Alison Ross

Historical undecidability: the Kantian background to Derrida's politics

This paper deals with Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment in his essay ‘Economimesis’. I argue that Derrida’s analysis of Kant’s aesthetics can be used to describe the aporia within Kantian politics between rebellion and progressive revolutionary acts. The focus of my argument falls on examining how the recent debate over Derrida’s ethics can be usefully considered from the background of this treatment of Kant. In particular, the analysis Derrida gives of Kant’s aesthetics commits him to a series of conceptual constraints that can be detected in his recent commentaries on ‘forgiveness’ and ‘hospitality’. I suggest that these recent commentaries on political topics also depart from his earlier practice of ethics in ‘Economimesis’ as a ‘witnessing’ of the particular. This departure can be clearly seen once the Kantian background to Derrida’s recent writing is set out.

Moral metaphorics, or Kant after Blumenberg: Towards an analysis of the aesthetic settings of morality

This paper examines the role of formal, aesthetic elements in motivating moral action. It proposes that Blumenberg’s analysis of the existential settings of myth and metaphor provide a useful framework to consider the conception and function of the aesthetic symbol in Kantian moral philosophy. In particular, it explores the hypothesis that Blumenberg’s analysis of ‘pregnance’ and ‘rhetoric’ are useful for identifying and evaluating the processes involved in self-persuasion to the moral perspective.

The aesthetic fable: Cinema in Jacques Ranciere's "aesthetic politics"

Politics resembles art in one essential point. Like art, politics also cuts into that great metaphor where words and images are continuously sliding in and out of each other to produce the sensory evidence of a world in order. And, like art, it constructs novel combinations of words and actions, it shows words borne by bodies in movement to make them audible, to produce another articulation of the visible and the sayable. (Ranciere, Film Fables, 152)

The Problem of the Image: Sacred and Profane Spaces in Walter Benjamin's Early Writing

Abstract From the comparative framework of writing on the meaning of ritual in the field of the history of religions (M. Eliade and J. Z. Smith), this essay argues that one of the major problems in Benjamin’s thinking is how to make certain forms of materiality stand out against other (degraded) forms. In his early work, the way that Benjamin deals with this problem is to call degraded forms “symbolic”, and those forms of materiality with positive value, “allegorical”. The article shows how there is more than an incidental connection with the recent approach to ritual in the field of history of religions, seeing that Benjamin too wants to set out the significance of certain material forms against those that are “ritualistic” and hence false. It is argued that he treats the latter in his essay on Elective Affinities and the former in his Trauerspiel. The key claim is that the way material forms stand out as meaningful is akin to the Kantian description of the aesthetic attitude, which identifies how certain formations warrant and attract reflective attention and underpin (the) moral orientation. The point is significant since Kantian aesthetics is an object of polemical attention across Benjamin’s heterogeneous corpus. Moreover, the approach shows the main difficulty in Benjamin’s treatment of sensible forms: what are the criteria he uses to distinguish the “bad” way a sensible form has of being meaningful from the “good”?

What is the ‘force’ of moral law in Kant's practical philosophy?

Kant’s moral philosophy understands the experience of moral law in two somewhat divergent ways. In the preface to his Critique of Practical Reason Kant defines moral law as a mere ‘fact’ of moral conscience. Later in his ‘Critique of Teleological Judgment’ he notes how ‘very remarkable’ it is that a rational idea can be found among ‘matters of fact’. This comment underlines the unusual status of a ‘fact’ of ‘reason’ in Kant’s philosophy. If the formulation of the moral law as a ‘fact’ is, on Kant’s own admission, a solecism, it is nonetheless crucial for Kant because it verifies the consciousness of the obligation to act morally. Indeed it places the central postulate of moral law out of contention; it insists that freedom (a rational idea) is ‘real’. Consciousness of rational universality is experienced as a demand on the self that possesses insight. The ‘insight’ of the moral fact is what distinguishes this kind of ‘fact’ from any kind of empirical fact. Further, it is this quality of insight that points to the deficiencies of theoretical reason, which is able to defend an a priori idea of obligation as well as the content of that obligation as the hypothetical presupposition of freedom, but is not able to instil consciousness of the obligation to act morally.

Derrida's Writing-Theatre: From the Theatrical Allegory to Political Commitment

This article analyses some of the shifts in tone and argumentation in Derridas work by comparing the treatment of the topics of theatre and theatrical representation in his early writing on literary and philosophical texts with the conception of a politically committed ‘ethics’ in his late work. The topic of theatrical representation is particularly useful for a critical assessment of Derridas later ethics because it allows us to give careful consideration to his position on different types of, and contexts for, involvement. I argue that some of the important differences in tone and argumentation in Derridas work arise not just because of the different exigencies that distinguish readings of literary/philosophical texts from analyses of political circumstances and events. There is also a shift in his work from attempting to account for the aporetic economy that supports positions held and defended to the terms of his advocacy for ethical commitment. In the case of his early writing the emphasis falls o...

The work of the art-work : Art after heidegger's origin of the work of art

Heidegger’s reflections on art inaugurate a distinction between his own socalled ‘post-aesthetic’ approach to art, and the conception of the artwork in modern philosophical aesthetics. According to recent interpretations of Heidegger this distinction pivots on Heidegger’s attempt to prise art away from the status of an ‘aesthetic object’ in a ‘cultural field’. The non-calculative conception of the work of art that is the result of this attempt does not just organise his 1937 ‘Origin of the Work of Art’ essay but is sustained in his 1955 essay on ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, where art plays the role of a counterforce to the instrumental thinking of the technological epoch. The role of art as a counter to instrumental thinking outlined in the ‘Origin’ essay acts in these interpretations of Heidegger as an operative contrast to the otherwise totalising instrumentalism of the technological Gestell. Art’s capacity to counter instrumentalism follows its differentiation from the status of a merely ‘aesthetic object’. In a number of recent publications, Ziarek has cited the distinctive features of post-aesthetic art in support of art’s ability to confront ‘the impact of technological modernity on experience’. This confrontation signals the importance of renegotiating in a post-aesthetic context ‘art’s relation to social and political dimensions’, because this context opens up the specific ‘possibility of an emancipatory, post-Enlightenment thinking’, able to sustain a critical relation to ‘experience in the age of technology.’ This ambitious social and political scope may not be endorsed by other commentators, but the terms in which Ziarek describes art’s confrontation with the technologization of experience in Heidegger often are. Ziarek emphasises the negative effects of the technologization of experience and argues that Heidegger’s account of poiesis in the technological epoch delineates ‘the obscured yet potentially emancipatory significance of the juncture between technological practices of schematising experience and the poetic’. What is stressed in this reading of Heidegger is the particular relation of art ‘to (everyday) experience, where art, taken to be disclosive and enactive rather than representational and reproductive, produces (reveals) the world as the play of differences and heterogeneities, which disappear within the intuittive immediacy of experience’ (ibid). Art is able to resist ‘the dominant schema of experience’ because its emphasis on the contingent and the singular contests the general and schematic mode of experience in the technological age. The possibility of this resistance is a feature of the ‘co-belonging’ of poiesis and technology in the technological epoch such that ‘poiesis in modernity is

THE ERRORS OF HISTORY

Abstract This paper critically evaluates Foucault’s relation to Bachelard and Canguilhem. It reconsiders the relevance of the concept of “influence” for treating this relation in order to register the more sceptical position Foucault adopts towards knowledge practices than either of these figures from twentieth-century French epistemology.

Between Luxury and Need: The Idea of Distance in Philosophical Anthropology

Abstract This paper offers a critical analysis of the use of the idea of distance in philosophical anthropology. Distance is generally presented in works of philosophical anthropology as the ideal coping strategy, which rests in turn on the thesis of the instinct deficiency of the human species. Some of the features of species life, such as its sophisticated use of symbolic forms, come to be seen as necessary parts of this general coping strategy, rather than a merely expressive outlet, incidental to the ultimate goal of life preservation. The paper analyses the arguments used in support of the thesis of instinct deficiency in Hans Blumenberg and considers their implications for the status of symbolic expression in species life. It contrasts the approach this thesis involves with one that proceeds by presenting and arguing from biological evolutionary evidence. The contrast is used to examine the questions: in what sense instinct deficiency is specifically anthropological, and in what precise sense philosophical anthropology is ‘philosophical’.

Practices of Form: Art – Philosophy – Life – History

ABSTRACT This article canvases some of the issues involved in the idea of form as a practice in Kant, Blumenberg and Foucault, and it also outlines the different contexts and approaches the individual papers collected in this Special Issue use to explore this idea.