1. The first publication of a substantial number of these notes is found in Seubold, Kunst als Ereignis; subsequently, Pöggeler would publish a large number of the notes in Bild und Technik.
2. Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 158, letter of February 21, 1959.
3. See ibid., 65.
4. Two of the other artists who were key for Heidegger—George and Rilke—also possessed this talent for writing about their work and about the character of art itself. In a like fashion, Heidegger's attraction to van Gogh was initially through van Gogh's letters.
5. For a fine discussion of the presence and importance of Klee for twentieth-century continental philosophy, see Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational.
6. Heidegger, Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 90–91.
7. Klee, Notebooks, 80.
8. Klee, “Über moderne Kunst,” 64.
9. For an approach to the work of art that starts with such silence, see Sallis, Transfigurements. See also my comments on Sallis's book and his reply in my article “In Kant's Wake,” 104–14.
10. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 189. On this point, see also my Lyrical and Ethical Subjects, 130–62.
11. Deleuze, Qu'est-ce que la philosophie? 30.
12. Gadamer, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8, 197 (henceforth cited as GW followed by the volume number and page number).
13. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 91.
14. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887–1889, KSA13, 500 (16[40] #6).
15. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in Primacy of Perception, 161.
16. Although this is precisely the tendency of so many. Thus Plato takes Homer as the artist par excellence, Aristotle chooses Sophocles (and even more specifically takes Oedipus Tyrannus as the exemplary work), Nietzsche (at least for a while) takes Wagner as the only artist, and Heidegger turns to Hölderlin (and to a few other select poets).
17. On this, see Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, 51–52 (henceforth cited as KU followed by the Akademie Ausgabe page number). See also Sallis's discussion of this in Transfigurements, esp. 44–45.
18. I have attempted to address this relation from a somewhat different approach in my Lyrical and Ethical Subjects.
19. Kant, KU, AK 298. I have attempted to unpack this kinship of art and ethical life in my On Germans and Other Greeks.
20. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 237.
21. Rilke, “Archaïscher Torso Apollos,” Werke, vol. 1, 557. When I return to these issues, I will also point to a somewhat different but still quite compatible way of addressing them that is outlined by Kleinberg-Levin's Gestures of an Ethical Life.
22. See, for instance, Kant's remark that “one says of nature and its capacities…too little if one describes it as an analogue of art…. One comes perhaps closer to this inscrutable character of nature if one calls it an analogue of life” (KU, AK 374).
23. Adorno's remark is actually not a question but a condemnation of our age: “nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das frißt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich ward, heute Gedichte zu schreiben” (in Prismen, 30). The notion is one that Adorno will comment upon in other texts, most notably in Negative Dialektik, 355–56.
1. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, para. 110. In the same paragraph, Hegel also notes that the singular “this” is “unreachable” by the word and that what is “unspeakable” is “untrue.”
2. Plato, Phaedrus, 264. Of course, Plato will make the identification of writing and painting a key point: “Writing [graphē], Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting [zōgraphía]; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written words…” (Phaedrus 275D). It should also be noted that Plato is among the few who have recognized the philosophical problem belonging to script. See, for instance, his Cratylus where one finds a discussion of handwriting. On this, see my “Putting Oneself in Words…,” 483–95.
3. Plutarch, Moralia, 346–47. See Lessing, “Laokoön”; see also Carson, The Economy of the Unlost, 47, where she gives a list of texts expressing this view (including Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Cicero, Longinus, and Augustine). One sees in this list just how enduring and how central to the history of philosophy this view is.
4. Horace, Ars Poetica, lines 361ff.
5. Augustine, “Answer to the Pelagians.”
6. Ekphrasis is a notion with a complicated history. In the early centuries of the Christian era (1–5 CE), it referred to a rhetorical exercise in which the goal was to make language into a “window” though which the reader/audience “sees” the work of art. See Becker, Rhetoric and Poetics of Early Greek Ekphrasis.
7. On Homer's blindness, see my “What We Didn't See” and “Von der Wahrheit Sprechen.”
8. Homer, Iliad, book 18.
9. Pope, The “Iliad” of Homer, 896. The difference between Homer's description of Achilles’ shield and Virgil's description of Aeneas's shield (in book 8 of The Aeneid) is significant: Virgil places on the shield the real history of Rome and so depicts a story in those images. When Achilles carries his shield, he is carrying the whole of life itself, not frozen in any moment but quite simply alive. No names, no particular individual or event, is recounted. The shield is what should protect Achilles, and yet one can also say that it is his burden, his responsibility to bear this whole of life itself. The shield that Aeneas carries is the story of the founding of Rome and the justification of its position as master of the world. It is full of the proper names of real individuals. In some sense, the shield validates Aeneas's own rights and authority insofar as it does that for Rome. The difference between the Greek and the Roman here is significant: in Virgil, the images serve the story; they confirm a story and illustrate it. In Homer, the images are the story; they illustrate nothing but themselves. On this, see Smith, “From Achilles’ Shield (Iliad XVIII) to Scenes from the Trojan War (Aeneid I),” 109–26.
10. The question of cinema both does and does not belong here. It belongs here insofar as the technology of film marks a departure from the possibilities and the limitations of painting. For the same reason, the discussion of cinema does not belong to the issues of this book. Since it will remain at the margins of many discussions here, there will be other times when it will need some attention. But, in the end, I would argue that the intervention of technology, the distance from the human hand, separates film from the most significant questions posed by painting.
11. On Twombly's painterly response to the Iliad, see my “Like a Fire That Consumes All before It…” in Lyrical and Ethical Subjects.
12. There were of course others who remarked on the sameness or difference of the arts prior to Lessing. For instance, Dio Chrysostomus in his twelfth Olympian Oration compares Homer with the sculptor Phidias with respect to their representations of Zeus. Leonardo da Vinci's Treatise on Painting makes similar remarks as well. But, with Lessing this difference is elevated to a principle shaping the approach to the work of art as such.
13. G. E. Lessing, Laocoön, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 66–68.
14. Kant, KU, AK 326. On the division of the arts in Kant, see Sallis, “Mixed Arts,” in Transfigurements, 41–54.
15. Heidegger, Nietzsche, vol. 1, 232.
16. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 478.
17. Nietzsche, Gebürt der Tragödie, 15 (henceforth cited as GT followed by the page number).
18. Sallis, Force of Imagination, 103.
19. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, 88.
20. Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 220.
21. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 478.
22. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, 189.
23. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 116ff.
24. Ibid., 116–17.
25. See Plato, Sophist, 262d. For a discussion of the metaphor of “weaving” in the ancient world, see Scheid and Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus.
26. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 118.
27. Ibid., 119.
28. On Gadamer's remarks and relation to cats, see my “What We Owe the Living,” in Between Description and Interpretation, ed. Andrzej Wierciński (Toronto: Hermeneutic Press, 2005), 401–409.
29. Nietzsche, GT, 36.
30. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 119.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 120 (emphasis added).
33. Ibid., 145 (emphasis added).
34. Ibid., 149.
35. Pliny, Natural History, 35.29. Cited in Carson, The Economy of the Unlost, 47. Carson's book outlines some of the same points that I raise here. What Carson does not mention, but what is nonetheless of great importance for the fullest treatment of these matters, is that writing too underwent a revolution at this particular historical juncture. On this, see Turner, Athenian Books in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.
36. See Carratelli, The Western Greeks, 99–100.
37. Recently, a crater on Mercury was named after Polygnotus. It sits next to a crater named Boethius. Simonides composed an inscription for Polygnotus's paintings at Delphi and when asked why replied, “So that it might be conspicuous that Polygnotus had painted them” (Plutarch, Moralia, 438b). Simonides is, of course, cited in the Republic by Polymarchus as the source of what he takes as his first definition of justice, namely, giving back what is due.
38. Pausanius, book 10, chapters 25–31.
39. Plato, Ion, 532a, and Gorgias, 448c.
40. Aristotle, Politics, 1340a40.
41. Aristotle, Poetics, 1448a2.
42. Ibid., 1454b11–12.
43. Aristotle contrasts Polygnotus with Zeuxis, who is the technically superior painter but whose work is simply intended to deceive. Pliny tells the story of a contest between Zeuxis and Parrhasius to see which one of them was the greater artist. When Zeuxis unveiled his paintings of grapes, they looked so real that birds came and pecked at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to draw back the curtain on his painting only to discover that the curtain was his painting. Lacan discusses this story to show how animals are attracted by surfaces while humans are drawn to the hidden. See Lacan, “What Is a Picture?” 103.
44. Simonides, fragment 821.
45. Plato, Republic, 599a.
46. Plato, Sophist, 235b8.
47. Ibid., 240c.
48. Heidegger, Platon, “Sophites,” 400.
49. Nancy, The Ground of the Image, 81.
50. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 181.
51. One of the most innovative discussions of this theme—one informed by, but not restricted to, Kant's understanding of this topic—is found in Sallis, Force of Imagination, esp. chap. 7.
52. Heidegger, Logik, 362.
53. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. R. Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 63–64.
54. Heidegger, Logik, 362. The book of photographs that Heidegger was almost certainly using at this time was titled Das Ewige Antlitz: Eine Sammlung von Totenmasken, by Ernst Benkard. This book with its 123 illustrations, which included death masks of Goethe, Schiller, Hayden, Beethoven, and Napoleon, among others, was a popular success in Germany, going through nineteen printings. Among the death masks photographed was one of “L'Inconnue de la Seine,” an unknown young woman who had drowned in the Seine River. Her death mask was widely reproduced and sold, often hanging in homes in Germany and France. It also became a sort of literary inspiration, showing up in some manner in works by Rilke, Blanchot, Camus, and Nabokov, among others. Why Heidegger would refer to the photograph of Pascal's death mask rather than to the very well known image of “L'Inconnue” is not clear. For an interesting discussion of the incommensurability, the non-coincidence, of something with itself that photography exposes, see Derrida, Demeure, Athènes.
55. On this, see my “What We Owe the Dead.”
56. Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 64.
57. On this, see Blanchot, The Gaze of Orpheus, 82–85, where he concludes with the claim that “man is made in his own image: this is what we learn from the strangeness of the resemblance of cadavers.”
58. Günter Figal, “Persona,” in Hans Wimmer Zeichnet Martin Heidegger, ed. G. Figal and T. Scheuffelen (Meßkirch: Martin-Heidegger-Museum, 2003), 12.
59. On the intensification of the image in the portrait and how the portrait shows in a condensed manner the character of all painting, see Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 143–44.
60. Kolbe's introduction to Das Ewige Antlitz by Ernst Benkard makes the interesting comment that “death masks are works of art made in the workshop of nature; they are however also transcendental objects” (7). The claim is also made that such masks “announce a new becoming.” Further reflection on the character of such masks would do well to begin by addressing both of these remarks.
61. On this, see Gadamer, GW vol. 1, 144.
62. Heidegger, Logik, 363–64.
63. Gadamer makes a similar point when he demonstrates that the image cannot be thought either as a “pure indication” or as a “pure substitution,” neither a sign nor a symbol. See GW, vol. 1, 149.
64. Ironically, it seems as if the image reaches the limits of its own possibility in the case of imaging the dead, the ghostly. Wedded to the visible, images will always struggle with the invisible. From out of this irony, one can begin to think of paintings of the dead. Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb and Kristeva's discussion of it in Black Sun would make an interesting starting point for this. Likewise, the role of the image, of the icon, in religion, as well as the iconoclasm, can be taken up at this point. See as well Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry.
65. For a fuller discussion of this move inaugurated by the third Critique, see chap. 1 of my Lyrical and Ethical Subjects.
66. For an insightful discussion of the effect of aesthetic experience upon the concept, see Sallis, Transfigurements, esp. 64ff., and my reply, “In Kant's Wake.”
67. Kant, KU, AK 351.
68. Ibid., AK 342. One of the decisive moments in the history of philosophical reflections on the production of art is found in Aristotle's Physics, B, 1, where Aristotle sets up an analogy between the prohairasis, the operations of the mind, of the maker of works of techne, and the causal being of nature. In that analogy, Aristotle tends to regard the workings of the artist's mind according to a sort of conceptual reason that Kant is challenging here. For a fuller discussion of this, see my “Economies of Production,” 145–57, 265–68.
69. Kant, KU, AK 303.
70. For a discussion of these “drives” or “impulses,” see my On Germans and Other Greeks, 73–83, 89–164, 191–224.
71. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, vol. 1, 871.
72. Other art forms, such as dance or music, have left no trace, no text, behind that would permit them to cross history into the present. But in taking up these claims, one needs to be careful not to conflate the primordial with the primitive (Heidegger makes this point in a different context in Sein und Zeit, para. 11). Nonetheless, painting that has not been influenced by conscious reflection and becomes self-conscious of historical forces does seem to emerge more directly from this archaic point, and so primitive paintings do have a special appeal to one who addresses the question of images. But, saying this, one must also bear in mind that the primitive is defined not only as historically distance. Children's “artworks” should qualify as such primitive works.
73. Merleau-Ponty, L'Oeil et Esprit, 92.
74. The most explicit account of this connection between dreaming (especially daydreaming) and art is found in Freud, “Der Dichter und das Phantasieren” (1907), Bildende Kunst und Literatur, 170–81.
75. Klee, Diaries, entry #905, 1912.
76. See, for instance, Nietzsche, GT, sections 1–2. For Nietzsche, it is important to bear in mind that our relation to the dream image individuates us.
77. Ibid., section 4.
78. Ibid. Hegel will also discuss this painting—his concern is to establish the unity of the upper and lower halves. See Hegel, Vorlesung über die Ästhetik, 96. Sallis has perhaps the most extensive discussions of this notion of “shining.” See, for instance, his Transfigurements and Shades—Of Painting at the Limit.
79. Nietzsche, GT, 39.
80. Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887–1889, KSA13, 500 (16[40] #6).
81. Heidegger, Holzwege, 67.
82. See, for instance, Nietzsche, GT, section 16.
83. Heidegger, Besinnung, 30.
84. It is worth noting that Adorno too regards beauty as relevant for the question of art. See his Ästhetische Theorie, 101ff.
85. An excellent discussion of the impact of the Eiffel Tower upon aesthetic consciousness can be found in Hughes, The Shock of the New, 9–56. A similar transformation in consciousness might be found in the images of the earth taken from the moon in 1969. Once again, our home was seen from a perspective only previously ever imaged. The shock of the sight of the blue ball streaked with white and brown standing in stark contrast to the pitch-black universe compels one to think of one's world in a different way. The sight of Paris from atop the Eiffel Tower did much the same, since from that vantage point—one that was new as a perspective—one sees Paris as a cubist painting.
86. Many of the efforts of this period need to be interpreted against the backdrop of the paradoxes of history at this time. So, for instance, one should never forget that Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, which speaks of the essential importance of music for the understanding of life, was published in the same year (1872) as the invention of the phonograph, an invention that Stravinsky would claim marked the date of the death of music.
87. See, for instance, Benn's lecture to medical students titled “Das moderne Ich,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 7–22. He opens the lecture by remarking that most in his audience served in the war and so many had “glass eyes, bound or missing limbs.” A similar poetic work is found in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), a piece based on Wilfred Owen's poems from the First World War.
88. Nietzsche, GT, section 16.
89. Though Nietzsche's use of this term is invoked by National Socialists occasionally in order to give it the apparent imprimatur of philosophical legitimacy, the primary reference in most such cases is to a book by the physician Max Nordau titled Entartung (1892). The word, as Nordau uses it, is a medical term to describe those who were not physically “normal” and who were, as a consequence, morally “deformed” as well. Nordau's book also used the term to characterize modern art. See Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 26.
90. There are numerous studies of this point, but one that is especially interesting for the project of this book is Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique.
91. See Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 25ff.
92. The exhibit was extremely popular. In the four months it was displayed in Munich, there were over two million visitors. All told, three million people saw the show, making it one of the most popular exhibitions of modern art ever.
93. Abstraction and expressionism were considered especially corrupt, so much so that even artists, like Nolde, who were members of the National Socialism Party were denounced as “degenerate.” See Barron, “Degenerate Art,” 9–13. But not everyone would see this notion of a connection between madness and art to be a form of “degeneration.” Bataille's journal Documents frequently made such a connection. Likewise, Klee said (in the journal entry already cited regarding children [note 75 above]): “Parallel phenomena [to the kinship of children's art to painting] are provided by the works of the mentally diseased; neither childish behavior nor madness are insulting words here…. All this is to be taken very seriously.” This issue will be discussed later. But in the context of discussing the Degenerate Art exhibit, it cannot be properly discussed.
94. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 25. English translation, “Art and Imitation,” in The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. R. Bernasconi (Cambridge: Cambridge university Press, 1986), 92 (henceforth cited as RB followed by the page number).
95. Gadamer, RB, 12.
96. Klee, Diaries, entry #905, 1912.
97. Though one reason Nietzsche never fully seems to appreciate the value of painting is precisely because he never fully abandons the traditional categories for thinking images. Even though he will speak of the dream image, it never completely severs its ties with the notion that here we confront, as with every image, a representation.
1. One need mention only a few of the other texts that take up this same task at this time to recall how extensive this list is: Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), several Hölderlin lectures and essays between 1933 and 1943, a seminar on Schiller's writings on art (1936), a seminar on Kant's Critique of Judgment (1936), and the series of Nietzsche seminars (1936–39). The list is even longer once one begins to include works of later years.
2. Heidegger, Holzwege, 50.
3. It is worth noting that there is no evidence that I have found to indicate that Heidegger saw, let alone was aware of, the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Given the immense popularity and propaganda intention of that exhibition, it would be odd to think that Heidegger was not at least aware of it. In his lectures on Nietzsche's “Will to Power as Art,” which were given in the late 1930s, there is also no mention of Nietzsche's use of the phrase “entartete Kunst.”
4. So, for instance, when Heidegger first saw van Gogh's painting Kornfeld mit Mäher und Sonne, he developed a special fascination for it after he learned that it was painted in the same year as Heidegger's birth (1889), which was also the year of Nietzsche's collapse and just days before van Gogh's own collapse. Van Gogh would write of this painting to his brother, Theo, that it was “the image of death” that he had painted.
5. In the lecture course of 1937–38, Heidegger still counts van Gogh among those who were early on awake to the destiny of our times and whose names are “enigmatic signs written into the most concealed ground of our history.” See Heidegger, Grundfragen der Philosophie, 216. Also named are Schiller, Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
6. We also know that Heidegger gratefully acknowledges receiving a copy of Jasper's book Strindberg und van Gogh, which discusses the schizophrenia that plagued both artists. All of these references are cited in Pöggeler, Bild und Technik, 160–61. See also Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 149.
7. Pöggeler, Bild und Technik, 167–68.
8. Gadamer, GW, vol. 3, 189. Gadamer notes that Dostoyevsky also belonged to this period of Heidegger's passion for van Gogh. Both represented a radical conception of human life; both stood outside—even against—the academic world. Both spoke of a suffering that needed to be understood as profoundly honest and authentic.
9. Heidegger, Ontologie, 32.
10. The letter is from November 15, 1875. The passage is one that van Gogh cites as a remark his father would often make to him. The lines come from King Solomon in the Bible.
11. For instance, that the shoes belong to a woman; in fact, most everything Heidegger says of these shoes is drawn from an act of imagination as much as from the painting. But, it should also be noted that Heidegger, who avidly read van Gogh's letters, was well aware that the shoes in van Gogh's painting were a symbol of the social revolutionary Bauernkrieg.
12. A similar middle position is assigned to the image by Gadamer in Truth and Method when he defines it as neither sign nor symbol. See GW, vol. 1, 158ff.
13. Heidegger, Logik, 364. This passage immediately follows a passage that discusses the photographic image of Pascal's death mask in which Heidegger remarks that “here a concept of the image emerges that is different from the concept of image [Bild] as copy [Abbild], but that is connected to it” (362).
14. For a more detailed discussion of this claim, see my On Germans and Other Greeks.
15. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, 105.
16. Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, 503.
17. Ibid., 505.
18. Heidegger's frequent apparent proximity to Hegel is an ongoing problem for him, and Heidegger never ceases to make an effort to differentiate himself from this apparent similarity. On this, see my The Ubiquity of the Finite (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988).
19. Hegel, Werke, vol. 13, 28.
20. Sallis's work has, perhaps more than any other, pursued this key question of how one is to think sense freed of its subordination to meaning. He has done this in several texts, but perhaps most systematically in his recent Transfigurements. Sallis has recognized that the primary site for addressing this question is the work of art. This would be the point at which a consideration of Sallis's work could open issues regarding this enigma of sense in a more productive way than one finds them opened in Heidegger. However, I will not do that only because my concern points in a somewhat different direction in this book.
21. Heidegger, Hölderlin, “Der Ister,” 19.
22. Ibid., 28. See also the comment in the epilogue to “The Origin of the Work of Art” that “the transformations in the essence of truth correspond to the essential history of western art.” Heidegger, Holzwege, 68.
23. Heidegger, Hölderlin, “Der Ister,” 26.
24. Heidegger, Holzwege, 30.
25. Ibid., 31.
26. Heidegger never comments upon the monumental and politically determined architecture—an effort to reproduce the temples of Greece and Rome—that was so integral to the Nazis and that was so prominent in Germany of the mid-to late 1930s. On this, see Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique, 92–114.
27. Adorno will pose a similar question when he asks “if and how art might survive after the fall of metaphysics which has been that which granted art its existence and its form.” Ästhetische Theorie, 506.
28. Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund, 41, 66.
29. July 30, 1973, in Heidegger, Heidegger-Kästner Briefwechsel, 121.
30. Cézanne is an element in this encounter as well, and indeed Heidegger's interest in Cézanne seems to predate his interest in Klee (see Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 149–52, and Pöggeler, Bild und Technik, 170–84). According to Petzet, Heidegger's interest in Cézanne begins sometime in 1947 when the two of them discussed a Cézanne exhibition and Rilke's letters about Cézanne. A letter of October 17, 1907, was of particular interest to Heidegger. In it, Rilke says:
It is not at all the painting which I study (for I remain, despite everything, uncertain in front of all images and I have learned only badly to distinguish good from less good, and I always confuse early with late paintings). It is rather the turn in these paintings that I recognized because I had reached it in my own work as well or somehow had come close to it, and I have prepared for it for a long time since so much depends upon it. That is why I must be cautious when trying to speak of Cézanne; it is very tempting to me…. But being so touched, so unexpectedly in my own life…is something of a confirmation and a connection.
Heidegger's relation to Cézanne's work would always have some sort of connection with his relation to a poet; so, he would, for the most part, find either Rilke or Rene Char to be closely connected with Cézanne. Heidegger's understanding of Cézanne would also be intimately connected with an image of Greece, which Heidegger found to have a deep kinship with the Provence. Curiously, Heidegger's travels and friendships in the Provence would never lead him to speak of van Gogh. He did, however, say (March 20, 1958) that “[in the Provence] I found Cézanne's path, a path that—from the beginning to the end—corresponds in some sense with my own path of thinking” (see Pöggeler, Bild und Technik, 172). Heidegger's only “text” on Cézanne is one of the poems that Heidegger wrote for René Char titled “Gedachtes”:
Das nachdenksam Gelassene, das inständig
Stille der Gestalt des alten Gärtners
Vallier, der unscheinbares pflegte
am chemin des Lauves.
Im Spätwerk des Malers ist die Zwiefalt
von Anwesendem und Anwesenheit einfältig
geworden, “realisiert” und verwunden zugleich,
verwandelt in eine geheimnisvolle Identität.
Zeigt sich hier ein Pfad, der in ein Zusammengehören
des Dichtens und des Denkens führt? (Denkerfahrungen, 163)
See also the “later” version in Jahresgabe der Martin-Heidegger Gesellschaft.
Interestingly, Heidegger would never—so far as I know—link Klee with any poet, even though there is a strong connection between Klee and Rilke, who were next-door neighbors in Munich for a year. Rilke even wrote to a friend (Baladine Klossowska), mentioning at one point that Klee had lent him sixty paintings. That letter of February 28, 1921, reads in part as follows:
I knew you would read Hausenstein's book [in 1921, Wilhelm Hausenstein published his monograph titled Kairuan oder eine Geschichte vom Maler Klee und von der Kunst dieses Zeitalters] with a certain experience; I sent it to you more because of Hausenstein than because of Klee. For his way of seeing is very full of spirit and sometimes amusing. Do not forget that he too uses the word “doomed” in relation to the creations of Klee. One cannot regard Klee in any other way, only that his doom is also set close to many unbelievers today—and that Klee takes up this fate which is handed to him in a very special way…. This shortcut of the arts behind the back of nature and even of the imagination is the strangest appearance of this time, but also such a liberating one…(in 1915 Klee brought sixty of his works in color to me and I was allowed to hold onto them for a month; they occupied me a great deal and drew me to them).
Much more could be said of this relationship between Rilke and Klee as well as of its significance for the issues that Heidegger takes up.
31. See, for instance, the disparaging remark of 1929–30, which must have been directed at the Bauhaus: “It is only one more sign of the governing groundlessness of thinking and understanding defining today that we are asked to consider a house as a machine for dwelling and the chair as a machine for sitting; there are even people who believe that they see in such foolishness a great discovery and the preludes of a new culture.” Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 316.
32. Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 158, letter of February 21, 1959.
33. See ibid., 154, 157. See also Pöggeler, “Neue Wege mit Heidegger?” 47.
34. With respect to Chillida, see Heidegger's collaboration with Chillida for the publication of a bibliophile edition of Die Kunst und der Raum (1969). See also the fine article by Miguel de Beistegui, “Assemblages: In Praise of Chillida,” 317–37.
35. The letter can be found in Phänomenologische Forschung 18 (1986): 170–83. This passage can be found on p. 179.
36. So one reads Heidegger commenting in 1961 that “to be sure, art today is more and more used up in the culture industry as if it were something of utility. At the same time the question remains whether or not it is precisely art today that is able to be defined in the confrontation with the technical world and to take up and lead to what is most proper to modern technicity.” Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebenweges, 583.
37. Foucault, Dits et Écrits, vol. 1, 544.
38. Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational, 2.
39. The texts are as follows: the so-called “Notizen zu Klee” (still unpublished), comprising seventeen pages of notes and sketches; the protocol of a seminar in 1958 (five pages); the text of a conversation (the day after that seminar in 1958), which was reproduced in Japanese by someone present and then translated into German (four pages); the opening paragraph of “Time and Being” (1962); and a few scattered letters to friends. There are also some anecdotal remarks that others have discussed in publications (Petzet is the most useful resource in this case).
40. De Beistegui puts this distinction that defines the classical modern well when he says that “twentieth century abstraction dared to do what classical abstraction—including cubism—had never dared or dreamed to do, that is, produce works that presupposed the prior negation or destruction of the world as a whole.” “Assemblages,” 317. See also Maldiney, Art et Existence, 101.
41. Klee, “Schöpferische Konfession,” 28. This sentence was heavily underlined by Heidegger in his copy of Klee's writings and would be cited by Merleau-Ponty in “Eye and Mind.”
42. See Seubold, “Heidegger's nachgelassene Klee-Notizen,” 7–8. The words that Heidegger chooses to note are interesting and give a sense of what he was finding in that text: Deformation im Bildnerischen, Wort und Name, Dimension, Schöpfung, Aussehen, Gebilde, Farbe, Namen, Bilder, Vorbild, Urbild. The written texts were not an immediately accepted resource by Heidegger. Initially, he considered Klee's self-understanding inadequate and “too neo-Kantian.” However, his repeated readings, coupled with his repeated viewings of Klee's paintings, changed Heidegger's attitude toward these texts.
43. Klee, Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, vol. 10, 49.
44. One thinks here as well of a painter like Cy Twombly, for whom words can constitute the entire image. On this, see my “Like a Fire That Consumes All before It…” in Lyrical and Ethical Subjects. In the case of Twombly, one finds paintings that are nothing but “words,” but these painted words, by virtue both of their appearance in a painting and of the isolation of those words, fade into being simply images. Of course, such fading of the word into the image is, in the end, never fully possible since the relation of the word to the image will always have a peculiar undecidability about it.
45. Klee, Diaries, entry #389, 122.
46. Ibid., 52–53.
47. Lessing, Laocoön, 99.
48. Here a text that deserves serious attention should be noted: Merleau-Ponty's Notes de cours 1959–1961 is remarkable for its efforts to unfold the nature of painting in terms of movement. See especially pp. 55–64, which are largely devoted to a discussion of Klee. Also notable in this volume are the pages devoted to Heidegger (94–148).
49. See, among other places, Nietzsche, GT, 49.
50. For an extended discussion of music in Klee's work, see Düchting, Paul Klee.
51. Klee, Diaries, entry #1081, July 17, 1917.
52. Klee, Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, 51–53 (emphasis added). Interestingly, Hegel would use similar language when he speaks of the beauty of art as “spirit which is born and reborn.” Hegel, Vorlesung über die Ästhetik, 14.
53. Klee, Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, 64–67.
54. Klee, Diaries, 1920, emphasis added. This passage also served as Klee's epigraph on his tombstone.
55. Merleau-Ponty, L'Oeil et Esprit, 74. Shortly after making this comment, Merleau-Ponty ascribed to Klee “the ontological formula of painting” by citing what he says is a line from Klee's diaries that ultimately became the epithet on his tombstone: “Je suis insaissable dans l'immanence.” This is a mistranslation of Klee's remark. The line from Klee is rather “Diesseits bin ich unfassbar.” See L'Oeil et Esprit, 87.
56. Klee, Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, 65. Cézanne would make a similar claim when he says, “To paint nature does not mean to copy objects, but to realize impressions of color.” Cited in Seubold, Kunst als Ereignis, 119.
57. Klee, Paul Klee in Jena 1924: Der Vortrag, 69 (emphasis added).
58. The word “borne” here is tragen, which is the same word used to describe how a woman “carries” or “bears” a baby during pregnancy. On this, see Derrida's “Le dialogue ininterrompu: Entre deux infinis, le poeme,” in Beliers, and my “On Interrupted Conversations,” in Gadamer: Sprache ist Gespräch, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011).
59. The “exhibition” was not a public exhibition. Rather, Ernst Beyeler displayed eighty-eight works by Klee that he had recently purchased from David Thompson, an American industrialist. Many of those works were promised to a museum in Düsseldorf, and Beyeler wanted to display the entire Thompson collection to friends, artists, critics, and others before it was split up. Heidegger was invited through his connection with Heinrich Petzet. The paintings were displayed in various rooms in a house in Basel that served as a temporary museum. On his first visit there, Heidegger was able to spend much of his time alone with the paintings. See Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 155–57.
60. The sources of the Heidegger quotes in this paragraph and in many of the following are found in note 1 of the introduction.
61. Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter, 63.
62. Merleau-Ponty, L'Oeil et Esprit, 69.
63. This is the point from which the difference between painting and photography can be thought. Rodin's comment—“it is the painter who tells the truth, while the photograph deceives; for in reality time never stops cold”—points to the seriousness of this difference. Cited in Merleau-Ponty, L'Oeil et Esprit, 80.
64. As an example of this, see fragment 8 of Empedocles that begins “physis oudenos estin apanton thneton [of all mortal things none has birth, nor any end in accursed death]…” since here physis clearly needs to be thought as “birth.” Furthermore, to speak of physis as something independent, that is as a realm exhibiting its own “nature,” emerges as a way of speaking only at the end of the fifth century BCE. When this happens, it marks a revolution in the Greek understanding of this word. Prior to that, physis only referred to the physis of something; it was never spoken of as an independent realm of beings. Even the sole possible example of this—Heraclitus's fragment 123, “physis kryptesthi philei”–is no real exception since, even if it is authentic, we should remember that here too physis needs to be thought as “birth” and so we should translate this passage as Gadamer once did, “die eigentliche Anfänge eines Wesens bleiben im verborgen.” Here too we can recognize that it is an event rather than an independent realm of objects that is being named.
65. When Aristotle identifies physis with genesis–in opposition to techne–he is leaning back into the earlier identification of physis with birth. It is that which comes to be “of itself,” and the character of this coming to be is what most defines physis. Plato too will draw upon this more archaic sense of physis as well. So, for instance, on the last day of his life, Socrates speaks about “peri physeos historia” (Phaedo, 96a) and immediately clarifies this as “the reason something comes to be [genesis].” Aristotle, however, marks the beginning of the move away from this original sense of physis. In finding genesis at the heart of what is spoken of by physis and—at the same time—in failing to differentiate genesis from other ways of becoming, Aristotle marks both the summit of a long tradition of Greek thought, insofar as he thinks physis out of genesis, and he equally marks the moment of its cessation, insofar as he fails to preserve the singular character of the genesis that is physis.
66. On this movement, which Heidegger describes as the movement of truth, see my “Die Wahrheit Sagen.”
67. In 1933, the year the National Socialists took power in Germany, Klee was dismissed from his teaching post by the Nazis and would leave Germany forever in December of that same year.
68. Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 156.
69. Although symptoms of his disease first appeared in 1933, it was in the summer of 1935 that he was diagnosed with progressive scleroderma. He would die five years later at the age of sixty.
70. Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 156.
71. Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebenweges, 552. All further citations from this seminar are from this volume, pp. 552–54. Both Heidegger and Hisamatsu reviewed, edited, and approved of the final version of this text.
72. Ibid., 556.
73. Ibid., 554.
74. Klee too was aware of this non-Western sensibility in his work. So, we read in his diary (entry of January 22, 1917) that “I am becoming increasingly Chinese.” Klee, Tagebücher 1898–1918, #1054.
75. Ibid., 778.
76. Plato, Phaedrus, 275D–E. On this, see my “Putting Oneself in Words…” Gadamer's reply to my essay is included and goes right to the point at hand.
77. Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebenweges, 552.
78. Ibid., 777.
79. Just as one should not demand immediate intelligibility of a poem such as Trakl's “Siebengesang des Todes” or an excerpt from Werner Heisenberg's writings on theoretical physics, so should one recognize that energy and time are needed to even begin to understand a painting. See Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens, 1.
80. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, 107.
81. Heidegger, Besinnung, 35. The great depth of Heidegger's despair about his times could be seen in a passage a few pages later where, after criticizing the “cultural machine” of the times, he says, “Thus there arises a historical situation in which beyng [Seyn] is not even any longer something like the ephemeral passing of the flat shadow of an empty dream…Beyng—a fading echo of an empty word—and the question of beyng? Not even an error—only an indifference” (40).
82. Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebenweges, 583.
83. Heidegger, “Technik und Kunst—Gestell,” ix.
84. Heidegger, Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, 90–91 (Zusatz).
85. Heidegger, Holzwege, 67.
86. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, 145.
87. Heidegger, “Technik und Kunst—Gestell,” xiii.
88. Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen, 139. Heidegger had already made a similar comment in 1935 in Einführung in die Metaphysik, 13: “That which is essentially the same in physis and techne can be clarified only by means of a special consideration.” On this, see my “Economies of Production,” 145–57, 265–68.
1. Merleau-Ponty, L'Oeil et Esprit, 15.
2. One event planned for 1960 sadly never resulted in a publication. Heidegger held a seminar titled “Word and Image,” which is described in the following way and as centered upon the following texts: “a passage from Augustine's Confessions (X, 7 and 8), Heraclitus’ Fragment 112, the parable of the ‘Glockenspielständer’ from Chuangtzu, Klee's On Modern Art, and two lines from Heidegger's own work. The Augustine text concerns the sensible and the force of memory. The Heraclitus fragment reads: ‘Thinking well (sophronein) is the greatest excellence and wisdom: to act and speak what is true, perceiving things according to their nature (physis).’” The Chuang-tzu parable reads:
Khing, the woodworker, carved a bell-stand, and when it was completed, all who saw it were astonished as if it were the work of spirits. The Marquis of Lu went to see it, and asked by what art he had succeeded in producing it. “Your subject is but a mechanic,” was the reply; “what art should I be possessed of? Nevertheless, there is one thing (which I will mention). When your servant had undertaken to make the bell-stand, I did not venture to waste any of my power, and felt it necessary to fast in order to compose my mind. After fasting for three days, I did not presume to think of any congratulation, reward, rank, or emolument (which I might obtain by the execution of my task); after fasting five days, I did not presume to think of the condemnation or commendation (which it would produce), or of the skill or want of skill (which it might display). At the end of the seven days, I had forgotten all about myself;—my four limbs and my whole person. By this time the thought of your Grace's court (for which I was to make the thing) had passed away; everything that could divert my mind from exclusive devotion to the exercise of my skill had disappeared. Then I went into the forest, and looked at the natural forms of the trees. When I saw one of a perfect form, then the figure of the bell-stand rose up to my view, and I applied my hand to the work. Had I not met with such a tree, I must have abandoned the object; but my Heaven-given faculty and the Heaven-given qualities of the wood were concentrated on it. So it was that my spirit was thus engaged in the production of the bell-stand.”
Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 64–66. Klee's On Modern Art was the text of a lecture Klee gave in 1924 to open an exhibition of modern art in Jena. The lines from Heidegger read: “Nur Gebild wahrt Gesicht / Doch Gesicht ruht im Gedicht.” For a discussion of this seminar, see Petzet, Auf einen Stern zugehen, 64–66.
3. On the role of Klee in this period and these philosophers, see Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational. Benjamin's celebrated essay “On the Concept of History,” in which he discusses Klee's painting Angelus Novus, was first published in 1950 but not widely available until 1968. Likewise, Merleau-Ponty's lecture courses from 1959 to 1961, which were not published until 1996 (Notes de Cours 1959–1961), contain some significant discussions of Klee (and of Heidegger). This tradition of pursuing the possibilities of aesthetic experience and the work of art as opening up new possibilities for philosophy would continue in Derrida and Nancy, and, more recently, in the work of Sallis and Figal.
4. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, 159–61. This opposition between art and science echoes Heidegger's remark in Ursprung des Kunstwerkes that truth happens in many ways, among them art, the founding of a state, essential sacrifice, and questioning, but that “science is not an original manner in which truth happens.” Holzwege, 50.
5. Against this metaphysical dependence upon the logic of the concept, one should hear the provocation of titles such as Deleuze's The Logic of Sensation and Merleau-Ponty's Primacy of Perception.
6. This is why Watson is right when he argues—even if only with reference to Klee—that the list of those who engage the work of art during this time reads like the list of twentieth-century continental philosophy's leading figures (see Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational, 2).
7. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 141.
8. In doing this, Gadamer is following two key claims that Heidegger makes in Being and Time, first, that cognition is a “founded mode” of being in and knowing the world (§13) and, second, that understanding is an original manner in which the world is disclosed and articulated (§31).
9. It is, I believe, a fair criticism to say that Heidegger's prejudices against Kant's third Critique, prejudices that tend to be traceable to the dominance of neo-Kantian interpretations of that text during Heidegger's early years, led Heidegger to overlook the genuinely original contribution of Kant to the questions regarding the work of art that were driving Heidegger. It is no accident that one of the very first essays Gadamer would ever write that dealt with Heidegger was Gadamer's introduction to Heidegger's Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, a text considering themes that connect Gadamer's own work to his teacher's but—at the same time—allow Gadamer to establish the originality of hermeneutic theory vis-a-vis Heidegger. One of the most significant wedges that helps Gadamer take up this critical distance to Heidegger is found in the seriousness with which Gadamer, unlike Heidegger, regards Kant's third Critique. Curiously, Heidegger's two most intimate successors, who began as his students in Marburg—Arendt and Gadamer—both find in Kant's third Critique a decisive work of true originality. For both of them, the Critique of Judgment is among the most central works for their own projects.
10. Gadamer, GW vol. 1, 492. The original conception of Truth and Method did not include what we now know as part 1, which has as its centerpiece the analysis of Kant's third Critique and which has as its task the “Freilegung der Wahrheitsfrage an der Erfahrung der Kunst.” In later years, the importance of the artwork for Gadamer would be so obvious and so clearly central that one is surprised to realize that in Truth and Method the analysis of the work of art is a later addition. The necessity of the treatment of art is, in the largest measure, owing to the way in which Gadamer understands Kant to be assuming the mantle of the humanistic tradition in the Kritik der Urteilskraft. One would not have strong reasons to explain Gadamer's interest in Kant outside of the problematic of hermeneutics as it is developed in Truth and Method. Prior to Truth and Method, the sole article by Gadamer that takes up Kant's aesthetics is an eight-page article in 1939 (“Zu Kants Begündung der Ästhetik und dem Sinn der Kunst”). It is then in the context of the problematic of Truth and Method that Gadamer's interest in Kant is to be understood.
11. For a more detailed discussion of the role of Kant in Gadamer's Truth and Method, see my “Kant und die Subjektivierung der Aesthetik,” 29–42.
12. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, Wahrheit und Methode, 14.
13. Gadamer, while sympathetic to Heidegger's critique of humanism in “Letter on Humanism,” is also not so quick to subsume the project of humanism to metaphysics and the oblivion of being. Once they are published, one will see how this is the case in letters from Gadamer to Heidegger on January 27, 1948, and February 15, 1966.
14. For one of the most interesting and insightful works on this essential tie binding philosophy and the concept, see Deleuze, Qu'est-ce que laphilosophie? 27–37. On this resistance to the concept characterizing aesthetic experience, see my “On the Idiom of Truth.”
15. Kant, KU, AK, 188.
16. Ibid., 61.
17. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 47.
18. Ibid., 49.
19. Ibid., 103.
20. Ibid., 87.
21. Ibid., 107.
22. Gadamer stresses the link between the notion of the text and its roots in words such as textare, tissue, textile, texture. The notion of a “transformation” into Gebilde also hints at words such as Gewebe. For an interesting discussion of Greek senses of these notions, see Scheid and Svenbro, The Craft of Zeus.
23. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 139.
24. Gadamer notes that there is something of a paradox defining traditional discussions of painting: because painting is regarded as the most representational of the forms of art, it is taken as best illustrating the very being of art such that “we make every artwork into a painting” (GW, vol. 1, 140), and yet, precisely because the image is thought in advance from out of its being as a copy, this privileged position of painting in the conception of art is what discredits the very idea of art at all.
25. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 136.
26. Ibid., 139.
27. Ibid., 140.
28. Ibid.
29. The word Zuwachs means “increase” or “augmentation.” The idiom Zuwachs bekommen means to have an addition to the family. Such an addition may be described quantitatively—one more member of the family arrives with the birth of the child—but such a description cannot account for the fundamental transformation and the essential “newness” announced by such an “addition.”
30. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 142. This is a point quite similar to Benjamin's remarks about the “cult of the movie star” in which the “image” of the actor takes over the real being of the actor such that one expects the actor to be “like” his or her image or like the characters portrayed. See “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 492.
31. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 120.
32. Ibid., 146.
33. Ibid., 148.
34. Ibid., 150.
35. Adorno too speaks of the “more” that defines the work of art: “artworks become artworks in the production of this more; they produce their own transcendence.” Ästhetische Theorie, 122.
36. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 151–52.
37. Ibid., 152.
38. For some ways in which the discussion of the symbol here is problematic, see my “Über Sprache und Freiheit aus Hermeneutischer Sichtpunkt,” 59–73, and “On the Incalculable,” Research in Phenomenology 34 (2004): 31–45. See also Todorov, Theories of the Symbol.
39. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 152. But the memento is unlike the painting in that it can lose this characteristic when the past it memorializes ceases to have meaning for the person who has the memento. In other words, the pointing, the transcendence, that characterizes the memento is contingent upon something other than itself.
40. Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 154 (emphasis added).
41. Ibid., 155.
42. On this, one should see the essays by John Sallis (“The Hermeneutics of the Artwork”) and me (“Aesthetics and Subjectivity”) in Figal, Klassiker Auslegen.
43. Gadamer, GW vol. 8, 25. Other essays written at this time (1967) open with the same concern about the “gap” between traditional and modern forms of art. So, for instance, “Image and Gesture” begins: “There is today a great mistrust of all traditional forms of expression.” Ibid., 323.
44. Ibid., 28; RB, 96.
45. Gadamer, “Bildkunst und Wortkunst,” 94.
46. Kant, KU, AK 314 (see also AK 342).
47. Arendt, The Life of the Mind: Thinking, 193.
48. The question of nature haunts the question of the beautiful in the work of art, and indeed no discussion of art can ever even approach a satisfaction unless the experience of nature is broached. And yet, it is the absence of this experience of nature that Heidegger finds foreclosed in the age of the Gestell and of Machenschaft. With a similar concern but expressed in a different way, Adorno's comment is right: “Since Schelling whose aesthetics was called a philosophy of art, the interest of aesthetics has centered upon the work of art. For theory since then, the beauty of nature, which was the occasion for the most penetrating determinations of the Critique of Judgment, is hardly ever thematized.” Ästhetische Theorie, 97.
49. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 30–31; RB, 98.
50. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 32; RB, 99. See also Truth and Method, where Gadamer links this recognition described in the notion of mimesis with the Platonic notion of “anamnesis.” Gadamer, GW, vol. 1, 119–20.
51. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 32; RB, 99–100.
52. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 32; RB, 100.
53. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 33; RB, 101.
54. On the Greek conception of number and the nature of number notation in the Greek world, see my “On Counting, Stars, and Music,” 179–91. Of course, Plato's Timaeus is the Greek text in which all of these notions are given their most compressed and intense expression. On this, see especially Sallis, Chorology.
55. Kant, Reflexionen, 1820A.
56. This, I believe, is the sense of the ethical to which Heidegger referred when he wrote that “if, according to the fundamental meaning of the word ethos, we should now say that the name ethics reflects upon the abode of human being, then that thinking which thinks the truth of being as the original element of human being…is intrinsically original ethics.” Wegmarken, 353.
57. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 322; RB, 91.
58. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 35–36; RB, 103.
59. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 36; RB, 103–104.
60. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 323; RB, 74.
61. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 327–28; RB, 79.
62. For an insightful discussion of Deixis and Bildlichkeit, see Boehm, Wie Bilder Sinn Erzeugen. Especially interesting is his discussion of the move from bodily gesture to the gestural meaning of the image; see the chapter “Die Hintergründigkeit des Zeigens,” 19–33.
63. On this, see Kommerell, “Die Sprache und das unaussprechliche,” in Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung, 243–317.
64. Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1060–61.
65. Thus, Benjamin speaks of an animal gesture in Kafka that “combines the utmost mystery with the utmost simplicity.” Indeed, Benjamin finds that Kafka's “entire work presents a codex of gestures which in no way have a native symbolic meaning for their author.” Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, book 2, 418.
66. On this, and for a comprehensive anthropological study of the human meaning of gesture and of the role of gesture in the formation of language, see Leroi-Gourhan, Le Geste et la parole.
67. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 327–28; RB, 79.
68. Heidegger, Was Heiβt Denken? 51. See also Heidegger, Parmenides, 188ff., as well as my “Von der Wahrheit Sprechen.” See also Derrida's discussion of these passages in Heidegger in “Geschlecht II,” in Psyché, 415ff.
69. Kommerell, Dichterische Welterfahrung, 153.
70. Agamben, Potentialities, 77–78.
71. Ibid., 78.
72. The notion of an eikos logos is central to Plato's Timaeus. On this, see Sallis, Chorology, esp. 55. It is worth noting here that the German word for gesture is Gebärde, which is the same word that is used to describe the language of the deaf, the language that English designates as “sign” language. It seems that the word “gesture” is much more appropriate to describe the nature of such a language. It is also important to understand how such Gebärdesprache is in some sense “more original” than spoken language. It is a typical misunderstanding of sign language to regard it as somehow derivative of a spoken language. Such a misunderstanding would, for instance, assume that the sign language of someone who lived in an English-speaking country would be “based upon” and derivative of spoken English. Such is not the case. In fact, a signer of American sign language could not communicate very well at all with a British signer. But the same American signer could rather easily speak with a French signer since those sign systems have largely the same roots. Sign language is independent of spoken languages. On this, see my “On the Dark Side of the Moon,” in Lyrical and Ethical Subjects. It should also be noted that in the Critique of Judgment, Kant suggests that gesture is at the basis of all speech in the fullest sense. Importantly for my interests here, Kant argues as well that the “bildende Kunst [the art of the image]” needs to be counted as an instance of “gesture in speech.” See KU, AK 320 and AK 324.
73. There is a fascinating image of such coercion in a dream that Stefan George recounts in an entry titled “Der Redende Kopf.” In it he tells of bringing a friend to see a plaster mask of a face that hangs on his wall and that he boasts he can compel to speak. When he does this by forcefully moving its lips, it remains silent but bites his finger. See George, Werke, 490–91.
74. The most insightful analysis of this temporal character of painting—in particular the relation of time, appearance, light, and sensibility—is found in Sallis, Shades—Of Painting at the Limit. Of special interest is Sallis's discussion of Monet's Wheatstack paintings. A further elaboration of these issues, as well as a productive discussion of the place of music here, is found in Sallis's Transfigurements.
75. For a discussion of this kinship of language and script, see my “Words on Paper,” in Lyrical and Ethical Subjects.
76. Kommerell, Essays, Notizen, Poetische Fragmente, 84. Cited in Agamben, Potentialities, 84.
77. In 1968, Gadamer wrote a lengthy commentary, Werner Scholz, to accompany a volume of Scholz's paintings. That commentary takes the notion of gesture as the key to Gadamer's readings of Scholz's paintings (on this see esp. 17ff.). It is worth noting that Gadamer was a close friend of Max Kommerell's and that he had a great respect and admiration for Kommerell (indeed, Gadamer edited some of Kommerell's work after Kommerell's death). Kommerell died quite young (he was forty-two) and so never quite had the impact that his work deserved. Gadamer's sense of gesture is clearly close to, and in some sense indebted to, Kommerell's use of this notion.
78. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 329; RB, 80–81.
79. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 328; RB, 80.
80. Kommerell, Geist und Buchstabe der Dichtung, 316.
81. Gadamer, GW, vol. 8, 329–30; RB, 81–82.
82. The most comprehensive conception of the work of art as bound to sense is found in the work of Sallis; in this regard, see especially his Transfigurements. Sallis's work has long been exploring the sense of art in terms of its rootedness in sense. In doing this, he has forged a sense of the project of philosophy that has let itself be fundamentally challenged by the achievement of the work of art that is not understood within the horizon of a metaphysical distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. While Sallis's intention points in different directions, it seems to me to be driven by the same concerns that I have tried to articulate in this book.
83. Heidegger, Was Heiβt Denken? 188. On this question of body, hand, and gesture—all investigated with an eye to the question of measure—see Kleinberg-Levin's Gestures of an Ethical Life, esp. 204–74. Kleinberg-Levin's project in this very interesting and quite illuminating work dovetails closely with my own concerns here, especially my concern with the ethopoietic character of the work of art. Kleinberg-Levin has demonstrated with much care and precision the role of the body in gesture and the relation of gesture to the question of an ethical measure. This project comes together in what he calls “physiognomies of ethical life” (xxxiii-xliii). Kleinberg-Levin draws upon Merleau-Ponty quite productively to this end.
84. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” Primacy of Perception, 162.
85. One finds this in Benjamin, who at one point had a serious interest in graphology, and, with a somewhat different intent, but no less sense of the importance of the role of the hand in language found in handwriting, in Heidegger; see for instance his Parmenides, 116ff.
86. Hölderlin, “Friedensfeier,” in Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 364. Although different in substantial ways, Hölderlin's use of the word Gesang–to refer to what we soon become in this conversation—is not very remote from what I have been referring to as gesture.
87. Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” Primacy of Perception, 167.
88. Gadamer, Werner Scholz, 17.
89. It is not by chance that Lessing chooses this image as the focus of his discussion of the difference between words and images in his Laocoön, since something of the essential character of the image is presented in Homer's account of this shield. When Thetis delivers the shield, the Myrmidons cannot bear to look upon it. Only Achilles can, and when he does, his “anger came ever harder upon him…and he filled his heart by looking at it” (book 18, lines 13–15). His anger grows because in this shield he sees the enormity of what Patroklos has lost and what Achilles too will soon have to lose: all of life. It is right to suggest that, in the midst of great slaughter, the shield “furnishes the Iliad with its most memorable images of peace.” See Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles, 157.
1. Kommerell, Jean Paul, 418.
2. Agamben, Potentialities, 83–85.
3. Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, 279–80.
4. Heidegger suggests that the most peculiar feature of the distress of our time is that we are not aware of our own distress, that we are numbed.
5. On this, see Horowitz, Sustaining Loss. The question of the relation of modernity to the past, a question sharpened by the notion of the avant-garde, is also key here. On this, see Ziarek, The Force of Art, and Andrew Benjamin, Style and Time.
6. On this, see (among the many works devoted to this topic) Föti, Epochal Discordance; Krell, The Tragic Absolute; and my On Germans and Other Greeks, chap. 4.
7. This line from Hölderlin's poem “Patmos” is cited by Heidegger to make precisely this point at the end of his essay “Die Frage nach der Technik.”
8. Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebenweges, 671. Significantly, this interview ends with Heidegger questioning the “place” of art in the world today and then with his comment that “I do not see any indications that modern art points a way for us” (682).
9. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, book 1, 201.
10. Letter to his brother on January 1, 1799, Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 726.
11. On this, see Bernstein, The Fate of Art; and Ross, Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy. For a discussion of this as it defines the themes of twentieth-century continental philosophy and as those discussions weave through attention to the paintings and writings of Klee, see Watson, Crescent Moon over the Rational.
12. Another point, equally important, that is reclaimed by maintaining this tie to Kant concerns the place of nature in the intersecting problematics of art, aesthetic experience, and judgment more generally. In the end, resurrecting the question of nature is itself an element of how the ethical issues that emerge here can be pursued. On this, see my “On the Significance of Nature for the Question of Ethics,” 62–77.
13. On this, see my “Hermeneutics and Original Ethics,” in The Difficulties of Ethical Life, 35–47, 214–16.
14. Heraclitus, fragment 119. One should also consider the original sense as well expressed by Homer's use of the word “ethos” as the dwelling place of an animal. See Iliad, book 6, 506–11. See also Scott's illuminating discussion of this passage in his The Question of Ethics, 143–45. See also Chamberlain, “From ‘Haunts’ to ‘Character.’”
15. This point coincides in important ways with Foucault's discussions of the care of the self as well as Hadot's discussions of spiritual exercises in Philosophy as a Way of Life. In a similar manner, Zen practices, especially those practices that concern writing and gesture, belong in this discussion. The decision not to turn to these other, closely related approaches should not be taken as an indication that such engagements are not important. Quite the contrary, they are quite necessary and also quite complex, and it is precisely because of this that they reach beyond the scope of this book and of my own competence.
16. Hegel, Werke, vol. 1, 235.
17. While these words are not appropriately called translations of the word ethopoiein, they do qualify as quite legitimate ways of resaying or interpreting the sense of that word.
18. Rilke, “Archaischer Torso Apollos,” Werke, vol. 1, 557.
19. Kant, KU, AK, 299–300.