurism in the early twentieth century. ISIS returns to modernism. Cyberpunk stands for the exhaustion of the industrial economy while Italian Futurism is the origin of an optimistic kind of Science Fiction.

Alex Ling seizes upon the philosophy of Alain Badiou to clarify a central question in film scholarship: ‘can cinema be thought?’ Treating this question on three levels, the author first asks if we can really think what cinema is, at an ontological level. Second, he investigates whether cinema can actually think for itself; that is, whether or not it is truly ‘artistic’. Finally he explores in what ways we can rethink the consequences of the fact that cinema thinks.

: The article addresses a problem of mediation through the lens of imagination. An idea of " intermedial imagination " — a critical faculty that bears witness to the world's out–of–jointness " — proposed by Pietro Montani is analysed and brought in the context of Bernard Stiegler', Gilles Deleuze's and Jacques Derrida's thinking. In this way, imagination is associated with various functions of montage, rather than synthesis, as well as revealed as the power of overcoming clichéd forms and fetishes through its shape–shifting and unprecedented transformations. The article also offers an analyses of exhibitions by Raimundas Malašauskas (Photo Finish in Vilnius, and the Lithuania/Cyprus " oO/Oo " Pavilion at the th Venice Biennale) and the avant–garde performances of Romeo Castellucci.

At the heart of this article is a fairly straightforward assertion: that literature has a trans-verbal level at which it affects us as a work of art. Hence discussing a novel means bringing to the fore not only its overt narrative function but also its covert artistic function: a consideration of the work in light of its aesthetic intention. Following the phenomenological traditions of Roman Ingarden and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I argue that aesthetic intention does not determine the significance of the art object, which is presumed to be dynamic within a spectrum of meanings. Rather, aesthetic intention takes into account the circumstance of the novel having been actuated into form by an " artistic gesture. " This " gesture " is not physical: it is a metaphorical motion referring to the artist's actuation of an aesthetic intention using one or another medium to give an artwork its perceivable form. In painting, this " gesture " can sometimes be traced through a work's visible brushstrokes or formal composition, but in literature such " gestures " can appear beyond the literal text and remain invisible even while they are experienced in the literary work. The conception of such a " gesture " is meant to incorporate the insights of literary and aesthetic theory, along with poststructuralism, in a critique that allows for structural analysis to also pursue a reconstituted significance. What appears below is more a program of the problem than a full treatment of its implications – a stretching of the canvas, so to speak. But I believe that the articulation of this kernel has a value in itself even if the full unraveling of the subject is yet to come.

Alex Ling seizes upon the philosophy of Alain Badiou to clarify a central question in film scholarship: ‘can cinema be thought?’ Treating this question on three levels, the author first asks if we can really think what cinema is, at an ontological level. Second, he investigates whether cinema can actually think for itself; that is, whether or not it is truly ‘artistic’. Finally he explores in what ways we can rethink the consequences of the fact that cinema thinks. In answering these questions, the author uses well-known films ranging from Hiroshima mon amour to Vertigo to The Matrix to illustrate Badiou’s philosophy as well as to consider the ways in which his work can be extended, critiqued and reframed with respect to the medium of cinema.

Catharsis has been recognized as a healing, cleansing, and transforming experience throughout history, and has been used in cultural healing practices, literature, drama, religion, medicine, psychology, and even communication disciplines. Some contemporary modalities such as enterprises, think tanks, even creative groups, to mention a few, use catharsis as their core technique to achieve positive constructive change in relation to the self-conceptual expression, particularly on its ability to influence one’s ideas of aesthetics.

Whereas aesthetics is commonly defined as the study of beauty, and its opposite, ugliness in its application relating not only to the arts or to artistic experience, but to everyday professional practices with regards to the creative cognitive functions influenced by the virtues of catharsis.

Keywords: Catharsis, Aesthetics, Arts, Experience, Philosophy.

In un tempo in cui l'Europa riscopre l'inquietante presenza di movimenti di destra, xenofobi, intolleranti e violenti, "Il veleno del commediante. Arte, utopia e antisemitismo in Richard Wagner" (ombre corte), scritto da Leonardo V. Distaso e Ruggero Taradel, offre uno strumento prezioso per comprendere quale nesso vi sia stato tra alcuni tratti dell'ideologia di Wagner e della sua poetica e l'oscuro baratro dentro cui è caduta l'Europa alcuni decenni dopo. Rileggere l'opera wagneriana a partire dallo Judenhass che percorre buona parte della produzione saggistica del grande compositore può contribuire a ricostruire il quadro storico-ideologico all'interno del quale si è innestato e si è diffuso il virus dell'antisemitismo e dell'intolleranza, che oggi sembra drammaticamente ricomparire.