This collection of essays explores the conflictual history and future implications of two important traditions of twentieth-century European thought: the ...
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)
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)
Proposes to rethink the ontological and ethical dimensions of language by rereading Heidegger's work and by engaging Levinas' ethics and contemporary poetics.
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 (...) 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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
