I. The Problem of Art
In order to properly consider and articulate a cogent answer to the query regarding the value of art in relation to the praxis of philosophy, two separate but related questions must first be analyzed and reasonably answered. First, it is necessary to rearticulate the definition and content of the terms “expressive arts.” In other words, it is necessary to consider the various conceptions of aesthetics that have been developed by philosophers, scholars and theoreticians and determine what, if anything, can be retained from each of these, and what can be discarded. In a manner similar to that pursued by Martin Heidegger,[1] it is fitting that we should “raise anew” the question of the meaning of art. Secondly, it is important to reappraise the current distinction[2] that is made between discursive philosophical practice and the process of aesthetic labor. One must evaluate the conceptual division which separates the current schemas relating to artistic and philosophical work and determine, if possible, whether the relationship that exists between them is dichotomous or necessary. Once these issues have been examined sufficiently it will then be possible – or at least plausible – to determine what knowledge philosophers may glean from their encounter(s) with aesthetic production.
The initial quandary is particularly daunting. Aesthetic praxis is an extremely complex – one might say labyrinthine – arcanum. The question regarding the character and content of aesthetics is one that has aroused philosophic discursus and remains pregnant with mystery, abstruseness and profundity. Indeed, the development of a comprehensive, systematic knowledge apropos the identity of “art” remains elusive and is one of the main sites of epistemic rupture in the Weltanschauung of modernity.[3] This is especially true within the context of postmodernity, in which the distinctions between creative, authorial engendering, philosophic fructification and the banal, or vulgar manufacture of commodities have been made ambiguous and cryptic. That art, pornographic representation, and articles of plastic consumption can be viewed as interchangeable has been demonstrated by the work of artists like Jeff Koons,[4] Larry Mantello,[5] Takashi Murakami,[6] and Martha Rosler.[7] The works of these artists nonetheless retain the distinction of being “art.” Their identity as fragments of art is not challenged nor put into question by their proximity and similarity to the more bromidic elements of consumer culture. That art may resemble and even be composed of items intended for consumption and economic exchange does not dilute or contaminate the art itself. On the contrary, mimesis is essential to contemporary artistic activity, not a condition of its impossibility. Thus far, the question of art remains open, as a point of rupture in relation to aesthetic theoretical knowledge.
Walter Benjamin anticipated the exigency of this dilemma in his prophetic essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in which he ponders the decomposition of what he refers to as the “aura” of art in response to the advancement of the technologies of reproduction.[8] While the central concern of this essay is not the definition of art as such, Benjamin’s analysis of the concept he refers to as “aura” does provide an intimation of an important criterion related to definition of art proper – at least as it is expressed in plastic or tactile form:
Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at a place where it happens to be…The situations into which the product of mechanical reproduction can be brought may not touch the actual work of art, yet the quality of its presence is always depreciated…In the case of the art object, a most sensitive nucleus – namely, its authenticity – is interfered with whereas no natural object is vulnerable on that score. The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that us transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the object. One might subsume the eliminated element in the term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art (emphasis added).[9]
In other words, for Benjamin one of the main elements of the work of art is its presence, “aura,” or its historicity. It is the work’s point of origin within the context of human history and cultural progression that reveals it as a site of “truth,” and imparts it with import as an element in the production of meaning.
In this way Benjamin’s analysis of the work of art represents a perspective similar to, though much more fragile[10] than that delineated in Heideggerian aesthetic theory.[11] Heidegger’s conception of art makes a distinction between any original objects of expressive labor and the various forms of simulacra and facsimile. Art, as it appears in numerous forms, is the locus of truth, the mise en scène of ἀλήθεια – the “unclosedness,” “unconcealedness,” revelation, or truth of beings and of Being. This point is made clear in Heidegger’s discussion of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of peasant shoes and his progression to an analysis of beauty and truth as concepts in relation to his valorized ontology:
What happens here? What is at work in the work? Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings alethia. We say “truth” and think little enough in using this word. If there occurs in the work a disclosure of a particular being, disclosing what and how it is, then there is here an occurring, a happening of truth at work. In the work of art the truth of an entity has set itself to work. “To set” means here: to bring to stand. Some particular entity, a pair of peasant shoes, comes in the work to stand in the light of its being. The being of beings comes into the steadiness of its shining…Truth is the unconcealdness of that which is as something that is. Truth is the truth of Being. Beauty does not occur alongside and apart from this truth. When truth sets itself into the work, it appears. Appearance – as this being of truth in the work as work – is beauty. Thus the beautiful belongs to the advent of truth, truth taking of its place. It does not exist merely relative to pleasure and purely as its object. The beautiful does lie in form, but only because the forma once took its light from Being as the isness of what is. Being at that time made its advent in eidos. The idea fits itself into the morphe. The sunolon, the unitary whole of morphe and hule, namely the ergon, is in the manner of energeia. This mode of presence becomes the actualitas of the ens actu. The actualitas becomes reality. Reality becomes objectivity. Objectivity becomes experience. In the way in which, for the world determined by the West, that which is, is as the real, there is concealed a peculiar confluence of beauty with truth. The history of the nature of Western art corresponds to the change of the nature of truth. This is no more intelligible in terms of beauty taken for itself than it is in terms of experience, supposing that the metaphysical concept of art reaches to art’s nature.[12]
II. Art as Gift/Art as Revelation
Implicit in both Benjamin’s and Heidegger’s understanding of art as a locus, or dwelling of ἀλήθεια is the notion of presence. While the exoteric explication of Heidegger and Benjamin converge on the conception of the work itself as the event and location which reveals “truth,” or instigates the production of cultural meaning, their esoteric interpretation of art’s significance resides in their underlying phenomenological perception of aesthetic works. Art is phenomenal. It occurs, is created and takes its place in history. Art is produced by the artist(s), and is given to the human community whether this gift[13] is received or not.[14] Works of art are not produced within a void, but are created and presented within an economy of exchange and a cultural matrix composed of signs, symbolism, image(s), as well as intellectual and biological phenomena.[15] In more simplified terms, art is manufactured and placed in the presence of others. Its most basic element is that of alterity, but it is a radical alterity which is constituted by an anticipation of the other. In this way aesthetic activity is a variant of Levinas’ trace.[16] These concepts of presence and present allow for a basic understanding of art as gift.
In order to develop a more clarified understanding of the relationship between the concepts of presence and present, and the apperception of aesthetic labor as gift one must consider the etymology of the term present. In her book Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology Robyn Horner notes that “[t]he use of the word “present” to mean gift apparently originates in the Old French locution mettre une chose en presence à quelqu’ un, to put a thing into the presence of someone.”[17] At this point, only a modicum of percipience is required to extrapolate the application of the term “present” in relation to the work of art. This relationship is further clarified as Horner develops the concept of gift-as-present indicating that certain linguistic turns and idioms reveal that gifting and giveness is associated with presence and otherness. According to Horner people frequently
speak of presenting someone with something, making a presentation, or making a present of something. So a gift seems to have something to do with presence in the present. A gift is made present, it is brought before its intended recipient, it enters into the presence of the one who is to receive.[18]
This conception, or definition of the gift-as-present can be viewed as equivalent with the function and appearance of most forms of expressive aesthetic activity.
Before one can move to the question regarding the nature of the gift which art represents, it is necessary to further establish the ideology or conception of artistic production as substantively given. In short one must further explicate what is meant by the formulation of art-as-gift. In his essay “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift,” Jean-Luc Marion has deduced one of the most important aspects of the gift. In consonance with Martin Heidegger’s conception of art’s import, Marion conceives of the intellection of the gift – or of giftedness – as being explicitly and inextricably linked to the religio-philosophical construct of revelation.[19] For Marion, the idea of revelation creates the possibility of a purified gift economy.[20] In contradistinction to Derrida,[21] Marion does not see the gift as an aporia, a rupture in an economy of reciprocity which results in debt and an eternal recurrence of exchange. The presence of the gift does not necessarily create a condition of its impossibility. Contra Bataille,[22] Marion sees the gift-as-revelation as a site of positive “excess” rather than negation, waste, or “loss.” According to Marion, the gift, in order to have meaning must be reduced to pure givenness, without resort to either an analysis of the giver or the recipient.[23] It is for this reason that Marion is inclined to use the theological concept of revelation as a copula with respect to the hemorrhaging concept of the gift. The gift gives out of itself but is separate from any metaphysical conception of substance.[24] It produced “truth,” but is not itself the truth.[25] The Marionian phenomenological envisaging of gift-as-revelation conceives of the gift as an “opening,” as ἀλήθεια, as the paradoxical present without presence or the identity of the gift.[26] The gift is rather the givenness of truth, the revelation of the phenomena which envelops human existence to the extent that philosophical reflection is demanded as a response. It is in this sense that art is best understood as gift, or givenness.
It must be admitted that one difficulty still remains. Though Marion’s explication of the gift as a reduction to pure givenness appears to provide a reasonable answer to the Derridian objection above, its potential application to the multifarious forms of expressive art remains contentious and obscure. Aesthetic production is a process that takes place within a materialistic milieu. Though art may be brought into being in fluid and ephemeral media, such as the movement of human bodies and the tonalities produced by woodwind and stringed instruments, it must still be understood in terms of ontic, or substantive phenomena.[27] Works of art, remaining corporeal appear to entangle the givenness of the gift once more in the problematic nexus of economic exchange and reciprocation. If the plastic and organic forms of aesthetic labor are to be understood in the terms of gift and revelation, a point of mediation must be found. The work of Jean-Luc Marion is again instructive.
In order to develop a more clarified understanding with respect to the concomitance of Marion’s apperception of givenness, the gift, and art, an examination of Marion’s conception of “saturated phenomena” is necessary.[28] According to Marion, all phenomena within the “material” sphere of empirical existence reveals more than what is experienced in its presence. In more simplified terms, Marion makes a distinction between what is visible, tangible, present, extant, and what is revealed by somatic experience.[29] To discern only material substance from one’s encounters with the multitude of sensibilia present within the natural environment is to commit the empiricist fallacy which Claude Romano has referred to as “the de-worlding of events and information.”[30] This perspective is perhaps best summarized in Marion’s discussion of the phenomenology of the Eucharistic sacrament in his essay “The Phenomenality of the Sacrament – Being and Givenness”:
anything of the world, when it shows itself truly, that is, when it appears in its plenitude and as such, instead of traversing our visual field during the short moment when we employ it for a purpose that remains foreign to it (whether by everyday tools or that of technique), makes manifest much more than its materiality or its immediate utility. Water cannot not appear initially as what saves my life (alleviates thirst, cleanses a wound) or threatens it (drowns me, carries me away); bread as what maintains my strength, even poorly; wine, as what rejoices my spirit, even if it also blurs it for me; oil, as what comforts my flesh, embellishes it, or embalms it. That which signifies the things of the world already brings to visibility more than simply matter; therefore, it always renders manifest an invisibility (a sense, a promise). Anything already shows infinitely more than its materiality. It is not necessary for the gaze of a painter to give it some assurance – only an eye open to more than economic interest. And these moral and spiritual tonalities already appear at the outset, intrinsically, with the materiality of the sacrament, which thus implements a determination of the phenomena in general in a simply more radical mode. Here, as in all cases, that which the thing shows, at least when one allows it the freedom to show itself, depends on the width of our reception and the meaning it carries with it.[31] (emphasis added)
In this respect the objects of aesthetic labor, though substantive, may be seen to render something akin to Marion’s conception of reduced, or purified givenness. The gift is not rendered non-gift because it is made present, because it is given as a present. This is important, because the expressive functionality of art and works of art are almost always manufactured for other persons, whether extant and real, or hoped for. Art is a public sacrament.
That art is produced for an audience, for others, or the Other is essentially ceded by the general experience of art. Art, when it is not merely decorative, is a public affair. Alterity is an inescapable aspect of creation in the realm of aesthetics. In this sense, it is clear that art is given. This is why Deleuze, and Rancière after him, were able to describe art and the artistic process as “a monument in the constant process of becoming,”[32] and “a monument which speaks to the future.”[33] What must be clarified, however, is the extent to which art may be seen as gift-as-revelation. Fortunately, there is a plethora of material concerned with this aspect of artistic creation. The theme of art as revelation (ἀλήθεια) has been taken up by many artists and art critics as a point of analysis and inspiration. The German-born American artist and theorist Josef Albers has described the origin of art in similar terms. For Albers, the genesis and process of aesthetic production are imbued with qualities similar to the theological concepts of revelation and prophecy. Indeed, a brief fragment authored by Albers in 1964 and entitled “The Origin of Art,” appears to be absolutely pregnant with the understandings of revelation and givenness described by both Heidegger and Marion:
THE ORIGIN OF ART:
The discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect
THE CONTENT OF ART:
Visual formulation of our reaction to life
THE MEASURE OF ART:
The ratio of effort to effect
THE AIM OF ART:
Revelation and the evocation of vision[34] (emphasis added)
Revelation is here described as art’s aim, as the very purpose, raison d'être, and ratiocination for the existence of aesthetic praxis. Furthermore, art is created, is given to evoke a response in its audience. Art is brought into the presence of other - is made present, or made to be a present – in order to initiate and elicit a response from the other who views it. In short, art is given to the other in order to reveal something about the human condition and its existential and phenomenological position with respect to the cosmos.[35] As Gianni Vattimo has noted, “the encounter with a great art work always represents not only an ‘aesthetic’ but also a theoretical, moral, and emotional experience, which engages the person at all levels and leads us to speak of art’s truth, of its cosmic nature, and of its ontological meaning (emphasis added).”[36]
The notion that art is tantamount to spiritual revelation is explicitly discussed and explored by the artist Wassily Kandinsky in the pertinent tome, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.[37] Within the context of this thin libretto, which was essentially Kandinsky’s manifesto regarding the importance of art, he asserts that art and artists are essential for the continued progression and spiritual evolution of humankind.[38] In Kandinsky’s view, artistic endeavors are crucial human enterprises, possessing an exigency along with the capacity of revealing the truth about the spiritual condition of mankind.[39] Continuing with the theme of adumbration and spiritual apocalypse, Kandinsky envisages the artist as “a priest of beauty,”[40] capable of restoring a certain animus to human existence through a “spiritual revolution”:
When religion, science and morality are shaken, the last two by the strong hand of Nietzsche, and when the outer supports threaten to fall, man turns his gaze from externals in on to himself. Literature, music and art are the first and most sensitive spheres in which this spiritual revolution makes itself felt. They reflect the dark picture of the present time and show the importance of what at first was only a little point of light noticed by few and for the great majority non-existent. Perhaps they even grow dark in their turn, but on the other hand they turn away from the soulless life of the present towards those substances and ideas which give free scope to the non-material strivings of the soul.[41] (emphasis added)
It is important to note that here, in the midst of this Kandinskian apokálypsis, one finds a conception of art quite similar to the Heideggerian insistence upon art’s relation to ἀλήθεια, “unconcealedness,” and revelation. Truth, especially the truth regarding the spiritual condition of humanity, comes to itself in art and through the aesthetic praxis of the artist. It is also important to note that, as with Marion’s conception of the gift, Kandinsky emphasizes the non-material, non-substantive aspects of the artistic process. What is important about art is what it reveals about the human soul, about the “inner,” existential experience of humanity. Finally, one must note the esoteric but perceptible linkage that exists between Kandinsky’s conception of art and that of Deleuze and Rancière. For Kandinsky “[t]he artist has a…responsibility to the non-artists,” with respect to driving the spiritual development of mankind forward. Like the monumental and somewhat mystical conception of art developed by Deleuze and Rancière, Kandinsky’s ideological formulation perceives art as always being for “a ‘still-missing’ people.”[42] Alterity, contingency, the future, and revelation all converge to create a more intelligible conception of art-as-gift.
III. έκ-στασις: Art, the “Phenomenology of Eros,”[43] and “Erotogapic” Desire
It is now possible to turn to the question regarding the constitution and substance of art-as-gift; the question regarding what is actually given by the artist through works of art. Up to this point only various qualities of art-as-gift have been described, but if art is seen as a gift – or as an instance of givenness a la Marion – then one must still provide an explication as to the actual nature of the gift which art gives.
It has been demonstrated that art is a site of revelation, “truth” conceived as “unconcealedness,” and spiritual renewal and revolution. Part of the significance of art-as-gift, then, is its apparent ability to tear individuals from the empirical, or “empirie,”[44] and point back toward what Romano has referred to as the “innerworldly” component of phenomenological intuition and knowledge.[45] As Herbert Marcuse indicated in the preface to his essay The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, “art subverts the dominant consciousness, the ordinary experience.”[46] These affectations are, however, merely indicative of the symptomal torsion that is aroused by being brought into close proximity with works of art. They are emblematic of the nature of the actual “gift” that is made present in aesthetic works.
On its surface, the gift made manifest in art is essentially the reassertion of the economy of relationality and interpersonal responsibility. Art, in this sense, is the “trace of the Other,”[47] the crystallization, embodiment, incarnation, or the “face” of the Levinasian conception of illeity.[48] Art-as-gift is an epiphany of the one behind it. It is the presence of another, presented as a gift, which draws the ego out of itself into a relational economy with the specter[49] of another, and in so doing, draws the ego into relationship with others in general. In this sense art must be understood as an act of love as described by Levinas in Totality and Inifinity: An Essay on Exteriority:
Love aims at the Other; it aims at him in his frailty [faiblesse]. Frailty does not here figure the inferior degree of any attribute, the relative deficiency of a determination common to me and the other. Prior to the manifestation of attributes, it qualifies alterity itself. To love is to fear for another, to come to the assistance of his frailty.[50]
The frailty in this instance is the synthetically isolated ego, the self that has been removed from the nexus of relationality and transformed into an atom of consumption. The work of art is the gift of a self,[51] to another self, which results in recovery of a holistic selfhood. It is a reminder that the fundamental attribute of existence is not ontology, but, as Zizioulas has noted, communion.[52]
The love disclosed by the work of art is not, however, a kenotic love. The artist’s self remains intact. The relationship between the artist and the audience is characterized by reciprocity. It is also characterized by pathos and, because of its tactile nature, by desire and eros. What is meant by eros here is not simply sexualized love, or amorous emotive responses within human relationship, but eros as a psychological drive, as described by Herbert Marcuse.[53] Understood in this manner, the gift of art is a positive form of excess that is comparable to the Lacanian notion of jouissance.[54] The saturated phenomena that constitutes art is sensually expressed and experienced. The object of aesthetic labor is a congealed and visceral form of the eroto-agapic love, or desire for ecstatic union between the artist and the congregation of spectators.[55] Art reveals itself, both to the artist and the spectator(s) through sense perception of an extreme nature. Being saturated with meaning, art disrupts – ruptures if you will – the “innerworldy” experience of the sensibilia and creates a cognitive dissonance that denudes and dispossesses the ego of itself and presents it with the experience of the trace of alterity, or the crystalized presence of the Other. Luce Irigaray has provided a detailed analysis regarding this impact of sensual experience in relation to the “revelation,” ἀλήθεια, or “unconcealedness” of the Other:
On the horizon of a story is found what was in the beginning: this naïve or native sense of touch, in which the subject does not yet exist. Submerged in pathos or aithesis: astonishment, wonder, and sometimes terror before that which surrounds it. Eros prior to any eros defined or framed as such. The sensual pleasure of birth into a world where the look itself remains tactile – open to the light. Still carnal. Voluptuous without knowing it. Always at the beginning and not based on the origin of a subject that sees, grows old, and dies of losing touch with the enthusiasim and innocence of a perpetual beginning. A subject already “fixed.” Not “free as the wind.” A subject that already knows its objects and controls its relations with the world and others. Already closed to any initiation. Already solipsistic. In charge of a world it enjoys only through possession. With no communion and childlike acceptance of that which is given. A consumer who consumes what he produces without wonder at that which offers itself to him before any finished product occurs. Sensual pleasure can reopen and reverse this conception and construction of the world. It can return to the evanescence of the subject and object. To the lifting of all schemas by which the other is defined. Made graspable by this definition. Eros can arrive at that innocence which has never taken place with the other as other. At that nonregressive in-finity of empathy with the other. At that appetite of all the senses which is irreducible to any obligatory consumption of consummation. At that indefinable taste of an attraction to the other which will never be satiated. Which will always remain on the threshold, even after entering into the house. Which will remain a dwelling, preceding and following the habitation of any dwelling.[56]
That this analysis of sensual experience is applicable to the experience of art should be readily apparent. One need only read this passage while viewing art and aesthetics as the eventile horizon against which Irigaray’s explication is developed. It is also important to note that Irigaray’s discussion of eros and sensual experience, defines this fleshy, phenomenal affectation in such a way as to preclude economic exchange, thereby retaining a certain relation to Marion’s conception of purified or reduced “givenness.”
Art is the incarnation of the presence of the artist which is experienced even in the artist’s absence.[57] The work, or works of art become, quite literally, the artist’s oeuvre, or “body of work.” This is important, for the facticity of the body is the medium through which one has an experience of the “world of others.” As Jean-Paul Sartre has noted that “[i]t is as body-in-situation that I apprehend the Other’s transcendence-transcended, and it is as body-in-situation that I experience myself in my alienation for the Other’s benefit.”[58] In one sense, aesthetic artifacts might represent what Irigaray has described as the “memory of the flesh as the place of approach.”[59] The gift of art then is a return of the presence and caress of others. It is the negation of the consumer society described by Baudrillard as being characterized by “our absence from one another,” an ecology in which “men of wealth are no longer surrounded by other human beings, as they have been in the past, but by objects.”[60] The objects of art are not enjoyed in themselves, but are suggestive of the human reality behind them and around them. Art functions as a reminder of the nexus of interpersonal relationality, alterity and responsibility. It precludes economics and reestablishes the primacy and sublimity of the ethical. In other words, the gift of art is the reassertion of the impulse towards the excess of human relational systems known as ethics.
IV. Philosophy as Art/Art as Philosophy
Consideration must now be given to the question regarding the distinction that is made between art and philosophy. To rephrase this quandary, one might inquire as to whether there is any discernable, qualitative difference between aesthetic activity and philosophical praxis proper. If the previous question is answered positively, if a difference can be located, then one must ask whether that difference warrants a conceptualization of art and philosophy in such a way as to classify them as entirely distinct human activities.
The necessity of this particular line of analysis may appear questionable. In some respects the difference between art and philosophical cogitation are evidently fundamental and obvious. The heterogeneity that exists between the sundry forms of performance art and philosophical convenance provide one poignant example. Initial puzzlement soon evaporates, however, after one considers the parity between literature, especially poetry, and philosophic writing. Hektor K. T. Yan has noted this congruity in his essay “Morality and Virtue in Poetry and Philosophy: A Reading of Homer’s Iliad XXIV”:
It is apt for Plato to describe the quarrel between poetry and philosophy as an ‘ancient’ one (Republic 607b). Art and poetry reflect our humanity; so does philosophy. Perhaps the affinity between poetry and philosophy is most clearly seen in the domain of human conduct or ethics. Both disciplines offer means for the enhancement of understanding…[61]
It is relatively uncomplicated to discern how the above view of art – namely that it “reflects” certain aspects of the human condition – can be applied to Homeric poetry, the hymns found within the Judaic and Christian Psalter, as well as the poetry of Rilke, Hölderlin, Rimbaud, and Artaud. Simon Critchley has developed a similar appraisal of the importance of literature and aesthetics. In his slim tome Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature he argues that in the wake of philosophical modernity’s divine epitaph, literature and aesthetics are left with the task of restoring a sense of meaning to human existence.[62] Literature and art are to function as a mirror of human experience, reflecting and animating reflective thought.[63] Returning humanity to itself through creative affectivity, and poiesis or the “invention of truth” through the creation of simulacra.[64] This is the hinge that pivots between and enjoins philosophy and aesthetic practice. Understood in this way, even the dissimilarity between performance art and philosophy noted earlier becomes more ambiguous.[65]
That poetic articulation has become increasingly important within the realm of aesthetic production is readily apparent. The declension of the certainty of modernist assumptions has created a vacuum of meaning. Artists and the artifacts of their labor have to create the foundations and justifications for their existence as such. The manifesto becomes as important to the artist as the work itself. The importance of cognition is elevated in relation to the creative aspects of artistic work. This apotheosis of philosophical speculation transforms the work of art into a philosophic work in its own right. Gianni Vattimo has provided a perspicacious analysis of the recent ascension of poiesis and the creation of meaning in the aesthetic sphere. It is worth quoting from him at length to obtain a clarified understanding of this matter:
Surely, one of the more general definitions one can give of the twentieth century from art’s perspective is that it is the century of poetics. The phenomenon of explicit poetics – of manifestos and art programs that are put forth, discussed, and fought over by the artists themselves not only by means of their artworks but also of essays, in which they take a stand on theoretical views – goes back after all to romanticism, and not by chance. Strictly speaking, the expression “the century of poetics” may describe a chronological period harkening back to the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, its remotest presuppositions are to be found in romantic poetics (it is sufficient to think of the “romantic school” or of authors who, like Hölderlin, were not members of the school in the literal sense of the term). Thus, the blossoming of explicit poetics that is particularly striking in our century has deep roots; this must be said as a preamble, to anticipate possible objections and to clarify that what will be said in regard to our century – for the convenience of our inquiry – applies to a period that is chronologically longer, and which in its ensemble may be called the “century of poetics.” The curious reference to our century has a very precise reason: never as today (although this too can be probably explained on the basis of our temporal proximity) has a programmatic enunciation prevailed over the production of works. So it is not so much a case of poetics serving us to better understand and evaluate the works as it is that the works are nothing but provisional examples and illustrations of “programs” that claim to be held and recognized as such. Therefore, although the phenomenon of explicitly enunciated poetic programs is quite old, the complete reversal of the traditional relationship between poetics and works – a reversal that is still at work – seems to me typical of our century (and of the last decades of it). While in past centuries it was legitimate for art to position itself in front of the work – whether or not it was possible to recover the explicitly stated program of which it was the realization – today the opposite attitude is the norm. While there are no legitimate realizations (i.e. consistent in and by themselves) of specific poetic programs, these programs pretend to be held as such. Having formulated the problem in this way, it is clear that the poetics of our century appear to constitute an aesthetic problem: they disclose themselves as actual theoretical-philosophical positions in regard to art and thus demand a philosophic reading and evaluation.[66]
With the understanding that works of art are essentially crystallizations of various poetic or theoretical programs, it is easy to appreciate the ways in which artistic production can be viewed as possessing a certain congruity with philosophic praxis.
The assumed difference between philosophy and art is placed under further tension when one examines the work of certain philosophers that use playfully literary forms within their philosophic work. The Platonic dialogues initiated this interplay between literary device and philosophic expression. The nineteenth century Romantics regularly beclouded the boundaries that separated art and philosophy.[67] A number of contemporary theorists and philosophers have also adopted literary formats in order to communicate the main themes and concerns of their more academic works. A notable example is Jean-Paul Sartre, who gained recognition and status as a novelist as well as a philosopher.[68] Iris Murdoch and Hélène Cixous are also examples, the latter often being described as a professor, French feminist writer, poet, playwright, and literary critic as well as being a philosopher.[69] The philosopher/theorist Jacques Derrida has blurred the distinction between literature, art and philosophy by allowing for instances of poetic play and performance within his philo-critical writing. Peggy Kamuf notes that
Derrida’s gesture is altogether other. It presumes to assert, to retrieve, to reinvent that which the philosophical, aesthetic tradition has attempted to forget or suppress: the invention of truth by what the Greeks called poiesis, its invention, that is, as a simulacrum. The most far reaching presumption here, the one that most profoundly upsets the order within which literature has always been contained, is not that a “critic” dares to measure his writing with that of the poets, but that as he reads the poets – Poe, Mallarmé, Leiris, Blanchot, Ponge, but also many others – as having already taken the measure of philosophy.[70] (emphasis added)
The philosopher-artist par excellence is Friedrich Nietzsche. The central themes of his work are nihilism – or the crisis of meaning – and the active creation of meaning through a return to mythos.[71] Here a correspondence between Nietzsche’s philosophical perspective and those of Critchley is revealed. Poiesis and the aesthetic are to resolve the crisis created by the absence of divine presence.[72] However, Nietzsche moves beyond the mere philosophical analysis of art as the mechanism by which philosophy can recapture meaning in relation to human experience. In his text Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None[73], he recovers the literary devices of poetic and mythic literature and “philosophy turns into art, with Nietzsche playing the artist-philosopher’s role.”[74] Allan Megill explains the central importance of aesthetic activity and experience in the work of Nietzsche, as it relates to Zarathustra:
It is almost impossible to read Zarathustra except as a very peculiar sort of artwork, so little is it a matter of philosophical or historical argument, so much a matter of poetic image and metaphor. Little wonder that in Zarathustra itself Nietzsche refers to the Zarathustrian project as poetry and to Zarathustra as a poet, and that in Ecce Homo, where he reviews all of his previous writings, he attributes Zarathustra to a specifically poetic inspiration. And lest the poetic inspiration manifested in Zarathustra seem something peripheral, it is worth pointing out that Nietzsche regarded that work as the “highest” and “deepest” of his writings – indeed as the “greatest gift” ever given to mankind. Thus, Nietzsche himself saw his thought as, in some fundamental sense, aesthetic in character, and viewed that aesthetic element as central to his own significance as a thinker.[75]
Thus, in Nietzsche one finds an example of the potential for mimesis between philosophical, poetic and aesthetic production.
V. The Gift(s) which Art Gives to Philosophy: What Philosophy Can Learn from Art
It is now possible to conclude with several remarks regarding the possible lessons which philosophy may be able to glean from its interaction with the aesthetic realm. This is because considerable analytical engagement has been given to the questions relating to the identity and character of art in juxtaposition to the practice of philosophical thinking. The first lesson or gift that art offers to philosophers is a reminder that philosophical praxis does not provide privileged access to “truth.” As was demonstrated with a consideration of the philosophies of Heidegger and Marion, the work of art can be seen as a site of “truth,” a “clearing,” or a concrete manifestation of ἀλήθεια – “unconcealedness.” The artist can thus be seen as the intermediary for the revelation of truth, and each piece of aesthetic production and artistic play can be viewed as an apocalyptic event. This is why Derrida insists that there is little, other than form, that one can use to differentiate philosophical writing from what has in modern ages been designated as “literature,” or artistic and poetic writing.[76] For Derrida, “[p]oetry and literature provide or facilitate ‘phenomenological’ access to what makes of a thesis a thesis as such. Before having a philosophical content, before being or bearing such and such a ‘thesis,’ literary experience, writing or reading, is a ‘philosophical’ experience…insofar as it allows one to think the thesis.”[77] Poiesis, or the “poetic” in writing is understood to prefigure philosophic writing and understanding. Kevin Hart reiterates this position asserting that the poet is already philosophizing “as soon as he or she starts to write.”[78] This serves to remind philosophers both that philosophic thought is not limited to the formal practice of philosophy, and that poetics are an integral component of philosophic inquiry. The philosopher constructs “truth,” as much as the artist, and the artist reveals “truth” as much as the philosopher.
Before continuing, it is important to note that human knowledge is a composite of what contemporary phenomenologists refer to as “givenness,” and poetic formulation. Human understanding is never a simple matter of analysis applied to empirical data, for this would amount to what Romano has termed a “de-worlding” of events, things, places, persons, and existential experience in general.[79] Paul Feyerabend has noted in a number of places that the scientific/philosophic program is problematic because it frequently reduces the abundance and richness of existence to “tales of abstraction” that coincide with particular assumptions and epistemological programs.[80] For this reason, he asserts that science – philosophy can also be included here – “is essentially an anarchic enterprise,” and that “no idea, however ancient and absurd…is not capable of improving knowledge. The whole history of thought is absorbed into science and is used for improving every single theory.”[81] Thus, aesthetic works such as literature, painting, poetry, music and live performance are equally capable of contributing to human knowledge. Science and philosophy are but two methods by which conscious human experience is amplified.
Secondly, art returns one to a conscious experience of alterity within the human community. Since art is a reminder of the human presence behind itself, and all such works, art calls each observer back into the nexus of human interaction and the conditions of responsibility for the other. Art returns the individual to the realm of ethics. For philosophers this can function as a reminder that even their labors are characterized by an attention to “otherness,” even if it is unconscious or subtle. No philosophical work is written in total seclusion. There is no philosophy in a vacuum. Philosophy is, as works of art are, produced for others. As such it carries with it an inherent ethical bent. This is why Levinas asks whether ontology should be conceived of as the fundamental object of inquiry for philosophy.[82] This is also why he posits ethics as a “first philosophy.”[83] Taken together with the conception of philosophy as poiesis, philosophic literature can begin to assume a more gregarious character. Understood in this way, each philosophic work could be viewed as an epistle or story, written for an almost infinite number of “recipients.”[84] This in turn could allow a sense of humanness, an organic character to philosophy, as of yet limited to a small number of continental thinkers.
Ultimately, the most significant offering presented to philosophy by art is its manifestation of the unmediated experience of life. The experience of art draws one beyond what Michel Henry has referred to as the “truth of the world,” which only manifests itself in phenomena.[85] According to Henry, this is the truth of science and philosophy, the truth of the vivisection table which results only in “things being given outside themselves, being deprived of themselves, being emptied of themselves in their very appearing.”[86] In contrast to this “dead,” hollow truth, the truth which art manifests is what Jean-Louis Chrétien has referred to as the “visible voice” that calls man back into a relationship with the very source of life.[87] Art, being a radical, experientially contingent phenomenon is the mise en scène of life’s self-revelation. Henry provides an auspicious linkage between art as revelatory truth and life’s essence:
Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing, self-revelation as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced.[88]
The work of art, being a site of life’s self-revelation, is then a potential locality for the reintegration of living “truth,” Irigaray’s sensual caress, into philosophical praxis. Art is an example of living reality’s excess that cannot be fully quantified or examined according to the methods of science or western metaphysics. It is an example of jouissance, of life’s auto-affectivity, the visible call, that if heeded has the potential to revitalize philosophy as a human activity.
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[1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1962), 1.
[2] It should be noted that several contemporary thinkers have questioned the difference (or difference a la Derrida) that has been assumed to exist between artistic and philosophic production, iteration, or discursive fabrication. For example, David Farrell Krell has implied that philosophic practice, especially as it relates to the production of philosophical literature, is itself a form of artistic expression. See Krell’s essay “Engorged Philosophy II” in Postmodernism and Continental Philosophy (New York, SUNY Press, 1988), edited by hugh J. Silverman and Donn Welton.
[3] This is perhaps why the questions and methods of aesthetics are given a place of primacy in the work of many postmodernists, poststructuralist and deconstructionist. For many of the thinkers that would be included in these schools of thought there is little to distinguish philosophic activity from that of literary production. This is an issue that will be addressed at length in the second portion of this text. It should be sufficient to note here that the complexity of the issues relating to the identity and nature of artistic expression has been further obscured by the postmodern ascertainment of the similarities and affinities that exist between creative, authorial engendering and philosophic fructification.
[4] Koons entire oeuvre is marked by an intermingling of imagery taken from the milieus of popular entertainment, the advertising of the commodities market and pornographic cinema. An extreme example is Koons’ painting and sculpture series entitled “Made in Heaven,” which graphically depicts Koons and his former wife Ilona Staller in a series of differing sexual positions, costumes and settings.
[5] Mantello’s art is comprised completely of consumable objects, novelty items, toys and articles related to American popular culture. These are usually arranged as “drawings” and/or sculptures in a way that mimics display arrangements found in department stores. In this way Montello playfully and critically reproduces the memetic composition of storefront advertising within the walls of the gallery.
[6] Takashi Murakami hyperbolically simulates the style of art characteristic of Japanese anime cartoons, graphic novels and animated pornographic films known as “henai.”
[7] The main focus of Rosler’s work is the latent relationship between the reproduction of the feminine image, advertising and American culture in general. Frequently, she has used the media of montage and collage, juxtaposing images taken from commercial advertisements, pornographic magazines, and images of events of historical importance.
[8] Walter Benjamin, “The work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, edited by Hanna Ardent and translated by Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969).
[9] Ibid., 217.
[10] For though both of these interpretations of aesthetic creation and experience emphasize art and the production of art in relation to the production of “meaning,” the Heideggerian view of art is less brittle and susceptible to declension. According to Benjamin’s Marxist estimation, aesthetic authenticity is threatened by modern capitalist modes or replication and repetition.[10] This is a consequence of replication which alienates the original piece from its original historical and cultural contexts, the source (in Benjamin’s view) of the work’s authenticity. Heidegger’s conception of appears much more elastic. Art is the location or commorancy of truth, and as such is distinct from the simulation created by any ersatz reduplication.
[11] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 647-703.
[12] Ibid., 665 – 666 and 702 - 703.
[13] Further analysis of art as gift will be explored later in this text, but for now the term must be used to introduce and explain an important quality of aesthetic works.
[14] The work of Robyn Horner is helpful here. She elaborates on the distinction between the actions of giving, receiving, and acceptance in her discussion of the concept of the gift in her book Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). According to Horner one may receive or take a gift into one’s possession without accepting it as a gift. For Horner, acceptance is the key to the recognition of the gift as a gift, because this action takes the gift’s origins (along with the giver’s intentions) into account. See pages 2-4.
[15] It is important to note that the intellectual and biological elements of human cultural experience need not be viewed in a dichotomous manner. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have shown the difference attributed to these human faculties is, for the most part, artificial. See their collaborative text Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Viking Penguin, 1977), especially pages 1-8 and 22-35.
[16] Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Continental Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by William McNeill and Karen S. Feldman (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 176-185.
[17] Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 2-3.
[18] Ibid., 3.
[19] Jean-Luc Marion, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, edited by Marold Westphal (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 122-23, and 142.
[20] Ibid., 142.
[21] Those interested in Derrida’s development of the concept of the gift, or rather its impossibility, should examine his text Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
[22] In his work The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, George Bataille develops a conception of economic systems that are inevitably linked to negative excess and waste, consumption and expenditure. For Bataille, what is given would likely be linked to a generalized conception of excreta, egesta, econo-ordure, excretion or dung. See The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1988), especially vol.1 Consumption. Those interested in a further development of this philosophical point of view should also consider Bataille’s essay “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, edited by Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). See especially pages 94 through 102.
[23] Jean-Luc Marion, “Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Gift,” in Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought, edited by Marold Westphal (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 134-42.
[24] Ibid., 130-42.
[25] Ibid., 127-30
[26] Ibid., 127-30.
[27] Both Derrida’s problematization of the gift, as well as Bataille’s conception of art - among other things – as being a dissipative or excremental excess, appear to take a materialistic philosophic position for granted. This has the appearance of a tacit deference to the capitalist mode of material quantification and valuation.
[28] Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004).
[29] Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). Those interested should pay special attention to the second chapter, which is entitled “The Saturated Phenomenon,” on pages 18 through 48.
[30] Claude Romano, Event and World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 191-200. Romano’s analysis is quite perspicacious and worth noting: “As we have seen, the obscuring of the evential meaning of experience is inseparable from characterizing experience’s correlate as innerworldly facts. But empiricism strips innerworldly facts, in their turn, of their proper phenomenological traits, and of the following characteristic in particular: every fact announces itself as such within a signifying context, on the horizon of a ‘world.’ Empiricism misunderstands the innerworldly character of facts when it interprets the correlate of experience as a mere ‘given’ without world – and then interprets this ‘given’ as a ‘sensible’ given. Experience, stripped of its relation as a totality to the world, which belongs to it constitutively, is thereby reduced to the reception of sense data…” (page 200).
[31] Jean-Luc Marion, “The Phenomenality of the Sacrament – Being and Givenness” in Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 100-101.
[32] Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 176-77.
[33] Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 171.
[34] Josef Albers, “The Origin of Art,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Los Angeles: University of California Press, April 18, 1996), 107.
[35] The art critic Herbert Read once noted that the human conception of “nature” was actually the crystallization of natural phenomena as transmuted through the lens of human consciousness. This Kantian perspective of Read’s led him to insist that all art is, in one form or another, a reflection of the human consciousness in relation to the universe. As such, art is essentially a human practice, and is intimately linked to the experience of human existence. Those interested should refer to Read’s book the Philosophy of Modern Art (New York: Fawcett Premier Printing, 1967). See especially the fourth chapter entitled “Human Art and Inhuman Nature.”
[36] Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, edited by Santiago Zabala and translated by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 158.
[37] Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. M.T.H. Sadler (New York: Diver Publications, 1977).
[38] Ibid., 10-20.
[39] Ibid., 53-55.
[40] Ibid., 55.
[41] Ibid., 14.
[42] Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 171.
[43] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Dunquesne University Press, 1969), 256.
[44] Claude Romano, Event and World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 200.
[45] Ibid., 200.
[46] Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), ix.
[47] Emmanuel Levinas, “The Trace of the Other,” in Continental Philosophy: An Anthology, edited by William McNeill and Karen S. Feldman (Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 176-185.
[48] “[A] trace signifies beyond being. The personal order to which a face obliges us is beyond being. Beyond being is a third person, which is not definable by the oneself, by ipseity. It is the possibility of this third direction of radical unrightness which escapes the bipolar play of immanence and transcendence proper to being, where immanence wins against transcendence. Through a trace the irreversible past takes on the profile of a ‘He.’ The beyond from which a face comes is in the third person. The pronoun He expresses exactly its inexpressible irreversibility, already escaping every relation as well as every dissimulation, and in this sense absolutely unencompassable or absolute, a transcendence in an ab-solute past. The illeity of the third person is the condition for the irreversibility.” Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), 356.
[49] Here one can draw out another interpretation of the word presence in relation to aesthetic production. For all works of art are apparitions or phantasms. They carry with them an impression of the consciousness which brought them into being.
[50] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Inifinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 256.
[51] The philosopher Peter Kreeft has noted the relationship between love and the exchange of selves: “Something extremely simple yet incredibly mysterious is said in Song of Songs 2:16 and again in 7:10: ‘My beloved is mine and I am his.’ Love exchanges selves. When I love you, I no longer possess myself; you do. I have given it away. But I possess your self. How can this be? How can the gift of the giver be the very giver? How can the hand that gives hold itself in itself as its own gift? The ordinary relationship between giver and gift, subject and object, cause and effect, is overcome here.” See Peter Kreeft, Three Philosophies of Life – Ecclesiastes: Life as Vanity, Job: Life as Suffering, Song of Songs: Life as Love (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 128.
[52] John Zizioulas, Being as Communion (Crestwood, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985).
[53] Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry Into Freud (New York: Vintage Books, 1961).
[54] Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (Vol. Book VII) (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1997), 167-242.
[55] Here one may be reminded of the artful explication of the origin of Eros given by Aristophanes in the Platonic dialogue entitled The Symposium. Though Aristophanes is playful and poetically ironic in his description of the source of erotic love, it must be noted that there is some truth to his conception of Eros as a desire for unification with another. This certainly resonates with the physical aspects of erotic encounter, and as Jean-Paul Sartre has indicated in his discussion of “the Hole” of human existential experience. Those interested should refer to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel Press, 1987), especially pages 84 through 91, and the platonic dialogue The Symposium. With regard to the latter, one of the best recent translations is entitled Plato’s Symposium: A Translation by Seth Benardete with Commentaries by Allan Bloom and Seth Bernardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
[56] Luce Irigaray, “The Fecundity of the Caress: A Reading of Levinas, Totality and Infinity, ‘Phenomenology of Eros’” in Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (Re-Reading the Canon) (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 119-120.
[57] In this way the work of art can be thought of as aporia in the sense suggested by mystical and negative theology, which Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard have described as “presence realized in absence.” Those interested in a more elaborate discussion of this understanding of the concept of aporia should refer to Kessler and Sheppard’s preface to the book Mystics: Presence and Aporia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), viii-ix.
[58] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology (New York: Washington Square Press, 1993), 471.
[59] Luce Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference (London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 179.
[60] Jean Baudrillard, “Consumer Society” in Selected Writings (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1988), 29.
[61] Hektor K. T. Yan, “Morality and Virtue in Poetry and Philosophy: A Reading of Homer’s Iliad XXIV” in Humanitas Volume XVI., No.1, 2003, p. 15
[62] Simon Critchley, Very Little…Almost Nothing: Death, Philosophy, Literature (Oxford: Routledge Publishing Group, 1997).
[63] This position is asserted with vigor, at least implicitly, in the work of the literary critic and thinker Harold Bloom. Those interested in this aspect of Bloom’s work should refer to his books Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999) and The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Riverhead Books, 1994).
[64] Peggy Kamuf, “Beside Philosophy – Literature,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 144.
[65] This is especially true when one considers performance pieces which are created in order to comment upon human activity or social performance. One specific example of such an aesthetic performance would be Martha Rosler’s filmic presentation of her piece entitled Semiotics of the Kitchen, which was intended as a parodic critique of the assumed functional roles women are assigned within American patriarchy.
[66] Gianni Vattimo, “The Ontological Vocation of Twentieth-Century Poetics” in Art’s Claim to TRUTH (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 29-30.
[67] Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 5-9.
[68] Jean-Paul Sartre is as well known – if not more so in certain circles – for his novels, like Nausea, and his plays, such as No Exit, as he is for his philosophic work.
[69] Stuart Brown, Diane Collinson, and Robert Wilkinson (eds.), One Hundred Twentieth-Century Philosophers (Oxford: Routledge Publishing Group, 1998). See also The Hélène Cixous Reader (Oxford: Routledge Publishing Group, 1994), especially the introduction on pages xxvi through xxxiv.
[70] Peggy Kamuf, “Beside Philosophy – Literature,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 144-145.
[71] Werner J. Dannhauser, “Friedrich Nietzsche,” in A History of Political Philosophy: Third Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 829-850.
[72] Ibid., 838-840.
[73] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (New York: The Modern Library, 1995).
[74] Allan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), 36.
[75] Ibid., 36.
[76] Peggy Kamuf, “Part Two: Beside Philosophy – Literature,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 143-237.
[77] Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature (Oxford: Routledge Publishing Group, 1991), 46.
[78] Kevin Hart, “it/is true” in Words of Life: New Theological Turns in French Phenomenology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 71.
[79] Claude Romano, Event and World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 200.
[80] Paul Feyerabend, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3-18.
[81] Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London: Verso Books, 2010), xxix.
[82] Emmanuel Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1996), 1-10.
[83] Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” in The Continental Philosophy Reader (Oxford: Routledge Publishing Group, 1996), 124-135.
[84] Demonstrating this reality is perhaps the main source of the genius found in the Jacques Derrida’s text The Postcard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Those interested in the way this text interacts with the concepts discussed above should refer to the section entitled “Envios,” found on pages 1 through 256.
[85] Michel Henry, I Am The Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 12-20.
[86] Ibid., 19.
[87] Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 33-43.
[88] Michel Henry, I Am The Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 27.
