"Working from newly available texts in Heidegger's Complete Works, Krzysztof Ziarek presents Heidegger at his most radical and demonstrates how the thinker's daring use of language is an integral part of his philosophical expression. Ziarek emphasizes the liberating potential of language as an event that discloses being and amplifies Heidegger's call for a transformative approach to poetry, power, and ultimately, philosophy."--Publisher's website.

This collection of essays explores the conflictual history and future implications of two important traditions of twentieth-century European thought: the ...

This book offers an original approach to avant-garde art and its transformative force. Presenting an alternative to the approaches to art developed in postmodern theory or cultural studies, Ziarek sees art's significance in its critique of power and the increasing technologization of social relations. Re-examining avant-garde art and literature, from Italian and Russian Futurism and Dadaism, to Language poetry, video and projection art, as well as transgenic and Internet art, this book argues that art's importance today cannot be explained (...) simply in aesthetic or cultural terms but has to take into consideration how artworks question the technological character of modern power. To emphasize the transformative character of art, the book redefines art as a force field, in which forces drawn from historical and social reality come be to formed into an alternative relationality. Through discussions of such key avant-garde figures as Marinetti, Duchamp, Khlebnikov, and Vertov, and innovative contemporary artists like Viola, Wodiczko and Kac, The Force of Art counters the pessimism about art's social function by recovering and redefining art's transformative role in modernity. (shrink)

Krzysztof Ziarek's essay, The Return to Philosophy? or: Heidegger and the Task of Thinking, constitutes a response to Russell. While Ziarek admits that there is some philological sense in the attempt to read Heidegger through a transcendental optics, he argues that philosophically this strategy risks covering-up the most significant developments of Heidegger's thinking. Whilst it might be said that the attempt to locate a transcendental reduction in Heidegger only ever applies to his early work, and in particular (...) Being and Time, to distinguish between an 'early transcendental Heidegger' in opposition to a 'late history-of-being Heidegger' makes the living development of his work invisible in that it reduces philosophical thought to systems of positive, affirmative judgements. Against such a reduction not only in, but also of Heidegger's work, Ziarek mobilizes the insights that develop explicitly during the 1930s, which constitute a radical break not only with transcendental ' phenomenology, but also with philosophical, metaphysical thought as such. (shrink)

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry. Ziarek explores, through selective readings of avant-garde poetry, the key aspects of the radical critique of experience: technology, everydayness, event, and sexual difference. To that extent, The Historicity of Experience is less a book about the avant-garde than a critique of experience through the avant-garde. Ziarek reads the avant-garde in dialogue with the work of some of the (...) major critics of modernity (Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Jean-François Lyotard, and Luce Irigaray) to show how avant-garde experiments bear critically on the issue of modern experience and its technological organization. The four poets Ziarek considers—Gertrude Stein, Velimir Khlebnikov, Miron Biaoszewski, and Susan Howe—demonstrate the broad reach of and variety of forms taken by the avant-garde revision of experience and aesthetics. Moreover, this quartet illustrates how the main operative concepts and strategies of the avant-garde underpinned the practices of canonical writers. A profound philosophical meditation on language, modernity, and the everyday, The Historicity of Experience offers a fundamental reconceptualization of the avant-garde in relation to experience. (shrink)

To understand globalization, one needs to examine its provenance within the metaphysical tradition and, in particular, in relation to the ways in which power tends to operate in modernity. While its operations are necessary for shaping relations, the pervasiveness with which power invests beings tends to obscure the event, and in particular, temporality and historicity, which mark the possibility of undoing power's formative influence on beings and relations. The event becomes the site of a specific tension between power and the (...) power-free, between changes intrinsic to power's intensification and a transformation indicative of a letting-go of power. In the face of our (post)modern tradition of increasingly intense macro and microflows of power, the power-free calls into question the metaphysical tradition of power that has underwritten the development of modernity. This transformation is neither a destruction nor an abandonment of modernity, but indicates an alternative to the prevalent and pervasive practices of power. (shrink)

The essay develops a parallax between Lispector and Heidegger with regard to the question of being: being not as an idea or a concept, or as anything substantive, but being in the spatio-temporal sense of being in being, of the event which lets each instant of “in being” take place. Instantiating this proximity, the essay focuses on dis-humanization and the role that openness to nothingness plays in this context. Lispector’s writings, especially Passion, illustrate how what hinders the true humanity of (...) human beings is not barbarity or animality but what she calls “false humanization,” which sets humans apart from all other beings as if separate from life and nature. Heidegger’s critique of humanisms and their machinational approach to things and the world opens a similar perspective on being. Although presented in markedly different tonalities of writing, Lispector’s and Heidegger’s texts concern the “same” of the passion/pathos of being. (shrink)

Looking at Dickinson and Hölderlin, this essay begins by exploring the idea of the poetic dimension of existence and its relation to the image, or more precisely, to the capability to disclose into images. For Dickinson the relentless “poverty” of a non-poetic existence indicates that what is missing from such existence are not just images but the capacity for their “disclosing” - the poetic gift or aptitude. With the help of Heidegger’s essays on poetry and poverty, I invert this relation (...) between image and poverty to show that, even though the inceptive character of the poetic word and the element of poetic dwelling it allows to emerge appear poor in comparison to images or concepts, it is the poetic word that for the very first time lets humans dwell. Although it can neither boast the richness of “pictures” nor the strength and precision of conceptual comprehension, the poetic is what opens up the world for humans and simultaneously opens their being to its characteristic manner of inhabiting this world. (shrink)

Proposes to rethink the ontological and ethical dimensions of language by rereading Heidegger's work and by engaging Levinas' ethics and contemporary poetics.

In coming to words, language “reserves” itself: it holds back its event, keeping it illegible and silent. It is possible to see much of modern innovative or “experimental” poetry as such an experience of reticence and stillness, an experiment of language listening to itself “speaking” in order to allow the force of the illegible to come to speech. How this silence both limits what can be said and holds what has been written open to the possibilities of saying otherwise comes (...) from the “restraint” characteristic of the specific way in which language “speaks,” that is, arrives each time singularly as words precisely by withholding this very arrival from signification. Myung Mi Kim’s poetry stands out among contemporary American poets precisely for its specific attentiveness to this simultaneously “generative” and “constraining” force of silence. To understand better the workings of this force of silence, I examine Kim’s poetry in the context of Heidegger’s reflection on language, specifically his point about the withdrawal and restraint “essential” to the unfolding of language. I suggest that this withdrawal marks the poietic momentum of language, which can be traced, though, only by way of a listening response. This listening response becomes in turn a kind of constraint under which poetic thinking operates, a holding back of assertions and statements in favor of a listening which responds precisely to how the saying withholds itself from what comes to be said. Exploring the proximity between Kim’s poetry and Heidegger’s thinking, this essay examines how this withdrawal—a restraint at play in language itself--necessitates the attitude of poetic “reservedness.”. (shrink)

Modernism remains a complex and complicated term, contested not only with regard to its historical meaning or period boundaries but also with regard to its relevance for aesthetics and, more broadly, for the contemporary understanding of art. Is modernism the culmination of modernity, its crowning moment or perhaps its tipping point toward the purported postmodernity/postmodernism, or is the radical challenge instigated by modernism’s artistic inventiveness—what I call its avant-garde momentum—still extant and current beyond the apparent succession of modernism by postmodernism? (...) This essay approaches these questions through a discussion of various approaches to artworks in modernism and the avant-garde: Adorno, Rancierè, Heidegger, and Lyotard in order to explore the extent to which aesthetics remains both the precondition and the optics for modernism. At the same time, it assesses the implications of the avant-garde’s challenge to the very idea of art. The divergence in the discussions of the split between modernism and avant-garde, as well as the contention between proposals for a new aesthetic and the critique of the notion of art, pivot on the issue of freedom and the role of the human. In its challenge to art, the avant-garde calls into question the centrality of the human and the idea that freedom is a human possession. In doing so, it rethinks the notion of the artwork with regard to the non-human or inhuman. Against the backdrop of this rift between modernism and the avant-garde, the essay discusses the works of Wallace Stevens and Gertrude Stein. While Stein’s avant-garde writing is intensely engaged in its practice with drafting a new poetic rigor of writing and experience, the modernist Stevens uses aesthetic paradigms and reflection to trigger the liminal state at the end of the imagination or the mind. This brief study of Stevens and Stein illustrates the fact that modernism and the avant-garde inhabit the same historical moment yet part ways with regard to aesthetics. As the avant-garde elaborates its new rigor in order to work in tune with the non-human reach of the event, it moves beyond the metaphysical determination of art and aesthetics. In the avant-garde, what is ‘proper’ to humankind comes to be “inhabited by the inhuman,” to paraphrase Lyotard, and is “celebrated” as such. This fissure means also that the momentum of the avant-garde extends beyond the historical boundaries of, for many already closed, chapter of modernism. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 4, Page 19-30, December 2011.

The geological perspective adopted and validated by the term Anthropocene brings into view an interesting quandary, as the term in the same gesture endorses anthropocentrism and yet calls the centrality of the human into question in relation to the geological span of the planet or the cosmic time of the galaxy. Therefore, I use the Anthropocene as a prompt for a critique of the anthropological conception of the human and of technology underlying this notion. It is symptomatic that the notion (...) of the Anthropocene enters the calculus of geological time under the aegis of the threat of the irreversible tech-anthropic imprint on the planet. The geological and supra-planetary extent of this imprint, precisely by bringing into view the scope and the dangerous intensity of the changes brought about by human activity, opens the possibility of attending in a different key to reality, a new way of attending to and attaining being and living, human and non-human beings. The possibility of such a different key of relations hinges, however, on the ability to bring into question the very central position of the anthropos, underscored by the term the Anthropocene. And with it not only the central position of the human but also of life and of living beings, on which the notion of the anthropos depends. One could say that it is perhaps for the sake of living beings, that is, for the sake of their survival, that, paradoxically, the centrality of living has to be called into question. (shrink)

This essay reconsiders the notion of “world” by looking critically at the idiom of life dominating current critical debates. Showing how and why life should be displaced from the privileged position it has assumed in modernity, it examines Arendt’s and Heidegger’s comments on the world. In The Human Condition, Arendt provides an interesting philosophical and cultural account of the rise of life to prominence in the modern age, pointing out its detrimental effects on the understanding of the world and human (...) action. Heidegger, on the other hand, executes, through his idiomatic approach to mortality, perhaps the most radical displacement of life in an attempt to rethink and bring to eminence being and the event of the world. At stake is a different experience of the world and a change in the understanding of the human, situating the human life always already in response to the nonrepeatable event of being. (shrink)

Heidegger repeatedly performs the encounter of thinking and poetry, explicitly for the sake of inaugurating a non-metaphysical way of thinking. This transformed thinking is to be poetic and non-conceptual, eschewing the comfort of transparent meaning, the grasping power of concepts, the presentational force of images, or the self-evident correctness of propositional statements. The need for such a non-metaphysical thinking arises historically, at the endpoint of the epoch of the completion of metaphysics, when it comes to roost in the Gestell, the (...) technological essencing of being, which pervades and powers all that is in being: all beings, entities and occurrences. Poetic thinking responds to the modern drive to maximum availablity and dispose-ability of being and beings, freeing up the possibility of a path alternative to the dominion of calculative thought and its technological metrics. (shrink)

This essay examines the notion of “poetical rescue” in Heidegger, which derives from Heidegger’s commentary on Hölderlin’s lines from “Patmos,” “Yet where danger is, grows also that which rescues.” Heidegger’s remarks on the two-faced essence of technology draw on these lines, characterizing the enframing as both the danger and the possibility of saving. The turn from danger to rescue depends on the possibility of a poetic revealing, which has been overshadowed, even disallowed, by the dominant revealing in modernity—namely, das Gestell. (...) To free the possibility of the poetic revealing and the rescue spreading from it, humans, as Heidegger remarks, need to learn to become mortals. To be mortal means here being “capable of death as death”—that is, becoming attentive to the nothingness pulsing in every moment. The rescue Heidegger explores is thus the freeing of the experience proper to being mortal in the midst of a revealing that orders all that exists into the ready availability of a standing-reserve. (shrink)

Explicating Heidegger''s and Irigaray''s critiques of difference, this essay proposes a new approach to the crucial concept of relationship in their thought. Articulated as proximity rather than difference, such relationality works in a manner that is non-appropriative and free from power. The essay shows that at the center of Heidegger''s questioning of being is not the ontico-ontological difference but the notion of nearness (Nähe), elaborated by Heidegger as a critique of the metaphysical logic of difference and relation. Linking Heidegger''s nearness (...) with his critique of power in the recently published Besinnung, the essay explains how such relationality exceeds the parameters of power (machtlos). The remainder of the essay investigates the way in which Irigaray''s reformulation of sexual difference as an ethics of proximity similarly calls into question the differential economy of being and aims at a new model of non-appropriative relation. While Heidegger links the change in relation from power to letting be to a decisive confrontation with modern technicity, Irigaray criticizes this approach and reformulates the question of technology through the prism of sexual difference. By taking into account the often ignored aspects of Irigaray''s thought - temporality, event, proximity - the essay situates Irigaray''s ethics and culture of sexual difference not only beyond the discussions of essentialism but also outside the equality-difference debates. (shrink)

Poetic Disinterest: Power, Movement, and Language After HeideggerKrzysztof Ziarek’s study of Martin Heidegger calls attention to the German philosopher’s writing and to the movement and momentum of his poetic practice. Ziarek frames Heidegger’s thinking-writing as a practice focused on what is revealed in the turning of words, on what appears in the synergy between words as signs and words in their singular relationship to the world. In this translation and interpretation of volumes 71 and 74 of Heidegger’s Collected (...) Works, Ziarek “underscores the idiomatic character of Heidegger’s approach”. Ziarek’s discussion of these works, which were written in the 1930s and 1940s, builds... (shrink)

Several authors have investigated the question of whether canonical logic-based accounts of belief revision, and especially the theory of AGM revision operators, are compatible with the dynamics of Bayesian conditioning. Here we show that Leitgeb's stability rule for acceptance, which has been offered as a possible solution to the Lottery paradox, allows to bridge AGM revision and Bayesian update: using the stability rule, we prove that AGM revision operators emerge from Bayesian conditioning by an application of the principle of maximum (...) entropy. In situations of information loss, or whenever the agent relies on a qualitative description of her information state - such as a plausibility ranking over hypotheses, or a belief set - the dynamics of AGM belief revision are compatible with Bayesian conditioning; indeed, through the maximum entropy principle, conditioning naturally generated AGM revision operators. This mitigates an impossibility theorem of Lin and Kelly for tracking Bayesian conditioning with AGM revision, and suggests an approach to the compatibility problem that highlights the information loss incurred by acceptance rules in passing from probabilistic to qualitative representations of beliefs. (shrink)