Aesthetic Theory

Edited by Dieter Mersch,

Sylvia Sasse, and Sandro Zanetti

Translated by Brian Alkire

DIAPHANES
THINK ART Series of the Institute for Critical Theory (ith)—
Zurich University of the Arts and the Centre for Arts and
Cultural Theory (ZKK)—University of Zurich.

© DIAPHANES, Zurich 2019

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-3-0358-0146-0

Cover image: Yuri Albert, I like art very much (2017),

artist’s collection, © Yuri Albert

Layout: 2edit, Zurich

Printed in Germany

www.diaphanes.com
 Contents

7 Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

Introduction

21 Frauke Berndt
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

37 Boris Previšić
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

53 Elisabeth Bronfen
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

69 Sandro Zanetti
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

87 Klaus Müller-Wille
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

109 Sylvia Sasse

The Theoretical Act

125 Dorota Sajewska

Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

143 Fabienne Liptay

Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

163 Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

177 Barbara Naumann

Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt
199 Rahel Villinger
Aesthetic Judgment: Alexander Kluge

219 Dieter Mersch

Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theōria

237 Benno Wirz

Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought

253 Sandra Frimmel

Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

267 List of illustrations

269 About the authors
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

Introduction

Emphasizing art as an instrument of analysis

(rather than of expression, statement, etc.).
Susan Sontag

There is no theory which is not in some way related to percep-

tion—to αἴσθησις (aísthēsis)—and in this sense to the aesthetic,
to the sensually perceptible. Conversely, perceptions without
theoretical conceptualization, and thus without a relationship
to theory—θεωρία (theōria)—dissipate into indeterminacy.
Theories are unable to form without perspectives or ideas con-
cerning what they are about (just as sensual perception would
remain diffuse without the power of distinction and judgment).
They would also—in the way they are formulated as arguments
or, more generally, as figurations which make use of texts and
discourses—be imperceptible and incommunicable if they did
not refer back to perception-oriented media, through which
they first become readable and comprehensible. Readability
in a double sense—of the senses and of comprehensibility—is
coupled to basal structures in the realm of language where the
sensual aspect of language becomes just as noticeable as its
ability to function conceptually. The merely seen or heard, in
contrast, would, without theory, remain blurred or indistinct,
consisting solely of scattered stimuli and affections.
It was an insight of the Enlightenment, specifically
­Immanuel Kant and his dictum that perception without con-
cepts is blind and thought without perception empty, that
both sides are reliant upon each other and belong together.1

1 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

7
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

The Critique of Pure Reason famously begins with a “transcen-

dental aesthetics.” The assumption that theory is originally
­aesthetic, and that the aesthetic is genuinely theoretical—an
idea advanced in this book—leads us, however, to further ter-
rain. For the aesthetic character of theory includes more than
just the simple fact that readings are always sensually mediated,
and the theoretical character of the aesthetic is not exhausted—
with a view to Kant—in the “synthesis” of apprehension and
apperception or the schematism of the “imagination.” It also
includes the form of representation,2 medial and figural fram-
ing, the work on language, articulation, and embodiment, the
various techniques and modalities of articulation as well as the
formation of terms and concepts.3 The theoretical character of
the aesthetic can in turn be seen, for example, in the various
methods of dream interpretation, its poetics of “condensation”
and “displacement,”4 and even more fundamentally in the spe-
cific procedures of attention, of sensitivity to detail, to nuance.
These forms of attention and relation at times seem similar to

In German: Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781), ed. Wil-
helm Weischedel (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1956), p. 97f.
2 The necessary coupling of theoretical outlines to processes of rep-
resentation (and their underlying economies of affect) makes clear why
it is possible to find a theory “attractive.” See Joachim Küpper et al.,
eds., The Beauty of Theory. Zur Ästhetik und Affektökonomie von Theo-
rien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013). The fact that “theory” could be seen
as chic or even as a lifestyle (and even still can) is based on the implicit
need for representation of “theory,” i.e. every form of theory. For more
on the historical boom of “theory” as an article of faith and lifestyle
in France and Germany of the 1960s to 1980s, see Philipp Felsch, Der
lange Sommer der Theorie. Geschichte einer Revolte 1960–1990 (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 2015). On the relationship between design and thought see
Daniel Hornuff, Denken designen. Zur Inszenierung der Theorie (Pader-
born: Wilhelm Fink, 2014).
3 For more on the creation of terms/concepts, compare Deleuze
and Guattari’s model of the “conceptual person” as well as of “per-
cept, affect, and concept” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is
Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994).
4 See Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (published in
German in 1900), trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1955),
pp. 296–299, 322–326.

8
Introduction

or even interchangeable with artistic praxis and allow the idea

of a “particular nature,” as Alexander Baumgarten called it, of
“aesthetic knowledge” to appear plausible.5
A further consideration relates to the question of the
“effect” or “efficacy” of theories. For there is, as rhetoric in
antiquity was already aware, no text or persuasive speech, and
thus no theoretical statement, without its artificial construc-
tion, without the voluntary or involuntary use of stylistic means,
without a τέχνη (technē) involving and simultaneously under-
mining the sphere of the senses. This “technique” or “artistry”
is not limited, as it is in Plato’s critique of sophistry, to turning
the weaker item into a stronger one. Rather, this technique is
what engenders the argument in the first place, allowing it to
develop its efficacy. At the same time, affectivity, as expressed in
processes of perception, contains a specific form of associativ-
ity and thought, one which Theodor W. Adorno referred to with
the aporetic expression “synthesis without judgment.”6
Moreover, theories, their propositionality,7 and the arrange-
ment or dynamic of their continually enacted arguments largely
exist on the foundation of a peculiar topography, which pro-
vides motifs and perspectives through which a thing or ­matter

5 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik, ed. and trans. ­Dagmar

Mirbach, Vol. 2, Part 1 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007), §§ 30, 38;
Baumgarten, “Metaphysica,” in Texte zur Grundlegung der Ästhetik,
ed. and trans. Hans Rudolf Schweizer (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1983),
§ 511.
6 Theodor W. Adorno, “Erpresste Versöhnung” (1958), in Gesam-
melte Schriften in 20 Bänden, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Gretel Adorno, Susan
Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003),
pp. 251–280, here p. 270.
7 See in contrast Gottfried Gabriel, “Literarische Form und nicht-
propositionale Erkenntnis in der Philosophie,” in Gottfried Gabriel
and Christiane Schildknecht, eds., Literarische Formen der Philosophie
(Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1990), pp. 1–25. On the specific relationship
between philosophy and literature, see Christiane Schildknecht and
Dieter Teichert, eds., Philosophie in Literatur (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp / Insel, 1996); Richard Faber and Barbara Naumann, eds.,
Literarische Philosophie – philosophische Literatur (Würzburg: Königs­
hausen & Neumann, 1999).

9
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

is observed. We could also speak here of models, always implicit

or concealed, which have been discussed under various names
throughout the history of philosophy and which stubbornly
undermine the naïve illusions of an “analysis” calibrated on
the basis of logic or rationality. Walter Benjamin speaks in this
sense of “thought-images,” Hans Blumenberg of “absolute met-
aphors” which can no longer be broken down into more funda-
mental elements, Martin Heidegger of language as a “showing”
(Zeige) containing its own performance. These “models” further
thought just as much as they thwart it by questioning the man-
ageability of discursive means and demanding transparency
and lucidity in their own rhetorical composition.
Due to these limitations, the philosophical formulation of
theories has become systematically confused and disoriented
while, in the same breath, relentlessly attempting to generate
new words, formulations, and genres in order to understand and
define what needs to be thought. We could speak in this context
of an “endlessly” aesthetic character to the texts which contin-
ues to develop while repeatedly producing points of connec-
tion, as the situational constellations which end up in the texts
are constantly changing. At the same time, we cannot avoid the
fact that the aesthetic is an unavoidable feature of everything
theoretical. That is also true where theories or their “models”
are at their most formal: consider computer programs, always
written and thus formulated, and their algorithms which, like
mathematics, are genuinely aesthetic in their being designed
concisely and simply, or elegantly presented, or based on sym-
metries and other aesthetic principles.
Something similar can be said of perception and in par-
ticular of art. We should not forget that aesthetics, as a philo-
sophical discipline, was, from the very beginning, ambiguous,
positioning itself between a theory of perception in the sense
of αἴσθησις (aísthēsis) and a theory of art or the arts. The latter
was first and foremost a poetics and later an authorship-based
doctrine of creative activity, and even later an institutionalized
practice which was largely self-referential in permanently ques-

10
Introduction

tioning and expanding upon its own self-concept. The former,

in contrast, was never limited to the sphere of art.
Philosophical aesthetics took on the task of both theorizing
the various positions as well as justifying their theorizability. It
was also characterized by a typical “backwardness” or reserve.
For the act of theorizing continuously refers back to percep-
tions and remains oriented towards them, with the perceived
and perceivable being respectively confirmed, corrected, or
discarded. Even the “exact” sciences are only able to “verify” or
“falsify” their data to the extent that a respective individual data
point—through whatever technological or medial means—has
been made visible or audible.
In theories of perception—whether of Aristotle, Baumgar-
ten, Hegel, Husserl, Wittgenstein, or Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to
name only a few—a differentiation is repeatedly made between
the “that” and the “what” of perception, its object (or always-
precarious “content”) and the act of perception itself. It became
clear that the latter remains to a certain extent singular (as I
cannot perceive the perception of another) and cannot be ques-
tioned without falling into a contradiction or instability with
respect to our relationship towards the world.
This in no way means that theories are sufficiently or
exhaustively explained by their relationship to the aesthetic—
just as αἴσθησις (aísthēsis) is not exhausted in the forms of syn-
thesis, whether of imaginatio, memoria, or other forms of con-
centration. The claim is simply that theories cannot dispense
with the relationships which condition their aesthetics, and
that, specifically, they are defined—in their claims, their justi-
fication, and their relevance (if any)—by the way in which they
are unable to dispense with these relationships. Conversely, the
arts are also much more than simply a praxis of θεωρία (theōria)
or, more recently, of “research,” as they maintain their own
relationships to knowledge and in doing so always also raise
the question of what art is and what characterizes arts as arts.
In the case of theories, we need to take into account their
indisputable connection not only to rational justifications and

11
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

methods but also to the public institutions which define their

exoteric pathos, their emphasis on ceaseless publication and
review. With respect to the arts, it is the structures of exhibition
and curation, their marketability and economic value, as well
as their participatory engagement, which appear important and
push artistic practices in the direction of the ethical or social.
Nonetheless, one of the major intentions of the following essays
is to show that the aesthetic nature of theory and the theoretical
nature of aesthetics are in a certain way conditiones sine quibus
non in the sphere of philosophical aesthetics just as much as in
literary and art criticism.
This double meaning, an implicitly chiastic constellation,
is already latent in the title: Aesthetic Theory, which was inten-
tionally kept simple and austere in order to leave open various
directions of inquiry, the abundance and surplus, so to speak,
of perspectives. For if the aesthetic is prima vista merely a the-
matic object of inquiry in “aesthetic theories”—i.e. aesthetics
as a phenomenon and discipline—, then it proves to be criti-
cal for our task that its theorization can hardly be brought to
light otherwise than through an aesthetically-qualified mode
of involvement, work, and recapitulation, as well as the pre-
sentation of material and medium, or ways of writing as scene
and process. These in turn relate directly to one’s own acts, the
grammatological textures of putting something into writing,
the means of doing this, its “models” and “figurations”—in
order to simultaneously intervene in them.
Martin Heidegger spoke in this context of an “outline”
(Aufriss, implying a “rift” or “rupture” in German) through which
“we try to speak about speech qua speech,”8 where the expres-
sion “outline” is itself reminiscent of aesthetic procedures
originating in architectural methods of drafting and sketching.

8 Martin Heidegger, “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Lan-

guage, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 112. In
German: Martin Heidegger, “Der Weg zur Sprache,” in Unterwegs zur
Sprache (Pfullingen: Neske, 1975), pp. 239–268, here p. 241f.

12
Introduction

And Adorno did not think of the outline of his A ­ esthetic Theory
as a simple theory concerned with aesthetic phenomena or art
specifically as its subject; rather, he was always acutely aware of
the aesthetic implications and relationships at play in his own
formulation of a theory which uninterruptedly co-composes,
distorts, and warps the work or “takes a turn” at the moment
it begins to develop its power of persuasion. In his much-dis-
cussed interview in Der Spiegel on May 5, 1969, Adorno con-
fessed: “I am a theoretical person who feels that theoretical
thinking is extraordinarily close to its artistic intentions.”9
It thus makes sense that the title of Adorno’s posthumously
published Aesthetic Theory, which we are freely borrowing less
as a citation than as a program, conceives of theory as some-
thing aesthetic and theoretical work as an intrinsically aes-
thetic project—and not as a theory about aesthetics. Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory should be considered a thoroughly composed
work which at every moment refers to the media and instru-
ments of its own composition and thus remains mindful of
what makes it possible in the first place.10 It is the correlate of
the subject it concerns: art itself, to the extent that its theory

9 “‘Keine Angst vor dem Elfenbeinturm’. Spiegelgespräch mit dem

Frankfurter Sozialphilosophen Theodor W. Adorno,” Der Spiegel 19
(1969): pp. 204–209, here p. 204. (Translated by Brian Alkire.)
10 We remain in urgent need of a historical-critical edition of ­Adorno’s
Aesthetic Theory—with images of the handwritten manuscript and its
corrections: not just the documented “aesthetic” work but what is on
the paper itself. See Martin Endres, Claus Zittel and Axel Pichler, “‘Noch
offen’. Prolegomena zu einer Textkritischen Edition der Ästhetischen
Theorie Adornos,” editio 27 (2013): pp. 173–204. Rüdiger Bubner’s criti-
cism misses the mark here in the idea of a “becoming aesthetic” of the-
ory in Adorno. See Rüdiger Bubner, “Kann Theorie ästhetisch werden?
Zum Hauptmotiv der Philosophie Adornos,” in Burkhardt Lindner and
W. Martin Lüdke, eds., Materialien zur ästhetischen ­Theorie Theodor
W. Adornos Konstruktion der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1980), pp. 108–137, here p. 133. For the question is not how much a the-
ory performs an “aestheticization” of itself (and for Bubner, “aesthetici-
zation” is something purely negative: silence about its own foundations,
thetics instead of argument, etc.), but to what extent and how a theory
(including Bubner’s) is in a relationship to its own aesthetics.

13
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

and thoughts themselves proceed artistically. For this reason, it

does not conceal its origins in that which is its goal. Philosophy
not only requires the “friendship” of art, as Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph Schelling noted:11 it also participates in art, in the aes-
thetic: it must be composed, i.e. written in an aesthetic way, in
order to articulate itself.
But this aesthetic qualification of theory is only one dimen-
sion of Aesthetic Theory and its immanent chiasm, as something
similar is true of theoretically-reflected objects, procedures,
or events, which are not only taken up and commented on by
theory but are themselves also “theories” in the sense of θεῶμαι
(theōmai), of astonishing presentation or appearance, specifi-
cally to the extent that art reveals itself as θεωρία (theōria). In this
way, in fact, the task and difficulty of “aesthetic theory” doubles.
It does more than just theorize something aesthetic while itself
implying an aestheticization of theory: the correlates which are
its subject, aesthetic phenomena, reveal themselves to be theo-
ries, which in turn present themselves in the garb of aesthetic
practices, in this way coming before our eyes or ears.
Without this kind of genuinely “theoretical” understanding
of art, we would not be able to judge the epistemological poten-
tial of works like Kasimir Malevič’s Suprematist white or black
squares, or Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass, or Stéphane Mallar-
mé’s Coup de dés. These projects called into question not only the
understandings of art prevalent at the time of their composition
and the connected normative ideas of a corresponding “aesthet-
ics.” They also demonstrate how thinking about art requires an
altered mode of perception, or even how art enters into a “dis-
course” with itself, taking part in the conversation about art.
Suprematism, to take up the example of Malevič, was not
formulated as a “theory” exterior to the image but was rather

11 See Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Philosophie der Kunst

(Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974), pp. 122–131.
[In English: The Philosophy of Art, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 96–103.]

14
Introduction

evident in the work, e.g. in the Square of 1915, which only

later became the emblematic Black Square, developing a non-
representational and non-figurative philosophy of the image.
With this, Malevič made a contribution not only to art but to
aesthetics, as a theory of the iconic which broke with the tradi-
tional function and conception of the image as representation,
and the traditional gaze as “seeing-as.” Duchamp’s Large Glass
(1915–1923) not only referred back to a theory of perception;
it developed one which involved its observers while simultane-
ously leading them away from the sphere of the senses to the
level of the concept. The “image object” (Husserl) and the image
as object, i.e. inside and outside, blend together with the result
that we are no longer dealing with a representation but with an
installation which generates its own reality. Mallarmé’s Coup de
dés likewise referred not merely to a possible theory of reading,
starting with the material, sensually-perceptible distribution of
words on the double-facing pages of a book, but also to printing
design as an integral component of the work of theory, which
begins in perception in the act of reading without stopping and
remaining there.
So from both directions—aesthetic theory as text and dis-
course on the one hand and aesthetic praxis as θεωρέω (theōreō),
as insight or ways of making visible on the other—a connection
exists to the original meaning of θεωρία (theōria), which con-
ceives of theory as a form of seeing, as “intellectual intuition”
(intellektuelle Anschauung) or simply as perspective or point of
view. This also means that theory should itself be defined as a
form of praxis: a praxis of theory formation or theorizing. Or as
Goethe trenchantly said: “Every act of seeing leads to consid-
eration, consideration to reflection, reflection to combination,
and thus it may be said that in every attentive look on nature we
already theorize.”12

12 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles

Lock Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 1970), p. xl.

15
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

Peter Szondi in turn held that theorization of this kind can

crystallize into an “immanent theory” in an artistic—literary—
work itself: “I do not at all consider the theoretical examination
of a concrete literary work inappropriate and I believe in an
immanent theory which is always more pointed than the work
itself.”13 That an “immanent theory” of this kind was “more
pointed” than the “work” for Szondi indicates that he conceived
of the theoretical dimension of art, here of literature specifi-
cally, as transgressive: it is the thorn which can and even should
cause one to begin thinking, and not only within the confines
of academic scholarship. Stated another way: for Szondi, the
assumed immanence of theory in the work of art proves not to
be conclusive or closed but rather something decidedly open to
interpretation, something generally dialogical.14
In the 1950s, Mikhail Bakhtin suggested, with a view to his
own “aesthetic activity,” that literature is always also the artis-
tic perception or recognition of language. He was referring to a
tradition in Russian philosophy and literary theory which saw
the literary work not as an object of theory but as theory via aes-
thetic means. Bakhtin read both Rabelais and Dostoevsky, for
example, as authors who not only formulated their philosophy
but also represented it. Formalist theorists in turn, some of
whom were themselves artistically active (e.g. Viktor Shklovsky),
sought in the 1910s both to make form the main criterion of
analysis in the arts and to move form as a category to the center
of theory. It is no coincidence that the Formalists experimented
with various genres and approaches to writing.

13 Peter Szondi, Letter to Karl Kerényi, 7 August 1958, cited in Chris-

toph König and Andreas Isenschmid, Engführungen. Peter Szondi und
die Literatur (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft,
2004), p. 48 [translated from German].
14 On an immanent theory of this kind, see e.g. Luzius Keller, “Litera­
turtheorie und immanente Ästhetik im Werke Marcel Prousts,” in
Edgar Mass and Volker Roloff, eds., Marcel Proust. Lesen und Schreiben
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1983), pp. 153–169.

16
Introduction

The French poststructuralists also experimented with forms

of theory and theory construction. The Théorie d’ensemble,
published in 1968 by the Tel Quel group, formulated “theory”
as a program, beginning with the very title. In the foreword
to this work, the guiding “junction words” (mots-carrefours)
were defined: “Écriture, texte, inconscient, histoire, travail,
trace, production, scène.”15 These theoretical outlines gain fur-
ther development in the textual experiments—inconceivable
without Tel Quel—of thinkers like Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard,
and Foucault, e.g. in the latter's “idea reportages” (reportages
d'idées). Philipp Felsch also understands “theory” itself as a
genre where the point is not to aestheticize theory but to make
its own aesthetics visible.16
In all of these experiments and theoretical ventures the
question arises how the relationship between theory and
praxis, between texts and their subjects, between concepts and
their content can be thought and realized in detail. How, and
between which participants, does the dialogue, the engage-
ment, the critique take place? Art and literary criticism fun-
damentally answer these questions in the specific way they
approach their subjects, images, texts, documents, or events.
Every theory behaves, whether intentionally or not, in a spe-
cific—and aesthetically-defined—way towards its subject and
in doing so allows some aspect of this subject in itself to appear
(and also causes much to disappear).17 Under the paradigm of

15 Tel Quel, Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), p. 9.

16 Felsch, Der lange Sommer der Theorie. On the boom in aesthetic
theory, see Anselm Haverkamp, Latenzzeit. Wissen im Nachkrieg ­(Berlin:
Kadmos, 2004), p. 85f.
17 The connected issue of the use and point of theory is discussed
in Mieke Bal and Inge E. Boer, eds., The Point of Theory. Practices of
Cultural Analysis (London and New York: Continuum, 1994). The spe-
cific situation of literary theory, whose medium of articulation, repre-
sentation, and argumentation coincides with its subject’s medium, is
explored in Boris Previšić, ed., Die Literatur der Literaturtheorie. Sam-
mlung Variations 10 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010).

17
Dieter Mersch, Sylvia Sasse, Sandro Zanetti

“art as research,”18 advocated for in Zurich starting in the 1950s

by Serge Stauffer, later founder of the F+F school for experimen-
tal design,19 experiments were undertaken in the field of artis-
tic practice where art was intended to make a contribution to
research, and thus to theory. In theory, in turn, there has been
a major acceleration in recent decades of research working
with the concept of the “theoretical object,” foregrounding and
taking seriously the possibility that the “objects” to be investi-
gated—phenomena, events, and processes—are “theoretically
loaded.”20
But what does this mean for the praxis of research—and for
that of the arts? If we take seriously the philosophical claims of
the arts, their genuine praxis of θεωρέω (theōreō), then there is
no question of valuing theories performed in a scholarly context
higher than other forms of theory construction. This is also true
of the claims in the essays collected here. They feature reflec-
tions which highlight the aesthetic implications of discourses

18 See Jens Badura et al., eds., Künstlerische Forschung. Ein Handbuch

(Zurich: diaphanes, 2015); Elke Bippus, ed., Kunst des Forschens.
Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens (Zurich: diaphanes, 2009); Corina
Caduff, Fiona Siegenthaler and Tan Wälchli, eds., Art and Artistic
Research / Kunst und Künstlerische Forschung. Zürcher Jahrbuch der
Künste 6 (Zurich: Zürcher Hochshule der Künste / Scheidegger & Spiess,
2010); Sibylle Peters, Das Forschen aller. Artistic Research als Wissens-
produktion zwischen Kunst, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft (Bielefeld:
transcript, 2013).
19 See Serge Stauffer, Kunst als Forschung. Essays, Gespräche, Über-
setzungen, Studien (Zurich: Scheidegger & Speiss, 2013), pp. 53–55,
and Michael Hiltbrunner, “Fragen, Methoden, Prozesse, Archive,
Forschende Kunst bei Serge Stauffer und an der frühen F+F Schule,”
in Ute Holfelder et al., eds., Kunst und Ethnografie – zwischen Koopera-
tion und Ko-Produktion? Kulturwissenschaftliche Technikforschung 7
(Zurich: Chronos, 2018), pp. 113–126.
20 See Mieke Bal, “Narrative Inside Out: Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as
Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22, vol 2 (1999): pp. 103–126;
Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversation
with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (1998): pp. 3–17; Hubert Damisch,
The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, MA: The
M.I.T. Press, 1995), pp. 22–41; Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture.
Essais sur la représentation en Quattrocento (1989) (Paris: Éditions de
l'École des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2006), pp. 21–62.

18
Introduction

just as much as the epistemic implications of aesthetic events.

The interfolding of theory and aesthetics, however, always
evokes a limit or resistance, with the result that every formation
of a theory will always remain risky and keep a chronic distance
from itself. It is disputable, for example, whether such a project
is even possible in the framework of an academic publication
with its corresponding format requirements and traditions, or
even in the medium of a book or digital text—a fundamentally
fruitful skepticism which ensures continued discussion.
Each essay collected in this volume has a different answer
to the question of how it behaves towards its “aesthetic-theo-
retical counterpart,” its subject or theme. The contributions
emerged over the course of a multiyear cooperation between
theorists from various disciplines of the Centre for the Arts and
Cultural Theory at the University of Zurich and from the Zurich
University of the Arts. In the spirit of its guiding question, the
intention of this volume is not to provide conclusive answers
but to open up further perspectives.

19
Frauke Berndt

Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

Modern aesthetic theory emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries.

It began with the revaluation of the so-called inferior cognitive
faculties in the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Christian
Wolff and culminated in Alexander Baumgarten’s comprehen-
sive epistemology of aesthetics, which he himself referred to as
the “metaphysics of beauty,”1 a project planned to cover psychol-
ogy, semiotics, mediology (rhetoric and poetics), ontology, and
ethics.2 In the more than one thousand paragraphs of his Meta-
physica (1739) and Aesthetica (1750/58), Baumgarten expands
upon this epistemology, distinctive in being developed on the
basis of literary examples drawn from poetically dense passages
in lyric and epic classics. Operating dialogically, Baumgarten
draws connections to both rationalist philosophy and, above
all, to ancient mediology. It is precisely these retrospective refer-
ences to rhetoric and poetics, now generally read as 18th century
proto-aesthetic theories, which enable Baumgarten to conceive
of a school of aesthetic judgement. For he analyzes not only how
aesthetic experience, confronted with the world’s abundance of

1 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Kollegium über die Ästhetik, in

Bernhard Poppe, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten. Seine Bedeutung und
Stellung in der Leibniz-Wolffischen Philosophie und seine Beziehungen zu
Kant. Nebst Veröffentlichung einer bisher unbekannten Handschrift der
Ästhetik Baumgartens (Leipzig: R. Noske, 1907), § 1; all English transla-
tions from this edition by Anthony Mahler.
2 My remarks follow my engagement with Baumgarten’s aesthetic
epistemology, among other topics, in Poema/Gedicht. Die epistemische
Konfiguration der Literatur um 1750 (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter,
2011); “Die Kunst der Analogie. A.G. Baumgartens literarische Epis-
temologie,” in Andrea Allerkamp and Dagmar Mirbach, eds., Schönes
Denken. A. G. Baumgarten im Spannungsfeld zwischen Ästhetik, Logik
und Ethik (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2016), pp. 183–199; Facing Poetry.
Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Literary Theory (Berlin and Boston: De
Gruyter (forthcoming)); esp. ch. 4.2.2, “Formlessness.”

21
Frauke Berndt

properties, is structured, but also considers how the subject—

how every individual person—can develop their natural talents
in such a way that they become able to understand the world
well, better, or in the best possible way. For aesthetic experience
leads, according to Baumgarten, to a more complex knowledge
of the world than logical cognition. The upgrading of the aes-
thetic experience of art to an epistemologically-relevant sub-
ject of philosophy revolutionized epistemology. Suddenly, art
opened up an alternative path for human understanding of the
world—even, if we take Baumgarten seriously, the ideal path.
But how do we travel down this ideal path? Baumgarten initially
proceeds discursively (I), before this discursive work falls into
crisis (II), with the result that the philosopher places his trust in
the persuasive power of images (III). The first aesthetic theory of
the modern period becomes the first aesthetic theory precisely
through this shift from concept to image.

Concept

Aesthetic theory’s sore spot—i.e. the need to prove that aes-

thetics is a genuinely philosophical subject—is the question
concerning the truth of aesthetic judgements. To resolve this
problem, Baumgarten relies on the traditional philosophical
work of forming and defining concepts and terms. In his sys-
tem, he distinguishes among a series of truth concepts with
various metaphysical premises. In the course of doing so, he
invents a new concept adapted to aesthetic experience: that of
aesthetico-logical truth (veritas aestheticologica), which he uses
to solve the philosophical dilemma of how something which
is sensate in and for itself nevertheless turns out to be logical
enough to be capable of truth (Fig. 1).
The first opposition in this system relates to the distinc-
tion between object and subject. Baumgarten places objective
metaphysics (metaphysica obiectiva) in opposition to subjec-
tive metaphysics (metaphysica subiectiva). With the notion of

22
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

Fig. 1: Kollegium über die

Ästhetik, § 424

­ bjective truth, he is proceeding on ontological terrain, as it is

o
based on the principle of the “unity of the manifold.” In the con-
text of a genuinely modern aesthetic theory, this truth seems
to be no longer interesting; its “untimely” positioning in the
world is of disturbing consequence above all when we measure
the dawning modern age against the yardstick of Kantian aes-
thetics. In Baumgarten’s defense, we must of course remember
that even Hegel’s aesthetics fully accounts for the object, thus
establishing aesthetic theory (again) in the ambiguity between
subject and object—like Baumgarten. Likewise familiar is
Baumgarten’s contrasting definition of subjective truth, which
he conceives of as logical truth in a broader sense and thus also
refers to as intellectual truth (veritas mentalis) or the truth of
influence, correspondence, or conformity (veritas afficientiae,
correspondentiae et conformitatis). He summarizes this distinc-
tion in the Aesthetica in the following way: “Metaphysical truth
could be called objective truth; the representation of objectively
true things in a given soul, subjective truth.”3
Baumgarten deals with one problem by positioning logi-
cal truth (veritas logica) and aesthetic truth (veritas aesthetica)

3 Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Ästhetik, ed. and trans. Dagmar

Mirbach, Vol. 2 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007), § 424; all English trans-
lations from this edition by Maya Maskarinec and Alexandre Roberts.
“Posset metaphysica veritas obiectiva, obiective verorum repraesenta-
tio in data anima subiectiva dici veritas.”

23
Frauke Berndt

on the side of subjective truth. While logical truth is firmly

anchored in rational epistemology, aesthetic truth is something
both brand new and philosophically unnerving. Baumgarten
refers to it as real or material truth (veritas realis, materialis).
One must be conscious here of the fact that these terms are logi-
cal contradictions (contradictiones in adiecto), even paradoxes.
For how could something be truth which is not ideal but mate-
rial? “Aesthetico-logical” is thus the neologism, or more pre-
cisely the magic word which Baumgarten hopes will save him
from paradox. He situates this aesthetico-logical truth on the
side of subjective truth, between logical and aesthetic truth,
where the composite is assigned the task of reconciling reason
and the senses. For aesthetico-logical truth “somehow” has log-
ical elements which may be brought into discursive expression.
But it also, moreover, possesses aesthetic, i.e. real or material,
elements which are completely non-discursive. Because—argu-
ing semiologically—the sheer materiality of the sign has a sub-
stantial effect on its meaning, aesthetic truth is both inferior
to logical truth (because it is non-discursive) and superior to
it (because more complex). Above all, however, aesthetic truth
is emphatically independent, and perhaps even autonomous.
With his analysis of aesthetic experience, Baumgarten is steer-
ing towards the vanishing point of this kind of aesthetic auton-
omy in a Kantian sense.
This both/and may be easily explained with reference to the
plastic arts: the discursive element of, for example, a painting
from Vincent van Gogh’s sunflower series, would be the fact
that it is a painting of sunflowers whose truth is guaranteed by
the botanical term of the common sunflower (helianthus ann-
uus); whereas the non-discursive element would be the reality
or materiality of the sunflower painting, e.g. the texture of the
canvas, the color formulas, the contours and color choices,
the brushstrokes—i.e. the uniqueness of each of the twelve
individual sunflowers painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1888.
Baumgarten’s reference media are, however, neither paint-
ings nor—as was common at the time—ancient statues, as for

24
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

example in Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s antiquarian writ-

ings or in Johann Gottfried Herder’s paradigmatic treatise on
the Plastic Arts in 1778. Instead, Baumgarten’s epistemology
of the aesthetic is based on literary texts, thus simultaneously
inventing modern literary theory. This reference medium is
obvious in the sense that logical and aesthetic phenomena can
be relatively easily separated from each other in literary texts.
While semantics and grammar are responsible for logical truth,
all pre-predicative phenomena appearing in the non-discursive
passages of literary texts reference aesthetic truth. Phenomena
of this kind are the sensual dimension of literary language,
especially figures and tropes and their performativity, phonetic
and rhythmic elements in particular, as well as the graphics of
visual figures (expressiones figurarum; lusus (sic) literarum).
With this upgrading of aesthetic truth, which cannot be
undone even through the clever hedges of logical truth, a reval-
uation of the fundamental principles of philosophy is now on
the agenda of aesthetic theory. The only concepts accessible to
human reason are the universals (universalia) of methodologi-
cal scientific thought. Baumgarten, however, downgrades these
in favor of individuals (individua). The more individual some-
thing is, the more complex and thus truer it is also, with the
result that as we move from the concept of genus to the concept
of species and then to the individual, we also see an increase in
individual truth (veritas singularis): generic concepts are true,
specific concepts are truer, and individual concepts are truest
( prima veri, secunda verioris, tertia verissimi ). Baumgarten’s
critique of aesthetic judgement throws everything overboard
which was previously held to be sacred by philosophers, or at
least right and proper. Although the universal is abstracted
from the individual phenomena, this universal lacks that meta-
physical truth which characterizes the particular in its mate-
rial fullness.4 Seen from this perspective, the philosopher feels
compelled to mourn the entire project:

4 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 562.

25
Frauke Berndt

For my part, I believe that it is entirely apparent to philoso-

phers that whatever particular formal perfection in thought
and logical truth is present can only have been acquired
with the loss of much and great material perfection. For
what is abstraction if not a loss?5

Counter-concepts

Good, we might think, let’s leave it at that then: there is a new

truth, an aesthetic truth which is not fully released into the free
play of the imagination because, as a component of aesthetico-
logical truth, it remains firmly contained within the bounds
of philosophy. Baumgarten is, after all, not so modern that he
throws all logic overboard with the aesthetic. And so: better safe
than sorry, and this premodern philosopher is, of course, no
Kant. But why, after completing his traditional work of defini-
tion, is Baumgarten not satisfied? It is in fact precisely at this
point that he begins to flounder: where he places his aesthetic
theory on a truly conceptually-workable foundation, guarantee-
ing truth to aesthetic experience—a foundation which sustains
both the object and the subject of aesthetic experience.
In Baumgarten’s philosophical project, it is in the para-
graphs on truth, of all places, where the line between meta-lan-
guage and object-language blurs to the extent that concepts give
way to figures: similes, metaphors, metonymies, allegories, and
personifications. There, logical argumentation fades in impor-
tance behind associative, narrative, and dramatic connec-
tions. For with his “Wissenschaft von allem, was sinnlich ist,”6
Baumgarten in fact discovered something so new and unprec-

5 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 560: “Equidem arbitror philosophis aper-

tissimum esse iam posse, cum iactura multae magnaeque perfectionis
in cognitione et veritate logica materialis emendum fuisse, quicquid
ipsi perfectionis formalis inest praecipuae. Quid enim est abstractio,
si iactura non est?”
6 Baumgarten, Kollegium über die Ästhetik, § 1.

26
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

edented that he was no longer satisfied with the ideas he could

deduce philosophically. Discursive philosophical reasoning
seems to be insufficient for treating of something as exciting
as an aesthetic truth in all of its dimensions; such concepts are
simply not complex, and thus not aesthetic enough, to bear the
weight of the epistemology of the aesthetic. To put it another
way: aesthetic theory itself demands aesthetic procedures of
representation, although the middle period of the Enlighten-
ment, which Baumgarten represents, puts its faith not only in
the faculty of reason but also in the power of reason’s concepts,
through which the theory makes its claim to philosophical dig-
nity, i.e. in those very notions of truth which constitute the core
of the epistemology of aesthetics.
If, keeping this background in mind, we take a critical look
at the first paragraphs of the Aesthetica, we can see the dilemma
which Baumgarten has fallen into with the discursive founda-
tions of modern aesthetics. For the project of an aesthetic
theory in the middle of the 18th century is not based on discur-
sive concepts but on an elementary rhetorical and dialectical
procedure: aesthetics, Baumgarten explains, is an epistemo-
logical art analogous to reason (ars analogi rationis). Precisely
the truth-functional composite aesthetico-logical condenses
the double analogy of aesthetics and logic into a singular term
which is for exactly this reason characterized by a constitu-
tive ambiguity. Because to be honest, how can something be
simultaneously logical and aesthetic? This ambiguity compels
Baumgarten to illustrate the aesthetic on the basis of the logi-
cal. He thus departs from the philosophically virtuous path by
using an example. To characterize aesthetic truth, i.e. the aes-
thetic components of aesthetico-logical truth, he turns to the
aesthetic experience which one has in confronting uncut rock.
By presenting this example—because the aesthetic dimension
of truth cannot be philosophically conveyed in a concept—the
philosopher himself becomes a poet.
The use of an example disburdens philosophical discourse
of abstraction. Providing examples, one could argue, is a ­ ctually

27
Frauke Berndt

nothing unusual. Philosophers provide examples which, as

a rule, serve to illustrate concepts. Examples are epistemo-
logically relevant and ethically grounded in that moment,
of course, where there is nothing which something could be
an example of, nothing which subsequently illustrates qua
example because it was already a satisfying concept in the first
place. “Providing examples” is thus more than simply a means
of representation; it is an ethical practice through which the
philosopher positions himself against philosophy. Such prac-
tices, which demand nothing less than contributing to a “good
philosophy,” have an affinity with concepts in philosophical
discourse. In the case of Baumgarten, examples pave the way
to things which cannot be mastered by language. It is in this
sense that Theodore R. Schatzki defines practices as a “tem-
porally unfolding and spatially dispersed nexus of doings and
sayings.”7 Schatzki dissolves the tension between practice and
discourse resulting from this definition by emphasizing on
the one hand “the discursive component of social practices”8
while on the other hand maintaining: “In my opinion, the
difference between discursive and non-discursive actions is
fundamental.”9 These non-discursive actions lead directly to
the kinds of rhetorical practices which Michel Foucault exam-
ines in Self Writing. There they manifest themselves as “etho-
poietic function[s]” of discourse.10

7 Theodore R. Schatzki, Social Practices. A Wittgensteinian Approach

to Human Activity and the Social (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), p. 89.
8 Theodore Schatzki, “Sayings, texts and discursive formations,” in
The Nexus of Practices: Connections, Constellations, Practitioners, ed.
Allison Hui, Theodore Schatzki and Elizabeth Shove (Abingdon and
New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 126–140, here p. 126.
9 Ibid., p. 129.
10 Michel Foucault, “Self Writing,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth,
ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: The New Press,
1997), pp. 207–221, here p. 209.

28
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

In rhetoric, the figure of the sermocinatio (ethopoiia)

counts as one of the figures of thought (figurae sententarium),11
explained most notably by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his
treatise on the lives and works of Athenian orators using the
speeches of Lysias as an example. As an ethical figure, the etho-
poiia has the dual task of increasing the evidence for and cred-
ibility of the speech. This ethopoetic function can be isolated
in Baumgarten’s truth paragraphs in the rigidity with which
Baumgarten revalues the materiality of the sign, which is sud-
denly part of philosophical discussion along with the notion of
aesthetic truth. For never before had such a notion been part
of philosophy: an affirmation of “phenomenal individuality,”12
as Martin Seel succinctly puts it, which is the basis of aesthetic
experience. More radically formulated, this phenomenal indi-
viduality is accompanied by “the affirmation of the ‘that’ (quod)
of a settlement (Setzung),” as Dieter Mersch formulates it, i.e.
the affirmation of the “moment of ‘ex-sistence.’”13 Because this
revaluation is so unprecedented, Baumgarten’s concepts of
truth fail to cover precisely this aspect. His semiotic approach,
which emphasizes the material excess of the signifier in the aes-
thetic sign, ensuring that signifier and signified can never be in
agreement,14 is apparently lacking that persuasive power which
Baumgarten believes the Republic of Letters is owed.
It is, however, precisely this excess which simultaneously
makes an appearance, an excess which guarantees the perfection
(perfectio) of aesthetic judgement, referred to by ­Baumgarten
in line with metaphysical tradition as beauty (pulcritudo). To

11 Roland Spalinger reconstructed this figure of thought in “Etho-

poeia. Historische und theoretische Analyse einer rhetorischen Figur”
(Master’s thesis, University of Zurich, 2018).
12 Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. 26–29.
13 Dieter Mersch, “Paradoxien der Verkörperung. Zu einer negativen
Semiotik des Symbolischen,” in Frauke Berndt and Christoph Brecht,
eds., Aktualität des Symbols (Freiburg: Rombach, 2005), pp. 33–52, here
p. 35.
14 See Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 561.

29
Frauke Berndt

c­ ommunicate this aspect—as yet incommunicable in the con-

text of the 18th century—Baumgarten makes use of an example:
that of uncut rock, which he prefers to the geometrical form of
the sphere:

By similar reasoning, one cannot produce a marble globe

out of irregularly shaped marble, at least not without such
a loss of material that the price of roundness will be quite
high.15

This rock has no form which could be reduced to a geometrical

term. It proves, in its fragmentariness, to be more beautiful, and
thus more perfect, and thus truer than the sphere. Baumgarten
does not want to round off anything about the uncut stone, or
bring it into form, even if the sublimity of the phenomenon
which emerges exceeds the human power of comprehension.
Baumgarten is not the first to go on a philosophical search
for aesthetic truth. Already in Leibniz, there is an ontological
concept of individuality anchored in metaphysics. In contrast
to logical space, reality is characterized by chaos. No one thing
resembles another, and each is defined by its overwhelming
complexity. In his Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain
(1765), written between 1703 and 1705, Leibniz thus chooses
figurative comparison with uncut rock16—undoubtedly where
Baumgarten takes his comparison from—while making deci-
sive corrections. For Leibniz is concerned with the philosophi-
cal problem of so-called innate ideas:

15 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 560: “Pari ratione ex marmore irregularis

figurae non efficias globum marmoreum, nisi cum tanto saltim mate-
riae detrimento, quantum postulabit maius rotunditatis pretium.”
16 Johannes Hees analyzed this example in “Denken und Betrachten.
Zur Proto-Ästhetik bei Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz und Barthold Hin-
rich Brockes,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft
64/1 (2019), forthcoming.

30
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

I have also used the analogy of a veined block of marble, as

opposed to an entirely homogeneous block of marble, or to
a blank tablet—what the philosophers call a tabula rasa. For
if the soul were like such a blank tablet then truths would be
in us as the shape of Hercules is in a piece of marble when
the marble is entirely neutral as to whether it assumes this
shape or some other. However, if there were veins in the
block which marked out the shape of Hercules rather than
other shapes, then that block would be more determined to
that shape and Hercules would be innate in it, in a way, even
though labour would be required to expose the veins and to
polish them into clarity, removing everything that prevents
their being seen. This is how ideas and truths are innate in
us […].17

Baumgarten is interested in the uncut rock not for the problem

of the ideas that are innate to the marble block. He is also not
interested in the aesthetic relationship between rock and the
plastic arts which is suddenly under discussion with Leibniz’s
Hercules and which Winckelmann expands upon in his famous
text Beschreibung des Torso im Belvedere zu Rom (“Description
of the Belvedere Torso in Rome,” 1759). There, the autodiagetic
narrative instance—a rhetorical “figure of speech”—struggles
against the affirmation of phenomenal individuality, where it
brings the rock together with the ideal of the Greek demigod. In
an encyclopedic review of art and its history, the entire Hercu-
les archive is mobilized. What interests Baumgarten about the
rock is its material as such, or more provocatively expressed: he
is interested in the real—the material remains which constitute
the real truth.

17 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding,

ed. and trans. Peter Remnant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), pp. 52.

31
Frauke Berndt

Image

To convince us of the compellingness of this new concept,

Baumgarten moves from the concept to the image, announc-
ing a shift in the argumentation about aesthetico-logical truth.
Wherever the aesthetic judgement of the subject depends on
the material surplus of the aesthetic object, a certain uneasi-
ness emerges because the spheres of subject and object can no
longer be clearly separated from each other, as would normally
be required by philosophy. Baumgarten projects statements
about the aesthetic object into the process of aesthetic judge-
ment formation, as I ultimately intend to show. Or stated oth-
erwise: he can make no statements about aesthetic judgement
which are not molded by the aesthetic object. Or in yet other
words: there is no aesthetic theory without the aesthetic phe-
nomenon (phaenomenon).
So far, Baumgarten seems to have coupled aesthetic truth
to the aesthetic experience of the subject; now, though, he sud-
denly starts to speak of the aesthetic object again. From a philo-
sophical perspective, we thus have to accuse him of inconsis-
tent argument—at least in those places where we do not take
into consideration that Baumgarten is not operating logically
and conceptually but aesthetically and figuratively. This pro-
cedure can be described as simple projection: Baumgarten
shifts his statements concerning the systematic location of
the aesthetic object to the systematic location of the subject of
aesthetic experience—this is exactly how we can describe the
argumentational logic. A good two hundred years later, Jacques
Lacan will undertake a very similar projection of the object onto
the subject when defining the real in his epistemology of psy-
chic phenomena. This is the third position in the foundational
triad of Lacan’s epistemology, next to the imaginary and the
symbolic. Like the other two terms, the real refers to a psychic
structure, which, however, does not constitute a mere remain-
der in relation to the imaginary and the symbolic, even though
it is incomprehensible, unthinkable, impossible, and above

32
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

all ­unspeakable. Instead, Lacan defines the real as that which

resists both symbolization and the imagination and, as a resis-
tance to the symbolic, is a cut (coupure) in the symbolic.18
The shift from the object to the subject of aesthetic experi-
ence makes sense if we consider that the uncut rock is intended
to illustrate the aesthetic share of aesthetico-logical truth (veri-
tas aestheticologica). Baumgarten’s theory thus concerns the
incommensurable element of aesthetic experience, portrayed
as a confrontation with the real, i.e. affectively overwhelming,
although Baumgarten does not deploy the concept of the sub-
lime, as he will several years later when defining aesthetic the-
ory. The overburdening of the subject is one feature. The other
is the overburdening of discourse itself, which reveals itself to
be genuinely aesthetic to the degree that Baumgarten applies
the representational method from which he derives the struc-
ture of reality and the laws of aesthetic experience: the figures
of detailing—especially descriptio, distributio and enumeratio.
For this purpose, he takes up Leibniz’s idea of work on mate-
rial. With his tool, the sculptor works on the rock. But in con-
trast to Leibniz, the rock does not reveal a Hercules. Rather, the
passage culminates in an apotheosis of formlessness, not form.
Neither the statue nor a geometrical form like the sphere are
beautiful, but rather the rock itself:

[…] the aesthetic horizon especially delights, however, in

the singular, individual, and most determined things exhib-
iting the greatest material perfection of aestheticological
truth, in its forest, Chaos, and matter, § 129, out of which
it sculpts aesthetic truth into a form that is, if not perfect,
nevertheless beautiful, §§ 558, 14, such that while it is being
worked, as little materially perfected truth as possible may

18 See Frauke Berndt, “Das Reale,” in Frauke Berndt and Eckart

­Goebel, eds., Handbuch Literatur & Psychoanalyse (Berlin and Boston:
De Gruyter, 2017), p. 638.

33
Frauke Berndt

be lost and, for the sake of elegance, be rubbed away by its

own power, § 563.19

Baumgarten treats the phenomena philosophically—phenom-

ena being the singular and most strongly determinate objects
(exhibentes singulares et determinatissimi) to which the single
terms (individua) correspond. But Baumgarten immediately
replaces these terms with a series of metaphors which express
the affectively overwhelming element of aesthetic truth: for-
est, chaos, and material (silva, Chao et materia). With this, he
explicitly indicates that the problem of aesthetico-logical truth,
or the share of the aesthetic in this truth, can only be expressed
aesthetically—in images—because the problem does not itself
possess a conceptual form. Ralf Simon thus defines the struc-
tural denominator of the image series as “an increase in density
[…] without form, before form, as matrix of form”:20

Of the general aestheticological truths, the aesthetic ones

are those that can—and they are aesthetic only insofar as
they can—be represented without losing their beauty by
the analogue of reason in a sensate manner, §§ 440, 423,
either manifestly and explicitly or cryptically in the omitted
assertions of enthymemes or in examples in which, just as
in concrete things, these abstract things are detected.21

19 Baumgarten: Ästhetik, § 564: “praesertim autem perfectionem

materialem veritatis aestheticologicae maximam exhibentibus singu-
laribus, individuis, et determinatissimis fruitur horizon aestheticus,
sua silva, Chao et materia, § 129, ex quibus veritatem aestheticam ad
formam, nisi perfectam omnino, pulcram tamen, §§ 558, 14, ita exscul-
pat, ut inter elaborandum, quam fieri potest minimum veritatis mate-
rialiter perfectae pereat et elegantiae causa pollendo deteratur, § 563.”
20 Ralf Simon, Die Idee der Prosa. Zur Ästhetikgeschichte von Baum­
garten bis Hegel mit einem Schwerpunkt bei Jean Paul (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 2013), p. 52.
21 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 443: “Veritatum aestheticologicarum
generalium eae tantum aestheticae sunt, quae et quatenus analogo
rationis, salva venustate, sensitive repraesentari possunt, §§ 440, 423,
vel manifesto, et explicite, vel cryptice in omissis enthymematum

34
Rock Sample: Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten

Thus only the shift from logical and conceptual to aesthetic

and figurative language, the shift from philosophy to literature,
leads Baumgarten to aesthetic truth. The series of images thus
generates a “shift dynamic”: marmor, silva, Chao, materia. A
metonymy of this kind, which Wolfram Groddeck refers to as a
“border shift trope,”22 glides almost imperceptibly from the old
to the new. Its power lies in its ability to convince us of this new
thing—and specifically not in a logical but rather an aesthetic
way. While concepts in a Cartesian sense are logically self-evi-
dent, Baumgarten’s images are aesthetically evident. They are
the royal road upon which he makes his approach towards the
complex aesthetic truth. Just as with aesthetic truth itself, this
conviction also does not provide proof but rather affectively
overwhelms. This is why Suada, the Roman goddess of persua-
sion, is the patron23 of Baumgarten’s invention of aesthetic
theory. Despite the substantial effort he put into demonstrat-
ing the aesthetic share of aesthetico-logical truth, he ultimately
replaces aesthetic truth, boldly, consistently, and above all fully
anti-metaphysically: since then, modern aesthetic theory has
no longer been concerned with truth but rather simply with
probability or verisimilitude (verisimilitudo)—an aesthetic
“appearance of truth” in an emphatic sense. Referred to here is
the individual truth of the phenomenon, inseparable from the
double sense of appearances—both phenomenon and (mere)
seeming—and thus from a constitutive ambiguity of truth.

enunciationibus, vel in exemplis, in quibus, tanquam concretis, haec

abstracta deprehendantur.”
22 Wolfram Groddeck, Reden über Rhetorik. Zu einer Stilistik des
Lesens (revised edition) (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 2008), p. 234.
23 Baumgarten, Ästhetik, § 847.

35
Boris Previšiƈ

Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

Every historical and discursive contextualization of a theoreti-

cal object demands an act of objectification, a bringing together
of disparate elements into a comprehensible whole and thus
a distancing from the specific dynamics of the object—a
demand which holds true as well for Denis Diderot’s dialogue
D’Alembert’s Dream (Le Rêve de D’Alembert), the subject of this
essay. At the same time, it is precisely this contextualization
which has the potential to deprive the moment of its actuality.
The theoretical object provides us, as Hubert Damisch writes,
with a means not just of producing a theory but of reflecting
on what theory is and how it functions.1 The seductiveness of
theorizing, of seeing thought in its bodily, temporal, and dis-
cursive dimensions, makes clear how difficult it is to approach
the theoretical object without discursive or narrative distortion,
reducing it to a simple object.2 If theory, as “contemplation”
or “speculation,” emphasizes a visual method, the aesthetic,
as general sensual perception (αἴσθησις), points to the medial
­limitedness of theory.3

1 Yves-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Rosalind Krauss, “A Conversa-

tion with Hubert Damisch,” October 85 (1998): pp. 3–17, here p. 6.
2 It is in this sense that Mieke Bal criticizes the narrative overdose
with which contemporary works of art are often furnished, instead of
asking about what “matters.” See Mieke Bal, “Narrative Inside Out:
Louise Bourgeois’ Spider as Theoretical Object,” Oxford Art Journal 22,
vol 2 (1999): pp. 103–126, here p. 105. She is concerned here not only
with meaning but just as much with the non-transformable material-
ity of the theoretical object itself, a materiality which does not have an
arbitrary relationship to its medium.
3 See also Boris Previšić, “Akustische Paradigmen vor der Philologie:
Herder,” in Mario Grizelj, Oliver Jahraus and Tanja Prokić, eds., Vor der
Theorie. Immersion – Materialität –Intensität (Würzburg: ­Königshausen
& Neumann, 2014), pp. 337–350.

37
Boris Previšiƈ

D’Alembert’s Dream, by examining this dilemma of aes-

thetic theory in countless variations, is a reference text more
relevant today than ever. It was written in an epistemological
threshold time—similar to the one we find ourselves in today.
Diderot stands not in but before the modern epistēmē of tempo-
ralization and historicization, an era we have departed without
knowing where exactly we find ourselves today.4 Neither “grand
narratives” (Lyotard) nor even simply a general scientific atti-
tude based on objectivity and rationality are suitable instru-
ments for the analysis of our “broad present,” unable as they are
to escape their limitedness and immanence to the system.5 The
aesthetic, in contrast to theory, offers us a dimension which
resists objectification, as it concerns the question of the mate-
riality of perception and thought which Denis Diderot poses
to himself.6 As an advocate for an empirically-grounded sen-
sualism, he insists on a turning away from an Enlightenment
dominated by visual metaphors, favoring an acoustic and musi-
cal orientation and ultimately a differentiation of the various
senses. In his encyclopedia article on the color organ or “ocu-
lar harpsichord,” Diderot pointed to the problem that neither
the simultaneous nor the successive relationship between the
colors could be grasped.7 The visual thus does not, in this case,
offer an equivalent replacement for the acoustic. There is no
“aesthetic” per se. An acoustic aísthēsis does initially intensify
the paradox of aesthetic theory. At the same time, however, it

4 I am referring here to the shift of the epistēmē between the age

of classical representation and modern historicization around 1800.
See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human
­Sciences (published in French in 1966) (London and New York: Rout-
ledge, 2002).
5 See Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Unsere breite Gegenwart (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2010).
6 See Alexander Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Natura­
lismus,” in Denis Diderot, Philosophische Schriften, ed. Alexander
Becker, trans. Theodor Lücke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013),
pp. 205–269.
7 Denis Diderot, “Clavecin oculaire,” in Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire
raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, Vol. 3 (Paris, 1753), p. 511f.

38
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

offers us the ­possibility of a kind of meta-reflection on the theo-

retical object where perception and thought coincide as analo-
gous processes. In the course of this, the act of making analo-
gies is revealed as a kind of procedure. The epistemological
framework is reshaped in such a way that the entendement and
raisonnement are brought into a relationship which is simulta-
neously complementary and contradictory.8

Tempered: Analogy between instruments and people

The act of thinking in analogies accentuates the dilemma of

needing—in the words of the mathematician D’Alembert in
Diderot’s dialogue—to have at least two “things” present at
once: “it seems that at least two things are required.”9 The fig-
ure of Diderot offers this answer in the first dialogue: “I believe
so, and for that reason I have sometimes been led to compare
the fibers that make up our sense organs with sensitive, vibrat-
ing strings. The string vibrates and makes a sound for a long
time after it has been plucked.” (100) This simultaneity is the
point of departure for a polyphonic form of thought reliant on
temper and thus on the harmony of disparate elements which
only survive time through recording and the work of memory.
Only in this way does the formation of analogies as the basic
movement of thought become possible; only in this way do
philosophers form new ideas—“his ideas arise out of their
own necessary connections while he meditates in darkness
and in silence.” (100) This is an alternative to the Cartesian

8 See also Fumie Kawamura, Diderot et la chimie. Science, pensée et

écriture (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), p. 299.
9 All page numbers refer to “D’Alembert’s Dream,” in Denis Diderot,
Rameau’s Nephew and Other Works, trans. Jacques Barzun and Ralph
H. Bowen (Indianapolis, New York, and Kansas City: The Bobbs Merrill
Company, 1964), pp. 92–175. In French: Denis Diderot, Œuvres philo-
sophiques (Paris: Gallimard, 2010), pp. 343–402, here p. 350.

39
Boris Previšiƈ

­ editations, an alternative entangled in a peculiar visual and

m
acoustic absence—in “silence” and “darkness.”
Resonance is Diderot’s central figure of analogy and thought,
a figure which, by being conveyed purely through acoustic media,
apparently functions without direct physical contact, thus being
able to serve as the best model for an abstractly conceived form
of thought. The transmission of an acoustic signal at a certain
pitch through the air (e.g. on a tuned string) is a model of how a
new acoustic source can emerge without direct physical contact.
This also concerns a process used, for example, by the object art-
ist Hans Krüsi in collaboration with the recorder player Conrad
Steinmann, who attaches a dozen “beepers” to his jacket during
concerts, each of which reacts to a different tone.10 By also using
the phenomenon of resonance as a model of experience, recent
social philosophy is consciously referencing a “purely relational
quality” of acoustics and not “a purely bodily relationship to the
world,” which “is clearly based on a physical resonance effect
mediated by sound waves and the movement of air.”11
Starting from a model of perception, Diderot, as a char-
acter in his dialogue with D’Alembert, arrives at the model of
resonance to explain the fact that thoughts sometimes follow
each other incomprehensibly: “a newly awakened idea can
sometimes provoke a sympathetic response in a harmonic that

10 “For the entire length of the piece, an uninterrupted whirring and

flickering” “drowned out” the actual performance, as the recorder player
reports of the opening reception of the performance on the occasion of
Hans Krüsi’s 70th birthday in 1990 in the Lagerhaus of St. Gallen. Con-
rad Steinmann, Drei Flöten für Peter Bichsel: Vom Zauber der Bockflöte
(Zurich: Rüffer & Rub Sachbuchverlag, 2016), pp. 104–109, here p. 109.
11 Hartmut Rosa, Resonanz. Eine Soziologie der Weltbeziehung (Frank-
furt am Main: Suhrkamp / Insel, 2016), p. 162f. [In English: Resonance:
A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).] Rosa starts less from an acoustic
model of the Enlightenment and more from a “comprehensive ‘musi-
calization’ of the world since the 20th century as an unavoidable cor-
relate (because effective in effect) to an increasing reification of our
double-sided bodily relationship to the world.” Ibid., p. 164 [Translated
from German].

40
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

is almost inconceivably remote [à un intervalle incomprehen-

sible].” (100) Referencing Leibniz’s “flying thoughts” (fliegende
Gedanken, one of the few German expressions in the newly
published New Essays Concerning Human Understanding12),
D’Alembert’s conversation partner makes clear the degree to
which thought is dependent on outer and inner (sensuous)
impressions. This makes the simultaneity of disparate ele-
ments incomprehensible because the sequence of thoughts
does not exist in a rational relationship—“in a harmonic that is
almost inconceivably remote.” (100) Diderot thus falls back on
the intense aesthetic debate concerning musical attunement,
which questioned the rationality of pure pitch in the simple
numerical relationships of tones with one another (e.g. 1:2 for
octaves, 2:3 for the fifth) through the advent of tempering in the
17th century, with its slight deviation from these rational rela-
tionships. “Ratio” is given up in favor of modulation capability
and tonal character. Jean-Philippe Rameau argues in a ratio-
nalistic Cartesian fashion in his Traité de l’harmonie (1722),
explaining the tones of a chord as natural tones, or overtones
to a fundamental bass, and thus as a “principle.” However, he
becomes increasingly interested in the physiology of the corps
sonore (“sonorous body”). The physiological correspondence
between the musical instrument and the human being breaks
away from a matter-bound four humors theory and arrives at a
specifically resonative model, which Diderot developed in close
cooperation with Rameau in 1748.13

12 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “De la faculté de discerner les idées,”

in Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (Amsterdam and Leipzig:
Rud. Eric Raspe, 1765), Livre deuxième, chapitre xxi, §12. New Essays
Concerning Human Understanding, trans. Alfred Gideon Langley (Mac-
millan: London, 1896), pp. 181–182. Leibniz’s essays refer directly to
John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (published 1689)
and were written in 1703–1705 but not published until 61 years later,
posthumously.
13 See Thomas Christensen, “Diderot, Rameau and resonating
strings: new evidence of an early collaboration,” The Work of Music
Theory. Selected Essays (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 343–364.

41
Boris Previšiƈ

The divergence of tempered tuning from just tuning with

its rational relationships guarantees the sensuousness and
thus the relevance of acoustic analogies between body and
instrument. Or to speak with Adorno: “All relations that appear
natural, and are to this extent abstract invariables, undergo
necessary modifications before they can function as aesthetic
means; the modification of the natural overtone series by tem-
pered tuning is the most striking example of this.”14 The space
of naturalness thus shifts into the “capability of producing art,”
the question of which art form best corresponds to human per-
ception. The analogy between instrument and human being
serves simultaneously as a model for analogy itself—although
(or because) Diderot repeatedly emphasizes its hypothetical
character.15

Materialistic: Aísthēsis as metaform of thought

Diderot’s dialogue centers on D’Alembert’s dream, which is

framed by a first dialogue between D’Alembert and Diderot and
a third between Mlle de L’Espinasse and the doctor Bordeu. In
French, both the first and the third dialogue are captioned with
the word “Suite”: “La Suite d’un entretien entre M. D’Alembert
et M. Diderot” and “Suite de l’entretien précédent.” To the
extent that the caption of the third dialogue refers to the preced-
ing, the first remains ambivalent, as we do not know what was
previously discussed. Rhetorically, this is a beginning in media
res. The dialogue thus starts with a rejection of Descartes’ soul
organ in the pineal gland as put forth in Passions of the Soul

14 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor

(London, New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 292.
15 In his “Letter on the Deaf and Dumb,” especially, Diderot frames his
formation of analogies in the hypothetical mode. This is expressed most
succinctly in connection to the harmonic model of perception. Diderot
thus “never forgets the hypothetical character of his consideration.”
Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Naturalismus,” p. 212.

42
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

(1649). Nonetheless, D’Alembert raises doubts about the figure

Diderot’s materialistic thesis of a comprehensive sensibility
extending all the way to rocks: “For if you put some principle
of sensitivity or consciousness in its place, if you say that con-
sciousness is a universal and essential attribute of matter, then
you will have to admit that stones can think.” (92) In contrast to
the start of the third dialogue with its laborious introduction,
this beginning appears completely abrupt. But this highlights
that thinking about thought cannot be separated from the form
in which thinking is thought about. This leads to a homomor-
phy between the subject treated—the spatial interminability
of the subject (with analogies like a swarm of bees or a spider
web)—and the open literary form.16
Resonance reinforces metathought about its form with
thought itself. In the first dialogue, the interlocutor Diderot
assumes the active role of the Socratic questioner:17 he estab-
lishes the major topics and assumes the task of reasoning,
while D’Alembert simply confirms, doubts, questions, infers,
and evaluates. Diderot distinguishes in this way between
“actual” and “latent consciousness,” (93) the transition from
the latter to the former being achieved via food (94) or Locke’s
“tertiary quality,” for example when the sun causes wax to melt
via heat (102).These were of course familiar theses for an audi-
ence of the time. Decisive, however, is the extent to which both
conversation partners comment upon the course of the con-
versation itself and are themselves sometimes surprised, for
example when the more active conversation partner Diderot
objects: “But we are losing the thread of our original discus-
sion,” (97) whereupon the more passive D’Alembert admits to
a certain fatalism: “What of it? We can decide later whether we
want to go back and pick up the thread again [or not]” (“nous

16 Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Naturalismus,” pp. 243–

245.
17 Barbara de Negroni, “D’Alembert’s Dream. Notice,” in Diderot,
Œuvres philosophiques, pp. 1207–1223, here p. 1210.

43
Boris Previšiƈ

y reviendrons ou nous n’y reviendrons pas”). (98) In French,

Diderot uses the same self-reflexive syntactic structure in his
next thesis, “nos animaux d’aujourd’hui se reproduiront ou ne
se reproduiront pas”18 (“our plants or animals of today would
or would not reappear”). (98) These resonance phenomena are
located somewhere between self-reflexive dialogue and scien-
tific thesis, especially in the musical model of the “philosopher-
instrument” (101) with replies by D’Alembert like “I follow your
line of thought.” (101)19
The musical analogy can be extended: the “La Suite” of
the first dialogue’s French title, for example, in contrast to the
third, refers not only to the “preceding” dialogue but just as
much to the thought “sequence” within the dialogue, like the
progression of dance movements in a Baroque dance suite.
The formation of a series on the time axis intrinsically makes
the coherence of idea formation a subject of discussion while
simultaneously problematizing it. This is because succession
consistently undermines the tableau of classical representa-
tion.20 Diderot’s dialogues are modeled on Plato’s in that they
provide the individual characters with specific positions and

18 Ibid.
19 “J’entends” (literally “I hear”) in French. The ambiguity of “enten-
dre” in the sense of “hearing” and “understanding” might not be that
obvious here. But Diderot makes it explicit in the subtitle of his Lettre
sur les sourds et muets à l’usage de ceux qui entendent et qui parlent (“Let-
ter on the Deaf and Dumb, for the use of those who hear and speak”)
and also over the further course of this letter.
20 Foucault sees a “foreign” element here in the linguistic sign func-
tion as it was understood in the 18th century: “What distinguishes lan-
guage from all other signs and enables it to play a decisive role in rep-
resentation is, therefore, not so much that it is individual or collective,
natural or arbitrary, but that it analyses representation according to a
necessarily successive order: the sounds, in fact, can be articulated only
one by one; language cannot represent thought, instantly, in its total-
ity; it is bound to arrange it, part by part, in a linear order. Now, such
an order is foreign to representation.” Foucault, The Order of Things,
pp. 90–91. If we take Foucault at his word, the problem is not with the
general sign function but in the specific syntagmatic-acoustic element
of the phoneme (“les sons”), which can only be arranged successively.

44
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

ways of speaking corresponding to their professional and social

positions: Diderot as philosopher, D’Alembert as mathemati-
cian, Mlle de l’Espinasse as wife, and Bordeu as physician. Nev-
ertheless, Diderot does not leave his dialogues in the ancient
form of maieutic truth seeking: he is more interested in the for-
mation of arguments and analogies per se, in thinking itself.21
Diderot brings the progression of thoughts, the “suite,” into the
overall view of the tableau via certain resonance phenomena as
techniques of memory by turning the visual into the auditive:
succession is conceived of as interrelation, which in turn tem-
poralizes melody.
Referencing Diderot’s previous comment on the philoso-
pher listening to himself in silence, D’Alembert points out the
dilemma which Diderot wanted to avoid: that the philosopher
cannot be both instrument and listener at once, and is thus
reliant on some higher entity like the Cartesian res cogitans.
“But if you don’t watch out, you will end up saying that the phi-
losopher’s mind is an entity distinct from the stringed instru-
ment, a sort of musician that listens to the vibrating strings
and draws conclusions about their harmony or dissonance.”
(100) D’Alembert’s objection again highlights that listening to
the vibrating strings relates to a model of tuning which distin-
guishes between consonance and dissonance. It is admittedly
not clear whether a tempered tuning model is played off against
a model of pure tuning. But in this context the question does
not seem to be highly relevant. Instead, D’Alembert, in contrast
to Diderot, is thinking of a harmonic model where the strings
tone simultaneously. The “philosopher-instrument” manages
without memory, with Diderot countering: “The philosopher

21 Cassirer defines the critical and post-systematic Enlightenment of

the 18th century in self-reflection and self-observation: “[T]he thought
of this age is even more passionately impelled by that other ques-
tion of the nature and potentiality of thought itself.” The Philosophy
of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove
(­Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 4–5. [In German: Die
Philo­sophie der Aufklärung (1932) (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2007), p. 3.]

45
Boris Previšiƈ

instrument has sensations, so he is simultaneously the per-

former and the instrument. Because he is conscious, he has a
momentary awareness of the sound he produces; because he is
an animal, he remembers the sound. This organic faculty, by
linking together the sounds in his mind, both produces and
preserves the melody.” (101) The purely physical question of
the oscillation relations between the strings is differentiated by
Diderot the interlocutor: on the one hand, there is—on the part
of sensibility and thus the general perceptibility of aísthēsis—
the momentary consciousness of the present tone; on the other,
Diderot recalls the organic faculty of memory as an animal.
Characteristically, the tones in the “philosopher-instru-
ment” form themselves not into accord but into melody. This is,
in contrast to momentary accord, memorizable and repeatable,
in that our senses are struck like keys from within: “Our senses
are merely keys that are struck by the natural world around us,
keys that often strike themselves.” (101) The “philosopher-
instrument” receives its sensual impressions from both outside
and inside. A sensual impression cannot however be reduced
to a moment (“indivisible instant”) but instead endures and is
superimposed by a subsequent one: “Then a second impression
follows the first, arising similarly out of an external or internal
cause; then there occurs a second sensation. And these sensa-
tions all have tones—either natural or conventional sounds—
that serve to identify them.” (101) By means of the acoustic
model we can explain how self-reflection stands in a direct
relation to sensual perception and is dependent on temporal
delay and sequence. Voice articulates itself not only in time (in
the musical form of melody); polyphony thus implies both the
simultaneous sequential tuning of the tones (through “natural
tones” in rational relationships and “conventional,” i.e. tem-
pered, tunings) and temporal unfolding in the form of proten-
tion and retention of melody. Self-recursion is reliant on both
vertical accord and horizontal melody.

46
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

Eccentric: Text as polyphonic score

Self-recursion in D’Alembert’s Dream takes place on three levels:

thematic, commentative, and stylistic. One cannot summarize
the essential element of the treated themes and bring them to
a point. The actual connecting pieces of aesthetic theory are
not thetically integrated but rather outsourced and multiplied.
The connection only arises in a paradoxical countermovement
of interruption—which is true not only on a thematic level but
above all on the commentating and stylistic levels. It concerns
the interdependence between contiguity and continuity.22
Without the dialogue form chosen by Diderot, this interdepen-
dence would be unthinkable. The dialogue is not simply con-
tinued in the central second part under the title “D’Alembert’s
Dream.”23 Instead, the first half consists of a report in which
Mlle L’Espinasse has written down the dreams (“la ­rêvasserie”)
of a fevered D’Alembert and now reads them to Bordeu. These
dreams are obviously connected to the previous dialogue
between D’Alembert and Diderot, to the vibrating strings and
sensitive nerve fibers.24 But this thematic continuity is subject
to a formal contingency, as that which is being told must cover
the double medial break of the nocturnal writing scene and the
reading scene in the morning. The acoustic is turned into writ-
ing and then re-translated into as literal a reproduction as pos-
sible. The resonance model which was a subject of the first dia-
logue is implicitly taken up again. Mlle L’Espinasse thus begins
her reading by asking Doctor Bordeu to listen (“Écoutez…”). And
she concludes her first speech by ­questioning her ­interlocutor

22 The transfer from contiguity to continuity is also addressed in

Becker, “Diderot und das Experiment des Naturalismus,” p. 242.
23 With the repetition of the title of the overall text as the heading for
the middle part, resonance is projected onto the stylistic level, in that
the relationship between the whole and the part is transferred to the
time axis and repeated.
24 Diderot, “D’Alembert’s Dream,” p. 158.

47
Boris Previšiƈ

whether he has understood: “Doctor, can you make any sense

out of all that?” (110)
In the second dialogue, self-recursion is addressed via the
unity of the individual and the reflection point of self-percep-
tion—or as Doctor Bordeu puts it: “the various forms of sensi-
tivity, the formation of a conscious being, the unity of such a
being, the origins of animal life, its duration, and all the differ-
ent problems connected with this matter.” (120) This complex
and “serious” subject is avoided by referring to the mathemati-
cian’s dream, with Mlle de L’Espinasse saying: “As for myself,
I’d call that a nonsensical hodgepodge, something that may be
alright to dream about when you are asleep; but I can’t see why
a wide-awake person should bother his head about it, assuming
that he has any common sense.” (120) Both main protagonists of
the dialogue, Bordeu and Mlle de L’Espinasse, occupy two irrec-
oncilable positions with respect to the dreams: one affirmative,
one highly negative. Over the course of the dialogue, however,
the positions change, starting when Mlle de L’Espinasse uses
the example of the spider in its web, with the purpose of later
demonstrating that unity is the perceptive center of the spider,
in contrast to the swarm of bees.25 Characteristically, though,
she is initially unable to present her example, as this is the first
moment in this central dialogue when D’Alembert seems to
wake from his sleep and himself take part in the conversation
while still continuing to dream. She introduces her example by
mentioning the stylistic difference of her own thought: “Women
and poets seem to reason mostly by examples [comparaisons]”
(122) The use of examples or comparisons as a mode of thought
is a medium of style which Mlle de L’Espinasse contrasts with

25 “[E]ach thread of the sensitive network can be hurt or tickled at

any point along its entire length. Pleasure or pain arises at this point
or that, in one place or another, along one of the long “legs” of my spi-
der—I keep getting back to my spider. Well, the spider is the central
meeting place of all the ‘legs’ and these only transmit the pleasure or
pain to such and such a place, but without themselves feeling either
pleasure or pain.” Ibid., pp. 136–137.

48
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

the complex mode of expression of the “philosophers.” Instead

of speaking of a “fallacy of the ephemeral,” she references the
literary image of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, who, in his
Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (“Conversations on the Plu-
rality of Worlds,” 1686), speaks from the perspective of a rose for
whom the lifespan of a gardener seems to last an eternity. (120)
Hardly has Bordeu hinted that he can fully understand (and
even expand upon) Mlle de L’Espinasse’s analogy before she
continues with her reading—whereupon he suddenly becomes
uncertain and asks: “Is that you speaking or him?,” receiving as
an answer: “That’s what he said in his dream.” (110) The blend-
ing of voices and the difficulty of attributing them provoked by
the reading scene is characteristic of the second dialogue—if
we read it as a musical score in Roland Barthes’ sense, namely
as an acoustic realization of an ambiguous and polyphonous
textual space.26 It often remains unclear whether D’Alembert
is taking on the role of a mathematician or a philosopher in
the dream—particularly when he unites a dialogue within
his voice. If Diderot the author puts audacious theses in the
fevered mouth of the dreaming D’Alembert, he is not doing so
as a precautionary measure intended to prevent attribution of
them to him as an author, threatening political sanction and
disavowal. Instead, the dialogue is designed with resonance in
mind, demanding that contingency and continuity be thought
together. The playground of Diderot’s aesthetic theory is the
openness and transferability (also in the sense of “continuity”)
of text, score, subject, material, and life. The one cannot be
separated from the other because the aesthetic intersection is
sensual perception, “sensibilité.” Aesthetics is here situated in
its resonating performance.

26 “The area of the (readerly) text is comparable at every point to a

(classical) music score. The divisions of the syntagma (in its gradual
movement) correspond to the division of the sonic flow into measures
[…].” Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1974), pp. 28–29.

49
Boris Previšiƈ

Resonance as a double phenomenon of physical resonation

(as familiar from the resonant and/or sympathetic strings of the
lute) and melodic memory (“mémoire”), can thus offer a model
for the use of both “rational-natural” and “tempered-conven-
tional” interval relations simultaneously (in the sense of the
classical tableau and vertical harmonics) and in succession (in
the sense of an incipient modern genealogical epistemic order)
as meaningful thought processes. Two epistemai are thus active
at once. But the third and last dialogue, “Sequel to the Conver-
sation,” which figures solely as a short appendix, resolutely sets
aside the nature vs. culture dichotomy in Adorno’s sense above,
when D’Alembert and Mlle de L’Espinasse speak of self-gratifi-
cation without a natural purpose or the breeding of hybrid crea-
tures like the hare-hen. (166) And finally, the entire text ends
with an anti-colonial statement, when Bordeu demands that
human beings not be used for undignified slave labor: “And in
the colonies we would no longer have to reduce the natives to
the condition of beasts of burden.” (174)

A leap of thought: Theory as acoustic body

The second dialogue ends with the departure of Bordeu,

who has to keep his next doctor’s appointment. D’Alembert
attempts to make sure that he and Bordeu have understood
each other: “Doctor, do we really understand ourselves? Do we
really make ourselves understood?” (165) The answer to this
question is an acoustic one, aiming at the “sympathy” of harmo-
nious strings—but in their negation: “Nearly all conversations
are like reckonings […] [a]nd for the simple reason that no one
man is exactly like any other, we never understand one another
exactly.” (165) From the diversity of human beings emerges
an abundance of opinions. They do not, however, result in the
cacophony of nonbinding pluralism. The opposite is true: it is
precisely the incomprehensible interval, the leap into geneal-
ogy, which generates new connection points—like in the homo-

50
Theory as Resonance: Denis Diderot

phonic correspondence in French between “sots” (idiots) and

“sauts” (leaps):

MLLE DE L’ESPINASSE: Please, Doctor, just one more ques-

tion.
BORDEU: All right, let’s have it.
MLLE DE L’ESPINASSE: You remembers those leaps [sauts]
you were telling me about?
BORDEU: Yes.
MLLE DE L’ESPINASSE: Well, do you suppose that idiots
[sots] and men of genius may have leaps [sauts] of that sort
in their heredity? (166)

The continuity of temporal causal chains will eventually become

an epistemic cornerstone of the incipient modern order of
knowledge. It is the foundation of both biological genealogy
and the “grand narratives” of historiography. Diderot rejects
this in many ways in his aesthetic theory of resonance. He is not
at all interested—as we might want to assert today—in offer-
ing a counternarrative to the supposedly rational worldview of
the Enlightenment. Rather, intense skepticism is paired with a
materialism that dares to think the incomprehensible together
with the disunity of the perceiving and knowing subject. This
“holistic thinking” cannot be pure. Or expressed in the musico-
logical terms of the time: thought of this kind must be tempered
and, fully aware of its own intense artificiality, present itself as
nature. The non-rational interval, the leap of thought, the “fly-
ing thought” is thus not simply operationalized but instead
thought of as an opportunity for initiating further thoughts
which cannot be linked logically or causally.
The acoustic level of the text is decisive for this configura-
tion. As a written text, it is first of all oriented towards visual per-
ception. But the change of media into the acoustic provokes the
potential of the linguistic sign. Resonance is integrated in both
the music-theoretical and (subsequently) the physiological-
aesthetic tuning and tempering discourses of the 17th and 18th

51
Boris Previšiƈ

centuries. It enables semiotic connections which can be doubly

projected back onto the semantics of the text: first as resonance
in the sense of reverberation, and thus as a figure of memory in
the succession of linguistic signs, and second as resonance in
the sense of echo and resistance, which is inherent to the lin-
guistic sign in its visual-auditory doubling. For it is exactly this
feedback and back reference to the other medium which gen-
erate the space of theoretical (self-)reflection as a continuum
of inner reflexivity.27 However, resonance also simultaneously
links theory back to the body (“corps sonore”) and is the actual
relay to thought, which escapes technical reproducibility and
externalization by the human person. Resonance also always
implies a textual body which achieves its semiotic effect only in
the change of medium.

27 See especially the comments on auto-referentiality in Louis Marin,

De l’Entretien (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1997), p. 72f.

52
Elisabeth Bronfen

Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

Fantasy work as narrative management:

three formulas of thought

Sigmund Freud conceived of the work of fantasy as, in essence,

the correction of a disappointing reality. This wish fulfilment is
satisfied through three decisive formulas of thought. The first
concerns the relationship of fantasy to time. A wish triggered
by an event in the present draws on the memory of an earlier
experience and in doing so creates a situation referencing the
future, one which presents itself as the fulfillment of this wish.
Past, present, and future are consequently strung together on
the thread of the continuous wish. By naming the prototypi-
cal content which happily obsessed the daydreamer in child-
hood, “the protecting house, the loving parents and the first
objects of his affectionate feelings,” Freud admits that this
process concerns a story of relief.1 The family romance, which
he sees as the perfect example of this hovering between three
moments in time, also shows the degree to which the work of
fantasy requires a narrative. The idea that one is accepted as a
child uses the narrative of a noble heritage only apparently as
revenge on the actual parents, while this subsequent new inven-
tion simultaneously focuses on memories of the past which are
just as narratively shaped. This exchange should be understood
not only as an expression of regret that this supposed happier
time has disappeared. Rather, that fantasy which seeks to sooth

1 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in The

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Volume IX (1906–1908): Jensen’s ‘Gradiva’ and Other Works, ed. and
trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959), pp. 141–154,
here p. 148.

53
Elisabeth Bronfen

an unsatisfying present by way of one of these compensating

stories is an “overvaluation that characterizes a child's earliest
years [which] comes into its own again” in the fantasy.2
The psychological processing of present dissatisfaction by
way of a happier narrative glorifying the past is more than just
nostalgic. The work of fantasy creates a meaning-generating
narrative for the present which also helps reorient one towards
the future. But this formula of thought also contains a hint of
tautology. The explanation which Freud offers for the ensnar-
ing power of fantasy also acts in service of that fundamental
theoretical narrative on which his own psychoanalytical work
is based. The development of the adult subject demands not
only breaking away from the past—however painful that might
be—but also recognizing the ineradicable traces which this
past has left behind. As an insight into the psychological real-
ity which Freud learned was just as meaningful as any actually
experienced reality, fantasy work is productive for him because
it mirrors his own theoretical work. If an instance of wish fulfill-
ment appears in the dreamwork of the fantasizing person, then
the same also happens for the analyst, who folds this event into
a further interpretive narrative.
Fantasy work shares with the work of the analyst more than
just the use of storytelling for the management of experiences:
at the heart of this narrative governance—and this gesture of
relief is our second decisive formula of thought—there is also
a hero (or heroine). We may say of fantasy work that this hero
(or heroine) functions not only as a sympathetic figure but also
seems to be protected by a certain providence which allows him
or her to master any dangers or strokes of fate. “[T]hrough this
revealing characteristic of invulnerability we can immediately
recognize His Majesty the Ego, the hero alike of every day-dream
and of every story.”3 Both the focus on the one who fantasizes

2 Sigmund Freud, “Family Romances,” ibid., pp. 235–242, here

p. 241.
3 Freud, “Creative Writers,” p. 150.

54
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

and the feeling of security which this person always has are
also—and this shall be traced in the following—true of the ana-
lyst Freud. As a re-teller of that which has been told to him in a
distorted way, he proves to be more than simply the person who
brings all inconsistent information into focus, weighing and
ordering it. He is never in danger of being impacted by the story,
as he never loses his interpretive distance from any potential
repercussions. We might even claim that the more the material
to be interpreted threatens to escape his grasp, the more stub-
bornly he insists on his explanatory psychoanalytic formulas.
And in doing so, he reveals himself as the hidden hero of his
own analytic narratives.
Ultimately, we can detect a kind of oppositionality at the
heart of both the fantasy work and Freud’s theoretical work,
which leads us to a third decisive thought formula: our ambiva-
lent relation to death. The history of the development of psy-
chological processes which is at the center of Freud’s aesthetic
and culture-theoretical writings takes this as its vanishing
point. Although we are all inevitably heading towards death, we
find this fact more than just unimaginable: we also tend to leave
death out of our own accounts of our lives. If this constitutes a
loss for Freud, the world of fiction proves to be the place where
we look for a replacement for this hidden knowledge. “There
we still find people who know how to die—who, indeed, even
manage to kill someone else.”4 The narrative mastery provided
by fiction consists in our ability to experience dying (or killing)
through our imaginative identification with the hero (or hero-
ine) and also to survive his (or her) death, in order to then die
another time with another character. By virtue of this transfer-
ence, we are able to reconcile ourselves to death because this
death, as a narrative death, does not touch our actual lives.

4 Sigmund Freud, “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” in

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Volume XIV (1914–1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic
Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, pp. 273–300,
here p. 291.

55
Elisabeth Bronfen

Wish fulfillment in this case thus does not consist in the cor-
rection of a disappointing present. Rather, our empathy with
the deaths of fictional characters confirms our belief in our
own integrity while returning to our life, as Freud expresses it,
its full content. If, namely, the curbing of the destructive drive
in favor of a personal as well as a collective civility amounts to
a restriction—even if a necessary one—to psychological life,
the fantasized identification with the death of a literary charac-
ter compensates for precisely this deficiency. Because we were
allowed to experience death as the narrative destiny of a hero (or
heroine), we can confidently allow ourselves not to deny it. At
the same time, however, we can reassure ourselves that it does
indeed concern us but will not directly affect us.

Freud retells Shakespeare

Freud uses his idiosyncratic reading of the casket choice scene

in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice to clarify knowledge of per-
sonal mortality, which aesthetic texts express in a distorted form
as Schutzdichtungen (a play on words in German meaning both
“protective fictions” and “protective valve.”) The piece’s narra-
tive point of departure is the romantic and financial destiny of a
Venetian heiress. The father of the beautiful Portia has ordered
from beyond the grave what should happen with his property.
She must marry the man who chooses the leaden casket instead
of the golden or silver one—the leaden casket which alone con-
tains an image of her. This operates not only on the basis of an
equation between the female body and the casket but also of
a discrepancy between true interior and external appearance.
Because Portia is not allowed to say anything during the theatri-
cally staged choice of Bassanio, who is courting her, her silent
figure corresponds to the leaden exterior of the casket, with the
result that both—the casket and the woman—embody the law
of the father as a homicidal inscription.

56
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

Portia would have something to say but is not permitted

to speak. Bassanio not only chooses her—he also chooses in
place of her. A double narrative is attached to the leaden cas-
ket. The inscription on the lid proclaims a message which will
simultaneously demonstrate the fittingness of the groom:
“who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath” (2.7.9).5
Bassanio’s decision is also not free. If Portia is completely
unable to choose, then this young native of the city proves to
be her suitable spouse because he—and this was the father’s
gamble—could not, as a Venetian, make any other choice. But
if he alone is able to correctly read the inscription on the casket
(which corresponds to the bride and is the means by which she
shall be won), this also means that he must be able to read them
correctly. Because Bassanio undergoes the selection ritual as a
third party, nothing else remains for him dramaturgically than
to select this casket.
Freud’s astonishing interpretation of this scene primar-
ily focuses, however, on the connection between the silence of
the heiress and the pale color of the casket. He indicates that
Bassanio announces his choice through his attraction to that
conspicuous paleness: “thy paleness moves me more than elo-
quence, / And here choose I” (3.2.106). The shift in Freud’s theo-
retical retelling is just as significant. Portia is to be understood
as a goddess who has taken the place of the goddess of death.
Her beauty, as a kind of protective image, offers something of a
counter to both insignias of death—silence and paleness—and
dissolves the immutable law of human mortality while simulta-
neously bringing it into expression.
Once again, the question of the ambivalence of feelings—
critical for Freud—comes to the fore in how Freud brings this
aesthetic scene to its theoretical point: “Man, as we know,
makes use of his imaginative activity in order to satisfy the

5 William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, in The Norton Shake-

speare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,
2008), pp. 1011–1175, here p. 1141.

57
Elisabeth Bronfen

wishes that reality does not satisfy.”6 By referring his reading

exclusively to the groom selecting the casket while ignoring the
heiress who is being selected, he finds confirmed that transfor-
mation—characteristic of fantasy work—from an anxiety-caus-
ing state of affairs into its gratifying opposite. “In this way man
overcomes death, which he has recognized intellectually,” he
explains, adding: “No greater triumph of wish-fulfilment is con-
ceivable. A choice is made where in reality there is obedience to
a compulsion; and what is chosen is not a figure of terror, but
the fairest and most desirable of women.”7
We can actually identify two shifts in the narrative coping
which Freud ascribes to Bassanio with this formulation. As love
goddess, Portia not only replaces the image in the casket: she
also inverts the relationship between pale exterior and beau-
tiful interior, though her beauty conceals the mortality which
she secretly embodies as death goddess. At the same time, her
desirable appearance stands for that wealth which will doubt-
lessly brighten the mortal existence of her spouse (to whom
this wealth will be transferred). What is overlooked here is the
reverse side of the choice scene, aesthetically shaped by Shake-
speare. If the beauty of the bride allows the groom to translate
this choice scene into a narrative which allows him to suppress
knowledge of death, then it amounts for Portia to the killing
off of her ability to act in a double sense. The heiress is, in a
figurative sense, dead, as she can only be chosen and cannot
herself choose. With the wedding, she literally surrenders her
sovereignty together with all of her property. She must obey the
obligation which the law of the dead father has laid upon her
and, moreover, cannot ennoble her loss of power with the nar-
rative that she would have had a choice.

6 Sigmund Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” in The Stan-

dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
Volume XII (1911–1913): The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique and
Other Works, pp. 289–302, here p. 299.
7 Ibid.

58
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

The fact that Freud does not perceive the other side of fan-
tasy work in Portia’s sober acceptance of her fate points to a
wish fulfillment which affects his own theoretical work. To
prove the validity of a psychoanalytical understanding of fan-
tasy as a defense mechanism, he invents a narrative from the
casket choice scene which simultaneously limits and contains
the ambivalence of the piece. To the extent that his retelling
serves as a justification for his theoretical formulations, it also
serves as an aesthetic vehicle. In his retelling, Portia’s silence
stages precisely that unpleasant knowledge of the insurmount-
able illness which the symbolic law, by limiting the desire of the
individual subject, inflicts on the subject, but which simulta-
neously seeks to transform fantasy work and—in the sense of a
protective fiction—to shore it up or replace it with wish-forma-
tions of integrity.
Freud’s theoretical narrative replaces Portia with a fanta-
sized mythical double-figure of the death and love goddess, but
we can still hear, even if only ex negativo, the voice of Shake-
speare’s intelligent heroine. As the dramatic person who func-
tions only as a figure of a double replacement—death for life,
necessity for choice—in Freud’s retelling, Portia, through the
erasure of her independence, directs our gaze back to what
fantasy work leaves blank as a gesture of relief. Portia’s silence
guarantees a knowledge which we may not, according to
Freud—and this is precisely the ambivalence of his theoretical
work—not recognize. We must accept that disability which fun-
damentally constitutes life. Our mortality is ordained, and we
must obey this law of death. The wish fulfillment achieved by
fantasy work might be gratifying, but contradicts at the same
time the aesthetic insight of the Shakespeare text. If the Father
receives a power transcending death, wounding Portia in her
narcissistic fantasy that she can shape her own destiny, then
the casket choice scene—as intimated by the inscription on the
leaden casket—leads to a recognition of her own fallibility. She,
the one being chosen, can only give herself over to the risk which
the wedding represents. But it is also the goal of ­psychoanalytic

59
Elisabeth Bronfen

work to hold on to the necessity of fantasy work while neverthe-

less—or therefore—recognizing in it a protective illusion.

Returns in psychological development

Concerning the question of narrative management running

through Freud’s culture-analytical writings, it is helpful to take
another look at his continuously reformulated grand narrative
of the development of psychological processes. This theoretical
grand narrative also links three temporal moments, although
with less emphasis on how the past is remembered in an ide-
alized way. Rather, Freud again directs our attention to that
psychic material which can never be overcome and thus neces-
sarily returns from repression. Just as the past always plagues
the present and a course for the future can only be charted by
means of this backwards-looking reference, the overcoming
of primal psychological states is always only temporary, the
recurrence of the material relegated to the unconscious. In
his essay “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death,” Freud’s
deep disappointment with the outbreak of the First World War
moves him not only to realize that faith in the civility of cul-
tured nations must be understood as an illusion—it also leads
him to the speculation that the deepest essence of the human
person lies in so-called “primitive” drives which are restricted
and redirected through prohibitions and cultural regulations.
These suppressed drives can remain latent for years before
again being reactivated. And precisely the influences of the war
are among those powers which can produce a regression, if this
disturbance of the everyday “strips us of the later accretions of
civilization, and lays bare the primal man in each of us.”8
With this formulation, Freud not only makes an analogy
between “primal man” (the Urmensch) and the deeper layer of
the psychological life of modern persons (the unconscious). His

8 Freud, “War and Death,” p. 299.

60
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

grand narrative of the development of psychological processes

starts from repression as one of the most important cultural
defense mechanisms, while always conceiving of it together
with regression into those primal emotions and ideas which are
supposed to be repressed. For Freud, this means that unpleas-
ant psychic material lives on unchanged in the unconscious.
It survives any relegation, whether in a supposed prehistory or
in the unconscious. Freud’s narrative does have a thoroughly
mythical character to the extent that he postulates a ghostly
persistence of prehistory. But at the same time, the assertion
that conquered drives have an afterlife allows Freud to guide
our attention to those moments where repression fails. Fantasy
work, like dreamwork, is so important for his analysis of neu-
rotic illnesses because that which should be kept hidden again
becomes evident.
The disruption of everyday life—where fantasy work can be
linked to neurotic symptoms—is necessary for analysis to begin
at all. It is a sign of a dissatisfaction which needs to be inter-
preted. Once again, a literary motif serves to clarify this theo-
retical narrative formula. Freud’s turning to the uncanny as the
epitome of the return of the repressed one year after the end of
the war only makes sense if the desire for destruction ignited
by the world war caused the European homeland to also appear
foreign. Freud is writing again in a time of peace. However, the
ambivalence of feelings which he ascribes to both the field of
literature and to the experience of war continues to exist, as if
the earlier text were afflicting the following one. His engage-
ment with frightening fantasies which originate in familiar yet
estranged knowledge also contains a trace of the war which
has supposedly been overcome, and those violent drives which
seem to again be stemmed by cultural prohibitions overshadow
the newly won civility of peace.
“[T]his uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien,” goes
Freud’s famous assertion, “but something which is familiar and
old-established in the mind and which has become alienated

61
Elisabeth Bronfen

from it only through the process of repression.”9 The substitute

which is at stake in this case is one in which the known and
trusted is replaced by something strange and alienating. If in
the experience of the uncanny, according to Freud, the familiar
coincides with its opposite, then he is simultaneously clarifying
that which he referred to, in the context of the family romance,
as an overvaluation of childhood. The habituated, trusted home
was never fully homelike, but always already pervaded by hid-
den fissures. The home was always, even if only secretly, already
partially unfamiliar. At the same time, Freud takes up the men-
tal figure of the Double from his retelling of the casket choice
scene, thus reversing the interplay of fantasies of immortality
and knowledge of death.
The doppelgänger does have a history of development in
which a concept coincides with its opposite, but this mythical
figure was “originally an insurance against the destruction of
the ego.” The idea of the doppelgänger, he adds, “has sprung
from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcis-
sism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive
man.”10 The analogy not only brings a further category—the
childlike inner life understood as psychological prehistory—
into that series of repressed elements connecting the uncon-
scious with prehistorical human beings. Because this concerns
an emphatic repudiation of the power of death, it is easy to rec-
ognize the hero of fantasy work in the previous idea of the dop-
pelgänger. This figure also asserts of him- or herself that noth-
ing bad can happen to him or her.
For the grand narrative of psychic development which
Freud wants once more to extract from this literary motif, it
is crucial that the overcoming of the original narcissism (like
prehistoric thought) accompanies a change in the sign of the

9 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917–
1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, pp. 217–256, here p. 241.
10 Ibid., p. 235.

62
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

doppelgänger: “From having been an assurance of immortal-

ity, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.” Freud uses
“the surprising evolution of the idea” to reveal a protective fic-
tion conducive to repression.11 In the same way as the beautiful
Portia, as a double of the leaden casket, blocks out the neces-
sity of recognizing death, this imagined self-doubling hides
an unpleasant knowledge. Whether the love goddess replaces
a goddess of fate in the one wish fulfillment, or the terrible
harbinger of death a friendly figure of survival, each concerns
substitute ideas. Knowledge of mortality, which returns in the
form of the uncanny doppelgänger, while being able to be hap-
pily protected against in the figure of the rich bride, is in both
cases not only prior: the disruption as return of the repressed,
as revealed in the uncanny, also reveals that we are dealing with
old, familiar knowledge. It should have remained hidden but
has become manifest, specifically because this prior knowledge
of human infirmity must necessarily come into expression.
The return, which interests Freud as much as the power
of fantasy work, means: repression must fail. As much as the
arrangement supports and defends in everyday life, it is also an
illusion which can only ever be partially and temporarily sus-
tained. Freud returns repeatedly in his late writings to a his-
tory of development based on the development of the pleasure
principle into the reality principle, as well as on the negotiation
between individual desire and the demands of society which
restrict it, and this trajectory can repeatedly be reduced to one
narrative formula. In general, the development of the individual
as well as the culture places, as the essential content of psychic
life, the struggle between the life drive and the drive to destruc-
tion, between Eros and Thanatos, between dream work and loss
of happiness. In this struggle, the return of the second term and
the restoration of the first are always held in balance.

11 Ibid., p. 235.

63
Elisabeth Bronfen

A case study as narrative fragment

Freud’s will-to-narrative is nowhere more concisely expressed

than in his case studies, and here, too, various time levels coin-
cide. The foundation is first of all the medical history which
concerns both the genesis and the development of a psycho-
logical disturbance. Secondly, the purpose is to fit together the
often contradictory and gap-filled stories which Freud hears in
the course of analysis into a coherent narrative, and to furnish
them with his own commentary. Thirdly, the treatment history
as narratively managed by him serves the purpose not only of
documenting the outcome of the analysis but also of demon-
strating the validity of his psychoanalytic method. Freud pub-
lished “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria” ten years
after the 18-year-old woman whom Freud pseudonymously
named Dora sought him out, suffering from a nervous cough,
loss of voice, and quarrelsomeness with her family. The abrupt
abandonment of therapy also allowed Freud to reflect on the
fissures which result from the triple translation of psychoso-
matic illness into a narrative language.
To fill in gaps in her medical history and solve Dora’s rid-
dles—she suffers partly from amnesia, partly simply withholds
information—Freud needs a logical, comprehensible, and
orderly account of the many disparate events which contrib-
uted to her illness. Revealing connections and determining a
necessary causality for these would be, for Freud, equivalent to
a restoration of memory. Nonetheless, a cure also requires that
Dora agrees with this clarifying narrative, that she accept it as
her own, even if—and the fragmentary character of this case
study depends on precisely this discrepancy—the narrative
does not entirely align with her own desire. At the same time,
the corresponding piece “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of
Hysteria” turns out to be an expression of Freud’s own fantasy
work. To the degree that he understands the dream as a detour
which would circumvent repression, the written case study also
serves the fulfillment of his desire that dream interpretation

64
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

could be recognized as particularly suited for the treatment of

psychological disturbances. Because he attempts to supple-
ment and clarify what Dora tells him with theoretical models,
the demonstration of which caused him to retell Dora’s story in
the first place, we receive an uncanny double portrait. The hon-
esty of Freud as narrator consists in the fact that he reveals the
discrepancy between what Dora tells him and what he hopes to
hear.
Dora’s story can also be regarded as a family romance,
however one in which the fallible parents are not replaced but
rather carry on a lewd friendship with another married couple.
The mother, with whom Dora has long had an unfriendly rela-
tionship, hardly appears at all in Freud’s narrative. Instead,
everything in his account revolves around the father’s affair
with Frau K., which comes to a point in a scene on a lake where
Herr K. makes a declaration of love to the daughter of his rival.
As a result of this, Dora hits him in the face and runs away.
The daughter astutely insists that she is fully aware of her sta-
tus as an object of barter. She is, she says, delivered to Herr K.
“as the price of his tolerating the relations between her father
and his wife.”12 For his part, Freud believes he has discovered
in the accusations which she expressed towards all involved
parties a pre-existing deep romantic love for her father, who
has been replaced in her fantasy by Herr K. Again and again,
Freud attempts to convince Dora that the purpose of her hys-
terical symptoms—loss of voice as well as inconsistency—is
to turn her father away from Frau K. At the same time, in the
final session, he also makes the suggestion that her amnesia is
leading to this: “that Herr K.'s proposals were serious, and that
he would not leave off until you had married him.”13 Although
Dora, for her part, repeatedly refused to agree with his conclu-

12 Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,”

in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, Volume VII (1901–1905): A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexu-
ality and Other Works, pp. 1–122, here p. 34.
13 Ibid., p. 108.

65
Elisabeth Bronfen

sions in the previous sessions, Freud insists: “Dora had listened

to me without any of her usual contradictions. She seemed to be
moved; she said good-bye to me very warmly, with the heartiest
wishes for the New Year, and—came no more.”14
By reading Freud’s narrative against the grain, we are able
to understand the symptom of loss of voice as a counter-nar-
rative inscribed into his text. This concerns on the one hand
the fact that her speaking had lost its value because neither her
father nor Herr and Frau K. wanted to listen to Dora. On the
other hand, with her refusal to agree—whether in decisive nega-
tion or as silence—Dora directs our attention to that fallibility
of Freud which moves him to not take into account the highly
specific character of the relationship. At one point he does note
that Dora is, he claims, feeling and acting like a jealous wife.
He immediately dismisses the idea that the actual object of
love could be Frau K., whose delightful white body Dora repeat-
edly praised, and claims that the inclination towards same-sex
desire is nothing more than an earlier, overcome whim. Even
the fact that Dora spoke of Frau K. more in the tone of a lover
than a vanquished rival and never spoke a hard word against
her is quickly rejected by Freud as inconsequential. The text of
the case history, however, allows a reading which reveals pre-
cisely this intimacy as the actual core of the hysterical daugh-
ter’s displeasure. Freud even deciphers one of the dreams that
Dora tells him as a defloration fantasy, where she takes the place
of the lover penetrating the female genitalia. Her resistance to
Herr K. would thus be understood as nothing other than a cover
story hiding both her being in love with her father as well as an
unconscious love for Frau K. Contrary to the manifest interpre-
tation offered by Freud, the text offers another narrative for the
case study, one in which Dora’s love for Frau K. is a conscious
fantasy, even if one kept secret.
Only in one of the final footnotes does Freud openly admit:
“I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her

14 Ibid., pp. 108–109.

66
Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud

homosexual […] love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious

current in her mental life.”15 He rejects until the very end what
his own text reveals, because it does not fulfill the wish which
he imagined for this story. If the scene on the lake had had
another conclusion, “this would have been the only possible
solution for all the parties concerned.”16 Instead, Freud reads
the fact of Dora’s breaking off therapy with him after three ses-
sions as an act of revenge, in order to then seamlessly process
it in a daydream, where his fallibility enables him to simultane-
ously appear as a hero. In the main text of the case study, Freud
distracts us, by way of an admission of another failure, from the
fact that he did not want to see Dora’s most significant object of
love: “I did not succeed in mastering the transference in good
time,” he concludes, adding: “At the beginning it was clear that
I was replacing her father in her imagination.”17 The sudden
abandonment of therapy is again a slap in the face for him. Per-
ceiving this as a personal offense, he links the abrupt end of the
analysis to the scene on the lake, not only in order to propose
himself as a substitute for Dora’s disappointed love but also to
take on her position as a victim of unfaithfulness. She “took her
revenge on me as she wanted to take her revenge on him, and
deserted me as she believed herself to have been deceived and
deserted by him.”18 By becoming the actual focal point of the
frustrated analysis, he is not only speaking about and for Dora,
but rather about himself.
Like in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the
aesthetic procedure of this case study is shown in a pointed way,
Dora’s silence is her own form of articulation. Like the father
and Herr K., Freud also seeks to control the hysterical woman.
Her reaction in both cases—with a neurotic loss of voice in the
first and a mild silence in the second—suggests an absence of

15 Ibid., p. 120.
16 Ibid., p. 108.
17 Ibid., p. 118.
18 Ibid., p. 119.

67
Elisabeth Bronfen

consent. The text in turn enables—in opposition to the mani-

fest intention of the narrator—a reading where Dora, fully aware
of her analyst’s fantasy (that he is her imagined object of love,
to find his theory of dream work confirmed), cunningly played
along, providing him with the dream material corresponding to
his wishes. Just as the clever Portia had faith that only Bassanio
would be able to correctly read that Venetian code which her
father invokes with the leaden casket, the sharp-sighted Dora
recognized that Freud, obsessed by a will-to-narrate, can only
interpret what she is telling him through the lens of those love
stories whose pathological effects he is trying to explain.
The brilliance of Freud’s recourse to aesthetic methods, not
least to that uncanny double voice arising from the disconnect
between the main text and the footnotes, lies in the clues he lays
which enable a revealing glance into the theoretical construct
of his fantasy. Portia entices the spouse whom she can do noth-
ing other than accept into a trap with a game of rings, in order
to secretly gain the upper hand in this marriage; Dora lures her
analyst into a narrative loop from which his text cannot escape.
She has not only slipped away from him; she has also led him
to record—with a preface, a medical history, the interpretation
of two dreams, an afterword, and thus an entire series—how he
has gotten pulled into the current of his own fantasy, how he
can only compose a case study whose success lies in its own fail-
ure. He was in fact at risk of being impacted by the story, but his
narration makes up for this fallibility. The opposite of this is the
decisive aesthetic gesture.

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Sandro Zanetti

Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

La mésaventure du vilain style est arrivée à plus

d’un philosophe – à tous peut-être : la chose est
bien connue.
Jean-Luc Nancy

There exists no theory in which language, or communication

more broadly, is exclusively an object of analysis. However nar-
rowly we want to define “theory”—as a more or less systematic
way of looking at things or as a methodological foundation
for the development of something—the explanatory potential
of a theory never results solely from what is thought in or with
the theory, but always from how this thought occurs as well.
In the case of theories, this how is in turn necessarily reliant
upon symbolic mediation. That means, however, that theories
always simultaneously feature a sensually perceptible (medial-
material) side, and an immaterial side which has been brought
into representation with or through it. Each side always refers
to the other, or at least opens onto it—and the how of a theory
exists (not only, but also) in the way this reciprocal relationship
receives concrete expression: which pattern, which principles,
and which forms of development it follows.
If we take as our starting point the sensually perceptible
side of theory itself and associate the concept of aesthetics with
the characteristic of such perceptibility or perception-related-
ness, then we can affirm: every theory exhibits a certain aesthet-
ics. Even if a theory, in terms of its object, has nothing at all to
say about aesthetics, the theory itself must in a certain way be
formulated, presented, and thus perceptible—to the extent that
it is to be communicable or comprehensible at all. In the sense
of αἴσθησις (aísthēsis: “perception”), every theory, considered

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Sandro Zanetti

in terms of its own concrete expression, is perception-related

and in this sense aesthetic. Even mathematical theories are
reliant upon perceptible signs. This is not a direct reference to
the actually quite revealing fact that “theory,” as derived from
θεωρία (theōria: “view, contemplation, perspective”), is itself
a form of looking, of contemplation, perception, intellectual
“insight.” Crucial, rather, is that the way of (theoretical) look-
ing which theories contain or outline itself demonstrates a per-
ceptible structure.1
This aspect is usually ignored when speaking of “aesthetic
theory.” If we take the formulation “aesthetic theory” seri-
ously—not least with a view to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory—then
the point, in a purely grammatical sense, is not that there is a
theory that is concerned with aesthetics as its subject or with
individual aesthetic objects or events. Neither does the term
“aesthetic theory” express that theory in this case is identi-
cal with the concept of aesthetics (and certainly not with the
restricted concept of an aesthetics that would be a simple doc-
trine of art). Instead, “theory” here proves to be fundamentally,
in the sense of aísthēsis, aesthetically qualified.2 The question
is simply which type of aesthetics a theory implies, and even the
specific mode of rejection of (a certain) aesthetics would still
need to be composed or contoured in an aesthetic way.3 How,

1 We touch here on the phenomenon that theories allow something

to be seen (show something) and at the same time can show how this
allowing-to-be-seen (or, more precisely, this showing) happens. Sylvia
Sasse’s contribution in this volume considers this situation under the
keyword of the “theoretical act.”
2 This fact is reflected in the title, if less in the individual contribu-
tions, of Joachim Küpper et al., eds., The Beauty of Theory. Zur Ästhetik
und Affektökonomie von Theorien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013).
3 From the perspective of literary studies, a terminological problem
stands out here: why speak of “aesthetics” and not of “rhetoric”? The
question would merit more extensive engagement, but here a brief com-
ment: the battle lines which are occasionally drawn in literary theory
(especially in the case of Paul de Man) between rhetoric and aesthet-
ics make strategic sense. They also, however, create an often extremely
abbreviated understanding of aesthetics. Here, rhetoric could itself be
defined as a way of describing the aesthetics of linguistic articulation

70
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

then, are theories aesthetically composed or contoured? And

how in individual cases?
This raises further questions: is there a specific attractive-
ness to theories which can be attributed to their aesthetics?
What makes a theory attractive? For whom? Why? How exactly?
Are there linguistic characteristics which we can read as signs
of an attempt to increase a theory’s attractiveness? And what
poetics might such attempts to increase a theory’s attractive-
ness follow?

Benjamin’s theory of the aura

These questions will be addressed in the following along-

side several passages in Walter Benjamin’s theory of the aura.
This theory is not formulated in a single conclusive text but is
instead scattered throughout his work, in highly diverse obser-
vations, discussions, and fragments. One finds remarks on the
aura above all in Benjamin’s writings of the 1930s, i.e. in his late
work. These remarks first appear in the hashish studies (1930),4
then in the “Short History of Photography” (1931),5 then in “The
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological R ­ eproducibility”

with a view to its style and effects. In any case, the tropes and figures
familiar from rhetoric—which is to say all stylistic forms of articula-
tion—themselves exhibit a perceptible and thus aísthētic dimension. It
would therefore be false to essentially define rhetoric as an- or anti-aes-
thetic. The question is rather whether there is not an ideology of the rhe-
torical (insofar as it is based on a limited, historically-situated concept
of aesthetics and in the process excludes its own perceptible aspect).
4 Walter Benjamin, “Haschisch Anfang März 1930” (“Hashish,
Beginning of March 1930”), in Gesammelte Schriften 6: Fragmente,
Autobiographische Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 587–591
(Part of “Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen”). The Gesammelte Schriften
(“Collected Works”) of Benjamin are referred to in the following as GS
Volume·Subvolume, page number. All English translations are direct
translations from the cited German by Brian Alkire.
5 Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (“Short History
of Photography”), GS 2·1, pp. 368–385.

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Sandro Zanetti

(1935ff.),6 as well as in the Baudelaire studies (1939),7 and finally

in parts of the Arcades Project (1927 to 1940).8
Benjamin’s theory of the aura is, if there is in fact such a
theory, a scattered one. This already relates, however, to our
subject: clearly, there are theories which do not exist in a closed,
systematic form. Some are not even very rigorously or compre-
hensibly formulated. Benjamin’s theory of the aura—the aura
of works of art and other things—belongs to this category. Ben-
jamin’s relevant statements are certainly perceived as theory
both in the research literature and by an interested public. Ben-
jamin’s theory of the aura has even repeatedly been seen as a
particularly attractive—if not uncontroversial—theory.9
The thesis of the following remarks is that the attractiveness
of Benjamin’s theory of the aura consists precisely in the fact
that the elements of this theory contain, first, strong, marked,
and well-citable claims (assertions) and leave, second, a great
deal open, unclear, unstated for critical reception—which
means, conversely, that the critics can see themselves impelled
to cooperate intelligently at the level of interpretation and (de-)
enigmatization, as well as continue the theoretical work gener-

6 Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Repro-

duzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro-
ducibility”), GS 1·2, pp. 471–508.
7 Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire” (“On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire”), GS 1·2, pp. 605–653.
8 Benjamin, Das Passagen-Werk (“The Arcades Project”), GS 5·1,
p. 560.
9 Further information in this context can be found in Theodor W.
Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970),
pp. 406–413 [Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert-Hullot Kentor (London
and New York: Continuum, 1997) pp. 274–280]; Miriam Bratu Hansen,
“Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): pp. 336–375; Boris Groys,
“Die Geburt der Aura. Variationen über ein Thema Walter Benjamins,”
Neue Zürcher Zeitung 264, 11 Nov. 2000, p. 83; Josef Fürnkäs, “Aura,”
in Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, eds., Benjamins Begriffe, Vol. 1
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 95–146; Hans Ulrich Gum-
brecht, “Walter Benjamin und sein Werk. Ein neu zu erkundender Kon-
tinent,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 284, 6 Dec. 2014, p. 59; Robert Kaufman,
“Aura, Still,” October 99 (2002): pp. 45–80.

72
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

ally. There are obviously theories whose attractiveness lies not

in their comprehensive explanatory potential but rather in their
ability to stimulate interest while simultaneously generating a
partial, intermittent—and maybe only intermittent—satisfac-
tion of this interest.
One possible explanation for the attractiveness of theo-
ries which can be considered attractive on the basis of their
only ­partially redeemable explanatory potential is offered by
Hans Blumenberg in his Theory of Nonconceptuality.10 There,
Blumen­berg discusses where the specific attractiveness of con-
cepts comes from. He derives the concepts’ mode of function
from anthropology, making an analogy between concepts and
traps: just as a trap is designed (prospectively) to capture some-
thing which is intended to be contained by it in the near future
(the animal to be captured), concepts, according to Blumen-
berg, are designed to capture something conceptually (or men-
tally), something which is intended to form its content in the
future. (Blumenberg believes, at least, that the original function
of concepts is based on this kind of intentionality.)
In the course of this, traps or concepts must prove to be
attractive to their respective content(s) (through which they also
become attractive to their users). If they were not attractive to
potential content(s), they could not capture anything. One of
the most important basic conditions for this is that traps and/or
concepts be sufficiently large: that their form exhibit a greater
extent than their potential content(s). Concepts may thus, like
traps, not be conceived on too small a scale. They may not be
designed or outlined as too small of containers or enticements
for possible contents. Otherwise there would not be enough
space in them. Stated another way: concepts must be imprecise
to a certain extent. They may not, however, be too imprecise, too

10 Hans Blumenberg, Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit, ed. Anselm Haver­

kamp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2007), p. 11f. Blumenberg’s
theory has also only been transmitted in a scattered form. Theorie der
Unbegrifflichkeit (“Theory of Nonconceptuality”) was posthumously
published.

73
Sandro Zanetti

large, too arbitrary, because they would then likewise miss—or

lose hold of—their prey.
We may transfer the model sketched by Blumenberg of con-
ceptual leeway to that of theories, which of course consist of
concepts and establish connections between them. We could,
for example, apply the model to Michel Foucault’s use of the
term “dispositive” or “discourse”—it is easy to see that the suc-
cess of these concepts is due in no small part to their relative
imprecision, their specific indefiniteness, their relative open-
ness. Concepts which are defined too narrowly—and here is
the problem—might make sense in a very clearly-defined range
of application. If, however, a concept is to prove itself more
broadly meaningful, then it must possess a certain degree of
imprecision. For if everything which can be said by means of
a concept is actually said, then we could presumably no longer
use it anymore. It would have already, in itself, used up its entire
explanatory potential.
But back to Benjamin. Unlike Blumenberg’s imprecisions
and indefiniteness, and also in contrast to the trap model, Ben-
jamin’s theory does not only or primarily concern imprecisions
and indefiniteness. It rather concerns the opposite: an excess
of definition or an overemphasis on clarity precisely where it is
not immediately obvious. Here we arrive at the question of the
use of language in Benjamin’s theory: how does Benjamin write
about the aura—or of the aura, or concerning the aura? How
does Benjamin’s engagement with the aura unfold chronologi-
cally? Which ruptures or changes appear in the course of this?
How does aura as a topic relate to a possible aura of Benjamin’s
own theory? Is there a relation? And if so, which possible effects
are precipitated by the corresponding statements of Benjamin,
with their respective linguistic-aesthetic features at the level of
reading?
The primary focus of Benjamin’s engagement with the con-
cept and the phenomenon of the aura is, in the hashish studies,
the way things appear:

74
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

First of all, the authentic aura appears with11 all things. Not
only with certain things, as people like to imagine. Second,
the aura undergoes a thorough and radical change with
every movement of the thing to which the aura belongs.
Third, the authentic aura cannot at all be thought of as
the leaked spiritual magical radiance which vulgar mysti-
cal books illustrate and describe. Rather, the specific fea-
ture of the authentic aura is: the ornament, an ornamental
envelope (Umzirkung) in which the thing or essence lies like
a sheath. Nothing, perhaps, gives us a more correct idea
of the authentic aura than the late paintings of van Gogh,
where we could say that the aura is painted along with the
things themselves.12

Here already, the aura is not an intrinsic quality of an object

but rather something that appears with or around things, and
even, according to Benjamin, with all things. The “authentic
aura,” according to Benjamin, “appears with all things.” We can
already see here Benjamin’s typical handling of words which
are not yet concepts: the word “aura” is not used in an already
familiar sense, nor is it defined—instead, it is simply employed.
More precisely, “aura” is employed as a word in such a way
that it appears itself as an “ornament,” as an “ornamental enve-
lope,” an accessory, an additive to other words. For nowhere
does Benjamin say what the aura is. He only says that it appears
and, specifically, with things, with all things—taking as an
assumption that words, too, can be things. Furthermore, we
are told how the aura should not be conceived: not as a “leaked

11 The German preposition used by Benjamin here and in the follow-

ing is “an” (“an allen Dingen”), which we have chosen to translate as
“with” rather than “in” or “on,” emphasizing the way in which the aura
accompanies the phenomenon without being “in” the phenomenon.
It is important to note, however, that the preposition “an” in German
implies direct physical connection in a way that “with” does not. The
aura not only accompanies the phenomenon: it is also in direct, physi-
cal contact with it.
12 Benjamin, “Haschisch 1930,” p. 588.

75
Sandro Zanetti

spiritual magical radiance.” A “magical radiance” of this kind

would have to be qualified as an inauthentic aura, in contrast to
the “authentic aura” Benjamin has in mind. At the same time,
the criterion of authenticity does not offer a further explanation
of the aura. Instead, it simply introduces another element into
the reflection which itself requires explanation.
The only way Benjamin sees of forming a “correct idea” of
the “authentic aura” can be found at the end of his remarks—
but again only maybe—in the “late paintings of van Gogh”: of all
places in artistic artifacts which show something (sunflowers,
ears of wheat, etc.) not directly but rather indirectly via paint-
ing. This showing also simultaneously shows the material of
showing: the luxuriant brushstrokes, colors, the vividness of the
application of color. Taken together, the material of the painter
(in its self-reference) and that to which the material refers (exter-
nally, to materially concretized and contextualized and thus
semanticized phenomena: sunflowers, ears of wheat) are in this
case the intermediate space that Benjamin names the “aura.”13
Van Gogh, in his late paintings, seems in turn—and here Benja-
min is writing in a recognizably cautious way: “we could say”—to
have painted this “aura […] along with the things themselves.”14
Aura as an intermediate space—as a “genuine” intermedi-
ate space, here between a material aspect (self-reference) and
a semantic and/or referential aspect (external reference) which
are in a relationship which has not already been reproduced—
this could be one possible interpretation of the aura. Such an

13 See Dieter Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis

(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002), pp. 90–99; and Ereignis und Aura. Unter-
suchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 2002), pp. 44–53.
14 In the terminology of this collection, we could also say: van Gogh’s
late paintings already of themselves imply an aesthetic theory of the
aura by simultaneously showing the aura (representationally) and
making identifiable an open space between materiality and seman-
tics. Benjamin in turn could be characterized as someone who, in all
caution, admits to this “painted”—and in the cited passage only to
this “painted”—theory the possibility of gaining a “correct idea” of the
“authentic aura”: through a specific guiding of seeing.

76
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

interpretation is near at hand in Benjamin’s text. It is not, how-

ever, present in an explicit form. With this, we arrive at a spe-
cific reading of Benjamin, of which there are plenty—and they
are often not the worst among the philological or philosophical
access points to Benjamin. What happens, though, if we con-
tinue thinking through Benjamin’s terms, clarifying their pos-
sible implications, and in the process become ourselves the
constructors of Benjamin’s—but is it still Benjamin’s?—theory?
What happens is that we are pursued by a provocation in
Benjamin’s texts. We have entered into that “ornament” fash-
ioned by Benjamin, the ornamental “envelope” into which we
must go if we want to understand anything of these texts, or bet-
ter: take anything away from them. But we have simultaneously
entered into a region which is, in a strict sense, not already illu-
minated by the author Benjamin. Why Benjamin’s suggestion
of correctness, validity, and importance nevertheless captivates
us—or at least some of us—will be addressed towards the end
of this essay with a possible answer. But first, we should very
briefly tread the path which emerges in the various stages of
Benjamin’s engagement with the aura.
In both the short outline “A Short History of Photography”
and in the “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Repro-
ducibility,” we find the formulation, as succinct as it is enig-
matic, that the aura is the “unique appearance of a distance,
however near it may be.”15 Without commenting more on this
formulation here, it should be clear that the aura is again—as

15 Benjamin, “Photographie,” p. 378. This passage is an echo of

­Rilke’s 1925 poem “My eyes already touch the sunny hill, / going far
ahead of the road I have begun. / So we are grasped by what we cannot
grasp; / it has its inner light, even from a distance – / and changes us,
even if we do not reach it, / into something else, which, hardly sensing
it, / we already are; a gesture waves us on, / answering our own wave… /
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected
Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Robert Bly (New York: Harper Peren-
nial, 1981), p. 177. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, Vol. 2: Gedichte,
ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and the Rilke Archive, prepared by Ernst Zinn
(Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1966), p. 161.

77
Sandro Zanetti

in the hashish studies—described as a mode of appearance.

What is new in the essays on the history of technology is only
that Benjamin begins to take an interest in what inserts itself
between the appearing things and the subjects perceiving these
things, or what can be determinative from there: the technolo-
gies of perception and their media. The premises of Benjamin’s
engagement with the aura have in the meantime, to be sure,
become negative: he speaks now,16 though appreciatively, of
the “decay” and “disintegration” of the aura. There are however
a series of elements which remain the same and which can be
summarized as follows.17
The term “aura” always refers to an open space in which
a relationship emerges between (on the one hand) something

16 In the Paris photos of Eugène Atget, which count for Benjamin

as precursors of surrealist photography, he sees the “liberation of the
object from the aura” and then defines the aura as “a strange tissue
composed of space and time”: “He [Eugène Atget] introduced the lib-
eration of the object from the aura which is the incontestable merit
of the contemporary school of photography.” (Benjamin, “Photogra-
phie,” p. 378—contrasted with “retouching” as mere simulation of an
aura on p. 377.) “What exactly is aura? A strange tissue composed of
space and time: a unique appearance of a nearness, however distant
it might be. Calmly following a mountain range on the horizon or on a
summer afternoon, or a branch which casts its shadow on the observer,
until the moment or the hour participates in their appearance—this
means breathing the aura of these mountains, this branch.” Ibid.,
p. 378. “[T]hat which withers away in the age of mechanical reproduc-
tion is its aura.” (“Das Kunstwerk,” p. 477—see also the remarks on the
“Decline of the Aura” and the “Withering Away of the Aura” and the
repetition of the passage from the “Photography” essay: “On a Sunday
afternoon […],” p. 479). And further: “The definition of the aura as a
‘unique appearance of a distance, however near it might be’ presents
nothing else than the formulation of the cult value of the work of art
in categories of spatiotemporal perception. Distance is the opposite of
nearness. The essentially distant is the unapproachable. In fact, inap-
proachability is a primary quality of the cult image. It remains by nature
‘distance, however near it might be.’ The nearness which one is able to
gain from one’s material does not harm distance, which it preserves
according to its appearance.” Ibid., p. 480.
17 Both of the following paragraphs reproduce notes from a seminar
that I held in the summer semester of 2003 together with Davide Giuri-
ato at the University of Basel on the topic of the “Shattering of the Aura.”

78
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

which records or receives and (on the other) something which

has been recorded or received—or is to be recorded or received.
The thing which records can, as in the case of early photogra-
phy, be a machine. The thing which receives can, however, as
in the case of Benjamin’s depiction of the perception of natural
phenomena, also be an observer who enters into a contempla-
tive relationship to the thing perceived. The conceptual chal-
lenge is that the “aura” is not from the outset related to the
relationship between person and person or person and thing.
Instead, “aura” is the “medium” in which a relationship—and
in fact a specific relationship—between entirely different cor-
relates can develop.
For this relationship to be auratic, both counterparts must,
first, stand in a relation to each other simultaneously and (in
the estimation of the perceiver or recorder) with a certain dura-
tion. Secondly, the relationship must display a certain leeway or
latitude which is determined by a historically-situated technol-
ogy (including where it might not be expected—in natural phe-
nomena, for example). And thirdly, the relationship is such that
the perceiver or recorder acts passively with respect to the thing
perceived or to be perceived (deliberately or otherwise): the per-
ceiver or recorder, affected by the appearance, is exposed to or
subject to it (empowerment of the appearance). Accordingly,
“aura” should be defined as a concept which only makes sense
if one further specifies the relationship to which “aura” refers.

Experiencing the aura—while reading

Decisive for the following considerations is the fact that a shift

in emphasis occurs in Benjamin’s remarks after “The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility.” This shift
occurs in the studies of Baudelaire. In these studies—composed
shortly after the works on photography and the work of art—the
aura is still something which appears. The central question is
now, however, much more firmly to whom it appears—and why

79
Sandro Zanetti

it appears to this whom, primarily a human person, in a specific

manner. In other words: it is no longer simply assumed that the
phenomenon of the aura is something that appears with things
(with all things); instead, the question is raised concerning
the preconditions of the aura, for whom it appears and how it
appears. What does it mean, Benjamin now asks, to experience
the aura as a phenomenon?
Particularly revealing in this context is the following pas-
sage from the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939):
“Experiencing the aura of a phenomenon means loaning
(belehnen) it the property of opening the gaze.”18 The difference
from Benjamin’s previous comments consists in the fact that
the aura is now defined by a dialogic, if not dialectic interplay
between an observer and that which appears to him or her. We
may assume that the anthropological components of the defi-
nition of the aura were already present in the early remarks on
the topic. In the essays on photography and the work of art, the
auratic potential of a phenomenon, as linked to human beings,
was already recognizable ex negativo: to the degree that the rela-
tionship between film or photography and the thing perceived/

18 Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” p. 646. This sentence occurs in the follow-

ing context: “The gaze, however, consists in the expectation of being
returned by that to which it gifts itself. Wherever this expectation is
reciprocated (which can, in thought, be attached to an intentional gaze
of attention just as much as to a gaze in the simple literal sense), the
experience of the aura appears to him in its fullness. ‘Perceptibility,’ as
Novalis judges, is ‘an attention.’ […] The perceptibility being spoken of
here is nothing other than that of the aura. The experience of the aura
is thus based on the transfer of a socially familiar form of reaction to
the condition of the inanimate or from nature to human beings. That
which is seen, or believes itself to be seen, opens up the gaze. Expe-
riencing the aura of a phenomenon means loaning it the property of
opening the gaze*.” And the asterisk explanation: “* This loaning is a
source of poetry. Where a person, animal, or inanimate object, leant
to by the poet in this way, opens its gaze, it pulls this into the distance;
the gaze of a nature awoken in such a way dreams and follows the poet
in his dreams. Words can also have their aura. Karl Kraus described it
thus: ‘The closer one looks at a word, the more distantly the word looks
back.’ (Karl Kraus: Pro domo et mundo. Munich 1912. [Selected Writ-
ings, 4.] p. 164.)” Ibid.

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Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

recorded concerns a machine and not a human person, the aura

is subject to the process of breaking or falling into disrepair.
A positive definition of the aura only occurs again in the
Baudelaire studies. There, the observer is conceived such that
he or she is not merely a passive recipient of a phenomenon.
Instead, the observer is that person who must do something
or at least permit something in order for a phenomenon to be
able to gain an auratic quality. What does the observer have to
do or permit for that to happen? He or she must “loan a prop-
erty” to the phenomenon—i.e. give the phenomenon some-
thing, ascribe something to it, which it does not have of its own
accord. Benjamin defines this as the property of “opening the
gaze.” In other words: the impression one can gain that some-
thing is looking at someone, that something concerns someone
(“cela me regarde” in French),19 is defined, for one, as a quality
of the aura; it is also simultaneously defined as a quality which
only comes into place if there is someone prepared to ascribe
this—human?—quality to the phenomenon.
In the piece “Central Park,” which is part of the observations
surrounding the Baudelaire studies, Benjamin does not hesi-
tate in calling this event a “projection”—a “projection” emerg-
ing from and corresponding to a social experience: “Derivation
of the aura as projection of a social experience among humans
in nature: the gaze is returned.”20 This projection corresponds
exactly to that loan which Benjamin also called a “source of
poetry” in the essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” where he
explains:

Words can also have their aura. Karl Kraus described it thus:
“The closer one looks at a word, the more distantly the word
looks back.”21

19 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous

regarde (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1992).
20 Benjamin, “Zentralpark” (“Central Park”), GS 1·2, pp. 655–690,
here: p. 670.
21 Benjamin, “Baudelaire,” p. 646.

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Sandro Zanetti

Karl Kraus’s quote emphasizes the increasingly important role

of reciprocity for Benjamin’s concept of the aura. This concept
is equally decisive for the process of projection (and its retroac-
tive effect) and for that of loaning or returning a gaze. However,
Benjamin does not offer a precise definition of the aura in these
late remarks either—and the Kraus quote is more of a bon mot
than an explanation.
The observation that “words can also have their aura” is,
however, a good starting point for answering the question of
the relationship between the aura and language, and that not
only in a general sense but specifically with respect to the way
Benjamin himself works with language. According to Benja-
min’s own observations on the topic of the aura, it is basically
impossible to define the aura as a property of things. Aura is
something that appears with or around things, but, according
to the later remarks, only if there are people who grant to that
which appears to them a power of reciprocating the gaze—an
opportunity to answer.
With respect to the appearance of words, this means that
the aura in this case cannot be defined as a property of the
words themselves. Rather, there can only be an aura to words if
there is someone—like Karl Kraus’s reader—who is prepared
to examine a word very closely. What can then arise for the
reader is precisely this difference between the materiality of
things—in this case words—and their sense. This difference
is called the distance of the returned gaze in the Kraus cita-
tion—and in “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility” it is expressed in the phrase “appearance of
a distance, however near it might be.” An aura so understood
no longer has anything to do with that “leaked spiritual magi-
cal radiance” which Benjamin criticizes in his first observa-
tions on the aura. Aura only exists where there is a difference
between that which one is able to perceive and that which the
perceived thing can mean on the basis of its being perceived. The
uniqueness of the aura proves to be unique in each case, as the
experience of difference is fundamentally dependent on the

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Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

continually changing constellations, which are always in need

of redefinition, between the perceivers (the subjects) and the
thing appearing to them.
If we assume that enabling such an experience of differ-
ence—in an epistemological sense also—is something basi-
cally desirable, then the question arises for writers, as well as
for all who write, perhaps, whether one can provoke such an
experience through writing. Again: there are no words, and
thus no texts, which would be auratic of their own accord in the
sense that they would have already “absorbed” that experience
of difference which is so important for Benjamin. An experi-
ence of difference can at most—vis-à-vis potential readers—be
encouraged, suggested, provoked. One frequently encounters
such enabling moments in Benjamin’s texts, however—both
in those on the aura and others. “The closer one looks at a
word, the more distantly the word looks back,”22 as Karl Kraus
put it. And Benjamin cites the passage to make clear what the
aura of words can consist of for him. What does one need to
do, we could ask, if one wants to enable such an experience of
the aura in and with words? One must write texts that provoke
their own close reading; texts whose words are traces, which
make their deciphering appear valuable.23 One must write
texts which are not immediately comprehensible, but instead

22 Ibid.
23 “Trace and aura: The trace is the appearance of a nearness, how-
ever distant what it leaves behind might be. The aura is the appearance
of a distance, however near what it elicits might be. In the trace, we
apprehend the thing; in the aura, it seizes us.” Benjamin, “The Arcades
Project,” GS 5·1, p. 560. In written correspondence between Adorno
and Benjamin, the idea of the trace is connected to the aura: “Is the
aura not also the trace of forgotten humanity in the thing?” Adorno asks
in a letter on February 29, 1940 (GS 1·3, p. 1132). Benjamin answered
on May 7, 1940: “Tree and shrub, which are being loaned to [belehnt],
are not made by human beings. There must be something human in
things which is not created through work.” Walter Benjamin, Briefe 2,
ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1978), p. 849.

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Sandro Zanetti

only indirectly,24 and this not coincidentally includes working

with citations.25
Benjamin himself seems to follow this kind of writing pro-
gram: whoever uses words—like the word “aura”—in such a way
that they are not defined or explained but instead continually
suggested and used in an idiosyncratic way, provokes a closer
examination of these words. Those texts of Benjamin’s which
follow such a poetics, reduced in their specific esotericism and
terseness to the ability to be cited, hardly reveal anything if one
is not ready to perform a close reading of them. But whoever is
prepared to do so might very well find this poetics, and the aes-
thetics of these texts, based on a combination of abrupt usage
and conceptual openness, attractive.
Not every reader knew what to do with this kind of aes-
thetics and theoretical poetry. Bertolt Brecht found Benja-
min’s remarks on the aura specifically to be a peculiar kind
of “spleen,” or, more pointedly, “it is pretty dreadful.”26 And
Adorno famously had a very difficult time with the Baudelaire
studies: “Unless I am seriously mistaken, this dialectic lacks
one thing: mediation (Vermittlung).”27 This lack of mediation is,

24 In his readings, Benjamin himself seems to favor those poetics

which elude direct understanding. For example, the essay “On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire” begins with this conclusion: “Baudelaire counted
on readers for whom the reading of poetry would be difficult.” Benja-
min, “Baudelaire,” p. 607.
25 Quotations like those from Karl Kraus or references like those to
the late works of van Gogh should—depending on the attitude towards
them one gains while reading—be read as invitations to auratization
or de-auratization. In the quotation, something distant (the cited
thing) appears quite near. Benjamin’s (scattered) theory of the aura
has a counterpart in his theory (both scattered and provocatively per-
formed) of the quote and quotation. See Benjamin, “Über den Begriff
der Geschichte” (“On the Concept of History”), GS I·2, pp. 691–704,
especially p. 701.
26 Bertolt Brecht, Arbeitsjournal (“Working Journal”), vol. 1: 1938 –1942,
ed. Werner Hecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 16.
27 Adorno’s letter to Benjamin on November 10, 1938 from New York,
in Benjamin, Briefe (“Letters”), p. 785. The cited passage is prepared by
the following: “Motifs are collected but not carried out. In your accom-
panying letter to Max, you presented this as your explicit perspective,

84
Auratic Theory: Walter Benjamin

however, exactly the necessary precondition for a textual experi-

ence oriented towards enabling an experience of difference for
the reader—an experience of the aura.28
The auratic effect during a close reading of Benjamin’s texts
(like those on the aura) can begin in various ways. Analogously
to conceptions of the aura in the hashish studies, one can begin
with the assumption that it is the texts themselves which of
themselves display an auratic effect. We find a more method-
ologically promising option, however, in Benjamin’s own shift
of emphasis in the remarks on the aura in the late Baudelaire
studies, especially: the option of conceiving of the possible
auratic effect of Benjamin’s texts as the effect of an interplay
between usage and provocation in the text and attributions and
concessions by the reader.
Whoever conceives of both Benjamin’s provocations and
our own projections as elements which, in their productive inter-
play, form the basis of the poetics and aesthetics of ­Benjamin’s
texts also contributes to not simply being at the mercy of the
aura—evoked by language—of this theory. Knowledge only
emerges once the potential auratic effect of the texts is broken
through: that is, once the aura is simultaneously recognized
for its potential and destroyed in its possible tendency towards
incapacitation. Whoever recognizes this is possibly even more

and I cannot fail to recognize the ascetic discipline that was at work
there to everywhere omit the decisive theoretical answers to the ques-
tions and even to only allow the questions to be visible to the initiated.
[…] Flaneur and arcades, modernity and always the same without a
theoretical interpretation—is that a ‘material’ that can patiently await
interpretation without being consumed by its own aura? Does not the
pragmatic content of those objects conspire in an almost demonic way
against the possibility of its interpretation?” Ibid., p. 783.
28 It would be worth considering whether enabling this kind of expe-
rience of difference is not a fundamental feature of literature—or could
be. Benjamin’s texts would then have to be read as literature in an
emphatic (not affirmative, but rather difference-oriented) sense. This
kind of “reading-as-literature” would then, however, have to be consid-
ered for all texts whose readings turn out to be theoretically relevant.

85
Sandro Zanetti

intelligent than the texts: texts which might have provoked this
intelligence but did not themselves necessarily contain this
intelligence in the first place.

86
Klaus Müller-Wille

Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

Academic postlude1

In 1952, the Danish painter Asger Jorn sent a first print version
of his aesthetic study Held og hasard. Dolk og guitar (Luck and
Chance. Dagger and Guitar) to the recently appointed professor
of philosophy Bent Schultzer at the University of Copenhagen.2
On this occasion, he asked whether the study might be accepted
as a doctoral dissertation by the faculty of philosophy. In a
reply addressed to “Mr. Painter Asger Jorn,” Schultzer kindly
but firmly pointed out the problems which would make such
a process difficult or even impossible. Apart from the formal
hurdles, he referred to the unscholarly, even anti-scholarly style
of the treatise. Eventually, he allowed himself to make a few
instructive comments enlightening Jorn on the fundamental
difference between art and scholarship:

1 I thank Lucas Haberkorn of the Museum Jorn in particular for his

generous support in the research of this article.
2 Basic biographical information about this episode can be found
in the standard introductory works. See Troels Andersen, Asger Jorn
1914–1973. Eine Biographie (Cologne: Walther König, 2001), pp. 222–
227; Ruth Baumeister, Asger Jorn in Images, Words, and Forms (Zurich:
Schiedigger & Spiess, 2014), pp. 46–47. Held og hasard exists in three
Danish editions. After the extremely rare first edition which Jorn sold as
a private edition, the book was published in 1963 by the publisher Bor-
gen, which reissued the book in 1980. Asger Jorn, Held og hasard. Dolk
og guitar, Silkeborg 1952 (private printing); Asger Jorn, Held og hasard.
Dolk og guitar (Copenhagen: Borgen, 1963). Cited in the following is,
where possible, the German edition (translated into English by Brian
Alkire): Asger Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers. Heil und Zufall 1953. Die
Ordnung der Natur 1961–1966, trans. Thyra Jackstein (Munich: Edition
Galerie van de Loo, 1966).

87
Klaus Müller-Wille

The book is well written and attests to talent. Note, how-

ever, that I am using a word which one normally uses for
the characterization of a work of art rather than the judge-
ment of a scholarly work. You seem to me to be an artist,
an excellent artist as far as I can tell from your book, but
are you a scholar? This question answers itself on p. 93,
2nd paragraph, and I fear I must agree with this answer.
The strengths and weaknesses of your book lie precisely in
the fact that you are not familiar with scholarly methods (or
even ridicule them).3

Considering the careless and even erroneous handling of

sources, the lack of conceptual clarity, and above all the volatile
associative form of argument which characterizes Jorn’s work,
Schultz’s evaluation should not be surprising. Even Jorn seems
not to have taken his academic ambitions very seriously, as he
reacted immediately and withdrew his unofficial inquiry. But he
does not miss the chance to again address the somewhat more
deeply thought-out relationship between artistic and theoreti-
cal aesthetics, which is the central focus of his study:

The relationship is such that aesthetics plays a much larger

artistic than academic role, and it seems to me that the
chasm between the utility-aesthetics of the artist and the
university’s academic aesthetics is so great that it is impos-
sible for them to enter into conversation. If my book, as
you rightly note, treats with disdain the scholarly handling
of my material, I maintain that it concerns an attempt at
approach.4

3 Letter of December, 1952 from Bent Schultzer to Asger Jorn,

Archive of Museum Jorn. All English translations are based upon the
German translations of Klaus Müller-Wille from Danish.
4 Undated letter from Asger Jorn to Bent Schultzer, Archive of Museum
Jorn, Silkeborg.

88
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

Interestingly, Jorn firmly insists that he wrote the study as an

artist. That does not mean, however, that he questions its claim
to philosophical validity. He vehemently opposes Schultzer’s
attempt to simply play off the literary quality of the text against
its scholarly failings. Jorn attempts to overcome the simple
dichotomy between art and theory with a more complex con-
stellation where philosophically-inspired and thus genuinely
aesthetic artistic methods can interact with artistically-inspired
philosophical praxis. The corresponding philosophical-artistic
and artistic-philosophical modes of thought are ultimately dis-
tinguished from a traditional understanding of scholarly and
academic work:

I want to be a scholar just as little as I want to be a liter-

ary author, but art today is dependent on theory, specifi-
cally theory which deals with the essential, and for me this
concerns an attempt to emphasize that which the artist
must regard as essential, namely that the central essence
of philosophy, in an intellectual respect, must be regarded
as artistic and constructive and not scientific, and further-
more, that the aesthetic phenomenon has its origins in the
introduction of the unknown into a sphere of interest.5

In the following section, I will address the strange-seeming def-

inition of the aesthetic which Jorn plays with in this letter. For
the moment, let us simply note that Jorn is consciously attempt-
ing to legitimize artistic praxis as a special type of thought
which is thoroughly in possession of a claim to scientific valid-
ity, even if this claim is not coterminous with the understand-
ing of research and science embodied in the institution of the
university.
Schultzer seems to have simply overlooked the hair-split-
ting argumentation in which Jorn consciously plays off various
concepts of science, philosophy, and art against each other.

5 Ibid.

89
Klaus Müller-Wille

That is the only way of explaining why he reacts to Jorn’s let-

ter with significant relief: “I’m delighted by your clear confes-
sion of where you’re at home.”6 The way he again attempts to
address the fundamental opposition between art and science
shows, furthermore, that Jorn was in fact unable to make him-
self heard with his subtle form of argumentation:

Roughly and schematically, I would say: art is a concrete

mode of observing the whole. Science, in contrast, is
abstract and analytical. We thus stand before two attitudes
which can only be bridged with sympathetic understand-
ing, but such understanding has nothing to do with aca-
demic theory. Philosophers with an artistic attitude have
therefore paid a high price for their thoughts, namely their
scholarly validity.7

This concluding reproach is likely aimed at Nietzsche and

Kierkegaard, who undeniably play a major role in Jorn’s study.
But the reference to both of these literary philosophers of the
19th century conceals the actual matter that concerns Jorn. In the
course of his study, he repeatedly draws attention to the neces-
sity of an entirely new form of “theoretical research aesthetics”8
which has as its goal “transforming work in the theory of art
into a science of experience, taking into consideration the anti-
empirical character of aesthetics.”9 Central to this is the con-
cept of the artistic experiment, which Jorn does not relate spe-
cifically to image-centered kinds of artistic experience, instead
attempting to deliberately use this concept for farther-reaching

6 Letter of January 29, 1953 (mistakenly dated to January 29, 1952)

from Bent Schultzer to Asger Jorn, Archive of Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.
7 Ibid.
8 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 22.
9 Jorn, Held og hasard (1952), p. 93. In the second edition, Jorn char-
acteristically strikes the corresponding passage, while expanding it
in the German translation into a chapter which is solely dedicated to
the relationship between art and research. See Jorn, Gedanken eines
­Künstlers, pp. 147–157.

90
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

speculations concerning the theory of art. Jorn obviously does

not consider the book Held og hasard a traditional aesthetic
treatise, but rather an aesthetic experiment which is intended,
in an unconventional way, to lead to new insights into the the-
ory of art. The distinctiveness of this aesthetic experience is
not based, in my view, on the exceptional literary form alone,
but rather above all in the unique material design of Held og
hasard.10 In order to pursue the specific meaning of this mate-
rial design, I will, for heuristic reasons, first present a short
analysis of the book-as-object, followed by an initial reading of
the text Held og hasard. Ultimately, however, my interpretation
will lead to a third section where I will attempt to show that the
specific aesthetics of Jorn’s study are in fact based on a complex
interplay between theoretical argumentation and the material-
ity of the book.

Held og hasard as book-object

Held og hasard clearly exhibits a highly demanding typography.

In the 96-page book, Jorn works not only with various typefaces,
font sizes, and text colors (red, green, and black), but also with
many instances of italicization and an elaborate paratextual
accompanying work which is characterized by the excessive use
of a total of 41 headings, 133 mottos, and 147 margin notes,

10 For a definition of corresponding research experiments which are

defined by moments of performativity, seriality, and materiality, see
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Experiment, Differenz, Schrift. Zur Geschichte
epistemischer Dinge (Marburg an der Lahn: Basilisken-Presse, 1992).
For more information on the immediate circle of Jorn and accompa-
nying attempts to think of aesthetics and epistemology together, see
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Der Kupferstecher und der Philosoph. Albert
Flocon trifft Gaston Bachelard (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2016).
For extensive information on the relationship between Jorn and Bach-
elard, including in relation to his engagement with Flocon, see Karen
Kurczynski, “Materialism and Intersubjectivity in Cobra,” in Natalie
Adamson and Steven Harris, eds., Material Imagination. Art in Europe,
1946–1972 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), pp. 44–65.

91
Klaus Müller-Wille

as well as a corresponding amount of blank space (different

indentations and a relatively wide margin. (Fig. 1) The quality
of the page layout is particularly surprising when you consider
that the penniless artist’s book emerged from the correction
press of the provincial printer Emil Stecher in Silkeborg.
With the page layout of his aesthetic study, where he works
above all with the spatial grouping of numerous separate text
blocks, Jorn is certainly referencing the Bauhausbücher tradi-
tion, which also used this technology to bring theoretical argu-
mentation and typographic design into a calculated interrela-
tionship.11 He was also, starting with his close collaboration
with Le Corbusier on the World’s Fair of 1938, exceptionally
well-informed about related developments in French architec-
tural theory, where questions concerning the theory of space
were developed with the help of an ingenious design of book
and text spaces.12
Nevertheless, we may also name significant differences
which distinguish Held og hasard from the various functional-
istic currents which characterized the entanglement of book
design and theory in the 1920s and 30s. Jorn, for example, did
not typically work with a modernity-signaling sans serif font,
and in this book he also dispensed with photographic images
and related montage techniques, in contrast to the articles he
published in the late 1940s in Danish, Swedish, and Dutch archi-
tectural magazines. Both of the dominant fonts which Jorn uses
in the main text and in the headers remind one of commercial
graphics of the 1950s. The craftsman-like design of the print
layout—the various print colors, the noticeable traces of the

11 Jorn himself refers to the Bauhausbücher as implicit models in an

unpublished afterword to Held og hasard, which is available in the Held
og hasard file in the Archive of Museum Jorn.
12 Concerning Le Corbusier as a central catalyst for Jorn’s book art
work, see Klaus Müller-Wille, “From Imaginary Exhibitions to Urban
Book Spaces – Asger Jorn and Le Corbusier as Architects of the Book,”
in Ruth Baumeister, ed., What Moves Us? Le Corbusier and Asger Jorn in
Art and Architecture (Zurich: Schiedegger & Spiess, 2015), pp. 88–93.

92
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

Fig. 1: Text pages from the original edition of Held og hasard.

93
Klaus Müller-Wille

Fig. 2: Cover of the original edition of Held og hasard.

printing process which the sheets, printed on a simple press,

demonstrate—evokes association with early book p ­rinting,
which of course is still strongly oriented towards the form of
medieval codices. Jorn enhanced this impression even more by
placing 79 small colored linoleum prints in the margins of the

94
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

Fig. 3: Cover of the second edition of Held og hasard.

Fig. 4: Text page of the second edition of Held og hasard.

main text. These vignettes, where figural elements are linked

to anthropomorphic and animalistic features with an ornamen-
tal framing, vaguely remind one of the medieval style trends
of Scandinavia. The two different images which make up the
design of the cover (which Jorn made by recycling two earlier
linoleum printing plates) also point in this direction. (Fig. 2)
That this was inspired by early book printing is also suggested
by the fact that the colors of the vignettes vary in the individual
print versions and that the book, printed in a very small edition
of 119 copies, was produced in three series with substantially
different cover designs and paper quality. Each individual copy
exhibits so many differences from the others that they can each
be considered a unique specimen despite the fact that they were
produced as a series.
Interestingly, Jorn published the book one more time in
1963 as a kind of inexpensive version. (Figs. 3 & 4) It appears
in a substantially smaller format as a paperback book, which
enters into Jorn’s writing series Scandinavian Institute for

95
Klaus Müller-Wille

­Comparative Vandalism. The new edition is accompanied not

only by textual changes (Jorn adds several chapters and a series
of prefaces to the study while striking several sections on the
history of philosophy and large portions of the afterword), but
also by wide-ranging changes to the design of the book. The
most noticeable feature of these changes is the removal of the
text margins and marginalia. The marginalia are added to the
text as smaller subheadings, where they take on an entirely new
function. The vignettes which were originally placed in the mar-
gins are redistributed and added to the texts as images. Most
of the vignettes have been substantially enlarged, now covering
half a page, or even the entirety of a page. The linoleum prints
are now stereotyped and no longer appear in color but rather in
black-and-white. These details illustrate the substantial change
in the overall character of the book.
A German translation of the book, published in 1966 by the
Gallery van de Loo in Munich, appeared during Jorn’s lifetime.
Jorn again intervenes massively in the text of the edition: chap-
ters are combined and expanded upon, entirely new sections
are added. Overall, the central concept of genuine aesthetic
research is more intensively developed. Here, it seems to me
decisive that Jorn supplements the original heading “Academic
and Artistic Aesthetics” of the third part of his study with the
concept of an “Aesthetics of Aesthetics.”13 The “aesthetic of aes-
thetics” is noticeable again in the unique design of the book,
which is substantially larger than the Danish second edition. In
this case, too, the book is animated by the play with paratextual
elements. Particularly noticeable here is how these elements
(translations, mottos, vignettes) fill entire pages and thus con-
tribute to properly rhythmizing the book.
The first edition of Held og hasard is characterized on the
whole by a curious stylistic heterogeneity. The attempt to draw
a connection to Renaissance book printing art (reminding one
of the Arts and Crafts movement) is in substantial tension with

13 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 75.

96
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

the elements that remind one much more of the modernist

urge of the avant-garde or simply book design of the 1950s. The
impression of heterogeneity is enhanced by the re-publications
of the book, both of which are strongly distinguished from the
original. In the following, I will explore the question of whether
and to what degree there is or is not a connection between the
notable aesthetic of the book as object and the aesthetic theory
developed in the framework of this book.

Jorn’s extreme phenomenology of the aesthetic

The pivot point of the speculative theory developed in the con-

text of Held og hasard is Jorn’s critical engagement with Imman-
uel Kant’s Critique of Judgment and its understanding of beauty
as the object of disinterested pleasure. Jorn does not polemicize
directly against this definition but instead uses it as a starting
point for counterintuitively defining the aesthetic as the non-
beautiful. Unlike Kant, he is interested in judgments evoked
by a contradictory feeling of displeasure which simultaneously
release a desire. This specific definition of the aesthetic already
points to the fact that Jorn will be occupied with Kant’s analysis
of the sublime over the course of the rest of his argument. In
contrast to Kant, he does not restrict his engagement with the
sublime to the realm of experiences of nature, instead relating
it to other phenomena. Stated concisely, he engages Kant’s idea
that the crisis of imagination triggered by an encounter with
sublime phenomena ultimately contributes to a strengthen-
ing of the supersensory nature of human reason. Jorn criticizes
precisely this form of “sensual megalomania.”14 Like Kant, he is
interested in those phenomena which lead to conflict between
sensuality, imagination, understanding, and reason. Differ-
ently from Kant, however, he does not derive from this conflict

14 “[L]ystbetonede storhetsvansinne.” From the foreword to the sec-

ond edition. Jorn, Held og hasard (1963), p. 13.

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Klaus Müller-Wille

the premature reinforcement of understanding and reason,

instead defining aesthetic experience as a productive destruc-
tion which would allow critical reflection on sensual and ratio-
nal conventions as well as a standardized faculty of desire. In
this way, art is strikingly brought into connection with a crisis of
the ego which can express itself in madness, intoxication, and
other existential experiences.
The passages where Jorn reflects on the interest in intensive
existential experiences triggered by aesthetic phenomena are
certainly among the passages most marked as belonging to their
time. More interesting is his effort to develop an “extreme phe-
nomenology of the aesthetic.”15 Here, the aesthetic is defined by
way of a detour into an idiosyncratic reading of the “analytic of
the sublime” in Kant’s Critique of Judgement as the “formless,”
“abnormal,” “unlimited” or simply the “unknown.” This defini-
tion allows Jorn to radically distance himself from an idea of the
beautiful which is simply in service of formal conventions and
thus gives rise only to judgements of taste which are character-
ized by “disinterested pleasure.” This conclusion, too, is hardly
surprising. More surprising is the persistence with which Jorn
spells out the consequences of his idiosyncratic definition of
the aesthetic as the “introduction of the unknown into a sphere
of interest.”16
The turn away from a Kantian formal aesthetics is accom-
panied first of all by an upgrading of sensual perception and
the concrete and material dimensions of aesthetic phenom-
ena, which challenge accustomed sensual processes. In this
sense, Jorn explicitly speaks out in favor of a rehabilitation of
Baumgarten’s aesthetics as against Kant’s. The turn from the
idealistically-framed aesthetics of Kant is moreover linked to
the idea of a consistently material aesthetics which attempts to

15 Jorn, Held og hasard (1952), p. 5.

16 Undated letter from Asger Jorn to Bent Schultzer, Archive of the
Museum Jorn, Silkeborg.

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Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

abstain from any idea of the “supernatural,” whatever form it

might take.
The upgrading of the material dimensions of aesthetic
phenomena is accompanied by an approach to experimental
strategies which are intended, analogously to corresponding
procedures in the natural sciences, to generate new substances
and materials. Jorn starts from the idea of contingent events,
similarly to research experiments in the natural sciences, the
function of which is not to answer questions or hypotheses but
rather to generate new and interesting questions and prob-
lems in the first place. Jorn works in this context with the idea
of a continually rediscoverable “unnaturalness” of “the natu-
ral,” with which idea he again turns away from concepts of the
“supernatural.” Here, artistic experiments are defined, in con-
trast to scientific experiments, by the fact that the researchers
are themselves part of the structure of the experiment and thus
confronted with the “unnaturalness” of the ideas they have of
their own selves.
The strongly performative character of Jorn’s aesthet-
ics is already expressed in the key concept of the experiment.
Aesthetic experiments take place serially via “unanticipated
occurrences”17 which always have only a retroactive effect on
the experimental structure. Jorn makes the performative char-
acter of his aesthetics clear by explicitly defining aesthetic phe-
nomena as practices and placing them in a relationship to cor-
responding strategies of play, theater, and celebration.
But these three key concepts, which we may link with the
keywords sensuality, materiality, event, and performativity, are
also not enough to cover the full scope of Jorn’s theoretical
speculations. Jorn is fully aware that his critical engagement
with Kant also problematizes Kant’s concept of an autonomous
aesthetics. As a representative of an avant-garde movement,
Jorn advocates for a disorderly concept of the aesthetic which
is not defined separately from ethics, religion, economics, or

17 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 34.

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Klaus Müller-Wille

s­ cience, but rather the opposite: it is conceived of as an integral

component of the ethical, the religious, the economic, and of
science. In the relevant sections, Jorn repeatedly points out—
fully in line with the spirit of the anthropological turn of the
1950s—that art has its origins in primitive—magical, ecstatic,
and ritualized—cult practices, the potential of which has, how-
ever, been repressed.
With his interest in experimental artistic strategies which
are applicable outside of art institutions and which are intended
to exercise influence on everyday life and politics, strategies
already formulated in Held og hasard, Jorn anticipates essen-
tial attitudes which he will later formulate in more depth in
the context of the Situationist International. Even this rough
paraphrase of the work suggests that it would have been thor-
oughly rewarding for the University of Copenhagen’s philoso-
phy department to seriously engage with the aesthetic positions
developed in the study. At the same time, this paraphrase seems
to me to be lacking the core of Jorn’s theory. In both his corre-
spondence with Schultzer and over the course of the book, Jorn
again and again draws attention to the fact that his primary goal
with Held og hasard was to established a different—genuinely
aesthetic—form of theoretical construction.

Word disputes and the printing process:

theory as performance

To begin with, we can assume that Jorn attempts to illustrate

the relevance of his philosophical argument simply through
the specific design of his treatise as an artist’s book. Naturally,
the recipients of the book are confronted, through its specific
material design, with an immediate sensual experience, focused
primarily on the colorful vignettes. In his later writings, Jorn
will insist on the independence of a corresponding figurative
logic which embodies its own kind of rationality precisely on

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Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

the basis of its lacking conceptuality.18 In this sense, one could

claim that Jorn completes his discursive conclusions through a
purely figurative argumentation of the vignettes.
Jorn’s thoughts on materiality and event may also be well-
illustrated by the small linoleum prints. Knut Stene Johansen,
for example, was able to demonstrate in an inspiring section
of his Jorn monograph that Jorn was repeatedly modifying the
linoleum prints over the course of book production, during
which he also used surprising techniques, for example putting
imprints of small wooden boards underneath the linoleum
prints.19 In other words, these linoleum prints follow the perfor-
mative logic of series in which contingent events occuring dur-
ing the printing process are used for continual reworkings and
modifications of the printing plates.
A danger of related, graphics-focused interpretations is that
they ultimately threaten to confirm exactly those differences
which Jorn vigorously opposes in the study. Held og hasard is
simply not understood to be an aesthetic treatise but solely an
artistic experiment. It also seems problematic to me to inter-
pret the vignettes as a kind of illustration of the theoretical text,
or the theoretical text as simple commentary on the vignettes.
This way of reading the book would shift our attention to the
other form of theory construction around which Jorn’s discur-
sive argumentation revolves. In this sense, the question of the
aesthetic design of the text itself seems to be just as relevant as
that regarding the design of the vignettes.
It would be simple to draw attention to the literary charac-
ter of the study, which, as mentioned above, is marked by loose
leaps in thought, associations, ambiguous uses of terminol-
ogy, and frequently confusing cross-linkages to p ­ sychoanalytic,

18 For more detailed information, see Helle Brøns, “In the Beginning
was the Image,” in Museum Jorn, ed., In the Beginning was the Image.
Asger Jorn i Canica Kunstsamling (Silkeborg: Museum Jorn, 2016),
pp. 14–41.
19 Knut Stene-Johansen, Nødinnganger. Studier i Asger Jorn. Essay
(Oslo: Strandberg, 2014), pp. 45–62.

101
Klaus Müller-Wille

economic, and anthropological discourses. Contemporaries

of Jorn simply considered his writings unreadable due to
their chaotic form of argumentation. In the book itself, Jorn
attempts to explain the calculus of his writing style. In a capital
with the characteristic title “A Dispute About Words,”20 he sug-
gests modifying how we think about our targeted handling of
language:

Language is the key to understanding the new because it

changes context and sense in the old as soon as new experi-
ences appear. The word must thus undergo a constant shift
in meaning.21

How exactly Jorn thinks about the performative use of language

also becomes clear in a connected section, where he compares
the idea of the word-as-beginning of the Gospel of John with the
idea of an act-as-beginning: “The act gives rise to thoughts.”22
Decisive for my interpretation of the text is the fact that Jorn
himself attempts to make use of the performative principle
of the shifting meanings of words in Held og hasard. The text
clearly places the shifts in the term “aesthetics” at center stage,
a term which is continually developed in new contexts and is
thus constantly being redefined. This primarily occurs with the
help of a series of 18 one- or two-page chapters whose headings
all begin with the identical “Aesthetics as…” before defining the
term through a cascade of different concepts. In an italicized
passage, Jorn brings this situation of shifting meanings to a
head with a series of paradoxical formulations and oxymorons:

The truth of aesthetics is nothing more than the naturalness of

the unnatural, the humanity of the inhuman, the health in the
abnormal and sick, the clarity of darkness, the happiness of

20 Jorn, Gedanken eines Künstlers, p. 101.

21 Ibid.
22 Ibid., p. 102.

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Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

unhappiness, the worth and power of the unworthy and power-

less, the meaning of the meaningless, the trace of the traceless,
the reality of the unreal, the rights and truth of reluctance, of
disgust, disloyalty, disrespect, disobedience, injustice, reck-
lessness, cynicism, distrust, disingenuousness, falseness,
amorality, irresponsibility, untruthfulness, of crime and law-
lessness, the order and utility of the moody, volatile, dreadful,
doubtful, uneven, uncommon, and misplaced, as well as of the
inapplicable, useless, unfit, disorderly, and impractical, in
short, which is uninteresting except through its immediate
effect, the new, radical, original and experimental, the fertil-
ity of the earthquake.23

In the foreword to the second edition of the book, Jorn attempts

to explain the affinity of this type of performative language play
with his critique of Kant’s aesthetics and, not least, with his
attempt to practice a different form of theory construction. He
draws attention, at least indirectly, to the creative form of his
ongoing “theatrical” conceptual work, which is significantly
defined in connection with the feelings of pleasure and displea-
sure:

Kant emphasizes “that there is no transition from concepts

to the feelings of pleasure and displeasure”—and I gladly
admit this. At the same time, I do want to maintain that
there is a transition from the feelings of pleasure and dis-
pleasure to concepts, that there has never been a newly gen-
erated concept which has not been experienced as a symp-
tomatic demand, provoked by the feelings of pleasure and
displeasure.24

23 Ibid., p. 37.
24 From the foreword to the second edition. Jorn, Held og hasard
(1963), p. 13. (The quote alludes to Chapter Six of the Critique of Judg-
ment).

103
Klaus Müller-Wille

This passage, from a paratext which was added later, also indi-
rectly illustrates that Jorn is not at all restricting his experimen-
tal writing style to playing with concepts. Throughout the text,
he works with continual shifts in meaning. The new edition, for
example, is supplemented not only with the series title “Med-
delelse fra Skandinavisk Institut for Sammenlignende Vandal-
isme” (“Message from the Scandinavian Institute for Compara-
tive Vandalism”) but also with an extensive cover blurb and a
new foreword. These new paratexts allow the entire study to be
perceived and reinterpreted from a different perspective. The
importance of Jorn’s play with different paratexts can also be
illustrated by the genesis of the text, which he characteristically
archived in great detail. The typescript of the first edition, acces-
sible in the archives of the Museum Jorn, has a total of four fur-
ther forewords which deviate from the one in the published edi-
tion. Particularly interesting are the forewords to the apparently
planned Swedish, German, and French editions, which show
how purposefully Jorn attempts to modify the overall character
of the study in terms of its framing.
Jorn’s experimental use of language relates not only to
semantic questions but also to the handling of the material of
signs itself. His semiotic awareness should not at all be surpris-
ing. As early as 1944, he published the rather long article “De
profetiske harper” (“The Prophetic Harp”), where he explicitly
considers the visuality of written language and a related text-
image aesthetics.25 Jorn justifies his interest in written ­language

25 Asger Jørgensen (Jorn), “De profetiske harper,” Helhesten 2,

no. 5/6 (1944): pp. 145–154. See also Klaus Müller-Wille, “Prophetische
Harfen, analphabetischer Illettrismus und Gastrophonie. Asger Jorn
und die Dinglichkeit der Sprache,” in Sandro Zanetti, ed., Themenheft
“Wortdinge/Word as Things/Mots-choses,” figurationen 14, no. 2 (2013):
pp. 101–115. Jorn’s artistic engagement with the visuality and material-
ity of writing is summarized especially in the peinture-mots which Jorn
completed in 1953 together with Christian Dotremont. See Klaus Mül-
ler-Wille, “From Word-Pictures to the Wild Architecture of the Book.
Asger Jorn’s early Book Art (1933–1952),” in Dorthe Aagesen and Helle
Brøns, eds., Asger Jorn. Restless Rebel (Copenhagen: Statens Museum
for Kunst / Munich: Prestel, 2014), pp. 94–109.

104
Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

with the semiotic argument that it is in possession of a higher

degree of complexity than other signs. Writing can be read,
heard, seen, felt, and always interpreted differently depending
on various modalities of perception. Held og hasard, too, with
its conspicuous typography, stimulates reflection on the phe-
nomenon of writing’s visual and figurative dimension. However
in this case—and this seems decisive to me—the other (let us
call it immediate-sensual) perception of the image of writing
is accompanied by a reflection on the (often repressed) mate-
rial basis of theoretical texts. This points to a general aesthetic
dimension of theoretical texts, which are always linked to a spe-
cific page layout or paratextual phenomena like headings, mar-
ginalia, or tables of contents.26
But the unique design of the book does more than just
make the recipient aware of the literally material foundation of
theory: Jorn also uses experimental procedures to continually
modify the materiality of the book to effect a change in its char-
acter. Interestingly, the writing and printing processes seem
to directly overlap during the production of the book. This can
at least be inferred from the anecdotal notes of one of the two
printers, who reports how Jorn continued working on the man-
uscripts parallel to the printing process.27 The material in the
archive confirms this account.28 While the first typescripts still

26 See also Johanna Drucker, Graphesis. Visual Forms of Knowledge

Production (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
27 Chas Stecher, “En sjælden bog,” in Troels Andersen and Aksel Evin
Olesen, eds., Erindringer om Asger Jorn (Silkeborg: Galerie Moderne,
1982), pp. 121–126.
28 The material preserved in the archive of the Museum Jorn enables
a reconstruction of the overall writing and printing process of the vari-
ous editions of Held og hasard. Alongside manuscripts and typescripts
for the first edition, which include a total of six files, various print ver-
sions of the first edition (with and without vignettes) are accessible,
along with a dummy with glued-in text blocks and drawings of the sec-
ond edition. In addition, a few letters between Jorn and the printing
office Stecher are documented. Thomas Hvid Kromann informed me
that Jacqueline de Jong’s archive at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manu-
script Library (New Haven) also contains some drafts to the second edi-
tion of the book.

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Klaus Müller-Wille

present a consistent text which largely overlaps with the main

text of the edition, the correlation between the typescript and
the printed book visibly dissolves. The condition of the type-
script itself also markedly changes. Overall, the text becomes
more fragmentary: in some cases, only slips of paper remain
bearing individual text blocks or quotes. Over the course of the
text, Jorn transitions more and more to recycling text blocks
which he takes from already-published essays. I consider this
reference to the specific genesis of the text highly significant.
First of all, the archival material makes clear that Jorn is apply-
ing the experimental procedures which he uses for the printing
of graphics explicitly to the process of text production, where he
also attempts to make productive use of the particular dynamic
which characterizes the printing process. The resulting interac-
tions between the printing and writing processes may be rela-
tively well demonstrated. The first typescripts present a pure
running text to which details regarding headers and marginalia
are only subsequently added. In later typescripts, in contrast,
the visual appearance of the book’s text is directly transferred
to a typewriter with the mottos, marginalia, and headers. Even
the variety of different print versions of the book illustrates that
Jorn is consciously attempting to employ the manual labor of
the production process as an experimental procedure. After an
initial printing of the book without vignettes, which was bound
into several booklets, an edition with several linoleum prints
was produced, before books were ultimately printed where the
margins are littered with vignettes. The cover of the book, too,
was in a constant state of change.
The critical element in all of this is that the book came into
being not in Jorn’s head but instead over the course of a con-
tinual dialogue with the employees and machines of the print-
ing press. It is not surprising that Jorn acknowledges the role
of the typographer Johs. Gregersen and those of the correction
press of the Emil Stecher printing house in one of the paratexts
to Held og hasard. Likewise, it seems no coincidence to me that
Jorn documents and archives the genesis of the study itself as

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Material Aesthetics: Asger Jorn

an essential component of the concept of aesthetic theory con-

struction developed in it. Ultimately, the significant interven-
tions in the reissue and translation of the book show that Jorn
is attempting to intensify his considerations of the materiality
and processuality of aesthetic modes of procedure in his experi-
mental engagement with the written material of his own study
of art theory. One open question is the extent to which this pro-
cedure ultimately forced Jorn to reformulate essential positions
of his aesthetics. In this sense, too, we could claim that both
Jorn’s attempt to rehabilitate the concept of form in Pour la
forme (1957) and his politically-motivated situationist theories
are already laid out in the “Aesthetics of Aesthetics” which he
practices in his continual reproduction of Held og hasard.

107
Sylvia Sasse

The Theoretical Act

Literature is “not simply the use of language but rather its artis-
tic knowledge [poznanie]”1 wrote Mikhail Bakhtin in the mid-
1950s in a text which remains only as a fragment. With this
sentence, he is saying something—almost as an afterthought—
not just about literature: he is formulating his philosophical
interest in literary texts. For him, literature is not just a specific
“speech genre” which sometimes generates linguistic or theo-
retical knowledge, but one which, above all, makes this knowl-
edge perceptible. To capture this idea conceptually, Bakhtin
calls the artistic perception of literature an “obraz of language,
as the artistic self-understanding of language” and the “third
dimension of language.”2 In Russian, obraz means “image”
or “shape,” this shape being conceived of by Bakhtin as some-
thing not static but process-oriented, as a theater of language.
He thus writes in this text of a simultaneous seeing (videnie)
and experiencing (pereživanie) of language through language,
which he conceives of as a reflexive interrelation between a lan-
guage which shows and a language which is shown. Bakhtin
thus takes as his starting point that we are simultaneously in
this image and outside of it: “We live from inside of it and see it
from the outside.”3
With his use of the term seeing (videnie), Bakhtin is inten-
tionally alluding to one of the possible etymologies of θεωρία
(theōria), which connects theater and theory, seeing and/
as thinking. Theōria can refer to various things: seeing as an

1 Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “Jazyk v khudozhestvennoi literature,” in

Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 5, Raboty 1940-kh –
nachala 1960-kh godov (Moscow, 1996), p. 287–297, here p. 287 [trans-
lated from Russian].
2 Ibid., p. 287.
3 Ibid., p. 291.

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Sylvia Sasse

event (θέα—thea) or, relatedly, experience (θεώμαι—theōmai),

e.g. with “amazement,”4 or more concretely θεωροί or θεαροί
­(theoroi), the term in Ancient Greece for viewers or observers,
envoys sent in an official capacity by the state to consult oracles,
attend rituals, and to report on these and ensure their obser-
vance. My intention is not to overstrain these associations or
this etymology, but instead to more closely evaluate this theo-
retical act of looking and thus to foreground the performative
dimension of theory.

“Inner reflexivity”

From this point on, I will no longer refer to the reflexive event
as described by Bakhtin as the “image” or “shape” of language
but rather as a “theoretical act.” A theoretical act of this kind is
immanent not only to literature but also to other forms of artis-
tic expression. The fact that Bakhtin uses the terms “image” or
“shape” or “object” while nonetheless speaking of an event, of
an act of seeing, or, in other contexts, of an aesthetic activity
or aesthetic act, already indicates that he thinks of the image
(obraz) itself as a kind of image-act, although less in the sense
of an image that performatively generates a reality and more in
the sense of an image where something happens, where theory
takes place.
The philosopher and art historian Louis Marin points out a
similar event in art, especially in painting. In his book Opacité de
la peinture, he writes of an “inner reflexivity”5 of art but refers to
this inner reflexivity as a “theoretical object.” By inner reflexiv-
ity, Marin also means an event, an implicit collection of expres-
sive content concealed in the “historical object” which says

4 See the contributions by Dieter Mersch and Benno Wirz in this

­volume.
5 Louis Marin, Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation en
Quattrocento (1989) (Paris: Éditions de l'École des hautes études en
­sciences sociales, 2006).

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The Theoretical Act

something while simultaneously showing something, namely

showing itself to be a thing which shows. It is also uncommon
for Marin to name that which he describes as act, i.e. art which
shows itself as art, which performs this reflexive act of self-refer-
ence. Here we could also mention Hubert Damisch and Mieke
Bal, who both take up the topic of the theoretical object of art.
In Damisch’s The Origin of Perspective, for example, he analyzes
the artistic methods which generate a central perspective that
can be seen, while at the same time generating a way of seeing.
He sees here a model of thought, a “specific (visual) form of
reflection.”6
Even if Bakhtin and Marin characterize that which I call
here a theoretical act as an image or object, they are describ-
ing a reflexive process, a relational act between form, content,
material, and performance which emphasizes the perception of
art as art. In the early 20th century, under the heading of artistic
self-reflexivity or auto-reflexivity, there was already major inter-
est in this or a similar process in literary studies as well as in
film and art theory. But this “inner reflexivity” emphasizes other
features which we could call, using the vocabulary of Russian
formalism, not an “attitude towards the utterance” (ustanovka
na vyraženie) but an attitude towards the process of reference,
towards the performance of referentiality.
It was Roman Jakobson who, starting in 1921, spoke of
“poeticity” (poetičnost’) and later the “poetic function of lan-
guage,” ideas which would go on to have a major impact on
literary theory. But Jakobson was not primarily focused on the
act or process of self-reflection. While self-reflexivity, accord-
ing to Jakobson, draws attention back to the material, “inner

6 See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (Cambridge MA:

The M.I.T. Press, 1995); Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio. Contemporary
Art, Preposterous History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
p. 48; Marcel Finke, “Denken (mit) der Kunst oder: Was ist ein theo-
retisches Objekt?” 4.11.2014, wissenderkünste, https://wissenderkue-
nste.de/texte/ausgabe-3/denken-mit-der-kunst-oder-was-ist-ein-­
theoretisches-objekt/ (accessed: 1.11.2018).

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Sylvia Sasse

r­ eflexivity” instead concerns the question of how art refers to

itself as art and how in doing so it reveals itself as art. Jakobson,
who distinguished between a referential, poetic, and metalin-
guistic function, the attitude towards the code, did not see an
inner reflexivity at work in the poetic function or self-reflexivity
which would cause an act of self-showing as art to become an
artistic-theoretical act.
Marin and Bakhtin, on the other hand, were interested in
precisely this theoretical act, in the “inner reflexivity” of art as
art. Bakhtin distances himself from formalist and structuralist
theories, although he remains thoroughly interested in the idea
of literature as the artistic knowledge of language. He thinks
differently from Jacobson, however, especially when he writes
that we are both “inside” and “outside” of language. According
to Bakhtin, the essence of artistic perception lies in the dou-
bling of experiencing and seeing. If we think through the impli-
cations of what Bakhtin writes, literature, as artistic perception,
implies a reflexive act. This consists of simultaneously moving
within language and of showing an outside, a seeing (videnie)7 of
language or a view onto language in literature. This model can
also be applied to other art forms and their respective media.
The relationship between the medium which shows and the
medium which, in being shown, shows itself, is revealed in the
theoretical act.
Only in this way, I suggest, can we continue to think through
the implications of the self-referentiality of artistic works.

7 Bakhtin uses the word videnie, which literally translated means

“seeing” or “sight,” in a more comprehensive sense, specifically as an
active aesthetic perception. He also however translates Kant’s term
“Anschauung” (perspective) with videnie. Rainer Grübel and Ulrich
Schmid point out that Friedrich Theodor Vischer had already referred
to Anschauung as the “foundation of active creative fantasy,” in Fried-
rich Theodor Vischer, Ästhetik oder Wissenschaft des Schönen (second
edition) (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1922), p. 375. See “Stellenkommen-
tar,” in Mikhail M. Bakhtin, Autor und Held in der ästhetischen Tätigkeit,
ed. Rainer Grübel, Edward Kowalski and Ulrich Schmid, trans. Hans
Günter et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), p. 288.

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The Theoretical Act

These works no longer simply refer to themselves as something

which has been made, as works of art; instead, this act of refer-
ence becomes a more clearly central element in artistic activity,
precisely because it characterizes theoretical activity. It then no
longer suffices, as so often happens, to speak of simple self-ref-
erentiality, as this expresses nothing in and of itself and even
sometimes devolves into a mere pose. We must instead con-
ceive of and analyze the act of self-reference as art as a practice
or method, an implicit theoretical accomplishment of art.
Furthermore, this theoretical act itself should not be
thought of as one which takes place in isolation within an art-
work, but rather as a reflexive one which functions dialogically,
participatively, and with reference to other artistic works. The
theoretical act—to continue to think with Bakhtin—thus con-
cerns not only an “inner reflexivity” but also at the same time
an “outer reflexivity” which places a text or work of art into a
relationship with other works of art and thus also with theories
and other theoretical remains8 or acts.

Reflexive relationships

Bakhtin became famous not for his thoughts on literature as

the artistic perception of language but rather for his dialogism
theory, which Julia Kristeva popularized in 1967 with the term
“intertextuality.” For Kristeva, it was Bakhtin who understood
literature as a continual and inconclusive process of writing-
reading (écriture-lecture) and showed how texts enter both spa-
tially and temporally (khronotopos) into a permanent reflexive
relationship with other texts. Kristeva understood this writing-
reading process as an absorption and permanent transfor-
mation of existing texts in literature and through literature, a
process which is also relevant for the production of theory. But
although she speaks of absorption and transformation, she

8 See Dorota Sajewska’s essay in this volume.

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Sylvia Sasse

mainly reads Bakhtin as a structuralist, reading him through

the lens of Roman Jakobson and thus simultaneously obstruct-
ing our view of process and event, which is what concerned
Bakhtin above all.
Bakhtin found it important to emphasize that texts, in their
relationship to other texts, always contain the event of this
relationship, this act of other-reference, as another reflexive
and epistemological act which we could refer to as an outward-
oriented reflexivity. A text which refers to another text, which
cites, continues, and rewrites it, can only place itself and the
other text into a reflexive relationship which aims at both self-
and other-recognition. Or even: writing is necessarily dialogic;
writing and thinking are impossible without referentiality. For
this reason, Bakhtin also insisted on claiming that the word is
in and of itself dialogic.
Roland Barthes, who shortly after meeting Kristeva spoke
of “intertextuality” in an interview and then adapted Kristeva’s
idea of writing-reading in his famous text on the “death of the
author,” focused his attention much more on the act charac-
ter of this writing-reading . In this interview, Barthes initially
speaks just like Kristeva of texts which “enter into dialogue with
one another,”9 but in “The Death of the Author” he links writ-
ing-as-reading with ideas from speech act theory. He writes that
writing is a performance, and that an utterance has “no other
content than the act by which it is uttered.”10
This interweaving of speech act theory and intertextuality,
already begun in Barthes, aims at the dialogic act as a reflexive
act, at an act which brings into view how a word, a sentence, or
a text constitutes itself in relation to another text as text. That
which I call “outer reflexivity” here, is a reflexivity which hap-

9 Roland Barthes, “Énonciation, intersubjectivité, intertextualité et

analyse psychanalytique et linguistique de la lecture” (1967), sprache
und literatur 47 (2018): p. 95–107, here p. 104.
10 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen: The Magazine
in a Box, 5+6 (1967). Presented by Ubu: UbuWeb: http://www.ubu.com/
aspen/aspen5and6/index.html.

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The Theoretical Act

pens through contact with another text, another word, another

utterance.
In Bakhtin, it is literature itself (and not literary theory)
which knows that this understanding of language or the word
is always already dialogic: literature depicts this relationship. It
is in Dostoevsky that Bakhtin discovers this knowledge, after
lamenting that aesthetics and theory are unable to conceive
of themselves as dialogic and inconclusive. For Bakhtin, this
knowledge is revealed in Dostoevsky in every word, portrayed in
the characters’ utterances, in their relationships to one another
and to the narrator. Dostoevsky understood (Bakhtin claims)
that the activity of aesthetics (and theory) can only be “realistic”
and “ethical” if it does not turn the other, or the subject treated,
into an object but instead enters into dialogue with it. Turning
someone into an object can only occur in theory, aesthetics, or
the law. Only there is it possible to “close off” the other from a
position of total “exteriority.” These moments of “closing off”
are what bother Bakhtin about theoretical and aesthetic activity
and action. To think ethically about theory and aesthetics (ethi-
cal in Bakhtin’s sense) requires thinking from a position of rela-
tional “exteriority” which is always hidden from the other and
which can only grasp its subject incompletely, inconclusively,
and in a process of becoming.
Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky’s novels almost as a stage for
Dostoevsky’s presentation of his theory of language. Accord-
ing to Bakhtin, Dostoevsky shows that literature, and verbal
utterances generally, are always dialogical and that they always
take up another text or another word, transform it, repulse it,
struggle against it, etc. Bakhtin thus sees in Dostoevsky the
realization of the terminological point of the words “responsi-
bility” and “event,” a terminological point which had already
interested him in his early philosophical writings. Dostoevsky,
according to Bakhtin, conceived of “responsibility” as a respon-
sive act or event, sobytie in Russian, as a form of “co-being.”
Being responsible then means taking part in being in the here
and now, means not referring to Being as a theoretical ­construct

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Sylvia Sasse

or making up an alibi, i.e. pretending that one is not taking part

in the action that one is actively performing—as if one were
somewhere else.
Bakhtin thus distinguishes in Toward a philosophy of the
act between an aesthetic or abstract-theoretical act and an ethi-
cal act. In the here and now, it is impossible to fully penetrate
and see the other as a whole; something always remains hidden
from the observer. As Bakhtin sees it, Dostoevsky transferred
this relationship between self and other in his novels to the rela-
tionship between narrator and character. For Dostoevsky per-
forms a perspective or position change which enables the tran-
sition from “he” to “you,” to a “fully valid ‘thou,’ that is, another
and other autonomous ‘I’”: 11

The author’s design for a character is a design for discourse

(slovo). Thus the author’s discourse about a character is dis-
course about discourse. It is oriented toward the hero as if
toward a discourse, and is therefore dialogically addressed
to him. By the very construction of the novel, the author
speaks not about a character, but with him.12

What Bakhtin demanded of theory and aesthetics was that both

also think dialogically and thus conceive of theory and aesthet-
ics themselves as—in Kristeva’s terms—an écriture-lecture
which must necessarily reflect upon the fact that it is not only
something artificial, but also that references are made to previ-
ous texts, genres, ways of writing, materials, and narration in
this moment of artifice and thought, references which also gen-
erate new meanings.

11 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans.

Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), p. 63.
12 Ibid. p. 63. Emerson’s English translation chooses the word “dis-
course” as a translation of slovo (“word”), a translation which already
points at a postmodern form of reading. German translations, on the
other hand, typically choose to translate it as Wort, “word.”

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The Theoretical Act

But it is not at all necessary, as Bakhtin does, to focus on the

presentation of the dialogical as an immanent theory of litera-
ture. It is also useful to pursue other possible forms of realiza-
tion of theoretical acts. Barthes, for example, begins his essay
on the “Death of the Author” with Mallarmé, whom he not only
reads as a subject of study but as an author who, as Barthes
writes, above all saw and foresaw “the necessity of substituting
language itself for the man who hitherto was supposed to own
it.” Barthes, too, sees in Mallarmé’s texts something staged:
a knowledge that “to write is to reach, through a preexisting
impersonality […] that point where language alone acts, ‘per-
forms,’ and not ‘oneself’.”13
Regardless of whether we share Barthes’ reading of Mal-
larmé or Bakhtin’s reading of Dostoevsky, both saw that which
they called theory already “realized” in literature. The relation-
ship between literature and literary theory can be more closely
or more evidently observed in the parallel emergence of Rus-
sian Futurism and the Formalist School of Russian theory.
While Velimir Khlebnikov presents the “poetry of grammar”
in his texts, e.g. in his “incantation through laughing,” a poem
composed exclusively of variations of the morpheme “laugh,”
Roman Jakobson attempts to understand exactly this form of
presentation in his texts on literature. Khlebnikov’s poems will
later become an example of what Jakobson calls the “poetic
function” of language: he translates Khlebnikov’s method into
the language of theory.
Looked at another way: Jakobson analyzes Khlebnikov’s
method and gives a name to that which the poet does and
shows, how his poems are structured according to poetologi-
cal principles, by reading Khlebnikov’s neologisms as a “poetic
etymology.”14 In contrast to Bakhtin, the division between

13 Barthes, “The Death of the Author.”

14 Roman Jakobson, “Novejshaya russkaya poeziya,” in Selected Writ-
ings, Vol. V, On Verse, Its Masters and Explorers, ed. Stephen Rudy et al.
(The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton, 1979), p. 299–354, here 334.

117
Sylvia Sasse

poetic (self-reflective) and metalinguistic (code-relating) utter-

ances is constitutive in Jakobson. He also notes in his late writ-
ings that the “poet’s metalanguage may lag far behind his poetic
language.”15 Jakobson recognizes metalanguage in Khlebnikov
not in the poem itself but in its paratexts, and specifically only
when the content also explicitly refers to the code. A non-dis-
cursive (i.e. performative) reference to Jakobson’s code thus
remains unnoticed; it is also not thought of as a poetic refer-
ence. It would be interesting, though, especially in Khlebnikov’s
case, to read self-referentiality and referentiality as a poetic act.
For Khlebnikov’s language of stars transforms the act of refer-
entiality as a whole into a poetic process. Thought of in this way,
we are dealing with a process which does not negate referenti-
ality per se, by reading this as a type of thought concerned with
identification or as an always already failed representation or
mimesis, but rather as one which in turn conceives of the pro-
cess of referentiality itself as an artistic utterance—incomplete,
relational, and repetitive.
By more explicitly reading dialogism, self-reference, and
even reference as an act of self-reflection as well as reflection on
other texts and media with extra-literary subjects, the eventness
of literature can come more clearly to the fore.

The theorist as character

Literature and art do not just articulate—with more or less clar-

ity—their own potential theoretical acts: they draw attention to
the act-like character of theory. The artworks of the Moscow con-
ceptualists are the best example of this. The Moscow conceptu-
alists, a group of underground artists and writers in the Soviet
Union from the 1970s to the 1990s, were not only inspired by

15 Roman Jakobson, “Subliminal Verbal Patterning in Poetry,” in

Selected Writings, Vol. III, Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry
(The Hague, Paris, New York: Mouton, 1979), p. 236–147, here p. 139.

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The Theoretical Act

the theory of the French poststructuralists and Bakhtin—they

also produced (artistic) theory themselves. This was partially
for practical reasons, as working underground meant that there
was no public and thus that no analyses, interpretations, or the-
oretical works about their own art could develop. So the artists
themselves discovered theory as a genre and experimented with
typical modes of writing or even invented new ones.
The group Collective Actions, for example, developed a
“practical aesthetic” (Andrei Monastyrsky) and experimented
with the event, time, space, and the relationship of audience and
actor in an empty field near Moscow. The focus was no longer
on the argument but on the action, and theoretical texts were
themselves part of these actions. Yuri Albert and Ilya Kabakov
then discovered the theorist as character. Yuri Albert emerged
himself as a theorist of his own work, posed questions to art or
posited theses about art which appeared in the form of actions,
drawings, paintings, or installations. Kabakov added fictional
persons to his work who commented on his (Kabakov’s) work.
A highly diverse set of interactions emerged between the text of
the interpreting persons and the object of description, an “open
multitude of ambiguous, imperfect, indefinite, and mutually
exclusive commentaries which cannot be combined into a uni-
tary discourse.”16
In the early 1970s, Kabakov ultimately arrived at the idea of
having the work emerge via the commentary or interpretation.
An example of this is his project Exhibition of an Image (Vys-
tavka odnoi kartiny), where Kabakov’s single exhibition object
was an almost blank, white-enameled painting with hardly vis-
ible light green spots hung in an otherwise empty room. Kaba-
kov tape-recorded the reactions of the viewers to the almost
blank picture and later, in a second exhibition, hung them up as
commentary next to the picture. Initially, the viewers invented
a semantics of the image, saying that the almost invisible green

16 Günther Hirt, Sasha Wonders, “Legenden, die nicht enden,”

­Schreibheft 42 (1993): pp. 35–45, here p. 40.

119
Sylvia Sasse

spots were “green tufts of grass in flight.” Another time, they

spoke of forms with art historical significance.
The group Inspection Medical Hermeneutics—Pavel
Pepper­­­
stein, Sergei Anufriev, Yuri Leyderman—radicalized
this commentary technique by turning art historical com-
mentary, aesthetic theory, into a literary genre. We could call
their method theory parody, a parody of theory which revealed
the performativity of theory through exaggeration and defer-
ral. The Inspection Medical Hermeneutics group avoided the
processes of écriture-lecture, made almost extravagant use of
intertextuality and in this way showed its nonsensical, absurd,
and purely artificial side. Reference and citation themselves
became the site of literature.
Dimitri Prigov ultimately developed the paratextual liter-
ary genre of the so-called “pre-statements” (preduvedomleniia)
which he placed before every poem, finally releasing a volume
consisting solely of pre-statements, pre-statements whose ref-
erence body, the poem, was totally lacking. I would like to more
closely examine one of his pre-statements from 1997 with the
simple title Pre-statement, as it can also be read as a scene of
aesthetic theory. Prigov asks what his pre-statements have
to do with his poems. He writes that they are correlated with
a poem, but not in the same way as biography or confession
is related to a poem, “but rather as poems with poems,” and
if they happen to explain something then that is because the
explanation of Jaza the Turkmen is hidden with them.
Jaza the Turkmen, Prigov tells us, answered the question of
why some Turkmen have narrow eyes and others round eyes:

Ha ha! Some Turkmens live in the desert and others in the

mountains. Those who live in the desert pinch their eyes
together—you see everything, you see far, you see every-
thing as far as the ends of the world and everything well!
And the others look around themselves—only mountains

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The Theoretical Act

around, nothing to see around! And so they develop round

eyes.17

Jaza the Turkmen’s explanation is thus one which explains see-

ing and the gaze in terms of what one sees or looks at. We could
call this scene a kind of inverted alienation: art not only changes
the sight of the observer, the artist (or the theorist looking at art)
is herself changed by or shaped what she sees.
Prigov’s pre-statements do more than just explain the
poems: the poems produce the ability to see the pre-statements
in the first place, and vice-versa, as the pre-statements them-
selves then become poems again. Prigov remarks: “Poetry is
in fact not in the word but in the gaze, the focus.”18 If we also
take into account that the Russian word “focus” (fokus) itself
has three different senses—trick, perspective, and magic—
then the gaze is both word and act, and also, because it is both
simultaneously, magic. Theory, i.e. the seeing recognition of
the subject, is thus already contained within the subject. And,
as theory, it again becomes the subject of the poem.

Dialogue with theory

Bakhtin’s relationship to literature was itself dialogic. He did

not—in his own words—write about literature but instead car-
ried out a dialogue with literature. He did not look at literary
texts as objects but as “speech genres” which he could enter
into a dialogic relationship with. The term speech genre origi-
nates in his work and announces that speaking has a genre his-
tory which relates not only to sentences or theses but also to
the mode of their expression. By taking this relationship into
account, we can recognize that writing or speaking with art is

17 Dmitrij A. Prigov, Sbornik preduvedomlenij k raznoobraznym veščam

(Moscow, 1996), p. 5. Translated by Sylvia Sasse.
18 Ibid.

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Sylvia Sasse

part of a two-way interaction which is both dialogic and never

fully controllable.
Bakhtin had this in mind for himself, and he—like
Nietzsche—always saw his own writing process as part of his
theoretical activity. It is thus no surprise that he uses exactly
those terms which constitute dialogism or literature for him.
He referred to his texts as “unfinished.” With this, he takes up
an aspect of dialogism which is not directed towards the past
and towards re-reading but rather to the possible future of art
and of theory.
For Bakhtin, it was always important to leave his own texts
open for potential re-reading, both for his own re-readings
and those of potential others. Inconclusiveness, according
to Bakhtin, is what enables future reception, and specifically
one which can give that which has already been written a new,
different future. A re-reading of this kind does not mean the
repetition of an established thesis but rather the possibility
of re-actualizing and shifting something which has been said
into another spatial and temporal context. Bakhtin calls that
“writing with a backdoor,”19 writing with an exit into another
time and another space—a form of writing or speech which, for
example, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man performed. Kristeva
and Barthes are in many ways the ideal readers of this idea: they
transport the texts into entirely different contexts, where they
can be rewritten and renewed.
I am thinking here of dialogism as an act of reference, as
Bakhtin’s remarks are also relevant for performance theory and
have even already indirectly influenced performance theory.
Rebecca Schneider reads performance as repetition and reitera-
tion, as reappearance and response-ability of gestures and social
practices and thus makes the re- the center of all process-ori-
ented phenomena in art. Like Bakhtin, she describes these pro-
cesses as transgressive, spanning concrete performance in both

19 See Sylvia Sasse, “Hintertüren. Dostoevskij, Nietzsche, Bachtin,”

Die Welt der Slaven 58 (2013): pp. 209–231.

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The Theoretical Act

spatial (cross-spatial) and temporal (cross-temporal) senses.

With this, Schneider freed performance and performance the-
ory from the aura of the unique, isolated event and read acts and
processes which, like texts, are based on a reading-act, i.e. which
constantly take up, repeat, and transform other acts. However,
instead of simply stating this reiteration, as is often done in the
reading of literature, performance theory directs its attention—
due to its subject—entirely to the act itself, thus emphasizing
the form of reference, reiteration as an act.
Here, too, the act is conceived of to a certain extent as a
theoretical process. Here, Schneider cites the theater theorist
Anita Gonzalez, who writes: “Performance Theory can be deliv-
ered through a hand gesture or sketch, embedded in a lecture,
or disseminated within a pause of a sound score.”20 Schnei-
der expands upon this idea of Gonzalez’s by saying that every
moment of a performance or theory “relocates” something by
answering, by transposing the repeated into another time and/
or space. As a performance theorist, she is interested in the act
of relocation itself as act, as performance, and as theoretical
activity.
If we think back to the early stages of literary theory which,
beginning with Bakhtin, “read” performance as a permanent
act of re-reading, and then think of current performance theory,
which conceives of performance as a constant re-performance,
as attempts at critique of ontological theories based on origi-
nality and singularity in both artistic practices, then we discover
not just a single medial transfer of theory but rather a thesis,
especially for literature, which does not appear in the rereading-
based theories named so far. Literature is not just rereading; in
a text, it is not just the act of writing-reading which becomes
visible: literature is also re-performance, a re-performance of

20 Anita Gonzalez, Black Performance Theory (Durham NC: Duke Uni-

versity Press, 2014), p. 6. See also “‘In our Hands: An Aesthetics of Ges-
tural Response-Ability,’ Rebecca Schneider in Conversation with Lucia
Ruprecht,” Performance Philosophy 3, no. 1 (2017): pp. 108–125.

123
Sylvia Sasse

methods and practices, a re-performance of non-discursive ele-

ments of and in literature.
Conceiving of literature as performance, or a theater of
language, enables both the reflexive interplay between repre-
senting and represented language and the reflexive interplay
between texts and other media. Literature both becomes the
stage of language and reveals dimensions of it in the sense of
evidentia. That is what Bakhtin had in mind when he wrote of
literature as the artistic perception of language. By insisting on
the viewing of language through and in literature, his point was
not to say that theory is always already aesthetic, always already
requires a representation of thought—that was his presupposi-
tion. Instead, he wanted to draw our attention to the moment of
this viewing and thus to the event-like nature of theoretical and
aesthetic perception.

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Dorota Sajewska

Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

Contemporary art, a significant feature of which is its affinity

to strategies of repetition and documentary practices, has con-
tributed to the establishment of hybrid forms where a boundary
between artistic practices and aesthetic theories can hardly be
drawn. Artistic phenomena which make use of diverse media
and performative strategies, characterized by intensive inter-
disciplinarity, interdiscursivity, and interculturality, can be
seen as forms of investigation into the relations between and
among the arts as well as between the discourses of (art) history
and (art) theory. The focus on processes of mediation or com-
munication in the artistic act causes a shift in emphasis: from
the artefact to the situational experience of the work in its spa-
tiotemporal dimensions. Every artistic process (not only those
with a supposedly transient character like theater, dance, or
performance art) may thus be treated as an event. The empha-
sis on processes of interaction and mediation transforms the
analysis of art into a sensual experience and simultaneously
into an intellectual reconstruction of a complex and fragmen-
tary epistemological process. The execution of artistic practice
and aesthetic reflection thus occur outside of the principle of
representation, themselves becoming a form of performance in
which sensual and bodily elements cannot be separated from
that which is being discursively and technologically commu-
nicated or mediated. In this way, contemporary performative
art can exert an influence on the form of theoretical (art) dis-
courses, modify their structure, and generate new categories.
And thus this very discourse—whether of artistic practice or art
theory—becomes productive and capable of surpassing its own
limits.
The new mixed forms which go beyond clearly definable
genres and domains of art (like film, video, theater, dance,

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Dorota Sajewska

or performance) and which are intensely engaged with self-

archiving processes and medial interdependencies also lead
to the (further) decentralization of already-existing theories of
performativity. In artistic practices of repetition—e.g. reenact-
ments, re-performances, remixes, performative reconstruc-
tions, or medial-processual installations—we can observe a
stimulating critical engagement with different concepts of per-
formativity which focus on storage possibilities and processes
of the mediation of the event (the performance). Such prac-
tices may be understood as epistemological processes not only
because their methods contain their own interpretation but also
because they are irreducibly connected with art history and the-
ory: the particular refers to the paradigmatic, and the theoreti-
cal concepts are grounded in concrete matter. Contemporary
art thus formulates—in practice and in the language of art—a
series of fundamental questions which were of central interest
to performance art in the 1960s and 1970s and which are also
the core of current theoretical debates concerning performance
and documentation. In the art world today, however, theories
of performativity no longer function as a comprehensive field
of research which is given precedence over practice: rather, as I
intend to show in the following, they function as remains, as a
dead, withered fragment—as a necros which is brought back to
life in art and can itself come to life as an autonomous entity.

Performance and documentation

The “ontology of performance” maintains that performance is

something ephemeral, a singular phenomenon which escapes
any kind of recording, conservation, or preservation and is con-
stituted through its ephemerality—precisely in the moment of
absence. Peggy Phelan clarifies the concept of ephemerality
and non-reproducibility in this way: “Performance cannot be
saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the
circulation of representations of representations: once it does

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Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

so it becomes something other than performance. […] Perfor-

mance […] becomes itself through disappearance.”1 Because
every form of mediation of the acting body through media
(text, image, video) is described as a negation of performance,
the body also, with the performance of an act, “disappears” as
a bearer of meaning and energy and as a medium of sensual
experience. A total disappearance in the present—without vis-
ible traces or material remains—is, according to Phelan, what
makes performance performance.
The “anthropology of performance”2 states in contrast that
performance emerges in repetition, even is repetition, as every
form of human action is characterized by “restored behavior.”3
Performance, Richard Schechner insists, means never happen-
ing for the first time. “Performance means: never for the first
time; for the second to the nth time, twice-behaved behavior.”4
Restored behavior is itself not a performative event but rather
material stored in the body, a bodily remnant of a past process
and at the same time a medium for the production of a new act—
the performance. It should be understood as a living behavior
like clips of film in the hands of a movie director, which can
be “rearranged or reconstructed.”5 From an anthropological
perspective, performance is a self-reflexive act which occurs in
the repetition and re-experiencing of already-existing cultural

1 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and

New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 146.
2 This term refers to the interdisciplinary research program devel-
oped in the 1970s and 1980s by Richard Schechner and Victor Turner.
See Richard Schechner, Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadel-
phia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) and Performance Theory
(London and New York: Routledge, 1988); Victor Turner, From Ritual
to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts
Journal Publications, 1982); Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (Ithaca NY:
Cornell University Press, 1974) and Anthropology of Performance (New
York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1987).
3 Richard Schechner, “Restoration of Behavior,” in Between Theatre
and Anthropology.
4 Ibid., p. 36.
5 Ibid., p. 35.

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Dorota Sajewska

attributions and social values. Because it does not depend on

external, alien documentation (other than the body itself), per-
formance also evades the principle of representation.
We can detect in both positions more than just the juxtapo-
sition of performance and a mediatized culture associated with
the reproduction and circulation—primarily image-based—of
performative capital.6 Both the ontology of the Here and Now
and the anthropological theory of performance are based on a
radical division between live experience and the mediation of
an event through physical media, between bodily co-presence7
and the passive existence of the remnants of an event. Per-
formance is understood as a bodily act—whether ephemeral
or repeatable—which, however, is radically distinguished in
its materiality from the material of the remnants. In critical
engagements with performance, we notice on the one hand an
emphasis on the reciprocal relationship between direct expe-
rience and experience as conveyed by media. Philip Auslander
stresses that only once a performance is documented do we
have evidence of a performance’s existence.8 Medialization
then appears as an effective agent against the tracelessness
of performance art. For Diana Taylor, in turn, performance is
a “vital act of transfer” of social structures, forms of cultural
memory, and identity politics, expressed in a complex interplay
between the archive (i.e. meanings firmly inscribed in texts and
other medial documents) and repertoire (i.e. ephemeral social
practices, gestures, and rituals).9 In none of these concepts,
however, are medial forms of preservation themselves seen as
a living fabric. Instead, with these theories of the performative,

6 See Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture

(London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
7 On the topic of bodily co-presence, see Erika Fischer-Lichte, Ästhe-
tik des Performativen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004).
8 Philip Auslander, “The Performativity of Performance Documen-
tation,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 28, no. 3 (2006): pp. 1–10.
9 Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural
Memory in the Americas (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

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a cultural myth of the acting human body (subject) is created

which places things and places as dead objects in opposition to
organic remains and undefinable abjects. We can consider this
division as a manifestation of the dualisms inherent to West-
ern culture and philosophy: subject-object, human-nonhuman
being, living-nonliving.

Necros as remains

In contrast to this, my intention in this text is to conceive of

performance as an integrated functional relationship between
homogenization and differentiation, as a complex interaction
between the procedures of academic research (and cultural
theory) and artistic practices. To do this, I will outline and
develop the concept of necroperformance. This concept refers to
the relation between living and non-living matter in the context
of the practice and theory of performance as well as in relation
to theories of the archive. To indicate this “threshold body” I
suggest the term necros, already established as a category in
the field of Dead Body Studies, a term which encompasses the
differentiated levels of the meaning and interpretation of the
relationship between life and death, and which also implies the
potential for action of biologically and technologically repro-
ducible matter.10 The relevance of the term necros for perfor-
mance studies has long been overlooked, even though the prob-
lem of disappearance as well as agency and the idea of matter’s
potential for transformation—a certain ontology of the body,
in other words—link both fields of research. In the following, I
will develop a theoretical outline of the reciprocal relationship

10 See Ewa Domańska, Nekros. Ontologia martwego ciała (Warsaw:

PWN, 2017). In this monograph, the concept of necro-vitalism is devel-
oped while suggesting a methodically aware, systematic engagement
with the problem of the dead body in the context of the post-anthropo-
centric turn.

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Dorota Sajewska

between necros and performance11 which has emerged from

analysis of contemporary performative (and often inter- and/or
trans-medial) arts.
The etymology of the word element necro- is i­ lluminating in
this respect, particularly in the context of art’s critical engage-
ment with the processes of archiving performative practices.
The Greek word νεκρός (nekrós) includes the following mean-
ings: dead person, corpse, dead body, cadaver, something
lifeless. In Proto-Indo-European, the predecessor of the Indo-­
Germanic languages, the word has the root *nek-, which can
be variously translated as: perish, die, decay, be destroyed,
disappear, cease, dissolve. As an autonomous linguistic unit,
necros does in fact designate inanimate matter; as a determiner
in composite words, however, it is connected to an ability and
power to act as well as to processuality. Necromancy as the invo-
cation of the dead, necropsy as the display of the dead and the
opening up of corpses, necrocausty as the burning of corpses,
necrobiosis as the gradual dying off of tissues and cells—these
are just some of the striking examples which point to the per-
formative character of necros. The term does not just indicate a
passive remnant of a past process: it should also be understood
as an active medium in the creation of a new event.
The concept of necroperformance suggested here not least
of all attempts to undermine the archive as a traditional insti-
tution, one based on the authoritarian division of the remains
of documents12 as well as on the controlled distribution of

11 I first developed the concept of necroperformance with the help

of historical material in my postdoctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift).
See Dorota Sajewska, Nekroperformans. Kulturowa rekonstrukcja teatru
Wielkiej Wojny (Warsaw: Instytut Teatralny, 2016); engl. edition: Necro-
performance. Cultural Reconstructions of hte War Body, trans. Simon
Wloch (Zurich: diaphanes, 2019).
12 This relates to the conventional distinction in historiography
between tradition and remains, meaning the difference between
sources with and without an intention of historiographical transmission
to posterity. See also Alfred Heuss, “Überrest und Tradition. Zur Phänom-
enologie der historischen Quellen,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 25 (1935):

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Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

­ nowledge and power. According to Jacques Derrida, there is

k
an interference between the mediality of archival techniques
and their power-political implications.13 The act of archiving
itself, which is subject to the archontic principle of “standard-
ization, identification, and classification”14 and is “to be under-
stood not as arbitrary but as a lasting, ordered preservation,”15
is seen simultaneously as a processual event and a necropo-
litical praxis of power. The ordering of the archive, as Achille
Mbembe convincingly explains, is realized by means of a series
of rituals which transform the archive into a place resembling
a temple or cemetery: “fragments of lives and pieces of time are
interred there, their shadows and footprints inscribed on paper
and preserved like so many relics.”16 These fragments of life
are material and immaterial remains, which, through archival
rituals, are not only ordered but above all definitively separated
from life and from the present. Some parts are removed from
the archival space from the outset as unusable remains, while
other parts are classified as preservation-worthy17 documents
whose ontological status as objects is not to be called into ques-
tion. From this perspective, the act of archiving is not simply an

pp. 134–183; Ernst Bernheim, Einleitung in die Geschichts­wissenschaft

(third edition) (Berlin and Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1926).
13 The term “archive,” which is derived from the Greek word for
authority, ἀρχεῖον, and from the Latin word for a safe location for
preservation, arca (meaning something like box, case, chest, cas-
ket), already indicates the political power of the archive. See Jacques
­Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz
(Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996).
14 Ibid., p. 12–13.
15 Rainer Hering and Dietmar Schenk, “Einleitung,” in Wie mächtig
sind die Archive? Perspektiven der Archivwissenschaft (Hamburg: Ham-
burg University Press, 2013), pp. 15–18, here p. 15.
16 Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in
Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris et al., eds., Refiguring the Archive
(­Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002), p. 19.
17 The word “preservation-worthy” here relates to the concept of
“worthy of life” and is conceived with reference to Judith Butler’s con-
cept of the ontology of precarious bodies. See Judith Butler, Frames of
War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009).

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Dorota Sajewska

act of intervention in the past: more than anything, it is a pro-

cess—one based on violence—of generating the past, as only
the archived remains of the experienced present become the
basis of history. The archive itself, on the other hand, becomes
a space where the line between life (bios) and death (nekro)
becomes especially precarious, with the result that politics
transforms into necropolitics.18

Necropolitical performance

The conversion of pre-selected remains into archival sources

entails treating them as lifeless objects, belonging henceforth
only to the past and—like a dead body—surrounded by the
taboo of untouchability. The archive appears from this perspec-
tive as a place where remains are, in a certain sense, interred—
a semi-religious ritual which occurs under the mask of ratio-
nalism and historicity in modern societies. A necropolitical
performance thus takes place in the public institution of the
archive: an act of violence which is committed against histori-
cal remains similarly to a dead body. The corpse itself—as the
French thanatologist Louis-Vincent Thomas insists—is of itself
empty of meaning and must be transformed into a dead cul-
tural object with the help of burial rituals: a process equivalent
to the transition from biology to anthropology.19 According to
Jean-Didier Urbain, the coffin is what symbolically eliminates
the opposition between body and corpse in favor of the for-
mer: in this way, the body takes the place of the corpse.20 With
this, the cultural body—declared to be enduring and imperish-
able—becomes a more reliable body than the biological body.

18 See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public

Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): pp. 11–40.
19 See Louis-Vincent Thomas, Le cadavre. De la biologie à l’anthro­
pologie (Brussels: Éditions Complexe, 1980).
20 See Jean-Didier Urbain, La société de conservation. Étude sémio­­
logique des cimetières d’Occident (Paris: Payot, 1978).

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Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

In contrast to the biological body, it is not subject to the decay

process of organic material, which would bring along with it a
disintegration of meanings and semiotic structures. From an
anthropological perspective, the corpse must become a body,
become a representation of the body, in order to again be inte-
grated into the culture.
Archival remains are subject to a similar process: they are
perceived only as traces, as an incomplete representation of the
past, and require the attribution of an identity as document in
order to again be recognized as a part of society. The archive,
Mbembe clarifies, does in fact define itself through the materi-
ality of the collected objects, but the goal of the archive lies in
the research of extra-material processes—in the construction
of history. The conversion of material remains into documents
is a precondition for the writing of history, which conversely
lends the remains the credibility of a document. Through the
institution of the archive, an assembly of fragments also occurs
which creates an “illusion of completeness and continuity.”21
Nevertheless, things which are robbed of their thingliness in
the process of archiving can regain their materiality as a result
of theoretical and artistic experiments.

Rematerialization of remains

In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault interrogates

the concept of the document as a passive object and opposes
the document of history—something to be interpreted—to the
“monument”: named, following Husserl, a “sensual fundamen-
tal” (Sinnesfundament), a living tissue which one must treat like
an archaeologist treats her sources.
The “monument” should not be treated as a sign of some-
thing else nor as something which “must be pierced if one is to
reach at last the depth of the essential in the place in which it

21 Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” p. 21.

133
Dorota Sajewska

is held in reserve.”22 We must instead accept our discontinuity

and explore the relations within the document itself, in order
in this way to track down “formal analogies” and “translations
of meaning.”23 For Foucault, the horizon of archaeological
research is marked by “a tangle of interpositivities whose lim-
its and points of intersection cannot be fixed in a single opera-
tion,” the aim of archeological comparison never having “a
unifying, but a diversifying, effect.”24 From Foucault’s perspec-
tive, history thus means the transformation and mobilization
of documentary materials—and so a performance of documen-
tation which is itself always a discontinuous form of existence,
which includes the body as the most vital tissue.
Remains and documents are, in and of themselves, mate-
rial which may be examined apart from their possible repre-
sentative function in a situational, subjective, and sensual
experience of matter, which is the basis of necroperformance.
Necroperformance is thus above all a non-normative, situation-
oriented concept defined by way of network-like connections of
action, a concept which can be located at the interface between
various times and spaces, enabling a fragmentary and perfor-
mative experience and reconstruction of history. Necroperfor-
mance thus becomes a tool for reflecting upon and specifying
the relationship between body and archive as well as between
body and documentation. This approach allows us to decon-
struct the cultural and theoretical prejudice that performance
and the body are to be conceived as something purely ephem-
eral which eludes every form of preservation, leaving no lasting
traces behind. More than this, the focus is directed towards the
experience of death inscribed in the performance itself as well
as the performative possibilities of resurrecting that which has
disappeared.

22 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse

on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p. 138.
23 Ibid., p. 163.
24 Ibid., p. 159–160.

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Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

Remains as positive

Reenactment can be considered a particular kind of necrope-

rformative praxis, a kind of epistemological act which can be
situated in the context of its double practical-theoretical sta-
tus in the sphere of reflection concerning the relationship
between performance and archive. A reenactment is, accord-
ing to Rebecca Schneider, a repeated event which—despite
the cultural myth of the ephemerality of performance—leaves
behind “remains.” These take root in the body, which is woven
into “a network of body-to-body transmission of affect and
enactment.”25 From this point of view, the bodies of the par-
ticipants in a reenactment become a kind of ruin, or rather—in
performative repetition—living relics of history. By describing
the body of the reenactor in the excess of repetition as evidence
of the death of someone long dead, Schneider creates the idea
of a body-based witness grounded in experience and not in
historical demonstrability. Schneider conceives of bodily com-
munication as a form of “counter memory.”26 She does not just
see performance as a form of documentation; she also wants
to conceive of the gesture of archiving as itself a performance
subject to the order of the ephemeral.
In her pioneering theory of performativity, Schneider also
points to the incompleteness of repetition, to the fragmentary
and ruin-like nature of past events which can return or be resur-
rected in the form of remains. With the help of these remains,
one experiences what Schneider calls crosstemporality, an inter-
weaving of past and present. At the same time, this chiastic
conception of time enables an understanding of reenactment
as a kind of transaction whose goal is a “ritual negotiation”27
of the event through the production of an active and reflexive

25 Rebecca Schneider, Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of

Theatrical Reenactment (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011),
p. 100.
26 Ibid., p. 105.
27 Ibid., p. 102.

135
Dorota Sajewska

r­ elationship to the past and the dead. According to Schneider,

remains can turn up in a “forgotten encounter,” in an echo of
that which has disappeared: “the reverberations of the over-
looked, the missed, the repressed, the seemingly forgotten.”28
With the concept of remains, Schneider refers to both material
and immaterial remains (“material evidence, haunting trace,
reiterative gesture”),29 in which various temporalities are inter-
woven. Her attention is, however, focused mainly on the labora-
tory of bodies which performatively engage with the incomplete
past: “bodies striking poses, making gestures, voicing calls,
reading words, singing songs, or standing witnesses.”30 This
bodily laboratory is placed in opposition to the normalizing
archive and consequently confirms the experience of time as a
key experience of performance art or “time-based art.”
The concept of necroperformance might also point to a
complex relationship between space and time, since the archi-
val process, as “deposition somewhere, on a stable substrate”31
always also implies a topological allocation. Thus the material
and apparently enduring documentation of a performance—in
the form of photos, films, objects, and event locations—is con-
ceived of as a potentially active phenomenon: an acting necros.
Specifically, this archival material can be decoupled from the
source text and gain an autonomous power which is in a posi-
tion, as Schneider also maintains, to blur the semantic differ-
ence from the original (to the original event)32 in order to set
in motion a new process, a new performance. In this respect,
the acting body no longer appears as a foreign body constantly
threatened by death, as something which eludes the logic of the
archive in its transitoriness. Consequently, the technologies
of storage are no longer simply seen as violent practices of the

28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 37.
30 Ibid., p. 33.
31 Jacques Derrida, “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,” trans.
Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): p. 10.
32 See Schneider, Performing Remains.

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Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

archive: instead, matter itself appears on the scene along with

its own identity and history.

The archive as the site of necroperformance

The archive is here thought of as an experimental space which

precedes the creation of a (theoretical or artistic) narrative of
historical events. Thus, as Bruno Latour has stated, an archive
resembles a laboratory which, in the presence of the researcher,
becomes a site of action where non-human factors come to light
of their own power.33 In the archive, namely, a peculiar perfor-
mance happens which assumes the form of an encounter with
the past: a crossing of the threshold from the present—life—
into the space of time past—of death—is a kind of rite of pas-
sage. The initiatory character of this entrance into the archive
is usually connected with the first, sometimes fully arbitrary
selection of material, which from now on will be subject to
mediations and negotiations, in order to ultimately create the
image of the past construed by the researcher.
The documents located in the archive are then no longer
perceived as dead objects of research which enable a suppos-
edly objective reconstruction of the past or the filling of a priori
assumptions with concrete material. The documents instead
become living matter, which possesses not only a history of
interpretation and use but also its own biography, a past which
is subject to temporal change. To a certain extent, things from
the archive can, in the presence of the researcher, “take on a
body” and behave as active factors in the interaction. Robin Ber-
nstein explains that things contain scripts which provoke cer-
tain forms of behavior and actions and can thus call into ques-
tion the separation of archive and repertoire (i.e. performance):

33 See Bruno Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science

Studies (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999).

137
Dorota Sajewska

Scriptive things are simultaneously archive and repertoire;

therefore, when things enter a repository […], the repertoire
arrives with them. Scriptive things archive the repertoire—
partially and richly, with a sense of openness and flux. To
glimpse past repertoires through the archive requires a
revision of what qualifies as “reading” material evidence.
A scholar understands a thing’s script both by locating the
gestures it cites in its historical location and by physically
interacting with the evidence in the present moment. One
gains performance competence not only by accruing con-
textualizing knowledge but also, crucially, by holding a
thing, manipulating it, shaking it to see what meaningful
gestures tumble forth.34

Physical contact with archival material is not limited to the

sense of vision, which arranges, in an objectifying fashion, for
a precise division into research subject and research object and
as a result commonly leads to a loss of the temporality of things.
In the archive, the senses of touch, hearing, and smell are also
activated, thanks to which things can regain their materiality
(key word: foundation of sense, Sinnesfundament) and can thus
become a performative necros. The presence of multiple sen-
sory components can lead to an affective relationship to the
document and consequently to “a passionate construction of
history.”35 Only once senses other than the visual are brought
into play can a situation appear in the researcher’s activity
where material from the past can come into light on its own by
becoming a subject that actively takes part in the investigation.
Random and fragmentary material in which, as Bjørnar Olsen
rightly notes,36 various temporalities and historical references

34 Robin Bernstein, “Dances with Things: Material Culture and the

Performance of Race,” Social Text 27, no. 4 (2009): pp. 67–94.
35 See Arlette Farge, Le Goût de l’archive (Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
1989).
36 Bjørnar Olsen, In Defense of Things: Archeology and the Ontology of
Objects (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010).

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Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

are present can, in interacting with a human person, not only

shape his or her experiences and memories but also act as mat-
ter as such and transform itself in time without the influence
of human factors. This multitemporal experience, participated
in by multiple senses, allows us to treat the archive as the site
of a specific performance, which the interaction proves to be
particularly important for: participation and bodily presence,
and not the objectifying observation of the researcher, which is
often subject to an a priori assumption.
It is precisely this interplay of the supposedly dead with the
living that makes necroperformance a special event in the pro-
cess of performing research with archival materials which pos-
sess their own body and their own history. Necroperformance
is a cognitive state which also erodes the border between theo-
retical and artistic work by dissolving the opposition between
researcher and researched, between subject and object, theory
and praxis. It is a concept in which existing material gains its
power to act and reveals itself in its concrete shape in the pres-
ence of the investigator or even provokes human action itself.
Necroperformance does not, however, refer to a metaphysi-
cal dimension of things but rather—to speak with Latour—to
a certain “network of actors” between human and nonhuman
factors which enables the emergence of necroperformance.
Things summon us because we open ourselves to their material
and historical existence, to their body and their performative
power. We, with all of our contingencies—not just in the sense
of research but also social, economic, and political—also enter
into a relationship with things as an acting agent. A body thus
answers to the appeal of another body by again prompting this
body to answer. In this way, a reciprocal event arises in which
the usual dualisms and/or oppositions are called into question
and in which not only the past materializes but instead our rela-
tionship to the past. Necroperformance entails that the process
of communicating and transforming the past—which enables
an analysis of cultural practices—can never be considered
definitively concluded.

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Dorota Sajewska

Art as necro-archive

The archive as a site of artistic intervention plays a decisive

role in the concept of necroperformance, as the terms necros
and performance can enter into a particularly complex inter-
relation in contemporary art specifically. The necros is here a
comprehensive material documentation of the past, treated as
an agent: objects and places, but also—in extreme art—abject
remains and organic detritus, as well as a reproduction of the
remains of the past, subservient to medial and technological
archiving, which are preserved in witnesses living “then and
there,” in older as well as contemporary performative, visual,
textual, and audio works. The necros is more than just directly
experienceable archival material located in institutions which
preserve and classify collections: it also returns in artistic per-
formances, in the reanimation of the remains of the past as
discussed above with respect to reenactments. When treated as
living material, the relics of the past are not thereby restricted
to a tangible presence and activity of things. Just as important
is the re-medialization of matter, a renewed performative use of
storage technologies, for only by way of repeated mediation are
the processes of transubstantiation revealed, processes which
would otherwise be destroyed under the influence of documen-
tation, preservation, and the forms of usage of archival materi-
als. This other archive—art—in this way preserves the memory
of the actual space of the archive as the house of the Archons
and simultaneously enables a critical engagement with archival
processes. And precisely here—in the tensions between matter,
technology, and form, as well as through the displacement of
the senses during the transformation of the material—a space
opens up for necroperformance.
The intensive engagement of contemporary artists with the
possibilities of an intervention in the archive through practices
of repetition—reperformances, restagings, remixes—leads to
experiments striding the border between art and science, praxis
and theory, history and political present. The striving towards

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Necroperformance: Theory as Remains

the performative reconstruction of events, images, and past sit-

uations by means of remains preserved in diverse media (and
archives) enables more than the mere updating of past events,
but instead, above all, artistic reflection on the mechanisms of
memory and forgetting, on the status of sources, witnesses, and
documents, on the fictional character of documentation and
the performative potential of archival processes. The interest
in practices of repeated playback and scenic repetition by art-
ists from different fields of activity, using different media, also
leads to the emergence of hybrid forms which elude both tradi-
tional documentation and theoretical categorization. Contem-
porary trans-medial and processual artistic practice not only
goes beyond the limits of particular fields of art: established
theories, with their accompanying defined art objects (film,
theater, or performance theories) also undergo a radical trans-
formation. Theory, including the theory of performativity, func-
tions in itself simply as remains.
From the perspective of contemporary performative arts,
which engage with the body as a medium of storage, with
medial archival processes, and with the history of performance
art, every theory of performativity proves to be an incomplete
and fragmentary system. Insights of the ontology of perfor-
mance art, anthropological concepts of repetition in social
behavior, theories of ritual relating to foreign and non-foreign
cultures, engagements of the philosophy of language with tex-
tuality and orality, or medial reflections on the storage media
of human acts—all of these are a subject of discussion in cur-
rent performative practice but, at the same time, are subject to
essential corrections in art. The new hybrid forms reveal that
art is something mediated in a multiplicity of ways, something
highly self-reflective and simultaneously fragmentary, easily
subject to processes of transformation, re-staging, and defor-
mation. They also show that art itself is a decentralized and
­performative necro-archive.

141
Fabienne Liptay

Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

Disclaimer: I am not a theoretician.1

William Kentridge

Practical Epistemology / By which is meant / Jump-

ing on the King’s bed / Using the wind to rescue
speech / – / – / – / –.2
William Kentridge

Pacing, procrastinating

“Walking, thinking, stalking the image.”3 With these words, the

South African artist William Kentridge describes the activity of
producing his drawings. He continues:

It is not so much a period of planning as a time of allow-

ing the ideas surrounding the project to percolate, a space
for many different possible trajectories of an image, of a
sequence, to suggest themselves, to be tested as internal
projections. This pacing is often in relation to the sheet
of paper waiting on the wall, as if the physical presence of
the paper is necessary for the internal projection to seem
realizable. The physical size and material enforce a scale, a

1 William Kentridge, “Fortuna: Neither programme nor chance in

the making of images,” (1993), in Wulf Herzogenrath, Anne McIlleron
and Angela Breidbach, eds., NO IT IS! William Kentridge (Cologne: Wal-
ther König, 2016), pp. 68–76, here p. 68.
2 William Kentridge, “Death, Time, Soup,” (2012), in Herzogenrath
et al., NO IT IS!, pp. 102–114, here p. 107.
3 William Kentridge, “Artist and Model: Parcours d’atelier,” in Her-
zogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, pp. 22–23, here p. 22.

143
Fabienne Liptay

particular starting-point, a composition. The myriad of pos-

sibilities is called into order. This pacing sometimes occu-
pies ten minutes, sometimes a morning. (And the pacing
is sometimes replaced by sharpening of pencils, gathering
of materials, hunting for just the right music—all different
forms of productive procrastination.)4

Kentridge is describing a process of image creation which

emerges in the interplay of contradictory and fundamentally
irreconcilable movements: the realization of the image in an act
of progressively reducing options while keeping these options
open in an act of postponed realization. His pictures are both
drawings and withdrawings. They are advances and retreats and
the studio is a stage where the antagonistic play of these oppos-
ing forces is resolved and made visible.
In the collage Parcours d’atelier (2008), the withdrawal
of the drawing, the retreat into a field of myriad possibilities,
becomes a subject of the drawing itself. The drawing shows
the traces the artist leaves behind in walking around the stu-
dio—between “lassitude” and “shallow breathing,” between
the “insupportable weight of eyelids” and “6½ minutes sleep,”
between “emptiness” and a “distant view of a thought leaving.”5
(Fig. 1) All of this—preceding, delaying, or even preventing the
image—becomes itself a part of the drawing. The activity of
drawing thus seems like inactivity, the drawing like notation, a
choreographic movement script which records the acts of pro-
ductive procrastination. Kentridge himself speaks of a kind of

4 Ibid.
5 The collage was created in connection with Kentridge’s multi-
media presentation The Nose (2010) following Dmitri Shostakovich’s
opera of the same name on behalf of the Metropolitan Opera in New
York. It shows the process of work in the studio, where the small red
rectangle in the center of the image represents the camera set up in the
middle of the room, and the larger red rectangle on the right side shows
the drawing pinned to the wall.

144
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

Fig. 1: William Kentridge: Parcours d’atelier, 2008.

“thinking on one’s feet”6 where processes of understanding are

triggered by the physical activity of artistic production. He com-
pares the studio with a space of thought measured by pacing
around it:

The studio is an enclosed space, physically but also psychi-

cally, an enlarged head; the pacing in the studio is the equiv-
alent of ideas spinning round in one’s head […], impulses
that emerge and are abandoned before the work begins.7

One cinematic investigation into the artist’s studio is the seven-

channel installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès (2003). It
shows Kentridge in his studio in short scenes subject to the

6 William Kentridge, “Thinking on One’s Feet: A walking tour of the

studio,” (2013), in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!, pp. 25–30, here p. 25.
7 Kentridge, “Artist and Model,” in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!,
p. 23.

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Fabienne Liptay

magic tricks of early cinema: a torn self-portrait seamlessly

puts itself back together, loose pages and well-worn books fly
back into the hands of the autodidact. From an ink blot image,
folded and unfolded again, a flawless self-portrait appears.
Paper blackened by charcoal and coffee is turned white again
through treatment with cloth and a feather duster. (Fig. 2a, 2b,
2c and 2d) Tying the fragments together is the aesthetic expe-
rience of time running backwards and the associated promise
of transforming the image into a tabula rasa of its own endless
possibilities. The white sheet of paper is not actually empty
here: it is a space of projection filled with all imaginable draw-
ings.

Moving in circles, walking backwards

There is a connection between Kentridge’s characteristic draw-

ing technique of erasing and the film technique of reversal in
that both build up an image which is then made to disappear.
All artistic decisions, whether good or bad, are suspended, i.e.
simultaneously reversed and preserved for the future in a para-
doxical movement. All of the espresso pots and typewriters,
megaphones and rhinoceroses—motifs which the artist puts
to paper in somnambulistic certainty—return to the universe
of swirling thoughts, to the inexhaustible potential of artistic
production which precedes every image.
Kentridge looks into this universe in Journey to the Moon
(2003), a narrative film which is a remake of Georges Méliès’s
A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902) and accom-
panies the 7 Fragments that are dedicated to him. In this film,
the artist attempts to evade the decisions which the creation of
drawings demand of him—in order to find out “that the studio,
which [he] had hoped could be a whole universe, became only
the enclosed rocket” that leads him back to his starting point:

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Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

Fig. 2a–d: William Kentridge: Film stills from Tabula Rasa II, 2003.

to the landscape of Germiston, east of Johannesburg, where the

artist’s studio is located.8
The artist is stuck in this rocket—an espresso pot—which
becomes a symbol of his own limitations. If 7 Fragments cele-
brates the unlimited possibilities of the image, Journey to the
Moon is an ironic commentary on this promise, plainly showing
the limited capabilities of the artist. Here, Kentridge is basically
once more enacting the dualism of conception and craft which
has shaped much of art theory since the Renaissance. The artis-
tic self which Kentridge presents in his films and readings is
thus forced to mediate between intellectual and manual activity
in such a way that it becomes properly doubled:

8 Ibid.

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Fabienne Liptay

There’s a real sense of split in that moment, in which the

person observing the process seems to be all-knowing, and
the person doing the drawing seems to be stupid and not
getting it right, each frustrated that the other cannot be
more sympathetic and attuned to what is shown him.9

What these films add to theoretically available knowledge

about the premises of artistic productivity is its repeated revela-
tion in the material of the medium itself. The work of the artist
becomes just as much the attempt to comprehend this knowl-
edge, to tirelessly adapt it into gestures and actions. The impres-
sion of effortlessness which the film in reverse evokes—trans-
forming fissures into repairs and chaos into order in presenting
an effect which almost magically brings the things together—
corresponds to the physical efforts of the artist in producing
this impression during its recording. He must throw the books
as if he were actually trying to catch them, walk backwards as
if walking forwards, etc. And he must rehearse, rewind, and
review the course of these movements in a process of constant
repetition.10
Kentridge impressively described this process of repetition
and linked it at the same time to rotation as a basic principle of
film. Both the cinematic technology of film transport via spools
and reels and the pre-cinematic technology of the spinning cyl-
inders and wheels of the zoetrope, praxinoscope, or phenakis-
tiscope produce the illusion of moving images on the basis of
rotation. They are reflected in the principle of the endless loop
in which Kentridge’s films are shown in the exhibition space.
The routes of analogical thought which Kentridge follows
lead to the studio ultimately becoming a kind of zoetrope—a
place where the repetition of ever more similar processes is

9 Kentridge, “Thinking on One’s Feet,” p. 26.

10 See William Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology: Life in the stu-
dio,” in William Kentridge, Six Drawing Lessons (Cambridge MA and
London: Harvard University Press, 2014), pp. 99–128, here p. 107.

148
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

delivered just as much as the effort to escape them in order to

prepare the way for new ideas and images:

The studio has become the zoetrope, and the repetitive

action cannot be escaped. Knowing that the activity is both
avoiding the question to be found, and also essential. A pro-
ductive procrastination.11

Decisively, the mechanical rotation of the film becomes a kind

of metaphor which the artist uses not only for describing his
work but also appropriates in the repetition of processes of
movement. He is trapped in the zoetrope, in the orbit of the stu-
dio. The artistic act seems to be endlessly delayed until the very
moment it succeeds in breaking out of this orbit.
Rosalind Krauss interprets Kentridge’s “drawings for pro-
jection” entirely on the basis of the drawings themselves, which
she reads as an expansion of the graphic medium on the merely
technological basis of film animation. In doing so, she over-
looks the decisive significance of the image’s rootedness in
cinematographic mechanisms of motion.12 For Kentridge, film
is not simply a technological substrate but a material founda-
tion from which knowledge is gained that would not otherwise
have been accessible. This knowledge is owed to a praxeology,
a process of metaphorical translation and mimetic transforma-
tion of an aesthetic experience of media (here the backwards-
running film)13—and in this sense describes not a form of mod-
ernist self-reflexivity but an actual praxis of aesthetic thinking.
The artist must, as Kentridge stresses, lean forward when walk-
ing backwards, against his intuitive stance, in order to produce
the impression of natural movement.14 The reversal of motion

11 Ibid., p. 123.
12 Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock:’ William Kentridge’s Drawings for
Projection,” October 92 (2000): pp. 3–35, here p. 9.
13 See Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology,” in Six Drawing Lessons,
p. 107f.
14 Ibid., p. 107.

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Fabienne Liptay

sequences which go against experience and intuition, against

the routines of behavior, frustrates efforts to understand this
praxis with the concept of implicit knowledge; the point is
instead to escape this, to diligently unlearn what we implicitly
believed we knew. Kentridge’s praxis is to this extent compara-
ble to that of the Greek Cynics, which Michel Foucault described
as a struggle against traditional modes of conduct, opinions,
and customs.15 Cynical practice demanded, in the words of
the oracle of Delphi, to “alter the currency” and to rework and
revalue it.16 In Kentridge’s studio scenes, revaluation is carried
out in acts of repetition and reversal, in small exercises against
logic and skill, against knowing how and knowing that. These are
scenes of “unlearning,”17 the invention of forms of resistance
which serve to unsettle traditional methods of artistic produc-
tion. The impression of mastering the scene, the impression of
skillfulness enhanced through cinematic magic tricks, is in fact
due to an acceptance of one’s own lack of ability, the ponder-
ousness and sluggishness of practice in the disruption of rou-
tines of action and thought.

Rehearsing, understanding

The title of this essay is borrowed from one of Kentridge’s

Rubrics (2012), a series consisting of fourteen silkscreens, with
lettering in alizarin red ink on found book pages from an old
Latin dictionary. (Fig. 3) It is also the title of one of the Six Draw-
ing Lessons, which Kentridge presented in the framework of the

15 Michel Foucault, The Courage of the Truth: Lectures at the Collège de

France, 1983–1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (Basing-
stoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 269–290.
16 Ibid., p. 241.
17 For more on the Cynic practices of “unlearning” in Foucault, see
Ruth Sonderegger, “Foucaults Kyniker_innen. Auf dem Weg zu einer
kreativen und affirmativen Kritik,” in Isabell Lorey, Gundula Ludwig
and Ruth Sonderegger, Foucaults Gegenwart. Sexualität – Sorge – Revo-
lution (Vienna: transversal texts, 2016), pp. 47–75, here p. 62–72.

150
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

Fig. 3: William Kentridge: Practical Epistemology, 2012.

Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 2012 at the Mahindra Humani-

ties Center at Harvard, and which he later published in book
form. There, “practical epistemology” refers to knowledge pro-
duction delegated to medium and material and its reconstruc-
tion by the artist. The studio is ascribed special significance
here, as it not only guarantees insight into artistic processes—it
is what organizes these processes in the first place, in interplay
with gestures, materials, and techniques. It would thus not be
appropriately described as a site of immediate insight into the
creative process nor as a site of calculated self-presentation.
What we see there is instead the production of an aestheti-
cally-composed knowledge which evades the simple opposition
between the documentation and presentation of artistic prac-
tice. It is in this sense that Monika Wagner and Michael Diers
speak of the studio as a “reflexive model”18 which clarifies and
simultaneously questions the conditions of the production of

18 Michael Diers and Monika Wagner, “Topos Atelier. Werkstatt

und Wissensform,” in Topos Atelier. Werkstatt und Wissensform. Ham-

151
Fabienne Liptay

art, whether intellectual or material.19 In the studio, images—

preliminary sketches, sources of inspiration, notes, and half-
finished or abandoned projects—seem to correspond and col-
lide with each other, as if they were themselves taking part in
the process of artistic production. We could speak with Dieter
Mersch here of a “constellation,”20 an arrangement of things in
the midst of which aesthetic thinking takes place. Within this
constellation, thinking can be ascribed to neither the artist nor
the observer but is rather to be located outside of them in the
field of the “epistemic ‘power’ of art.”21
Kentridge compares the studio to a brain where the obsta-
cle course of the pacing artist, the discursus, corresponds to the
circuitry of the synapses. He thus outlines a model of artistic
production where thinking and doing are related to each other
via indirect routes which counteract the implementation of a
preconceived idea in a work.22 It is a praxeology of knowledge
which he performs in the studio, a process of understanding as
implemented through non-intentional bodily acts and techni-

burger Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte 7 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,

2010), pp. VII–X, here p. IX.
19 Visiting the exhibition NO IT IS! at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Ber-
lin, which showed William Kentridge’s body of work, one was able
to have the impression of moving within this reflexive model, taking
a walk through the artist’s studio. On the way from 7 Fragments for
Georges Méliès (2003) to Drawings for Projection (1989–2011) and More
Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) to The Refusal of Time (2012), one passed
two rooms where the studio itself was exhibited, namely as a hybrid
room somewhere between wunderkammer and laboratory, globe and
head, universe and capsule.
20 Dieter Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics (Zurich: diaphanes,
2015), p. 11.
21 Ibid., p 27.
22 See Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology,” in Six Drawing Lessons,
p. 124f., and William Kentridge’s Sigmund Freud lecture “A Defence
of the Less Good Idea,” given at the Burgtheater, Vienna, 7 May 2017
https://www.freud-museum.at/en/news/william-kentridge-video-a-
defence-of-the-less-good-idea-205.html (accessed 30.7.2018). The lec-
ture has been translated into German and published by Sigmund Freud
Museum, Vienna, In Verteidigung der weniger guten Idee. Sigmund Freud
Vorlesung 2017 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2018).

152
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

cal procedures. The point is to explore the possibilities of aes-

thetic cognitive faculties in actu.
Wherever the studio becomes the object of an exhibition, it
transfers the works it frames into a state of potential incomple-
tion. As long as these works have not left the studio, the effective
space of the artist, they remain subject to possible alterations
and dismissals. They exist, as Brian O’Doherty writes in Studio
and Cube (2007), in the sign of the process, in different stages of
work which are joined to a cluster of manifold tenses:

Studio time is defined by this mobile cluster of tenses,

quotas of past embodied in completed works, some aban-
doned, others waiting for resurrection, at least one in pro-
cess occupying a nervous present, through which, as James
Joyce said, future plunges into past, a future exerting on
the present the pressure of unborn ideas. Time is reversed,
revised, discarded, used up. It is always subjective, that is,
elastic, stretching, falling into pools of reflection, tumbling
in urgent waterfalls.23

For O’Doherty, this temporal turbulence is simultaneously

trapped in the system of late modernity, where the work of art
is constantly referring to itself. Against this background, the
incessant circling, walking around in the studio can be under-
stood as a Sisyphean labor for the artist, as the artist’s effort to
escape self-referentiality. The intention is also to connect the
work of the artist in the studio with that which has occurred out-
side of the studio, to broaden or exceed the narrow paths of the
self-referential actions in order to produce a relationship to the
world in artistic work:

23 Brian O’Doherty, Studio and Cube: On the relationship between

where art is made and where art is displayed (New York: Buell Center,
Forum Project, 2007), p. 18.

153
Fabienne Liptay

Understanding, hoping, believing, not out of conviction,

but from physical experience, that from the physical mak-
ing, from the very imperfections of technique—our bad
backward walking—parts of the world, and parts of us, are
revealed, that we neither expressed nor knew, until we saw
them.24

This also addresses the political responsibility of the artist in

the context of South Africa’s history of apartheid.

Reversing, repairing

Exhibiting the studio itself, as Duchamp, Brâncuşi, Schwitters,

Bacon, Warhol, Rauschenberg, Acconci, and others did, is a sig-
nature gesture of modernism, which no longer directed its gaze
towards the work of art but rather towards the artistic act, which
was in equal need of a stage where it could visibly appear.25 Ken-
tridge positions himself in this field when he names as his inspi-
ration the films showing Bruce Nauman or Jackson Pollock in
their studios.26 Kentridge worked on his Méliès films remotely
from his own studio in Johannesburg during a guest stay at
Columbia University in the fall of 2001 and spring of 2002. It is
here, in New York, that he entered into dialogue with post-war
American artistic production and made his films in direct refer-
ence to the studio practices of Pollock and Nauman.
In a talk he gave at the invitation of the Dia Art Foundation
in December 2002 in the “Artists on Artists” series, he spoke
about Nauman, whose video installation Mapping the Studio I
(Fat Chance John Cage) (1991), also consisting of seven screens,

24 Kentridge, “Practical Epistemology,” in Six Drawing Lessons, p. 128.

25 See Michael Diers, “atelier/réalité. Von der Atelierausstellung zum
ausgestellten Atelier,” in Topos Atelier. Werkstatt und Wissensform,
pp. 1–20.
26 See Kentridge, “Artist and Model,” in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT IS!,
p. 23.

154
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

could be seen in the exhibition spaces of the collection of the

New York Foundation for the Arts in the same year.27 This instal-
lation shows Nauman’s studio from seven different angles in
infrared recordings which document the nocturnal activity of
mice and a cat. The artist himself is absent.28 The installation
seeks to engage with the artist’s own previous works of the
late 1960s where Nauman filmed himself in his empty studio,
walking, sitting, laying down, playing the violin while walk-
ing around, or bouncing two balls between the floor and the
­ceiling.29
The studio here seems to be a place where the activity of
making art no longer produces a work but rather replaces it,
even in its most quotidian and banal gestures: “My conclusion
was,” noted Nauman of this time, “that I was an artist and I was
in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be
art.”30 Kentridge places his New York films in this tradition of
the performative exploration of the artist’s studio and simulta-
neously attempts to maintain distance from this tradition. The

27 There exists a second version of this work: Mapping the Studio II

with color shift, flip, flop & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage), Tate, Lon-
don 2001. There are edited versions of both: Mapping the Studio I (Fat
Chance John Cage) All Action Edit, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection,
Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin 2001, and Mapping the Studio II with color
shift, flip, flop & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage) All Action Edit, Walker
Art Center, Minneapolis 2001.
28 See “Bruce Nauman on Mapping the Studio,” in Bruce Nauman:
Mapping the Studio (Basel: Museum für Gegenwartskunst, 2002), un­­
paginated.
29 For example the films Playing a Note on the Violin While I Walk
Around the Studio, Bouncing Two Balls Between the Floor and Ceiling
with Changing Rhythms, Walking in an Exaggerated Manner Around the
Perimeter of a Square and Dance or Exercise on the Perimeter of a Square
(Square Dance), created in 1967/68 in the studio of his teacher William
T. Wiley in Mill Valley, CA, as well as the films Wall-Floor Positions,
Stamping in the Studio, Walk with Contraposto, Slow Angle Walk (Beck-
ett Walk), Bouncing in the Corner No.1 and No. 2, Revolving Upside Down
and Pacing Upside Down, made in Southampton, NY, in the winter of
1968/69.
30 Bruce Nauman, in Ian Wallace and Russell Keziere, “Bruce Nauman
Interviewed,” Vanguard 8, no. 1 (February 1979): pp. 15–18, here p. 18.

155
Fabienne Liptay

self-understanding of the artist who sees everything he does in

the studio as art, including doing nothing, is met by ­Kentridge
with both wonder and rejection: what was possible in the United
States would have been impossible on the periphery of South
Africa with the political conditions that art unavoidably needed
to take a stance towards.31
The backwards movement which Kentridge adds to the
catalogue of artistic actions in the studio, following Nauman,
should be understood as a kind of magic in this context, one
which should temporarily relieve his gestures of the burden of
South African history.32 For he does not himself seem to move
backwards, but instead the flow of time, which effortlessly takes
back everything which was created through physical and intel-
lectual effort. Drawings seem to emerge of their own will and
to disappear like spirits which the artist had, like the sorcerer’s
apprentice, just called. In the context of practical epistemology,
this backwards movement also refers to a form of active thought.
The American art historian Leora Maltz-Leca, who dedicated an
entire study to the metaphorical relationships between drawing
and thinking in Kentridge’s work, reads the reversal of the flow
of time in his Méliès fragments along with Hannah Arendt: as a
question of the possibility of making amends.33 The irrevocabil-
ity of that which has already been done, the insight that it cannot
be undone, is placed by Arendt alongside the human capacity for
forgiveness:

31 See “William Kentridge on Bruce Nauman,” Artists on Artists Lec-

ture Series, Dia: Chelsea, 19 December 2002, https://diaart.org/media/
watch-listen/audio-william-kentridge-on-bruce-nauman/media-type/
audio (accessed 30.7.2018).
32 See Harmon Siegel, “Feats of Prestidigitation,” in Margaret K.
Koerner, ed., William Kentridge: Smoke, Ashes, Fable (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2017), pp. 142–170, here p. 155.
33 See Leora Maltz-Leca, William Kentridge: Process as Metaphor and
Other Doubtful Enterprises (Oakland CA: University of California Press,
2018), p. 83f.

156
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

Without being forgiven, released from the consequences

of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were,
be confined to one single deed from which we could never
recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences
forever, not unlike the sorcerer's apprentice who lacked the
magic formula to break the spell.34

In the Méliès fragments, knowledge about the irrevocability of

acts is erased by the visual impressions of the film running in
reverse. The film shows, according to Kentridge, “a utopian per-
fection of one’s skills,”35 which consists of undoing an image
event, art being able to rescind as if by magic. At the same time,
though, it shows the inability of the isolated artist to place his
skills in the service of making amends to the extent that this
can only happen, according to Arendt, in the presence of others,
subject to the conditions of coexistence and mutual action.36

Forgetting, forgiving

With all of this, we must take into account the political insti-
tutionalization which the human capacity for forgiveness expe-
rienced in the context of South African history. The Truth and
Reconciliation Commission established by Nelson Mandela in
1996 took on the task of exposing political crimes in the apart-
heid regime and motivating the accused to admit their crimes
with the promise of remitted sentences. Kentridge vividly illus-
trates the effect of amnesty (ἀμνηστία, forgetting, forgiving) in
his work when he links the act of erasing to forgetting and that
of reversing to forgiveness. In this context, his films should also

34 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chi-

cago Press, 1958), p. 237.
35 William Kentridge, “Seven Fragments for Georges Méliès, Day for
Night and Journey to the Moon,” (2003), in Herzogenrath et al., NO IT
IS!, pp. 4–10, here p. 9.
36 See Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 199.

157
Fabienne Liptay

be understood as a reflection of the dilemma of being unable or

unwilling to offer a “remedy against the irreversibility”37 while
needing to fulfill the responsibility of taking a stance towards
what has already taken place and been done.
This reflection cannot be had without work in the studio.
It is neither the starting point nor the result of this work and
is thus at neither its beginning nor its end, instead being per-
formed in this work. Erasing and reversing thus produce aes-
thetic effects which generate meanings when they become
understandable for an audience in the context of South African
history, as traces of a politics of forgetting and forgiving. Before
any generation of meaning, however, they are traces of an artis-
tic effort to allow pictures to emerge in a process of progressive
rescinding. Doubt and uncertainty and the acknowledgement
of not knowing mix together in this process.
Kentridge repeatedly referred to his father’s career as a law-
yer and judge to define his own artistic activity in the difference
between the activities. In the Treason Trial, Kentridge’s father
was the defense attorney for the accused opposition leaders
who were being tried for treason, among them Nelson Man-
dela, causing them to be set free. Kentridge opposes to juridi-
cal thinking and judging an aesthetic form of thinking which
operates on the basis not of logical operations but of analogical
ones.38 The gestures of the artist in the studio, his artistic acts
and techniques, are given significance as metaphorical acts of
historical action. The artist’s favored animation technique of
imperfectly erased charcoal sketches, the persistent registering
of traces of their revision and deletion, serves artistic engage-

37 Ibid., p. 236.
38 William Kentridge conceived of the particularity of aesthetic
thought in various ways, for example in conversation with Rosalind C.
Morris: “I think the activity of being an artist rather than, say, a philoso-
pher consists in trying to maintain a place—which one does as a matter
of survival, not as a matter of theoretical argument—where it should be
possible to find meaning, although not through the processes of ratio-
nality.” William Kentridge and Rosalind. C. Morris, That Which Is Not
Drawn: Conversations (London: Seagull Books, 2017), p. 19.

158
Practical Epistemology: William Kentridge

ment with forms of censorship through whitening rather than

blackening. The paper becomes a basis of history where the
drawn landscape bears the traces of the repressed and forgot-
ten with respect to the experience of violence in post-colonial
South Africa.
J.M. Coetzee’s comment about Kentridge’s films, which
he called an “investigation into the troubled, amnesiac white
South African psyche,”39 is instructive in this context. Kentridge
himself gave shape to this psyche, e.g. in his film Weighing …
and Wanting (1997–98), which shows cross-sections of the brain
of the protagonist Soho Eckstein, a white South African mine-
owner and industrialist whose days of wealth are numbered
with the first democratic elections at the declared end of apart-
heid (like those of the Babylonian king Belshazzar whose Old
Testament story the film adapts). (Fig. 4a, 4b, 4c, 4d and Fig. 5a,
5b) His brain transforms into a rock, into a scale which weighs
the rock, into the head of a man who is sinking onto the rock
under the weight of his thoughts.
This rock, which is a symbol, repeated throughout Ken-
tridge’s work, of the history of apartheid,40 is subject to the oper-
ations of the balancing, calculating, and weighing of historical
guilt. In the Méliès fragments, it is opposed to the motif of the
overcoming of the laws of gravity, the (futile) attempt to escape
the economy of Western rationalistic thought in the arts. In this
way, the question of the specific nature of aesthetic perception
is linked to the possibility of justice, which can only be sought
separately from the logic of rational argument—in the sense

39 See J. M. Coetzee, “History of the Main Complaint,” in Neal Benezra

et al., eds., William Kentridge (Chicago and New York: Museum of Con-
temporary Art, Chicago and New Museum of Contemporary Art, New
York, 2001), pp. 82–93, here p. 93. The designs and ideas of South Africa
are white to the extent that they originate in people who are “no longer
European, not yet African.” J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture
of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 11.
40 See “Conversation with William Kentridge” in Carolyn Christov-
Bakargiev, William Kentridge (Brussels: Société des Expositions du
­Palais des Beaux-Arts, 1989), p. 75, and Krauss, “The Rock,” p. 4.

159
Fabienne Liptay

Fig. 4a–d: William Kentridge: Film stills from Weighing … and Wanting,
1997–98.

that Derrida spoke of justice in terms of the gift,41 and in the

sense that forgiveness is not a matter of settling guilt with a sen-
tence but of for-giving it. “Practical epistemology” is thus also
the name of a genuinely aesthetic thought which claims validity
“beyond the law, calculation, and transaction.”42 To procrasti-
nate, suspend, forgive—these indicate an entire spectrum of
procedures and gestures where aesthetic and ethical dimen-
sions of artistic production come into contact. This includes
the activity of walking around the studio and the ­principle of

41 See Jacques Derrida, The Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the
Work of Mourning, and the New International (first published in French
in 1993), trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994),
p. 26. On the topic of forgiveness, see Jacques Derrida, “Le siècle et le
pardon,” Le Monde des débats 9 (1999): p. 10; Jacques Derrida, “To For-
give: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible,” in John D. Caputo,
Michael Scanlon and Mark Dolley, eds., Questioning God (Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 21–51.
42 Ibid.

160


Fig. 5a–b: William Kentridge: Film stills from Weighing … and Wanting,
1997–98.

161
Fabienne Liptay

rotation as the basis of (pre-)cinematic technology, as well as

the reverse movements corresponding with them: ­walking and
projecting film backwards as a magical effect which is achieved
through arduous practice, and moreover as a revision of an
irrevocable act, as recognition of the impossibility of making
amends and the capacity for forgiveness. Each action is repeated
and mirrored, performed as if belonging to the inverted tempo-
ral order. This mirroring signifies a reversal, a form of reflection
where knowledge is gained not through distant observation but
through the examination and overcoming of available knowl-
edge in acts of doing.

162
Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

The first shot—if there can be a first shot in a video loop—pres-

ents the desktop of an Apple computer with an image of the
Andromeda Galaxy as a background.1 Icons hovering in the cos-
mos symbolize storage devices entitled “Data,” “Système,” and
“History of Universe,” and one video file in particular named
“Grosse fatigue.” What we see at the opening of the 13-minute-
long video, created by French artist Camille Henrot in 2013, is
a mise-en-abyme of this very video, Grosse fatigue, as if the his-
tory of the universe already contained itself and the video repre-
sented just one cosmology amongst others.2
Abruptly, two overlapping windows pop up featuring two
pairs of female hands, each of which opens a book—in one
frame, a volume of photos about African body painting in the
style of National Geographic, and in the other a publication
about Pop artist Keith Haring, whose colorful mazes suggest a
Western appropriation of tribal culture. (Fig. 1)
This physical contact with knowledge, the hands flipping
through the pages of the book, is compared to the internet as
a cosmos which, through the juxtaposition of images, opens an
essentially associative visual perspective onto the world. Hen-
rot’s video, and its recitation of different histories of the uni-
verse, are analyzed here as an exemplary form of artistic reflec-
tion on the aesthetic quality of theoretical conceptions of the
world.

1 The Andromeda Galaxy is a mosaic by Robert Gendler (https://

apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150830.html) (accessed March 4, 2019)
2 Camille Henrot, Grosse fatigue (2013), color and sound video, 13
min.; original music by Joakim; voice by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh; text
written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg; producer: Kamel Men-
nour, Paris; with the additional support of Fonds de dotation Famille
Moulin, Paris; production: Silex Films.

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Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

Fig. 1: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

Henrot developed the video during an Artist Research

­ ellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the largest
F
complex of scientific collections in the world. While her project
could at first sight be labeled “artistic research” presenting the
results of her investigations into these immense collections,
as well as of her nocturnal explorations of the internet, it first
and foremost exposes the aesthetic framing of scientific theo-
ries. The images from popular ethnographic and art historical
literature presented in the first minute of the film are framed
several times: first by the Mac windows where they appear, then
by the books, displayed on a bright monochrome background,
and finally by the hands turning the pages, fingernails painted
in the complementary colors green and red.

Graspability

Hands are shown repeatedly throughout the video, sometimes

those of Smithsonian staff showing objects from the collec-
tions and archives, but more often female hands, whose styled
fingernails are painted as if to mirror the objects they present,
­emphasizing the aesthetic presentation of scientific objects

164
The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

and pointing to the stylization of scientific models. (Fig. 2)

This “graspability” of knowledge is also understood as
a technique of reducing totalizing schemes of knowledge to
human proportions. Through the display of decorated hands
and the manipulation and montage of images and objects, Hen-
rot alludes to Aby Warburg’s notion of the Handbarmachung of
knowledge, to which she directly refers in a short article enti-
tled “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems.”3
The rationality of such universal systems is confronted by
the “intuitive unfolding of knowledge” performed by the hands
and the continuous and playful juxtaposition of images found
on the internet and scenes shot in different locations. Henrot
seems, above all, to investigate the idea that a theory strongly
depends on the material and sensory form of its presentation
and its publication in specific media.4 She not only reflects on
systems for the classification and mediation of knowledge, as
Mark Dion does for example in his installations of pseudo-sci-
entific wunderkammern—she is also interested in the aesthetic
framing of knowledge through formal relations.5 Apart from the
hands interacting with books, journals, maps, and objects, the
video consists of a series of other dispositives of visual and tac-
tile representation: drawers (Fig. 3), light boxes, monochrome
backgrounds, objects with color control patches and, most
prominently, the quick succession of overlapping Mac windows
that create a growing stack of visual correspondences.

3 Camille Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” Art in America

101, no. 6 (June/July 2013): pp. 44–45.
4 Mathieu Copeland, “Conversation avec Camille Henrot/Camille
Henrot in conversation,” in Camille Henrot et. al., Camille Henrot,
(Paris: Éditions Kamel Mennour, 2013), pp. 28–33, 34–39, here p. 32:
“vivre la connaissance comme une expérience physique.” See also
Jonathan Chauveau, Grosse fatigue (http://www.camillehenrot.fr/en/
work/68/grosse-fatigue) (accessed March 4, 2019).
5 See for example Iwona Blazwick, ed., Mark Dion. Theatre of the Natu-
ral World (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2018); Petra Lange-Berndt and
Dietmar Rübel, eds., Mark Dion. The Academy of Things. Die Akademie der
Dinge (Cologne: Walther König, 2015); Lisa G. Corrin, Miwon Kwon, and
Norman Bryson, eds., Mark Dion (London: Phaidon Press, 1999).

165
Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

Fig. 2: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

Recreating theory

Referencing Roland Barthes, Henrot identifies the rectangle, the

most prominent form of ordering in her video, as the basic shape
of rational power and as a “mark of the division between man
and nature.”6 However, the rectangle is only one of several ele-
mentary shapes that Henrot identifies as part of a “morphology
of totality”7: egg, circle, triangle, spiral, and other linear forms
are also understood as recurring elementary shapes (Fig. 4) that
structure narratives about the origins of the world, spread across
science, religion, mathematics, philosophy, and mythology,
which makes them not only rational but also “mystical forms.”8
According to Henrot, the structure of cosmogonic narratives
at times resembles that of creative artistic processes, such as draw-
ing a circle (Fig. 5) or modelling formless ­material.9 ­Morphology,

6 Camille Henrot, Elephant Child, ed. Clara Meister et. al. (New York:
Inventory Press / London: König Books, 2016), p. 54.
7 Ibid., p. 21.
8 Ibid., p. 68.
9 Ibid., p. 18: “Attempts to comprehend the origins of the universe
always bear resemblance to the artistic process, from the first sketch
to the first overwrought failure. For limitless ideas to be grasped, they

166
The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

Fig. 3: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

stemming from the developmental analysis of natural history,

is also a crucial notion for modern art history and aesthetics, as
exemplified by Henri Focillon’s Vie des formes, re-emerging in
Henrot’s work as a fundamental artistic methodology.10 Indeed,
it is art that produces the elementary forms and signs for visualiz-
ing complex ideas, including the ones expressing totality. Expos-
ing this vocabulary questions the distinction between scientific,
mythological, and aesthetic synthetizations of world history.11
For instance, Henrot alludes to the world egg or cosmic egg,
a common mythological symbol of creation, by peeling the shell
from a black-colored Easter egg, revealing its marbled inner
­surface (Fig. 2). The egg acquires the same e­ pistemological
­status as the Whole Earth photograph shot in 1972 during space

must be rendered visible, they must be sketched with elementary

shapes.” References, for instance, to Rhoda Kellogg’s analysis of chil-
dren’s drawings or to Paul Klee’s pictorial theory of form reveal an inter-
est in grammars of art, elemental theories, a structuralist approach,
and Gestalt. Ibid., pp. 20, 44.
10 Henri Focillon, Vie des formes (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1934).
11 See also Camille Henrot and Federico Nicolao, “Je veux voir.
Camille Henrot en dialogue avec Federico Nicolao,” in Guillaume Le
Gall, ed., La persistance des images (Paris: Le Bal/Éditions textuel/Cen-
tre national des arts plastiques, 2014), p. 130–149.

167
Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

Fig. 4: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

mission Apollo 17 which she shows at the end of the video, where,
again, a female hand with black and white fingernails presents
and rolls an orange and finally lets it disappear, as if science’s
divine hand determined the future of the planet Earth (Fig. 6).12
Henrot’s Grosse fatigue refers to a universe defined on the
one hand by cosmogonic theories stored in and developed by
institutions like the Smithsonian and mirrored on the other
hand in the flow of images through the internet, by which struc-
turalism’s hyperrationalism seems to be put in correspondence
with the web’s hypertextual network.13 Much like the filmed
scientists who open drawers, display specimens, or explain
illustrations, models, and machinery, the artist opens and
arranges windows to give the general public aesthetic access
to the universe of knowledge (Fig. 7). Instead of following the

12 Compare the caricature of the Whole Earth in the hand of “science”

as analyzed in Robert Jacobs, “Whole Earth or No Earth: The Origin of
the Whole Earth Icon in the Ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” The
Asia-Pacific Journal 9, Issue 13, no. 5 (March 21, 2011): no pagination.
Other scenes refer to the myth of the Earth as a disc while illustrating
the “creation” of the earth by showing hands with a rolling pin spread-
ing out dough or by presenting a DVD.
13 See Henrot’s statement on this connection in Henrot, “The Grasp
of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45.

168
The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

Fig. 5: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

logic of archival classification, represented by the boxes, draw-

ers, and exhibition rooms, Henrot follows an intuitive order
and includes views of the employees’ offices and laboratories
populated with banal personal objects, such as a Darwin pup-
pet, cartoons, sticky notes, pinned photos, and a birthday bal-
loon floating beneath an office ceiling, as if ironically alluding
to the laws of physics or to Andy Warhol’s Silver Clouds and the
Experiments in Art and Technology of the 1960s.
By revealing the actual contexts in which scientific theories
of the world are constructed and the objects of their evidence
stored, Henrot is suggesting that world histories have authors
and their own material history. Instead of didactically present-
ing the scientific theories put forward by the Smithsonian,
Henrot makes them materially and aesthetically accessible
­
without shrinking from banal formal analogies: in one sequence
we see a scientist commenting on an image of a star system
whose white spots are then juxtaposed against another similar
yet moving image of white spots on a black background, which
then turn out to be someone in spotted black jeans. These jeans
are then juxtaposed against a famous photograph showing
Jackson ­Pollock dripping paint on a canvas—an ­artistic method
which has been compared to the rituals of American Indians

169
Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

Fig. 6: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

painting with sand. Various creation myths and theories are

playfully associated and combined here by reference to their
origin in the formless material of the spot. In a later sequence,
bubbles of lather visualize the Big Bang nucleosynthesis called
out by the video’s voice, while a white froth on the dark skin of a
female body falling down on a dark ground symbolizes the cre-
ation of the Milky Way (a name which shows the shared visual
and metaphorical roots of science and mythology).
Similarly, chemical evolution is evoked through images of
the ocean and liquids in test tubes, alluding to the theory of the
“primordial soup,” mythological narratives of the “dark ocean”
or the birth of gods from the foam of the seas. Instead of present-
ing scientific models from the Smithsonian’s archives or collec-
tions, Henrot combines images with a strong sensory impact—
multicolored marbles rolling and hitting each other on a table
(Fig. 8), representing chaos, or an explosion of matter alluding
to the Big Bang—without, however, providing any explanations.
While black ink beautifully expands in a glass of water into
self-generated clouds of color, hinting at the physical processes
of diffusion that shape the universe, this sequence primarily
serves to expose the degree to which both scientific and mythi-
cal models are aesthetically conditioned (Fig. 9).

170
The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

Fig. 7: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

Physical experience

But focusing on visual analogies in Henrot’s Grosse fatigue

reveals only half the picture. The powerful effect of her video
and its flow of images is enhanced by a powerful, hypnotizing
soundtrack. It gives the opening sequences an electrifying beat
that structures the subsequent dynamic rap narration in the
style of the forerunners of hip-hop in 1970s New York.14 The
poem was written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg and is
spoken with great intensity by the performer Akwetey Orraca-
Tetteh. Its text is a joyous syncretism of scientific history and
creation stories made of samples taken from Hindu, Buddhist,
Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Kabbalistic, Freemasonic, Dogon,
Inuit, Navajo, and other traditions:

In the beginning there was no earth, no water—nothing.

There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha. In the beginning
everything was dead. In the beginning there was n ­ othing,

14 Chauveau, Grosse fatigue.

171
Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

Fig. 8: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement, no breath. In

the beginning there was an immense unit of energy.15

The spoken words and beat create a rhythm that accelerates and
decelerates in step with explosive evolutions and entropic devo-
lutions of the universe. The rhythm of the narration also echoes
the artist’s obsessive clicking through the internet. Theories
and myths about the creation of the universe, the evolution of
species, and of knowledge about them are woven into a dense
multilayered narration accompanied by visual associations.
The speeding up and slowing down of the beat evokes a strongly
sensual, even orgasmic sense of the energy of natural processes
and of the lustful, compulsive desire for scientific knowledge:

The Creating Power then took many animals and birds

from his great pie bag and spread them across the earth.
First came self-promoting chemicals, and then fat formed
membranes, and then came the green algae colonies in
the sea, and then the oxygen, oxygen. Eight-faced air, air to

15 The poem is reproduced in separate blocks in Henrot, Elephant

Child, p. 13

172
The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

Fig. 9: Camille Henrot, still from Grosse fatigue, 2013.

make winds and breezes, air filled with sounds, air carrying
oceans, […] And mankind discovered the knowledge of his-
tory and nature, of minerals, vegetables, animals and ele-
ments, the knowledge of logic and the art of thinking […]
pathology, astrology, aerology and more.16

As Henrot states in an interview, she does not want to present

theories as a form of knowledge to be acquired, but as a physi-
cal experience.17 The rhythm of the sound, setting in motion the
universe and its history, creates a “synthesis” with the v­ ideo’s
images and confers an experience of totality that the artist
explicitly borrows from religious practices. From a postcolonial
perspective, she deliberately makes use of primitivist references
and performs a pensée sauvage, “a kind of hyperrationality.”18

16 Ibid., p. 80. For Henrot’s interest in the “compulsiveness of acquir-

ing knowledge,” see Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45.
17 “Ce qui m’intéresse ainsi est de faire vivre la connaissance comme
une expérience physique, et pas comme un savoir à acquérir.” Cope-
land, “Conversation avec Camille Henrot/Camille Henrot in Conversa-
tion,” p. 32.
18 Henrot states that anthropology’s approach “to totalization
reflects what Claude Lévi-Strauss called la pensée sauvage, a kind of
hyperrationality.” Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45.

173
Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

By this she reveals that the scientific theories she refers to cannot
free themselves from their primitive, religious, or mythological
underpinnings. Henrot explicitly refers to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
La Pensée sauvage, suggesting that artistic and scientific prac-
tices are both driven by an inherent primitive force and contain
a prehistorical aspect which impels them to scrutinize and his-
toricize themselves.19

Passages between fact and fetish

Keeping in mind Bruno Latour’s statement that “we have never

been modern,” we might say that Henrot’s intention is not to
separate science from faith, fact from fetish.20 On the contrary,
her project explicitly opposes the faith in facts which consti-
tutes modern science. As Latour argues in his article Sur le culte
moderne des dieux faitiches, Western science is defined by the
separation of knowledge and faith and by the axiom that only
that is “real” which is not constructed or fabricated. By demon-
strating, however, that facts are just as fabricated as the fetish,
Latour shows that neither modernists nor postmodernists have
ever freed themselves from their respective credos: while mod-
ernists fetishize the fact, he claims, postmodernists believe that
reality is wholly constructed and mere appearance.21
Henrot seems to take a cue from such observations in creat-
ing a syncretic narrative explicitly merging science, myth, reli-
gion, and art. By this she directly addresses our fetishist view of
the objects of the world and their reproductions on the inter-
net. Her video presents aesthetic equivalents of what Latour
calls the faitiche, a hybrid of the fétiche and the fait, in line with
his statement that processes of model-making in laboratories

19 Ibid.
20 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1993).
21 Bruno Latour, Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches, suivi de Icon-
oclash (Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte, 2009).

174
The Formation of Cosmogonies: Camille Henrot

are fundamentally shaped by shifts between “reality” and “fab-

rication,” between “fact” and “illusion.” Henrot’s narration of
anthropology thus exposes mystic aspects of science by creat-
ing aesthetic forms which make such shifts tangible.
Henrot approaches theory solely as an aesthetic product
that provides access to complex systems in a similar way to
mythology and religion. By using and stylizing the aesthetic ele-
ments of theories, she also tries to find that which all totalizing
systems have in common and to make these systems accessible.
As she states herself:

BIG SYSTEMS, TAXONOMIES and totalizing structures

inspire in me a sort of fascination and distrust I find stimu-
lating. They compel me to wonder how to dismantle them
and then rebuild them myself.22

In this sense, theory is understood as a system in constant for-

mation. Henrot’s desire to rebuild the big systems of world his-
tory not only demonstrates her own distrust in and dismantling
of its mythic quality, but first and foremost conceives of history
as a process, a constant movement of the recreation of life. In
Henrot’s work, theory appears as dynamic “formation” in oppo-
sition to a fixed “form,” according to the artist Paul Klee’s defi-
nition of “formation as movement and action” and “formation
as life.”23 Henrot’s video Grosse fatigue ends with a lethal fatigue
which, nonetheless, leaves some ends open which can meta-
morphose into new forms of life.
The critical potential of her work consists in our being
confronted today with an “excess of systems,” a neurotic “pas-
sion for systems” which ultimately converges with “the need to
rebuild the religious illusion, to re-establish God’s existence.”24

22 Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 44.

23 Paul Klee, Bildnerische Gestaltungslehre, I.2/78, 8.1.1924. (Archive
of Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), Inv.-no. BG I.2/78.)
24 “In this moment there is an excess of systems that fit into one
another, and this nesting becomes a malady, a ‘passion for systems,’ a

175
Julia Gelshorn, Tristan Weddigen

­ owever, the very idea of God generates “the passion for cate-
H
gories and divisions” and eventually “scientific rationalism.”25
Dialectically, moreover, “the obsession with order creates
disorder.”26 Thus, any unified and totalizing system contains its
own destabilization which in turn reintroduces chaos. The art-
ist’s critical strategy consists in representing, re-enacting, and
especially overacting absolute systems: “Over-systematization
is a way of sidestepping the system by transforming it into a
game.”27 Henrot explicitly links creation myths to poetry and
child’s play since they are all “about encompassing everything
in one space, within which connections and exchanges can be
made.”28
The appealing effect of the video ultimately lies in its
ambiguous capacity to deconstruct the excesses of systems and
their primitive foundations while at the same time using those
aspects to re-enchant theory and to make it intuitively acces-
sible. While the archive seems to flatten the world by storing
mute objects and abstract documents, Grosse fatigue resusci-
tates the dead and reanimates cosmogonies.29

neurosis that merges with the need to rebuild the religious illusion, to
re-establish God’s existence.” Henrot, Elephant Child, p. 61. See also:
“And there was violent relaxation, The arrow of time. Heat death of the
universe. Pan Gu laid down and resting, he died.” (p. 168–177), and
Henrot’s comment “Pan Gu’s death is not a pure finality, it brings with
it new beginnings: his body parts transform into different features of
the world […],” p. 176.
25 “In the end, it is not scientific rationalism that led to the death of
God. It’s the reverse: the idea of God is what creates the passion for cat-
egories and divisions. The idea of God as a universal, indivisible being
creates the need to categorize and divide.” Ibid., p. 49.
26 “Just as the obsession with peace creates war, the obsession with
order creates disorder.” Ibid., p. 52.
27 “Over-systematization is a way of sidestepping the system by trans-
forming it into a game. This is how the exhibition The Pale Fox was sche-
matized.” Ibid., p. 165.
28 Henrot, “The Grasp of Totalizing Systems,” p. 45.
29 Copeland, “Conversation avec Camille Henrot/Camille Henrot in
Conversation,” pp. 32–33.

176
Barbara Naumann

Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

The film installation Manifesto (2016)1 by the Berlin-based art-

ist Julian Rosefeldt unfolds in the framework of an aesthetics of
transference. Rosefeldt presents transference as an intermedial
movement in multiple senses of the word. Manifestoes become
film scenes, simultaneously implying a historical transfer
between the historically-situated manifestoes and contempo-
rary circumstances, scenes, and film settings. This transfer-
ence also occurs between texts strongly animated by questions
concerning the politics of art and scenes of everyday life. In
Manifesto, the face of the protagonist, Cate Blanchett, appears
in every scene. Her face is given a decisive function in Rose-
feldt’s aesthetics of transference, as this face embodies the texts
of the manifestoes and their situational alienation. This face
becomes the site of transference. The often-dogmatic charac-
ter of the manifestoes is thus shifted into another perspective.
The aesthetics of transference is also evident in the nature of
the knowledge produced by the film installation, a knowledge
which is not only conceptual or intentional but also suffused
with a rich spectrum of sensual experience.
Rosefeldt’s Manifesto brings the filmed, mobile human
face into a particular relationship with the text. The artist dedi-
cates himself to the staging of artistic and literary manifestoes,
referencing texts from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Tristan
Tzara, Kasimir Malevič, André Breton, Wassily Kandinsky,
Claes Oldenburg, Yvonne Rainer, Elaine Sturtevant, Adrian
Piper, Sol LeWitt, Jim Jarmusch, Stan Brakhage, and Lars von
Trier, among others. The installation consists of twelve films,
preceded by a thirteenth introductory film sequence without

1 Julian Rosefeldt, Manifesto: A film installation in twelve scenes

(London and Cologne: König Books, 2016).

177
Barbara Naumann

actors. They are presented in endless loops. Each individual

film scene lasts ten minutes and thirty seconds; the introduc-
tion takes up four minutes. The individual films show concrete
situations from everyday life: a homeless person, a choreogra-
pher, a curator, a worker in a waste processing plant, a conser-
vative Southern American housewife and her family, a puppe-
teer, a stock broker, a physicist, an elementary school teacher, a
punk singer, a news announcer, and a funeral speaker.
In each of the twelve films, the protagonist speaks in mono-
logues which are collages of manifesto texts. The Australian
actress Cate Blanchett plays the main character in every scene.
In working with the continually re-imagined face of the protag-
onist, the camerawork reminds one of the classical iconogra-
phy of portraiture by emphasizing the person’s characteristic
traits (see Fig. 1). As the face is often shown in close-up, it turns
into a scene of the transference of image and text—of visual
roleplay and a manifest concept of art—and thus dissolves the
traditional alliance between the portrait and the representation
of character. This intermedial presentation of the face suggests
the mechanisms at play when texts, not people, are “given a
face” through the cinematic representation of a face.2 (Fig. 2)
The installation defines a space where the medium of film is
used to induce the audience to move through the room. Through
their own movement, the observers feel themselves involved in
the performative art form of the exhibited films. In each of the

2 Manifesto: A Film by Julian Rosefeldt (Germany, 2017). The film

version played in European arthouse cinemas in the autumn of 2017.
Manifesto was supported by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and
produced in cooperation with Bayerischer Rundfunk. The project was
filmed in Berlin from December 9–22, 2014. The film was awarded
the German Film Prize in 2017. The first exhibition of the 13-part film
installation took place on February 9, 2015 in the Australian Centre for
the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. The German premiere took
place on February 9, 2016 in the Hamburger Bahnhof museum in Ber-
lin. Further exhibition locations included the Art Gallery of New South
Wales in Sydney, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Taidehalli Hel-
sinki, the Park Avenue Armory in New York, the Villa Stuck in Munich,
and many other locations.

178
Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

Fig. 1: Poster for the installation Manifesto.

twelve roles, text collages from historical and contemporary

art manifestoes become the main characters’ monologues. On
a textual level, it is significant that a wealth of heterogeneous
manifestoes from diverse historical periods are assembled into
monologues for the respective protagonist—no less than sixty
different art manifestoes are included. Cate Blanchett, in accor-
dance with her different roles, articulates the texts in ways typi-
cal of the respective career and genre, and with different social
and regional accents (the conservative Christian housewife’s
Southern drawl, the punk woman’s London cockney, etc.).
Walking from one film to the next, the installation observ-
ers/visitors are drawn to the individual films, becoming more
and more immersed. At the same time, the spatial arrangement
of the film screens always allows a partial visual and acoustic

179
Barbara Naumann

Fig. 2: Manifesto: Official Installation View, The Armory Show, New York.

perception of the other stations. In moving from scene to scene,

the spectator perceives both the films as individual audio-visual
events and the simultaneous presence of multiple media. In
contrast to a cinema, the audience’s autonomous movement
through the room enables an individualized guiding of atten-
tion. This becomes particularly significant when contrasted
with the often imperative rhetoric of the manifestoes.
Yet another moment joins in the audio-visual event of the
films: the independently-running films are each synchronized
with each other during one specific passage. At this point, the
protagonist, in a close-up, directs her eyes straight into the
camera and rhythmically intones the text. This obviously vio-
lates classical film conventions, which include avoiding a direct
glance by the actor into the camera. (Traditionally, this glance
would be used only as a conspicuous dramaturgical move.) At
the same time, this sequence of simultaneous intonation is a
break in the illusion of each respective film sequence. Blanchett
uses a different tone for her rhythmic speaking in each of the
twelve films, resulting in a twelvefold accord and the spatial and
acoustic impression of choral song. After this short interval, all

180
Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

of the films return to their intradiegetic narrative level and the

actress returns to her role-specific speaking voice.
Each of the twelve film scenes, with the exception of the
introductory thirteenth film, is dedicated to a different set of
manifestoes. This is one of the striking methods of Manifesto:
the assembled manifesto texts do not relate in either content
or reference to the setting of the film scenes, nor to the role of
the protagonist or other characters. Instead, Rosefeldt transfers
these into various specific locations and social and aesthetic
contexts.
As already mentioned, the visual element connecting all of
the film scenes is lead actress Cate Blanchett’s face. Although
this face undergoes transformation through the change of
masks—even to the point of unrecognizability—we remain able
to recognize it not least because this face has become iconic
through popular films, theater, and advertisements. As a key
iconic, visual, expressive, and performative element of the exhi-
bition, Cate Blanchett’s face makes an essential contribution to
the continuity of Manifesto as a work of art.3
As viewers, we certainly know whom we see on the screen in
front of us. This background knowledge is actively incorporated
into the transference events of the artwork itself, for the figu-
ration and defiguration of this face takes place within the film
and the presentation of texts with one (and through one) face.

3 For more on the relationship between face, mask, and portrait, and
on the portrait as mask, see Hans Belting, Faces. Eine Geschichte des
Gesichts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013). Belting observes in contemporary
everyday culture a “hidden interplay between prominent faces which
the media continually brings into circulation and the anonymous faces
of the masses” (p. 215, translated by Brian Alkire). Rosefeldt’s instal-
lation also plays with a “prominent face,” but his installation does
not seek to engage with the iconic faces of so-called celebrity culture,
instead accentuating the variants of the masks fundamentally as an
enabling of speaking and roles. This fundamental dimension is acti-
vated in the artwork in the movement of transference from manifesto
texts to everyday (film) scenes.

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Barbara Naumann

Fig. 3: Blanchett as Clochard.

Art manifestos—rhetorical gestures

Most art manifestoes are characterized by a concise rhetorical

gesture: they address their audience directly; they are appel-
lative, demonstrative, action-oriented, confrontational. Art
manifestoes often do not shy away from glorifying machines,
weapons, and war, lending to the artist’s perspective a socially
revolutionary and even bellicose character. A very succinct
example of this can be found in Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto
or in the Surrealist manifestoes of Breton. Anna-Catharina Geb-
bers and Udo Kittelmann explain:

The affirmative nature of their language, their apodictic

imperative style, their declamatory tone, […] hyperbole and
superlatives, […] are all intended to serve an appellative
function and […] create an emotional impact.4

4 Anna-Catharina Gebbers and Udo Kittelmann, “To Give Visible

Action to Words,” in Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 85.

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Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

Regardless of their social and aesthetic orientation, regardless

of which art movement they belong to or establish, manifestoes
repeatedly insist on a strong self-positioning in art, in the times,
in history, and in society. They introduce a rupture; they pres-
ent themselves as a disruption with reference to the past and
future. Manifestoes fully discard that which has been made and
thought up to the present. With them, the authors and artists
present themselves as being able to practice from now on a new
artistic action unburdened by the past. In this sense, disruption
is always accompanied by a phantasmatic double orientation:
manifestoes call for an end to an obsolete past while simultane-
ously proclaiming and opening up an artistic future exclusively
oriented towards their principles.5 Even if these proclamations
are frequently pragmatic and action-oriented, they assume a
theoretical stance by formulating a historical position, an a pri-
ori of future art, and drawing out a consequence, understood as
an imperative, from this position.
Rosefeldt’s aesthetics of transference has a different atti-
tude toward the manifesto. He makes use of scene, perfor-
mance, staging, and spectacle, and draws our attention to noth-
ing less than the fluidity and contingency of these concepts of
art in the moment of transference.
Manifesto begins with a quote from the very manifesto which
would have a decisive influence on almost all future manifes-
toes, including artistic ones: the Communist Manifesto of Karl
Marx and Friedrich Engels, published in 1848. The Communist
Manifesto may be regarded as the prototypical historical model;
it sets the tone, the rhetoric, and the action-oriented nature of
future manifestoes. The short introduction to Manifesto shows
a burning fuse accompanied by a background voice quoting:
“All that is solid melts into air”—from the first chapter of the

5 See Alex Danchev, ed., 100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to
the Stuckists (London: Penguin, 2011).

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Barbara Naumann

Communist Manifesto, “Bourgeois and Proletarians.”6 A fierce

attitude, associated with a gesture towards a radical new begin-
ning, a devastating critique of the old order, sets the stage for
the powerful self-determination and self-invention of the artist.
This always occurs in the light of the new, the unprecedented,
or previously unthought of. As many manifestoes, above all
Futurist and Surrealist manifestoes, are closely connected to
political and artistic utopias, they are prone to the character-
istic impatient and aggressive tone of “angry young men.” In
André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, we read:

Those who might dispute our right to employ the term SUR-
REALISM in the very special sense that we understand it are
being extremely dishonest, for there can be no doubt that this
word had no currency before we came along. Therefore, I am
defining it once and for all: […] Surrealism is the “invisible
ray” which will one day enable us to win over our opponents.7

In 1909, Marinetti established artists’ standards of self-posi-

tioning with formulations like:

We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any

sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind
of materialist, self-serving cowardice. […] Art, indeed, can
be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice. […] We have
understood! … Our sharp duplicitous intelligence tells us
that we are the sum total and extension of our forebears.8

6 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das Manifest der Kommunist-

ischen Partei (London: Workers’ Educational Association, 1848). The
first edition was published in German and anonymously. A facsimilie
is available from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek: https://reader.digi-
tale-sammlungen.de/en/fs1/object/display/bsb10859626_00001.html
(accessed 28.10.2018).
7 André Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), in Danchev, 100 Art-
ists’ Manifestos, pp. 241–250; here p. 247 and 249f.
8 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909), in
Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, pp. 4–8; here pp. 5, 7, 8.

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Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, published in 1910, shares

the view that the old institutions of viewing and transmitting art
should be destroyed:

With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will: […]

regard art critics as useless and dangerous.9

Academics, and especially university professors, have a particu-

larly poor status for many manifesto writers:

[…] because we wish to free our country from the stinking

canker of its professors, archeologists, tour guides and anti-
quarians.10

No! No! Do not believe that we will ever return to you with
phrases of love: comrades, brothers, you traditional plas-
ter heads, dull professors, alcohol-drained civil servants’
brains, contaminated dermatologists and shrinks: No! we
hate, hate, hate you!11

Alongside their radical action-oriented nature, even the ges-

ture of refusal and non-action is suffused with what Tom Wolfe
appropriately called the “radical chic” of the new beginning:12

9 Umberto Boccioni et al., Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910),

in Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, pp. 10–13; here p.12. The manifesto
was signed by the following artists: Umberto Boccioni (Milan), Carlo
Dalmazzo Carrà (Milan), Luigi Russolo (Milan), Giacomo Balla (Rome),
Gino Severini (Paris).
10 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto (1909), in
Danchev, 100 Artists’ Manifestos, p. 6.
11 Yvan Goll, Zenitistisches Manifest (1921), in Wolfgang Asholt and
Walter Fähnders, eds., Manifeste und Proklamationen der europäischen
Avantgarde 1908–1932 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005), p. 254. Translation by
Barbara Naumann.
12 Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York Maga-
zine, June 8, 1970, pp. 27–56.

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Barbara Naumann

“Why are you writing a manifesto?” you scream at me. I am

writing a manifesto because I have nothing to say.13

Excursus: Texting the face, Lavater

Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomic Fragments represent a

significant moment in the history of the relationship between
face and text, and also in the history of the “readability hypoth-
esis” of the face. For our purposes, it suffices to recall that
Lavater’s goal was to systematize the readability of the human
face. His starting point was a “certain experiential truth” accord-
ing to which an “analogical character” between the “nerves and
fibers or the heart and the head” emerges, and in such a way
that physiognomic details can reveal the connection between
“the blood in the head and the blood in the heart.”14
Lavater’s endeavor to draw direct conclusions from physi-
ognomy to human character in the sense of a unifying interpre-
tation of the human face is grounded to a not inconsiderable
degree in his religiously- and metaphysically-influenced convic-
tion that the face of God can be found in the face of the human
person.15 Lavater conceived of physiognomy as an Enlighten-
ment undertaking, although he continually sought to bring it
into harmony with his religious convictions and his office as a
Christian, Protestant pastor. In this tension, he makes claims
about nothing less than the “truth” of the human person: to

13 Philippe Soupault, Littérature et le reste (1919–1931). Quoted in

English in Rosefeld, Manifesto, p. 5: “I am writing a manifesto because
I have nothing to say.”
14 Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförder-
ung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe. Eine Auswahl mit 101 Bil-
dern, ed. Christoph Siegrist (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1984), p. 29. Transla-
tion by Barbara Naumann.
15 See Karl Pestalozzi and Horst Weigelt, eds., Arbeiten zur Geschichte
des Pietismus, Bd. 31: Das Antlitz Gottes im Antlitz des Menschen, Zugänge
zu Johann Kaspar Lavater (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994);
Johann Caspar Lavater: das Antlitz, eine Obsession (Zurich: Kunsthaus
Zurich, 2001).

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Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

discover this and to move systematically from the external

appearance of persons to their “truth,” Lavater sees himself as
no longer bound to the refined portraiture of his time, although
he appreciated successful portraits. For him, visual media of
varying quality (and produced with various technologies) would
suffice, like silhouettes, profiles, engravings of paintings, often
copies of copies.
If we conceive of Lavater’s epistemological interest in a
unifying reading of the human face as a both dubious and now-
classic position among the various facial readability hypothe-
ses, we may also say that he undertook an act of texting the face.
He sought a systematic way of reading the face, to create a text
from a face. Julian Rosefeldt’s treatment of the face is differ-
ent, and in fact the exact opposite: in the Manifesto installation,
Rosefeldt confronts the text with faces that have no causative
relationship to the meaning of the text; he informs the text with
a face: facing the text.

Decontextualization, performance, dissonance

Rosefeldt concentrates in particular on the decision-oriented

and authoritative gesture of the manifestoes in order to play
with it and transfer it to completely changed contexts.
In the part explicitly dedicated to film manifestoes, Rose-
feldt has a primary school teacher say as one of the first sen-
tences: “Nothing is original.” This formulation, taken from Jim
Jarmusch’s 2002 manifesto Golden Rules of Filmmaking,16 intro-
duces a series of statements which the teacher conveys to her
class, as if these statements were the subject of a lesson to be
learned. (Fig. 4 and 5) The children are allowed to draw with col-
ors during the class period; only then, while drawing, do they

16 Jim Jarmusch, Golden Rules of Filmmaking, http://www.faena.com/

aleph/articles/jim-jarmuschs-golden-rules-for-filmmaking/ (accessed
30.06.2018). Also in Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 51ff.

187
Barbara Naumann

begin to act somewhat as artists. But what they receive from the
teacher, in an ironic inversion, is a theory of the fundamental
impossibility of creating an original work, or even simply of
thinking in an original way. The class is urged to repeat and
rhetorically confirm these instructive principles, causing them
to take on the function of an unalterable doctrine.
Jim Jarmusch’s manifesto Golden Rules of Filmmaking pro-
vides most of the text for this film sequence. This manifesto
consists of five sections with apodictic and imperative princi-
ples defining what a filmmaker has to do and allow. The rheto-
ric of the sentences can easily be associated with the rebellious
and frivolous, provocative and self-ironic gesture which defined
both the rhetorical and habitual self-presentation of the direc-
tor at that time:

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates

with inspiration or fuels your imagination. […]. Select only
things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you
do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authentic-
ity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. […]. In any case,
always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not
where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”17

By using these guidelines as a doctrine to be memorized by

children, they ironically transform into their opposite: instead
of letting them “speak directly to your soul,” the children must
now memorize and follow an order.
As in other film sequences in Manifesto, the adaptation of
the manifesto texts to the heterogenous scenery, to situations
of everyday life, produces a performative impression. By doing
so, it loses the original completely appellative context. Conse-
quently, the films aim at a kind of semantic friction between
the textual semantics of the manifestoes, the setting and scene,

17 Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 52f.

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Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

and the main character. The term illocutionary dissonance18 will

perhaps best describe this form of sustained inconsistency, an
inconsistency that comes across when there is a gap between
the actress’s action and what her text actually says. Sometimes
slight, sometimes blatant, the illocutionary dissonance occurs
as a transfer effect between text and heterogenous scenes. In
some of the twelve film sequences, this dissonance develops
into something humorous and ironic—as in the case of the pri-
mary school class—while in others it foregrounds a potentially
menacing and uncanny element. This is particularly notable
in the films about a punk (based on Stridentist and Creation-
ist manifestoes), a curator (Vorticism, Abstract Expressionism),
or a waste management worker (Architecture)—to name only a
few examples. The dissonance becomes especially conspicuous
when the ironic and uncanny sides of the performed texts coin-
cide, as in the film about a conservative fundamentalist Chris-
tian housewife in the American South. (Fig. 6)
Another play with famous facial expressions can be noted
in Cate Blanchett’s teacher’s mask and clothing: the face of
Mia Farrow in the 1980s (when she frequently starred in Woody
Allen films). The teacher’s mask thus in several senses turns out
not to be “original,” instead allowing us to recognize “where it
is taken from.”
Jarmusch’s manifesto was written in 2002; the primary
school teacher’s hairstyle and clothing are thus anachronistic,
referencing the 1980s. Citing a double image—Cate Blanchett
as teacher, Cate Blanchett with the clothing and hairstyle of a
1980s Mia Farrow—initially seems to do justice to the demand
of the manifesto to the extent that Rosefeldt “steals from any-
where” in the history of film and cites the iconic faces of stars.
Through the prominent presentation of the face and simultane-
ous recontextualization of Jarmusch’s film manifestoes (and of
those of other avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage) in

18 My thanks go to Ludwig Jäger of Morphomata College, Cologne,

for this reference.

189
Barbara Naumann

Fig. 4/5: Primary school teacher.

a primary school classroom, this film scene also achieves a re-

semanticization of the texts it is based on. The change is not
restricted to the simple emergence of a new work in another
medium with a film about a primary school class. It does not
merely mark the change of medium. What we see is a cheerful,
even funny everyday scene. Statements from film theory with

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Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

revolutionary demands and a dogmatic gesture are turned into

a film with minimal narrative elements. While the dogmatic
core of the manifestoes does remain in the teacher’s speech, the
film scene as a whole enters into performative and illocution-
ary conflict with it. A novelty appears here: it is incorporated
in the friendly face of the teacher, in the pedagogical address,
the child-friendly, unaggressive, even G-rated atmosphere.
Jarmusch’s manifesto, in contrast, firmly adheres to its initial
statement: “I am at war with my time.”19 But the film scene, like
the class period, flows along easily. No one here is at war, and
the continuity of the scene is not interrupted by the break or
disruption which the revolutionary gesture of the manifesto
requires. The doctrinal character of the text is given an oppos-
ing perspective, the cheerful, fluid performance, where an
ironic break emerges between what the teacher says and the
childlike context in which she says it. (Fig. 4/5)
An even more suggestive effect can be found in Rosefeldt’s
recontextualization of Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 “Pop Art” mani-
festo.20 Sitting together with her conservative Southern fam-
ily, socially and regionally identifiable through their accent
and the strict arrangement of their communal lunch (“Lunch
is ready!”), Cate Blanchett speaks the following sentences of
­Oldenburg like a Christian meal prayer:

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does

something other than sit on its ass in a museum.
I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all.
I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs.
I am for the art of ice-cream cones dropped on concrete.
I am for the majestic art of dog-turds, rising like cathedrals.

19 Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 54.

20 Claes Oldenburg, “I Am For an Art…” Environments, Situations,
Spaces (New York: Martha Jackson Gallery, 1961), reprinted in an
expanded version in Claes Oldenburg and Emmett Williams, eds.,
Store Days: Documents from The Store (1961) and Ray Gun Theatre (1962)
(New York: Something Else Press, 1967), pp. 39–42.

191
Barbara Naumann

Fig. 6: Housewife.

Saying grace is a ritual. For the children, it becomes a particu-

larly agonizing exercise in patience. The film shows the family
deeply embedded in a tradition which in itself has no provoca-
tive characteristics. (Fig. 7) The mother’s face with its out-of-
fashion glasses serves to express piety and a strong demand for
self-control and obedience to tradition.
Oldenburg’s text, in contrast, almost relishes the provoca-
tive gesture. Similarly to Jim Jarmusch’s attitude, the artist
presents himself as an agent of radical innovation. He seeks to
undermine a traditional, bourgeois notion of art, which seems
to him to be associated with precious materials, separate and
exquisite art spaces like museums and galleries, and to be
related to connoisseurship. He instead seeks to open up an
artistic field for heterogenous, unpretentious everyday objects.
For Oldenburg, proclaiming “Pop Art” means tearing down the
walls between different artistic materials, everyday junk and
garbage, between cathedrals and “dog turds,” between art and
non-art.

192
Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

Oldenburg makes use of a repetitive rhetorical device,

anaphora: “I am for an art…I am for…” Anaphoric speech lends
the text a liturgical, prayer-like character, even if its gesture
remains oriented towards a break in convention. Oldenburg’s
irony obviously sets itself against the supposedly petrified arts
and their equally fossilized audience. Although the manifesto
itself ironically attacks convention, it remains rooted in the
discussions concerning the definition of art and art’s pseudo-
religious attitude.
Whereas a “dog turd” is supposed to function as a “majestic
cathedral” of art in the manifesto, the film scene presents the
rigid routine of religious practice. (The family dog is included
in the scene as a kind of metonymic image, an element creat-
ing contiguity.) Here, too, the scene undermines the dogmatic
opposition of the manifesto’s formulations. The mother’s
prayers like the following are indeed striking:

I am for an art that twists and extends and accumulates and

spits and drips …, that does something other than sit on its
ass in a museum, … that embroils itself with the everyday
crap & still comes out on top.21

In her speech, utterances like “spitting and dripping” and “sit-

ting on its ass” effortlessly relate to the family’s shared meal.
Overall, the content of her prayer and the offensive language at
the table constitute a blatant violation of the norms of prayer
and the strict moral conduct of the family. Thus, the film again
ironizes the attitudes of the manifesto. It brings to the fore its
serious, doctrinaire, and rigid arguments and lays bare their
unacknowledged art-religious attitude. In its transformative
refraction through the face of the conservative praying mother,
the manifesto—which initially seems so casual and clever, so
“cool”—reveals its limits, showing its rigid and dogmatic face.

21 Rosefeldt, Manifesto, p. 40.

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Barbara Naumann

Fig. 7: Housewife and table scene.

Resistance, break, transfer: Facing the text

The conventional assumption about the readability and infor-

mative value of facial representations assumes that the por-
trayal of a face communicates something essential about the
person portrayed. In 18th century physiognomy, one frequently
encounters the opinion that the study of the individual face
allows one to arrive at conclusions about person and personal-
ity, to read character.
Julian Rosefeldt’s installation Manifesto takes the opposite
stand: its cinematic presentation of the face finds a face for the
text. It masks the filmed face for each respective role and turns it
into a scene of transference. In the face, and the presentation of
the face, the relationship between image and text, visual role play
and a manifest concept of art undergo a change: facing the text.
Whether in a strict psychoanalytic sense of resistance or in a
more general one, the moment of transference develops against
resistance and forces the constellation of the participants to
change. In the context of Rosefeldt’s aesthetic of transference,
we can identify a significant and motive-generating resistance

194
Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

in the disruptive gesture of the manifesto texts. Generally,

aesthetic transference ignites and takes place in moments of
resistance and disruption. Rosefeldt uses the textual resistance
of the manifestoes; he knows how to fundamentally alter the
constellation of (manifesto) text and (film) image by perform-
ing the transfer into film and into the continuity of the featured
scenes from everyday life. The same is true in Manifesto for the
relationship between the representation and semanticization
of the face. Whenever the protagonist’s face scenically inter-
prets the manifesto texts, it lends them a new, different mean-
ing. The continuity of the performed scene also alters the appel-
lative, hypertrophic, disruptive, and dogmatic character of the
manifestoes. The performative, play-like character of the film
sequences is the result of this process.
Rosefeldt thus dissolves the traditional alliance between
the depiction of the face and the representation of character.
Facing the text, then, takes on multiple meanings: on the one
hand, the observers are confronted with the manifestoes as spo-
ken monologue scripts in a staged setting that originally had
nothing to do with the texts of manifestoes. On the other hand,
the face of the speaking protagonist becomes, in a semiotic
sense, a text: the face performing itself. Face and scene relate
to the causes and history of the manifestoes in completely het-
erogenous ways; Rosefeldt does not allow any causative relation
between the two. In their recontextualized setting, the didac-
tic, appellative self-presentation of many manifestoes seems
immediate, commonplace, distant from the debates of art and
the original context.22 To the degree that the transference of the

22 Burcu Dogramaci speaks correctly of “speaking, acting, transform-

ing. The manifesto as Metamorphosis.” She names three moments
which characterize Rosefeldt’s aesthetic of transference. However,
the concept of transference, unlike metamorphosis, makes clear that
and how the underlying reference texts and forms of representation
can still be recognized, which is why this crucial term is preferred here
for Rosefeldt’s aesthetic. Burcu Dogramaci, “Speaking, Acting, Trans-
forming: The Manifesto as Metamorphosis,” in Rosefeldt, Manifesto,
pp. 92–95, here p. 92.

195
Barbara Naumann

texts into faces and scenes works against the dogmatic resis-
tance of the texts, the performative individual strength of the
film scenes develops.
As the installation poster shows (Fig. 1), the face of Cate
Blanchett has a decisive impact on all twelve variations with
their various roles (and masks) on the performative character
of the films. It is noteworthy that the audience always sees two
or sometimes even three faces at once: first, we perceive the
role and mask of the respective film character; this, however,
remains transparent on the famous and popular face of the
actress and on the face which in turn underlies this, the individ-
ual physiognomy of Cate Blanchett. At the same time, the indi-
vidual face continues to shine through all of these masks. It even
undermines the widely-recognized “general”—i.e. iconic—face
of the “star,” made famous through the camerawork of film.
The individuality of the actress is never fully concealed through
masks and roles in any of the films, instead remaining in the
mode which we could, with Walter Benjamin, call “distorted
similarity.”23 Instead of a film celebrity acting, we rather per-
ceive a face in twelve different masks. The artwork Manifesto
only becomes coherent through the fact that it does not present
twelve different actresses and twelve different faces embody-
ing the twelve roles, but rather one face in all of its masks. This
arrangement helps to rework and foreground the performance

23 “Distorted similarity” is a variation of Benjamin’s concept of “non-

sensuous similarity.” See Walter Benjamin, “Über das mimetische
Vermögen,” in Gesammelte Schriften 2: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge 1, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 210–213,
here p. 212. [In English: Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,”
Selected Writings, 1926–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Michael
W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap
Press, 1999), pp. 720–722, here p. 721.] On this variation, see Sigrid Wei-
gel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit. Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise
(Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 1997), and Barbara Nau-
mann, “Bilderdenken und Symbolisierungsprozesse in der frühen
Kulturwissenschaft,” in Claudia Benthien and Brigitte Weingart, eds.,
Handbuch Literatur und Visuelle Kultur (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter,
2014), pp. 86–113, here p. 100.

196
Facing the Text: Julian Rosefeldt

of the recited manifestoes as an independent element of film

staging. At the same time, however, the dogmatic demands and
appellative, aggressive character of the manifestoes recede into
the background.
Rosefeldt’s aesthetic of transference examines the mecha-
nisms at play when texts are given a face by the art of film. In
a sense, transference into everyday film settings makes space
again for playfulness, for the imagination of locations, scenes,
images, and masks. And against this background, the artistic
treatment of traditional and new forms can begin anew: not as
war, not as dogma, but as self-conscious play.

197
Rahel Villinger

Aesthetic Judgment: Alexander Kluge

In 2003, Alexander Kluge published a slim volume entitled The

Art of Making Distinctions (Die Kunst, Unterschiede zu machen)
containing texts—oral compositions1 and reprinted stories
from the Chronicle of Feelings2—which, as announced on its
cover, concern a specific power of human feeling. In these
works, Kluge aims to “track down,” “uncover,” and provide
support for the “mass production” of what he calls the “cease-
lessly active faculty of distinction.”3 Now we might consider the
“description of feelings as the producer of faculties of distinc-
tion” in general as “one of the axioms of Kluge’s artistic as well
as theoretical work.”4 The Art of Making Distinctions, however,
places special emphasis on one aspect of the overarching topic
of feeling in Kluge’s work which I intend to explore in the fol-
lowing, namely the relationship of feeling as a faculty of distinc-
tion to an art which makes distinctions.5

1 These consist of transcriptions of excerpts from a conversation

with Reinhardt Kahl in the Literaturhaus Hamburg. They were revised,
expanded, and edited by the author for the print edition.
2 Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle 1. Basisgeschichten 2. Lebens-
läufe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000).
3 Alexander Kluge, Die Kunst, Unterschiede zu machen (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 2. All citations in the following have been
translated directly from the cited German source.
4 Philipp Ekardt, “Gesten vor Gericht. Gefühl und Unterscheidung
nach Alexander Kluge,” Alexander Kluge-Jahrbuch 4 (2017): p. 177–189,
here p. 181. In his essay, Ekardt refers especially to Kluge’s film Die
Macht der Gefühle (“The Power of Emotion”) and the book with the
same title which was published in 1984 as an accompaniment to the
film by the German publisher Suhrkamp.
5 Kluge’s repeated re-compilations and re-issuings of his stories
under various titles, in various visual framings, serve the purpose of
emphasizing different or new perspectives on a topic. The individual
stories are thus able to be read in new historical constellations. In
the table of contents of Chronicle of Feelings, for example, the title
“Moment of Decision” cannot even be found. This story, which is the

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As I want to argue in this essay, Kluge here endorses a theory

of feeling—or, more precisely, a theory of the ability to make dis-
tinctions, to judge through feeling—which, in the tradition of aes-
thetics after Kant, is known as “aesthetic judgment” (ästhetische
Urteilskraft). Several fundamental affinities between Kluge’s
critique and Kant’s Critique of Judgment are immediately notice-
able (these affinities begin with terminology, as for example
Kluge’s use of the 18th century term “faculty” [Vermögen]). For
an aesthetic power of judgment in Kant’s sense also makes dis-
tinctions simply through feeling, without adhering to given rules
and without determining concepts through its judgment. To the
extent that it judges art, it is further promoted as a “free”—as a
non-conceptual—faculty of distinction. Kluge’s concept of feel-
ing also includes both the bodily affect of immediate sensory
perception and non-sensory feelings in a narrower sense (e.g.
various moods like sadness and joy), without drawing a clear
dividing line between them.6 For Kant, similarly, the feeling of
pleasure in the beautiful, which is the power of aesthetic judg-
ment, is not only a bodily sensation7 but also the subject’s “feel-
ing of life” (Lebensgefühl)8 as well as the principle through which
moods and feelings can, without terms or concepts and solely
through artistic form, the manner of representation (Darstel-
lung), be shared with others.9

subject of the following, does not appear there, as it does in The Art of
Making Distinctions, as an independent story, but rather as Part XV of
“The Embezzled Front Theater: How does art work?”
6 Compare a similar situation in Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Inner
Touch. Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books, 2007), which
investigates the history of a specific feeling, namely the feeling of being
alive.
7 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul
Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), p. 158f. Here and in the following, the original German of Kritik
der Urteilskraft will be cited in brackets according to Volume 5 of the
Akademie-Ausgabe of Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften: (AA 5: 277f.).
8 See ibid., p. 90 (AA 5: 204).
9 Ibid., p. 194f (AA 5: 317): “[G]enius really consists in the happy rela-
tion, […] to express what is unnamable in the mental state in the case
of a certain representation and to make it universally communicable,

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Kluge’s stories present us with a similar kind of non-con-

ceptual effectiveness and feeling’s power to distinguish through
art—together with all of their aporias. The connection to Kant
here is equal parts affirmative and critical. In the following, I
intend to show what that means by proposing and developing
seven dimensions of the faculty of aesthetic judgment treated
in The Art of Making Distinctions, which, as we shall see, form an
integral part of Kluge’s theory of narrative:
1. Kluge’s work analyzes the ways in which art (poetry,
opera, cinema—and, in its own critical way, narrative) makes a
distinction in the life of its recipient due to its (lingering) affec-
tive influence.
2. Art can thus stimulate the desire to live differently, for
example with respect to time, to feelings, and to interactions
with other people—even if we do not (yet) have a precise idea of
how this different life might look. Through aesthetically-medi-
ated feeling, we can at least begin to integrate not-yet-existent
or (discursively) not-yet-comprehensible or -classifiable events
into our lives and into a world shared with others, and to rec-
ognize their desirability (or undesirability), or at least imagine
their possibility.
3. Aesthetically-mediated judgment is, or intensifies, the
ability to judge connections and differences between fictional-
ity and reality. Here we are presented with a potential answer
to the question of what kind of “art” is referred to with the self-
reflective and programmatic title The Art of Making Distinctions:
evidently, on the one hand, an anthropological faculty (an art of
living, a Lebenskunst) and, on the other, the critical art of sto-
rytelling (which, for Kluge, is part of the art of living). Without
fictions which enrich the reality of life with other dimensions,
without telling stories, “we are in fact unable to live as human
beings”—this is the “anti-realism of feelings,” as Kluge says in

whether the expression consists in language, or painting, or in plastic

art.”

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a lecture titled “The Handicraft of the Storyteller.”10 For Kluge,

the specifically critical element of the art of storytelling always
consists in producing the ability to distinguish between reality
and fiction; this is what distinguishes it from uncritical produc-
ers of feeling (for Kluge these include for example 19th century
opera and 20th century Hollywood cinema).
4. The impossibility of deriving a free aesthetic judgment
from concepts can be seen in its spontaneity (Ursprungshaft-
igkeit), which in Kluge is also simply a volatility (Sprunghaftig-
keit)—the how of the critical decision remains strangely open, a
leap (Sprung) from nothingness in the sense that the judgments
of protagonists in Kluge’s stories often cannot be explained
causally, by reference to anything that preceded their actions.
5. In Kluge’s stories, that which is conveyed about the power
of feeling is not due to the reader’s being able to mimetically
empathize with certain represented feelings and thus feel these
feelings themselves. His protagonists’ expressions of feeling are
often surprising, contradictory, difficult to interpret, taciturn,
or opaque.11 Instead, Kluge negotiates art’s ability to communi-
cate via the specific form of exemplarity which Kant discovered
in the structure of aesthetic judgment. In the following, I will
thus also be concerned with a form of narration which is com-
posed in such a way—namely in an exemplary way—that the
reader sees herself addressed in it and can thus connect with it,
although or precisely because that which is represented or nar-
rated appears strange, extraordinary, and possibly even enig-
matic, incomprehensible, or unexplainable.
6. In the story that I will be mainly concerned with, “Moment
of Decision,” Kluge places before us, narratively and figura-
tively, the events and effects of an aesthetic experience which
opens up a space shareable with others (and takes place via the

10 Alexander Kluge, “Das Handwerk des Erzählers” (“The Handicraft of

the Storyteller”), die kleine filmfabrik, 7 Feb. 2012, https://www.­youtube.
com/watch?v=medmyVcsMdo/ (accessed:19.9.2018).
11 See also Ekardt, “Gesten vor Gericht,” p. 185f.

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feelings, imagination, and judgment of a recipient experienc-

ing an artwork, which become visible and audible in her expres-
sions—her wishes, desires, disclosures, claims, and demands
on others). The representation of this experience causes a dou-
bling of the virtual space of an aesthetic encounter (of an expe-
rience of art), while the site of something which is experienced
in the first place (the work of art, which is what this is all about)
remains peculiarly empty. Like Kant, for whom pleasure in the
beautiful becomes perceptible only through the free play of the
subject’s faculties (imagination and understanding), the beau-
tiful thing in itself remaining indeterminate, Kluge is also not
describing an artistic work but rather the fictional re-presenta-
tion of such a work and the affect it produces.
7. Kluge goes critically beyond Kant not only in the fact that
his theory of aesthetic experience is itself aesthetically composed
(staged, narrated, or otherwise re-presented), but also in the
fact that the power of aesthetic feeling is, here, only negatively
noticeable, specifically through a failure of its communicability
(of Kant’s principle of aesthetic judgment). That to which an aes-
thetic judgment would, according to Kant, necessarily lay claim,
that our feeling of pleasure in this beautiful thing is shareable
with others, is exposed in Kluge as an unfulfilled, disappointed
wish. And yet the representation of this disappointment to the
reader in all of its negativity now presents, in a very general way,
something communicable through feeling.
The story entitled “Moment of Decision” (“Moment der
Entscheidung”)12 demonstrates these seven theses narratively.
It begins with a citation from the Flying Dutchman: “If you
assent to your father, tomorrow he shall be your husband…”
While a complex of themes already appears—concerning love
and critical life decisions—the disoriented reader still does not

12 Alexander Kluge, “Moment der Entscheidung,” in Die Kunst,

pp. 45–48. (Reprinted from Alexander Kluge, Chronik der Gefühle 1.
Basisgeschichten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), pp. 816–818).
Cited in the following according to page number.

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Rahel Villinger

know that she is witnessing the thoughts of Hilde, the story’s

protagonist, moved by a visit to the opera—who is thinking
back of the Wagner libretto and posing herself questions about
it—and then also, in direct speech continually interrupted by
an authorial narrator, the conversation with her fiancé Emil.
The story thus begins with confusion: who is being quoted
here? Who is speaking? And where are these speakers located?
Even subsequently, almost nothing can be said with certainty
about what decision—as specifically announced and referred to
with the definite article in the title—this story is actually about.
Further uncertainties are connected to this: when (in which nar-
rated moment) and how was something decided here? Let us
take a closer look at these questions in order.
Only in the last third of the story, after the dialogue with
Emil has concluded, does it become clear that the decision in
question might concern, for Hilde, an entire life; that it is about
a decision for or against a life together with her fiancé. Specifi-
cally, we learn that Hilde was “disappointed by the conversa-
tion” (47) which she had had with Emil after the opera. And
furthermore:

At that moment, when she was finally able to open the door
of a taxi, she had to decide whether she was obligated to
consider Emil superficial (not holding her in regard, but
also hectic with respect to his own feelings) or whether she
might have certain “approaches” which would allow her to
go on living with him. Then she leapt after him into the back
of the car. (Ibid.)

The banal, everyday action of getting into a car now becomes—

as emphasized by the authorial italicization of the last sen-
tence—an imitation of the exemplary love plot of Senta in the
Flying Dutchman, who “plunges after” her lover “into the har-
bor waters” (45) to die together with him and in this way to
save him. The italicized sentence also literally cites Hilde’s and
Emil’s previous conversation a few minutes earlier, in which

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she had repeatedly asked him whether he would “plunge after”

her into the “cold harbor waters of a Nordic bay […] to save
[her]” (45). This conversation is so disappointing to Hilde pre-
cisely because she is unable to believe Emil’s “I would plunge
after you” (ibid.): their fiction, mutually produced in conversa-
tion, of an act of love determinative of life and death is nowhere
near as convincing as the one in the opera they have just heard.
Both mutually betray each other because they do not act in
the way the lovers in the opera do, but instead only talk about
what if—which repeatedly exposes the pretense, thus denying
and negating it.13 What we find here is thus, in a literal sense, a
repeated dis-illusionment, produced by the intention of discur-
sively determining feelings.
And yet: in the titular “moment of decision” described in the
above-cited passage, Hilde actually decides, by “leaping” into
the taxi, to “go on living” with her fiancé. While Hilde’s desired
mimesis of art—the idea that her fiancé, too, would prove his love
like Senta—remains unfulfilled, is disappointed by the discourse
of reality, the language of facts,14 she herself accomplishes, with-
out being aware of it in the moment, a mimetic act of love. For
the question remains open not only how (for what reasons) Hilde
decided to get into the car—Hilde is also herself completely
uncertain of what kind of decision (a decision for what?) this was.

13 Hilde, who accuses Emil of lying and unbelievability, herself speaks

ambiguously and untruthfully whenever she wants to end the fictional-
ity in their play of imagination (“Be honest. It has no influence on our
relationship if you don’t do it” [ibid.]). Emil, in turn, also denies the
fiction in order to justify his own unbelievability: “It’s not like you’re
the Flying Dutchman, either.”
14 “How should I, for the purpose of being saved, come with you out
of the dirty harbor waters in Munkmarsch harbor—to name an exam-
ple we both know well—where we couldn’t even drown during low tide
because the water is too shallow, and then, in the direction of land,
ascend into the sky, when we both very well know that above us is the
stratosphere, and afterwards the Van Allen Belt, and then the airs of
outer space, and no kind of home?—You can’t say AIRS OF OUTER
SPACE, Emil answered.” (46)

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Rahel Villinger

We subsequently read: “later, it cost her days to figure out what it

meant that she wordlessly followed Emil” (ibid.).
It is, however, not only the what and how of a wordless deci-
sion which remain open here. Differently from how it might
seem at a first glance, the story of Hilde and Emil concerns
not only a single moment of decision, nor a single decision.
Kluge’s juxtaposition of reality and fiction, everyday life and the
extraordinary, banality and sublimity has already been much
discussed.15 In this story, the many small moments of daily
life together, which unwittingly testify to their love and each of
which—each of the endlessly many moments of their time spent
together—represents a decision for continuing to live with each
other, are referred back to the “great” and conscious act of love
in a single, extraordinary moment, as described by the opera. Art
and life are thus not only (negatively) compared: instead, a com-
plex and interconnected relationship emerges between them
which involves mimesis, transference, and communication.
We can already see this in the overall subject: from begin-
ning to end, the narration contains nothing other than the feel-
ings of a protagonist who has been moved by a visit to the opera,
feelings which are articulated in her memories, thoughts,
speech, and affective acts. This is also apparent in the fact that
the thematic question primarily occupying Hilde is not at all
the question of whether she wants to continue living with Emil.
Rather, it is the question of “what art had communicated to her
and to him” (47). Over the course of the story, Hilde repeatedly
poses this question and it remains unresolved until the end. At
the end of the evening, Hilde is extremely disappointed—more
so even than before; the last sentence of the story is “Hilde
could have wept” (48)—and this because of the by now totally
apparent inability of either to decide “whether art had anything

15 For a very apt discussion of this, see Bernd Stiegler, “Die Realität
ist nicht genug. Alexander Kluges praktische Theorie und theoretische
Praxis der Montage,” Alexander Kluge. Text+Kritik 11, no. 85/86 (2011):
pp. 52–58.

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Aesthetic Judgment: Alexander Kluge

to say to them” (ibid.). How does this inability manifest itself,

though? What causes the failure of Hilde’s and Emil’s aesthetic
judgment?
Let us first take a closer look at the last paragraph of the
text, which gives the cause of Hilde’s extreme disappointment
at the end of the evening:

And so that evening they began to doubt whether art had any-
thing to say to them, were hesitant in their judgment, only
because he so single-mindedly wanted to go to the Leopold,
and that only because he had promised to make an appear-
ance there. As they walked into the Leopold, no one looked
at them for very long. Their friends assumed as a matter of
course that they would, as promised, show up. Take a seat,
Emil, someone said. Hilde could have wept. (48)

Clearly, the inability to decide “whether art had anything to say

to them,” an inability which causes Hilde so much pain, is con-
nected to Emil’s poor planning for the evening. It allows neither
time for lingering with the “mood” conveyed by the opera nor
even for a discussion of it. Moreover, the absence of an affec-
tive demonstration of feeling in the everyday world—to which
the engaged couple all too quickly returns—is contrasted in the
most disappointing way with the desire, aroused by the opera,
for more (time for) feeling. That is already apparent in the fact
that Emil laconically dismisses Hilde’s questions hoping for
the reality of “greater feelings,” only to grab a taxi as quickly as
possible. The urgency which Emil demands of her is not recon-
cilable with her desire to linger with the memory of the intensity
of the feelings which were conveyed in the piece simply through
the sheer length of the glances (while “no one looked for very
long” at Hilde).16

16 “Does that mean that there are no places or occasions for weightier
feelings? Clearly art wants to say that to us, answered Emil, who still
wanted to stop by the Leopold. To do this he needed to hail a taxi; the

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Rahel Villinger

What art thus emotionally conveyed to Hilde is a different

relation to time. The purely quantitative More of time for non-
discursive communication forms (through glances and ges-
tures), which is given to them in art, proves to be a qualitatively
felt More of feeling for the observer. In this way, the haste of
the opera-goers to get to the taxi stand, which Emil demanded
of her, already seemed “absurd” to Hilde (46), completely
unsuited to that which she “believes art wants to communicate
to us” (47), and that which would be appropriate behavior after
the show they had just seen: “The opera seemed to her suited
for A LONG BREATH IN THE TEMPO OF FEELING” (47).
This expression, emphasized by the author with capital let-
ters, is also the caption under the small drawing printed on the
last page of the story which simultaneously comments upon
and frames it. The image can be read as a motto of the parable,
which is here told, as is so often the case with Kluge, through
a confrontation between stories and images. The image likely
shows the interior of an old cinema, or possibly a theater or
opera house17—in any case a room filled with spectators during
an ongoing show. (Fig. 1) This space is represented in a cutout-
like way from the perspective of one of the rear rows. A single
woman stands in the middle of the sitting mass of spectators,

dispute prevented him. Hold on! said Hilde, you can’t just brush me
off like that. She was lingering inwardly with the glance of Senta, who
did not move for some time, the glance directed at the appearance of
the ghost showing up in the doorframe of the Handelshof, but now the
fiancé wants to hurry to the taxi stand to single-mindedly get to the Leop-
old, where they would meet people that Hilde didn’t want to see because
they didn’t fit in with anything in the basic mood of the opera, neither
with the ghost sailors nor with the Nordic trade depot.” (46)
17 This indistinguishability visualizes another common feature in
much of Kluge’s work: the non-dialectic or uncritical development of
the power of feelings through the opera (as leading artistic medium or
paradigm of 19th century art) on the one hand and through Hollywood
cinema on the other (as leading artistic medium or paradigm of 20th
century art). Their distinction lies, according to Kluge, in how a drama
ends. While the opera offers the recipient (in this case Hilde) a belief in
fate, Hollywood cinema concludes with a soothing and idealized happy
ending.

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thrilled by what she is witnessing on the screen or stage, her

arms thrown desperately in the air, as if rushing to help the per-
son drowning in distress at sea or herself calling for help (as if
she were in mortal danger). The eccentric, even ecstatic expres-
sion of her excitement attracts the irritated attention of some of
the audience members sitting near her. One wonders whether
she takes the world represented by art for reality or is simply
extremely moved by the artistic representation.
Kluge’s story decides the question which the picture itself
left open. Precisely because she has been emotionally moved,
Hilde feels the dis-illusioning difference between art and reality
more intensely than any of the other people who appear in the
story. The title “Moment of Decision” thus also stands for the
totality of that which is narrated beneath it: for the exit from
the opera, from the world of art, from the fiction of feelings,
into the reality of everyday life. The story is about the moment
of de-scission, of being cut apart, Ent-Scheidung in German, the
division and disconcerting difference between the two, which
has become significantly more noticeable in Hilde’s own life
through the alienating aftereffects of art—audible in conversa-
tion, visible in her tears. The figure of the woman shown in the
image which lies under the story like a motto, a woman who
has jumped up from her seat visibly excited by the artistic per-
formance, represents against this background the power of
the feelings conveyed by art to make a distinction. Standing
upright, the woman rises above the mass of spectators, behaves
in a nonconformist way—and thus also represents, as we will
now see, the form of exemplarity of artistic representation
itself.
Agamben, in the context of his reflections on exemplarity,
notes the particularity of the example,18 which is specifically not
to be thought of as one of many individuals, one of which would
embody the general case just as well as any other one (and, in
this decisive respect, would be indistinguishable from all other

18 I use “example” and “the exemplary” as synonyms in the following.

209
Rahel Villinger

Fig. 1: “A long breath in the tempo of feeling.”

possible examples of this generality, namely qua example of the

one generality), but rather is itself singular, particular, and thus
anything but normal:

What the example shows is its belonging to a class, but for

this very reason the example steps out of its class in the very
moment in which it exhibits and delimits it […] The example
is thus excluded from the normal case not because it does
not belong to it but, on the contrary, because it exhibits its
own belonging to it. The example is truly a paradigm in the
etymological sense: it is what is “shown beside.”19

19 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life

(1995), trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1998), p. 20. See also Agamben’s take on Kant’s concept of the
exemplary validity of an aesthetic judgment in Giorgio Agamben, “What
is a paradigm?,” in The Signature of All Things: On Method (2008), trans.
Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Atell (New York: Zone Books, 2009), pp. 9–32.

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Aesthetic Judgment: Alexander Kluge

As Agamben argues, exemplarity is paradoxically structured.

The exemplary stands as an example for something else, some-
thing general, precisely because it does not appear as a normal
case. By “exhibiting” its embodiment of the general, by becom-
ing clearly visible, noticeable, and thus conspicuous, this
embodiment is no longer normal but instead exemplary. Thus
the proverbial “perfect example” exemplifies a quality or rela-
tionship in a model—admirable, imitation-worthy—but also
possibly admonishing or regrettable way.20 With this, numer-
ous registers of the aesthetic are already addressed (exhibition,
imitation, astonishment, wonder, pity). The aesthetic is also
the original domain of the exemplary in Kant, who, however,
approaches the subject in an entirely different way: not by way
of the figurative mode of presentation on a public stage (the
“showing itself,” or more precisely “showing itself beside itself”
of the paradigm according to Agamben), but rather by way of
the question of the possibility of aesthetic judgment.21

20 Compare the expression “making an example of someone.” In

order to explain to her students the role of the example in Kant’s think-
ing on imagination and judgment, Hannah Arendt not coincidentally
chooses the example of the Homeric hero Achilles, who exemplified
the characteristic of courage precisely by demonstrating extraordi-
nary, even superhuman courage. Arendt argues in this context that an
example never possesses validity a priori but instead only in the con-
text of a specific historical tradition. See Hannah Arendt, Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
p. 84. I have elsewhere attempted to outline Arendt’s thoughts on the
exemplary with and after Kant. See Rahel Villinger, “Der blinde Dichter.
Hannah Arendts Theorie des Exemplarischen,” in Andreas Cremonini
and Markus Klammer, eds., Bild-Beispiele. Zu einer piktorialen Logik des
Exemplarischen (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2019) (forthcoming).
21 In Kluge, these two paths of entry are linked to one another: he
places the history of Hilde and Emil and their questions to art along-
side the image of the excited spectator. While the woman “is completely
out of order”—causing a disturbance, blocking others’ views—she also
stands in her conspicuous behavior for something which the experi-
ence of art originally possesses: pathos, affect, the affectedness of the
recipient which can, in extreme cases, rise to the level of ecstasy. Kluge
transfers in this way an archaic relationship to art into an investigation
of its ability to critique, of a critical engagement with art and the feel-
ings conveyed by art.

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Rahel Villinger

For Kant, the power of judgment is the general ability to

think, criticize, and negotiate the various possible relationships
between the particular and the general.22 In acts of cognition,
the power of judgment serves to either subsume an individual
phenomenon given to perception—this here—under a given
general concept and in this way to define or determine it (deter-
mining judgment), or to find a common concept for a collection
of new phenomena (reflective judgment). Here, examples func-
tion as “leading strings” (Gängelwagen)23 for the power of judg-
ment—biologists, physicians, or lawyers can orient themselves
in them; the good, paradigmatic example can guide the classifi-
cation of similar phenomena (legal cases, clinical pictures); the
new example can shed new light on related phenomena, and
even suggest the further sub-classification of a field of compa-
rable phenomena, to investigate and conceive of them with a
view to other aspects. In all of these cases, however, the power
of judgment stands in service of generally verifiable scientific
knowledge, in which the particularity of individual phenomena
must ultimately (again) disappear, absorbed by their general
concept.
The aesthetic judgment of taste, however, is also based on
a reflective activity of the power of judgment. In this case—in
aesthetic judgments—the individual, particular object which
is judged to be beautiful is not brought under a specific con-
cept, nor is a concept found for it. Its particularity, its singu-
larity is not erased but is precisely that which is judged in the
aesthetic judgment. Aesthetic judgment in Kant is thus strictly
distinguished from epistemological judgment. But how does
Kant conceive of the judging activity of reflection in the field
of aesthetics, where reflection (judgment) is free and autono-

22 See Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 66f (AA 5: 179). An

initial version of the interpretation of judgment in Kant presented in
what follows appeared in my book Kant und die Imagination der Tiere
(Göttingen: Konstanz University Press, 2018), Chapter III, p. 171ff.
23 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and
Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 269.

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mous—and thus not in service of the knowing understanding,

of finding, defining, and reclassifying concepts, but rather fol-
lowing the purely aesthetic pleasure principle? What is being
reflected upon here and what is the end of reflection if not the
discovery of a specific concept under which the particular can
be subsumed?
Kant writes:

Taste is […] the faculty for judging a priori the communica-

bility of the feelings that are combined with a given repre-
sentation (without the mediation of a concept).24

That which is judged via aesthetic judgment is thus the gen-

eral “communicability of feelings” which, as Kant writes here,
are “combined” with a “given” representation (e.g. through a
work of art). That does not mean, however, that an aesthetic
judgment is always a judgment of whether and to what extent
an artist succeeded in representing feelings. Much more fun-
damentally, it means that aesthetic judgment is an ability to
judge something not through general concepts but rather
through a mere feeling; namely a feeling for the general com-
municability and shareability of that same feeling which com-
municates itself through the aesthetic representation. Aes-
thetic pleasure, the basic principle of aesthetic judgment, is
a pleasure in its ability to be shared with others, in its ability
to speak.25 Kant thus also calls this principle “common sense”
(sensus ­communis):

24 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 176 (AA 5: 296).

25 Because pleasure—even the disinterested, free pleasure of Kant—
always contains the desire for more, specifically more of just this (disin-
terested) pleasure, the pleasure of aesthetic judgment contains a desire
for more of such a feeling of pleasure which is shareable with others.
Here, and not in reason (Vernunft), is where Arendt identifies the origin
of the political, the origin of human community according to Kant. See
Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy.

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[…] grounding our judgement […] only on our feeling […],

which we therefore make our ground not as a private feel-
ing, but as a common one.26

Kant says: we make aesthetic judgments only by way of subjec-

tive feeling. This is why the validity of an aesthetic judgment
cannot be proven and the agreement of others with it cannot
be compelled in the way that logical proof requires. Neverthe-
less—and this is what is so enigmatic, astonishing, and para-
doxical about this specific kind of feeling, which Kant identi-
fies as an ability to make (aesthetic) judgments—in making an
aesthetic judgment, we always demand the agreement of oth-
ers. For we judge purely aesthetically merely through the feel-
ing of a shared common sense, through nothing other than the
feeling that our feeling of pleasure in this beautiful thing is not
private, but shared with others: through a feeling that our plea-
sure is communicable. Kant also expresses this in the following
way: aesthetic judgments make a claim to a merely “exemplary
validity.”27 Or: the “necessity that is thought in an aesthetic
judgment [can] only be called exemplary.”28 That means, as
Kant explains, that it is conceived of as “a necessity of the assent
of all to a judgment that is regarded as an example of a universal
rule that one cannot produce.”29
Common sense is thus, according to Kant, the faculty of a
reflexive, self-referential and simultaneously political feeling.
Through common sense, we have a feeling for the communica-
bility of a subjective feeling: a feeling for the exemplarity of (still)
unconceived and particular phenomena, perhaps even newly
appearing in history (texts, works, forms, relations), which
many others (in many different ways) could connect with and
react to and which, in all of their indeterminacy, opacity, and

26 Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, p. 123 (AA 5: 239).

27 Ibid.
28 Ibid., p. 121 (AA 5: 237).
29 Ibid.

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particularity, can be made subject to criticism and thus trans-

parent to something which points beyond themselves, through
which they allow our common world to appear in a new light. It
is in this sense that the woman in the image which Kluge’s story
comments upon, excitedly taking part in the show and ecstati-
cally standing out from the mass of sitting (bourgeois) spec-
tators, is exemplary of the moment when art’s transgressive
potential to change our lives becomes recognizable. In a shared
world—in the world in which the standing woman is connected
to those sitting, even simply because she is in the same room
as them and is attending the same performance—it makes a
difference. That which aesthetically moves one viewer does not
only pertain to her but to many others as well.
More fundamentally, Kant’s thesis of the pleasure in the
beautiful as a form of common sense, which Kluge takes up and
negotiates, means that aesthetic feeling provokes and nour-
ishes the desire, even the claim and demand that it be able to
be shared with others. For that is of course the reason for Hil-
de’s disillusionment: Emil does not want to linger with her at
the opera. And for her this reluctance is equivalent—in a highly
Kantian sense—to a failure of aesthetic judgment, an inabil-
ity to judge “what art had to impart to them.” While the piece
showed Hilde what it could mean to rehearse a “long breath in
the tempo of feeling,” while she lingers with the images of the
performance and wants to extend and transfer this lingering
into real life by at least attempting to mutually share her feel-
ings with Emil, Emil’s reactions, arrested by the reality prin-
ciple, cause this attempt to run aground. Kant’s sense of the
shareability of feelings in the contemplation of art is exposed
here as fiction, as illusion.
In Kluge, the world of art divorces from the world of actual
life through bitter disillusionment; their difference becomes
painfully clear. While the emotional production of Wagner’s
opera does not allow Hilde to distinguish between the fiction of
feelings and the demands of reality, Kluge’s narrative art uses
the negativity of disappointed feelings, the non-fulfillment of

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desire, to “produce” the faculty of distinguishing between real-

ity and fiction. The critique of feelings which is thoroughly
positive in Kant becomes, here, negatively dialectic. If the story
enacts the failure of aesthetic communicability, then the capac-
ity of non-conceptual communicability, the decision-making
power of feeling (including Hilde’s feeling of love) is salvaged
in the end in its failure—and through the negativity of the fail-
ure itself. For nothing about Kluge’s story appears so familiar,
so comprehensible, and thus also so generally communicable
as Hilde’s disappointment in Emil’s behavior in reaction to her
desire for a mimesis of art in real life.

The pieces in this collection concern aesthetic theory in a dou-

ble sense: not only in the sense of aesthetics (as a subject or kind
of content) but also in the sense that the aesthetic theories dis-
cussed here are also themselves aesthetically composed. This in
turn implies the interrogation of the aesthetic methods of texts
and other works for their theoretical potential: their capacity for
thought and their way of thinking. Kluge works with the prin-
ciple of difference or distinction—with breaks, confrontations,
contrasts—between various media, forms, times, methods, but
also between art and life, facts and fictions, realities, desires,
and feelings. That happens in “Moment of Decision” primarily
through a negativity of representation—the representation of a
lack, a disillusionment of feeling.
The author here makes use—as every aesthetic theory does
in its own way, perhaps—of the principle of the exemplarity of
aesthetic judgment. Only by way of this principle is a subject
or phenomenon presented (“exhibited”) in its singularity or
particularity, which is never fully graspable in concepts—made
observable and judgeable from different angles. By himself aes-
thetically presenting his critique of the faculty of feeling, Kluge
draws out the last consequence of Kant’s aesthetics: transform-
ing aesthetic theory itself into a non-conceptual, exemplary

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r­epresentation of a shareable experience. Friedrich Schlegel

and Novalis were already able to show, in direct connection with
and following Kant, that the critical reader of a literature which
is art must become its second author. In “Moment of Decision,”
Kluge brings this insight to a point by going a step further: the
aesthetic-poetic representation of the experience of art does
more than just amplify it; Kluge also presents the aporias of the
original aesthetic sharing, the failure of sharing, which now in
turn become shareable and communicable.

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-
Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theoria

Preliminary remarks: How to read

The following remarks aim at a revision of the classical topos

of the epistemological power of aesthetics, with particular ref-
erence to the relationship between art and knowledge. This
classical topos can be traced back to Alexander Baumgarten’s
foundational Aesthetica and above all to the aesthetic theories
of Georg Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Josef Schelling. I will
examine and develop this concept with a view to the difference
between scientific “truth” and the language of philosophy (in
the sense of propositional speech and discursive argument),
and a genuinely constellational mode of operation in the arts
which derives its compositional dimension from a logic of con-
junction, linkage, and montage. An “operation” of this kind
takes place in a sensual or perceptive sphere, opening up that
which Adorno referred to in his musicological writings as “syn-
thesis without judgment”1 and which is specifically defined by
being at once conjunctive and disjunctive. The “language” of
art, to speak metaphorically, is consequently one of division
and connection which, in the sense of composition and differ-
ence, recalls and reassesses the etymologically-related expres-
sions of κρίνειν (krínein) for “separating,” “judging,” or “divid-
ing” and κριτική (kritikē) for critique and criterion, in addition
to θεωρία (theōria). The focus is thus less on the prominent con-
nection—still dominant in Adorno and Heidegger (if only indi-
rectly)—between art and “truth,” and more on the question of
what kind of thought artistic praxis generates and to what extent

1 Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,

1993). See esp. pp. 31–33.

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Dieter Mersch

it can be conceived of as a particular, even singular form of

thought, in contrast to a notion of thought linked to linguistics,
which philosophy has privileged since Kant at the latest. This
type of linguistically- and rhetorically-distinguished notion of
thought is already present in Kant’s dualistic attempt to system-
atically separate perception (Anschauung) and concept (Begriff)
from each other and to bind knowing to the form of judgement,
which is analytically based on a “propositional act.” This has
become something very much like an uncritical general para-
digm since the linguistic turn and the analytic philosophies
connected to it at the latest. Its norm applies equally to those
theories which unhesitatingly assume the precedence of struc-
ture, textuality, or semiotics. The following remarks may also
be read as an objection to the prejudices of the linguistic turn
and its implicit dogmas. For when art generates a “different”
form of thought, all of these discourses become relativized to
the aesthetic in such a way that not only is their validity called
into question; they are also continually provoked, frustrated,
and evaded by its stubbornness.

Art, judgment, knowledge

What, then, does art know? This question was recently raised by
Alexander Garcia Düttmann with a view to interrogating their
specific epistemological form. For the arts do not produce
autochthonous “forms of knowledge” but are instead defined,
according to Düttmann, by their particular ability to “exceed”
every kind of knowledge.2 Art thus disrupts not only its own self-
attribution but also its traditional attribution as knowledge, as
a practice of knowing. Art shares this particularity with philoso-
phy, but Düttmann’s intervention applies only to a pre-deter-

2 Alexander Garcia Düttmann, “Was weiß Kunst,” in Was weiß Kunst.

Eine Ästhetik des Widerstandes (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press,
2015), pp. 191–212, here p. 194.

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Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theoria

mined concept of knowledge, which conceives of knowledge as

“scientific knowledge” in a public sphere shared by all, a sphere
which art opposes with its idiosyncratic excesses. By choosing to
insist in the following on the epistemological power of the arts,
which appears fundamentally equal to the sciences and must be
classified alongside them, we are operating in a sphere very near
to Düttmann’s dictum while at the same time being required
to postpone his question. It is not the emphasis on the “what”
of knowledge, its content, that appears decisive but rather the
question of how does art know with the explication of its meth-
ods, praxis, and mediality, which, as I intend to show, cannot be
compared with the discursive methods of scientific justification.
The modes of production of the arts are thus at the same time the
focus of my remarks to the extent that they lead to the initial pos-
sibility of knowledge. More even that that, this postponement
includes the further, even more fundamental question of how
art thinks and in what the particularity of its thought consists,
keeping mind the necessity of distinguishing between forms of
knowledge and thought (Wissen and ­Erkenntnis).
The knowledge of the arts asserted with this maneuver is,
however, not a knowledge of the kind which philosophy is used
to speaking of and which may be posited in the form of theses
and defended with arguments; instead—let us add this from
the beginning—it takes place in perception and thus expresses
itself aisthetically. The difference between art and philosophy
or science lies, then, both in the procedures of legitimizing an
always already discursively structured knowledge as well as in a
“knowledge” of perception (conceiving of “knowledge” here as
embodied thought) which possesses the character of knowledge
to the extent that it is assigned its own form of evidence. It at the
same time touches a reflexive “knowledge” of the aesthetic itself,
as it were, a “knowledge of knowledge” of art’s capability since art
is also always about art. This does not require communication
in the medium of discourse, in the sense of judgements primar-
ily conveyed through language, but rather the presentation or
exhibition of these aesthetic “knowledges,” i.e. the t­ransition

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from saying to different modes of showing, which also shows

itself and points to itself.3 Discourses are certainly not foreign
to figuration: they in fact require rhetoric, and thus aesthetics,
for their articulation, but figuration here operates as medium.
It is, however, based on the proposition, although it is impos-
sible to make a strict distinction between propositionality and
non-propositionality, and thus also between “proper” speech
and “improper” speech as excluded by metaphysics: their dif-
ference would rather be attributable to propositionality itself.4
In contrast, the arts manifest themselves in other ways and in
other media, e.g. in the form of a sensual “language of things,”
as Walter Benjamin put it,5 i.e. through phenomena themselves,
their appearance and materiality as well as their respective con-
figuration. At the same time the arts transgress given modes of
mediation and turn them into new and yet unknown forms of
revelation. The question is how the arts handle such phenom-
ena, their arrangements and transgression, in order to evoke the
moment of that which is classically linked with θεωρία (theōria),
i.e. the view or perspective (An-Schauung), and where, I claim, the
specific forms of aesthetic knowledge, which can be also named
as self-reflexive knowledge, are condensed. Both, the aesthetic
as well as the reflexive, constitute that which we call art’s true
θεωρία (theōria).

3 For more on the motif of a difference between saying and show-

ing, see my writings since the mid-1990s, esp. Dieter Mersch, “Wort,
Bild, Ton, Zahl. Modalitäten medialen Darstellens,” in Die Medien der
­Künste: Beiträge zur Theorie des Darstellens (Munich: Wilhelm Fink,
2003), pp. 9–49.
4 See Dieter Mersch, “Nicht-Propositionalität und ästhetisches Den-
ken,” in Florian Dombois et al., eds., Ästhetisches Denken. Nicht-Propo-
sitionalität, Episteme, Kunst (Zurich, diaphanes, 2014), pp. 28–55.
5 Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache
des Menschen,” Gesammelte Schriften 2: Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge 1
(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), pp. 140–157, here p. 156.)
­[Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of
Man,” trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926,
ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge and London:
The Belknap Press, 1996).]

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Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theoria

- - aísthesis,
Episteme, - -
theoria

By returning to the sources of the classical term “theory,” my

intention is not to identify origins but to expand upon the
semantic dimensions of the term. If we trace the word θεωρία
(theōria), which has many meanings ascribed to it in Ancient
Greek, back to its roots, we see that it refers first of all to θέα
(thea), “perception,” and secondly to the practices of θεάομαι
(theaōmai), “astonishment” and “admiration” with reference
to the divine and which is particularly associated with θαυμάζω
(thaumazō), the “astonishment” that Aristotle placed at the
beginning of his Metaphysics.6 This type of astonishment and
wonder also applies to the θεάματα (theámata), desirable sights
or dramatic performances which were offered on the θέατρον
(theatron), or stage—in fact, we are everywhere here confronted
with the same etymological root. The θεωρία (theōria) opens up
both the wide horizon of art and that of sight and insight, the
word θεωρίος (theōrios) also being used to refer to spectators or
messengers who were dispatched to question the oracle. All of
these terms thus originally belong to the realm of theater, of
public festivities and rituals, just as Apollo originally bore the
epithet θεωρίος (theōrios) in relation to the oracle. Only later,
starting with Plato, were the terms related in a more restricted
sense to conceptual perception and metaphysical knowledge,
which found their ultimate formulation in the θεωρήματα
(theōremata), the central propositions of “theory.” Even if the
emphasis here is always on “sight” and the eye, the general
sense of theory has primarily passed over into that which is
described as “intellectual perception” (intellektuelle Anschau-
ung) in the vocabulary of German Idealism, which we try to trace
back to the chiastic opposite of a perceptual intellectuality. If,
in the following, art is shown to be a form of thought belonging
to θεωρία (theōria) in the broadest sense, then the intention is
above all to undo these narrow definitions and, in this sense,

6 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book A, 980a (21).

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Dieter Mersch

to return to the aesthetic—or the aisthetic—its own irreducible

weight in the framework of ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē).
The decisive question remains, however (and it can only be
given unsatisfactory answers, ones formulated, moreover, in a
thoroughly non-artistic medium): what exactly is this kind of
decidedly “aesthetic thought”? What is the basis of its particu-
larity or untraceability? And, how can it both be asserted outside
of the bounds of discursive-argumentative speech while simul-
taneously being shown or demonstrated through speech with-
out being robbed from the very beginning of its power or char-
acter? The claim, then, is that if a kind of thought, a knowledge
on the part of art exists, then we are dealing (simultaneously)
with a “non-theoretical θεωρία (theōria),” i.e. a paradoxical
non-conceptuality which Adorno similarly attempted to define
through the aporetic concept of “synthesis without judgment.”
“Judgment itself,” we read in a passage of Aesthetic ­Theory,
“also undergoes metamorphosis in the artwork. Artworks are,
as synthesis, analogous to judgment; in artworks, however, syn-
thesis does not result in judgment; of no artwork is it possible
to determine its judgment or what its so-called message is.”7 All
forms of “saying” prove to be problematic to the extent that they
include distinction, or the logic of differentiation; we should
instead take as our starting point “showings” in the multiple
senses of the word “showing,”8 which are based on opening
up, bringing into view, or announcing something which other
forms of exposition close off. The core of my claim is, then, that
there are forms of knowledge which elude discursivization—
sui generis modes of knowing which cannot be reformulated

7 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor,

(London, New York: Continuum, 1997), p. 123.
8 See Dieter Mersch, “Sichtbarkeit/Sichtbarmachung. Was heißt
‘Denken im Visuellen’?,” in Fabian Goppelsröder and Martin Beck,
eds., Sichtbarkeiten 2: Präsentifizieren. Zeigen zwischen Körper, Bild und
Sprache (Zurich: diaphanes, 2014), pp. 19–71, and Dieter Mersch, “Ambi-
guitäten des Zeigens,” in Katharina Sykora et al., eds., ­Valenzen fotograf-
ischen Zeigens. Das fotografische Dispositiv 3 (Kromsdorf: Jonas, 2016),
pp. 50–73.

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Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theoria

in concepts or even discovered in the medium of discourse as

proposition, modes of knowing which take place instead solely
in and through the senses, through αἴσθησις (aisthēsis) or per-
ception, which is to say through their mediality.

Thinking in, with, and through art

With respect to the most general formulation of this question—

i.e. how art thinks, or what it would mean to think in, with, or
through the arts—what we are of course not asking is how an
artist thinks or what he or she is thinking about over the course
of the erratic process of developing a work of art. Thought is
undeniably bound to subjects who are thinking something, but
this does not mean that every thought is simply subjective. We
are instead conceiving of thought as an event. It—sometimes—
manifests itself in objects or bodies, acts and performances.
The idea is that this quality of being an event is also capable of
raising, in the interspace between gestures, acts, or things, their
specific tensions and differences, with the result that it origi-
nates not in an author but in a praxis, a constellation between
them. It is consequently sufficient to connect the articulation
of a thought to such “scatterings” of “stars” (con-stellare) and
their com-positions without giving precedence to an agent or
author. Constellations or compositions do not necessarily obey
rules or a syntax. Instead, aesthetic thought occurs in the shape
of juxtapositions, distinctions, or connections and their “dis-
tances”—whether of sounds, images, sculptures, or figures.
This also includes sequences or series like tones and silences,
the quality of colors or the bodily physicality exhibited in perfor-
mative acts, their frailty like the conspicuousness of the naked
body, or strategies of social participation, as well as the literary
practices of the delirious speech, the improper comparison, or
of catachrestic excess. As media of thought, all of these refuse
to cooperate in their own reconstruction through concepts, just
as language in turn becomes exasperated with them. The way of

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thinking in the arts, in comparison to that of the sciences or the

practices of philosophical debate, then reveals itself to be forms
of exteriorization to the extent that, as Adorno also expressed
it, the phenomena or things are “applied” and their “facta
bruta” are brought into the tableau.9 And the ways of doing so
also transform practically possible understandings of aesthetic
interlinking as such.
From this it does not follow that art, science, and philosophy
diverge in all of their dimensions, just as it does not mean that
“the” aesthetic form of thought exists without the diverse prac-
tices of philosophical or scientific discourse, and art criticism
and its judgements. What is meant is: if there is an irreducible,
genuinely aesthetic dimension of thought, then this dimen-
sion exists without needing to rely on the difference between
discursivity and non-discursivity and its basis in speech, as the
border between the discursive and the non-discursive is—like
that between propositionality and non-propositionality—itself
discursive. Nevertheless, the view of philosophy since the lin-
guistic turn is clear: thinking means “having thoughts” (Hegel)
which are expressed in propositions, which are formed into
sentences which lend the thought its contours in the first place.
Thinking is language-dependent, or more precisely: thought
and knowledge take place in the medium of propositional defi-
nitions centered on predication, the logic of which culminates
in the small yet decisive grammar particle “is,” which performs
the determination in the sense of an “as-function.” The “is” and
the “as” thus include from the very beginning a division and a
doubling, a repetition and duplication through the form: Some-
thing is something as “p”—a formulation which simultaneously
separates and conjoins the “something” via both a difference
and identity. In other words: the “as” functions as the actual
generator of signification. However, art and artistic thought dif-
fer from these basic structures of determination.

9 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New

York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 11.

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Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theoria

Other-than-discursive thought

Philosophy thus normally ascribes a specific form of statement

to the output of thought as it arises from the model of propo-
sitionality. We think in the formats of judgement, which allow
us to make and justify distinctions, to put forward claims, to
strengthen or reject our convictions and so on. All of these acts
or functions of speech—however figuratively defined and deliv-
ered—are in service of the constitution of a kind of knowledge
which has already gone through semiosis, or the syntax of lan-
guage and its semantic conditioning. Furthermore, we think
by developing understanding, communicating meanings, or
exchanging views about the world, i.e. speaking about the world,
to simultaneously review and test our desires and understand-
ings against other desires and understandings. Thinking—and
this was basically Plato’s insight—is tied to exchange and dia-
logue in obedience to the λόγον διδόναι (logon didonai) and aim-
ing at ἀλήθεια (alētheia) or bringing out the truth. This occurs by
means of questions, models, and metaphors as well as through
fictionalization or anticipative trial actions, which is what
causes someone like Ludwig Wittgenstein to concisely write: “A
thought is a proposition with a sense.”10 “Sense” proves to be
tied here in particular to the logical form of language, which
is why thinking, expressing meanings, or representing knowl-
edge are primarily considered rational activities—which means
that if art thinks, it must think in another way, a way which is
not founded on the sentence or the copula “is” or the “as,” and
­consequently remains sensually ambiguous. The devaluation
of the arts vis-à-vis the sciences is located precisely in this preju-
dice (i.e. “pre-judgement”).
But maybe the question of what thinking means in pro-
fessional artistic practice cannot be sought in what is usually

10 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F.

Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London, New York: Routledge, 1961),
p. 22, proposition 4.

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Dieter Mersch

ascribed to representation (μίμησης, mímēsis in the broadest

sense) or conceived of as the product of design, figuration, or
fabrication.11 For this purpose, it is above all the works of the
avant-garde and neo-avant-garde arts which can provide us with
an introduction. It is less the figure that plays the decisive role
than its resolute defiguration, less “construction” than decom-
position and deconstruction of traditional aesthetic catego-
ries—just as abstraction or forms of installation, assemblage,
and performance seek to fundamentally discard representa-
tion and its “laws.” What would be representational about a
Piet Mondrian painting or the “protocols” of Jackson Pollock’s
“drippings”? And can we really say that the paradoxical provoca-
tions of Jasper Johns’ Flags (starting 1954) are exhausted in the
exact reproduction of an American flag? What can it mean to
be confronted with an Edward Kienholz environment, to enter
into it and become a part of it only to be accused in the very same
moment of being a voyeur of its design? And what should we
think of compositions like those of John Cage or Jannis Xena-
kis which are based solely on “framing,” on the “dice throw” of
chance or the results of stochastic functions, i.e. which follow
no intention at all but are rather the radicality of a statement
which releases itself in the happening of sounds and silences?
Clearly we must surrender the idea of the traceability of art and
thought to the modes of representation or the idea and instead
assume that art itself, the work or process, manifests a kind of
thought, that it formulates a θεωρία (theōria) in itself and that in
a different way than can be expressed in a discursive sentence
or be embodied in an image or something similar.
This sentence is provocative because of the scandal pre-
sented by rigorously non-linguistic thought, which unfolds its
possibilities solely in the medium of acts and things or of prac-

11 Kendall L. Walton interpreted the process of representation as a

virtual game of “make-believe” where objects become “props” which
can mean anything at all. See Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-
Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).

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tices of combination, its joints, associations, and connections, in

order to erect entire structures of alternative “argumentations”
from bodies, light, material, and sound—“something other
than discursivity occurs,” to take up and adapt a formulation
of Emmanuel Lévinas. Their content is in no way opened up
through translation, i.e. by virtue of transformation and appro-
priation by the linguistic sentence; rather, they correspond to
a validity of their own law, a meaningfulness of their own order
which cannot be expressed in any other way, i.e. which can-
not correspond to any other form of articulation. The claim is
that there is a non-discursive or even non-propositional form of
knowledge which challenges the economies of speech—which
is to say that there is a kind of thought which manifests itself
outside of its own linguistic framings, an other-than-discursive
thinking which both remains a type of thought and at the same
time is suited to overthrowing the traditional conceptual con-
tours of that which is known as thinking and to pushing them
in new directions. Philosophical thinking about thinking can-
not remain unaffected by this; we could even prophesy that the
aesthetic is in a position to “dis-locate” thought and its fossil-
ized “de-finitions,” to open up new paths for thought or to give
it back its “freedom” by unsettling its former medium and its
propositional narrowness and simultaneously bringing other
media into play. It also makes other things thinkable by follow-
ing its own formats and in this way relativizing and unsettling
the claims to validity of speech as they have so far existed.12

12 Can it be taken for granted that linguistic figuration is the only

medium that provides us with determination or meaning? Can we also
consider a sculpture, an acoustic manifestation of one single tune inter-
rupted by silences or noises or an image as a medium of expressing sig-
nificant ideas or arguments? Even more, can artworks serve as discovery
of unknown phenomena or aspects of the world—such as the appear-
ance of different color-qualities caused by the use of different materials?
The criticisms of science which are intrinsic to the “researching arts,”
which enable the conception of art as a type of research on a par with
the sciences, can find an unmistakeable model here. See the relevant
contributions in Jens Badura et al., eds., K ­ ünstlerische Forschung. Ein
Handbuch (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015).

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Practices of conjunctionality

But what, to continue this line of questioning, does this “other”

of discursive thinking consist of which cannot be reconstructed
after the pattern of the copula, the classic function of synthesis
and its power to identify? The following suggestions are com-
posed of two fundamental steps: first, the aesthetic dimension
and its medium are not based on the grammar of discourse,
even if the medium of the aesthetic is language, as in the case of
literature. Correspondingly, signification is not formed primar-
ily by way of the “is” or “as” but above all through the practices
of conjunction and disjunction, as expressed through the parti-
cles “and,” “or,” “both … and,” “not only … but also” as its very
medium etc. These practices extend to spatial tableaus just as
they can be formed in time through serialization. Their conjunc-
tion takes the place of the copula. Secondly, for artistic θεωρία
(theōria)—as distinguished from the aesthetic in general and
the “work of the concept” (Hegel)—such constellations are in
turn crucial which affect such series or sequences which not only
refer to something but—as a fundamental function of thought—
refer to themselves and thus become reflexive. That art expresses
itself through constellations is one issue; that, at the same time,
art uses these very constellations to reveal a way of combining or
tying material, things, or practices together is the other. Revela-
tion here is caused by separation through connection and con-
nection through separation. Linking things together by tearing
them apart implies the production of distances that allow for
reflection. This mode of reflexivity—and thus self-reflexivity—
is immanent to artistic practice. Here, self-reflection does not
require language; it is sufficient to place the things, their percep-
tibility or materiality, in such a way that sudden moments of aes-
thetic self-experience leap from them which relate to the type of
constellation itself. When we speak of aesthetic θεωρία (theōria)
as a praxis of artistic thought, it is such “leaps” that we are refer-
ring to. They induce “in-sights” in a literal sense, which can only
be completed in such a way but equally possess the power of, as

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Rilke expressed it, changing a life.13 They reveal themselves to

be events of literal re-flection (Latin, “bending back”) in percep-
tions (αισθήσεις, aísthēseis) which can be as little controlled by
the artist, the subject of its “discoveries,” as it can be the result
of explicit planning or intention.
The first thesis, then, is that where art proceeds via think-
ing, the praxis of conjunction is decisive, in the sense of com-
positions (from Latin, “putting together”) of things, materials,
images, sounds, bodies, actions and their performances, or simi-
lar. The prefix com- (“with”) addresses their interconnectivity,
the juncture. Conjunctions connect and separate simultane-
ously, and even separate through their connection and connect
through their “keeping separate,” resulting at the same time
in disjunctions. More pointedly stated: that which is connec-
tive about them is their difference (Unter-Schied, “placed under
[unter] a separation [Schied]”). We thus begin from a principle
of aesthetic difference. The praxis of aesthetic thought is con-
sequently fulfilled not in an identification but in that which
Heidegger refers to as “Unter-Schied” and Jacques Derrida with
the neologism différance, except that its differentiality does not
take place in language and its hermeneutics, nor in writing, but
instead in the “aesthetic,” the “percepts” (Deleuze) of percep-
tion. Art can in this sense be identified as a sui generis praxis
of difference. The equation of their conjunctionality/disjunc-
tionality corresponds to the formula 1 + 1 = 1, where we receive
three constitutive elements including the plus sign: a 1 and a
different 1 which respectively represent different singularia, as
well as the + or “and” of their respective conjunction or com-
position, which result in the newly created 1. The 1 is unique.
The “and” thus generates an excess, which cannot be captured
in concepts. This is true particularly for all aesthetic formats,
although the how—or more precisely the specific modalities of
its connection/division—is decisive.

13 “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” trans. Alfred Corn, in Columbia: A Jour-

nal of Literature and Art, no. 12 (1987), p. 50.

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Dieter Mersch

Catachrestic “leap”

This simultaneously suggests the second thesis: for the specifi-

cally artistic epistemology as θεωρία (theōria), as distinguished
from the praxis of the aesthetic in general, we in turn require
the constitution of a specific constellation, as the aesthetic is
more fundamental than art, which is why art conversely turns
out to be that which is limited or conditioned and which may
also fail. This ability-to-fail characterizes art, just as its limita-
tions also make clear that an additional “criterion” is needed to
separate art from non-art. The distinction is based on the spe-
cific modalities of a reflexivity which only arises through—by
springing forth from—the conjunctional-disjunctional praxis
of composition, and namely the form of its configuration. This
also means that it lies in the forms of its constellation itself, a
reflexive moment which springs forth from it, becoming visible
as can be seen in Pablo Picasso’s seminal work Tête de Taureau
from 1942 or the Dadaistic Merz-Images made by Kurt Schwit-
ters. While the merely aesthetic normally conceals, smooths
over, or clarifies, the arts “notch” (Deleuze/Guattari) the smooth
and expose nuances or disruptions—that about them which is
“unjoinable”—instead of eliminating them. Put another way:
“re-flexivity” in the aesthetic means emphasizing the joinings of
its junctures and allowing the praxis of differentiality, its rough-
ness and incompleteness, to appear in the same act of its com-
pletion, i.e. simultaneously announcing the frictions, imperfec-
tions, or unrealized dimensions and their remains. A reflection
of this kind consists in the exposition of a double perception
because it also makes something perceptible, just as it exhibits
the perception of this perception, the showing of self-showing, as
it were.14 In this way, it effects something related to the duplicate

14 See Dieter Mersch, “Die Zerzeigung. Über die ‘Geste’ des Bildes
und die ‘Gabe’ des Blicks,” in Ulrich Richtmeyer, Fabian Goppelsröder
and Toni Hildebrandt, eds., Bild und Geste. Figurationen des Denkens in
Philosophie und Kunst (Bielefeld: transcript, 2014), pp. 15–44.

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Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theoria

order of the “as”: namely, the simultaneity of a doubling and

division, the core of which is the intensification of differences and
their contrasts, the model of which could be the “anti-figure” of
catachresis or even the sudden heuristic of the leap.
If, then, art thinks, it does so in the shapes of such improb-
able yet risky and at times unfounded leaps, which together
“release” a kind of knowledge which cannot be otherwise
shown. Stated yet another way: if we ask, How does art think? or
What is the basis of art’s specific form of knowing?, the answer
is that it does not consist in the increase of positive knowledge
about the world, which may in turn be affirmed or denied, i.e.
whose truth or falsehood is in question—the purpose of the arts
is not to explain, but rather to open up new dimensions which
evoke reflexive knowledge which could not otherwise be gained.
And that ultimately means that aesthetic or artistic knowledge
is closer to the nature of philosophical knowledge than scien-
tific knowledge.15 The “friendship” between philosophy and
art, invoked repeatedly since Schelling and the Romantics,
stems from this.
The aesthetic’s reflexivity relates, however, to more than
just its materiality or thingliness, the practices or tools it uses,
and thus its medial dimension and conditions of production:
it also always implies an engagement with its own history. Art,
where it takes place, “ex-centers” its place and moves to another
location. The ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē) of art thus implies a knowl-
edge of and by art just as much as a knowledge about art. So
when we speak of the specific expressiveness of the arts, of their
“epistemology,”16 we are always speaking both of knowledge
production in the medium of its compositio and of a “discourse”

15 See also Dieter Mersch, “Kunst als epistemische Praxis,” in Elke

Bippus, ed., Kunst des Forschens. Praxis eines ästhetischen Denkens
(Zurich: diaphanes, 2009), pp. 27–48. We have to keep this in mind if
we talk about artistic research. Research, here, does not aim at certain
results but at ‘search’ and its sudden findings.
16 See Dieter Mersch, Epistemologies of Aesthetics, trans. Laura Radosh
(Zurich: diaphanes, 2015).

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Dieter Mersch

of art with itself. Nowhere does this generate an unambiguous

synthesis with a unity which seems to suggest the “work,” which
is in reality never one; rather, it resembles a transposition of tex-
ture, a repositioning of a tangled fabric, an unsettling complex
of effects which remains in constant turmoil, thus simultane-
ously unsettling the aesthetic itself. Its fundamental structure
is characterized by ambiguity. For this reason, too, it is not suf-
ficient to present or compose anything at all: instead—and this
is what our second thesis concerns—it requires a transcendence
and surpassing within composition itself, a reference to some-
thing beyond itself or alterity, from which the particularity of
artistic thought initially arises—as that “leap” or unspeakable
place where, to speak with Rilke’s fifth Duino Elegy, the “tire-
some nowhere” leaps “from the pure Too-Little” into “that
empty Too-Much […] [w]here the s­ taggering bill / adds up to
zero.”17 This change corresponds to Wittgenstein’s “aspect
change,” but also to a change in the aesthetic itself. Differ-
ently from the discursive sentence, which always falls into a
judgement, formulates a conviction, or implies a logical conse-
quence, this change marks that location of the “aesthetic sen-
tence” where its epistemological evidence appears, which can
prove to be actual sites of a non-subjective reflexivity. Only once
such moments occur does art happen, as well as that which
makes up the particular nature of artistic thought.
Decisive are thus the respective modalities of conjunction/
disjunction, the form of their construction (Fügung) or conjoin-
ing (Ver-Fugung), and my claim is that these can generate knowl-
edge to the extent that their organization proceeds “catachres-
tically.” Catachresis is a rhetorical term which refers to those
rhetorical figures as “non-figures” which are based on irregular
connections which enable the expression of the initially inex-
pressible. This thus concerns an impossible figuration sur-
rounding the speaking of the unspeakable or the representation

17 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus,

trans. A. Poulin, Jr. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), p. 39.

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Aesthetic Thinking: Art as theoria

of the non-representable itself. For this reason, catachreses are

often excluded from the classical canons of rhetorical terms for
art, with the result that we are dealing with something which
undermines genres or forms. They are therefore responsible for
a “saying otherwise” or “exasperation” which is primarily entan-
gled in contradictions, in order to create some new, third thing
from their paradoxes, something which can only be hinted at.18
Intemperate in a certain respect, catachresis thus refers to the
monstrous, which points to a heteronomy the sign of which can-
not be given and yet must nevertheless be situated: semiosis of
a non-semiotic element, or asemiosis of a semiosis as an indis-
soluble chiasmus, which cannot be reconciled from any angle.

Conclusion

To summarize: aesthetic thought, and artistic thought in par-

ticular, does not take place in the form of significations which
are governed by the copula “is” and its correlate “as,” but rather
through conjunctions which give rise equally to both loose
couplings and continual disjunctions. In this sense, we are
­confronted with an abundance of relations—e.g. addition, asso-
ciation, linkage, constellation, serialization, limitation, repeti-
tion, interruption, etc.—which are not traceable to the systems
of logic, rationality, and their respective grammars but are
instead owed to their own intrinsic logic, which unfolds in vari-
able and incomprehensible modalities. This logic is character-
ized by the paradoxical simultaneity of enclosure and exclusion.
Decisive for the evocation of aesthetic reflections, i.e. for a spe-
cific “knowledge of and by the arts” and their θεωρία (theōria),
is thus the creation of moments of reflexive experience (which
may equally be called a “catachrestic” or contrary constellation,

18 For more on catachresis and its non-figurative use, see Dieter

Mersch, Was sich zeigt. Materialität, Präsenz, Ereignis (Munich: Wilhelm
Fink, 2002), p. 28ff.

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Dieter Mersch

primarily articulated in chiasms, contradictions, or paradoxes

and defined by its differences, its διἀστασις (diástasis), its divi-
sions or its “confusions,” its διάβολον (diábolon) of opposites
in the sensual sphere)—moments which would otherwise not
be representable. These are sudden openings or disclosures,
similar to the sudden and forceful revelation of the previously
hidden in moments of unpredictability. Such openings or dis-
closures may be referred to as “leaps” which, like Heidegger’s
sentence about the sentence which makes a leap, allow us to
leap towards something where we have not yet been, which we
could not even imagine being. The arts’ form of thought and its
epistemological power can be found in this.
It would be, however, a mistake to assume that an inter-
preter would be needed to unlock these dimensions, or that the
specific aesthetic reflexivity is a strategy of the artist or even a
property of the things themselves—but such knowledge does
indeed arise from the potential of the constellations and their
relations, the elements and their structure itself. Analogously
to such sentences, the productivity of which, to yet again speak
with Heidegger, lies in their “showing,” they are not the result
of an allegorization but rather the performativity of those con-
nections which they are in a position to juxtapose, transform,
reverse, and multiply. We thus return to the beginning of our
considerations and to Düttmann’s dictum that art does not pro-
duce its own kind of knowledge but rather exceeds it. As I see it,
it is the excess of conjunctionality/disjunctionality which enables
reference to something beyond in the sense of a leap outwards,
through which, however, and to the same degree, a reflexiv-
ity can be established which causes the initial mobilization of
the specific epistemological mode of the arts and the thought
which the arts perform.

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Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought

The foundation of theory and the use of figures of thought

In the transition from the sixth to the seventh book of Plato’s

Republic, we witness one of the most significant foundational
acts of philosophical thinking. The sun plays an essential role
in the foundation of this kind of thinking, which Plato names
θεωρία (theōria) and which is concerned with the highest forms
of being and knowledge. My thesis in this essay is that Plato
uses the sun as a “figure of thought” which will enable us to
gain important insights into the figure’s conception. The focus
will be on the interplay between theory and aesthetics, crucial
both for ­theory’s way of thinking as founded by Plato and for the
concept of the figure of thought.
Plato’s foundation of theory is centered on the idea of the
good (ἀγαθον; agathōn) and on the explication of its privileged
position as the first principle of philosophy, where all theory and
praxis find their ground and justification. The order of the ideal
state—a guiding theme of the Republic—is oriented towards
this idea. Plato refers to it as the “greatest study” (505a)1 and as
that which “every soul pursues and for the sake of which it does
everything” (505e). With respect to this primordial position, it is
indispensable for Plato’s inquiry to define what the good is and
what privileged position this idea is owed.
Plato does admit that defining the idea of the good is a
­difficult undertaking. It can be seen “only with considerable

1 All citations refer to the respective passage in Plato, The Republic of

Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1968).

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Benno Wirz

effort” (517c).2 Plato deals with these difficulties not by attempt-

ing to define the idea of the good as such but rather by, as he
writes, telling “what looks like a child of the good and most
similar to it” (ἔκγονός τε τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ φαίνεται καὶ ὁμοιότατος; ekgo-
nos te tou agathou phainetai kai homoiotato ekeinô) (506e).3 He
replaces the idea of the good with the sun. With this replace-
ment, Plato introduces the analogy of the sun, the foundational
act of theory. Plato places the sun in a relationship to the every-
day event of seeing, presenting a constellation of relationships
involving light and sight which compose the analogy of the sun:
the sun illuminates, giving light; light welling up from the sun
is what enables the event of seeing, the sun itself remaining
unseen because looking at the sun leads to blindness.
Starting from this central position of the sun in connection
with the light/vision constellation, Plato introduces a series of
arguments by analogy where theoretical thinking emerges in
its fundamental conceptual, structural, and dynamic features.
In the same way that seeing is only possible when the object in
question is in the light before our eyes, a light which comes from
the sun, in thinking we can only recognize things with the mind
and produce true knowledge if we are in possession of ideas as
principles of being and knowledge with their ontological and
epistemological foundation in the idea of the good (508c-509b).
In his layering of analogical arguments, Plato founds theory
on three different levels: on the conceptual level, he systemati-
cally associates the Platonic fundamental terms—being, mind,

2 Here Plato raises the problem of the aporia of final justification.

The idea of the good cannot be defined in recourse to something else
but only through itself. See Emil Angehrn, Die Überwindung des Chaos.
Zur Philosophie des Mythos (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996),
pp. 100–109.
3 According to Lidell and Scott, the adjective ἔκγονος (ekgonos)
means “born of, sprung from”. The noun ἔκγονος (ekgonos) means
“child, whether son or daughter” or, in plural, “descendents.” Henry
George Lidell and Robert Scott, Greek-English-Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), p. 503. ἔκγονός τε τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ (Ekgonos te tou
agathou) (506e) thus relates to descent. Plato accordingly refers to the
idea of the good as a “father” (πατρός; patros) (506e).

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knowledge, and truth—with the idea of the good as first prin-

ciple; on the structural level, he shows the primordial position
of the good in theory; and on the dynamic level, he outlines the
acts of thinking connected to the fundamental terms, which
feature theory as thinking about the highest forms of being and
knowledge.
It is decisive that the sun, its light, and the connected acts of
seeing function as more than a template which is discarded after
the establishing act. Instead, the sun, light, and vision enter
into the established theory and there continue to have effect.
The idea of the good “provides” light, it “is” the source of light,
and in this radiant sense it represents the inexhaustible ground
of being and knowledge after the model of the sun (509b). Since
Plato, philosophy has functioned as a way of thinking which not
only works with concepts but is characterized by its light-like
quality, even its affinity to light. To this day, one of philosophy’s
main interests is bringing light into the darkness with its work
on and with concepts—clarifying and enlightening.4
In the Republic, Plato thus founds theory as a way of think-
ing which is concerned with the highest forms of being and
knowledge and which is at the same time interwoven at every
moment with the constellation of sun, light, and seeing.5 This

4 The notion of truth as an event of illumination and disclosure also

attests to this quality or affinity of light. This event, as Heidegger tire-
lessly reiterates, corresponds to the original meaning of truth (ἀλήθεια;
alētheia) as “unconcealment” (508d). See Martin Heidegger, Platos
Lehre von der Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1997).
[Martin Heidegger, Plato's Doctrine of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan,
in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998)]. Plato thus essentially contributes to the establishment of
the Western tradition of thought which privileges vision over the other
senses in ontological and epistemological questions. In the context of
the sun analogy, he refers to spirit, for example, as the “eye of the soul”
(533d), and being is conceived of as that which is before the eyes and is
seen (507c).
5 Jacques Derrida also recalls this when he speaks of philosophical
engagement with the metaphor of the “heliotrope.” Jacques Derrida,
“White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy,” in Margins of
Philosophy (Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 207–271.

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Benno Wirz

double character is accompanied by a problem relating to the

idea hypothesis, which is an integral component of theory. This
idea hypothesis, which Plato recapitulates immediately before
the foundational act of theory (507b), is founded on the differ-
ence between two spheres of being: the sphere of vision, ὁρατός
τόπος (horatos topos) and the sphere of thought, νοητός τόπος
(noetos topos).6 For Plato, this difference marks a hierarchy in
the order of being and knowledge. The modes of being and
knowing in the sphere of vision are, because oriented towards
the senses or the mixture of the sensual and conceptual, of a
lower type than those of the sphere of thought.
This hierarchy is turned upside down in the foundational
act of theory. Through the use of the sun as the “child” of the
idea of the good, the sphere of vision becomes the model for
the shape of theory, for both its structure and the dynamics of
thinking. Moreover, both spheres intermingle in theory, which
strictly divides the idea hypothesis. Fully in line with the etymol-
ogy7 of θεωρία (theōria), thought and vision overlap: theory is
thinking which sees as well as thinking vision and, to the extent
that the event of seeing can be considered an aesthetic event,
theory is always “aesthetic theory.” This way of thinking, as
Plato presents it, is anything but “purely” theoretical. It always
moves in a field of tension where claim (the division between
theory and aesthetics) and realization (the interplay of theory
and aesthetics) diverge.
This field of tension is not just problematic with respect to
the consistency of the theory established by Plato—it is also a
matrix for innovations and new foundations, both with respect
to the thinking of theory and to the related concepts and acts of
thinking. For the foundational act of theory does not conclude

6 In Phaedo 79a, Plato speaks of “two types of being.” See Emil

Angehrn, Der Weg zur Metaphysik (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft,
2000), pp. 214–266, here p. 214.
7 For more on the etymology of θεωρία (theōria) and the conse-
quences for theoretical thought, see the contributions by Dieter Mersch
and Sylvia Sasse in this volume.

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with Plato. Thinkers through all ages have repeatedly made use
of the possibilities provided by the constellation of sun, light, and
vision whenever concepts like being, mind, truth, or knowledge
need to be defined, placed in a new systematic context, or when
the dynamics of theoretical thinking need to be restructured.
What is Plato doing at the transition from the sixth to the
seventh book of the Republic when he replaces the idea of the
good with the sun, when he establishes theory as aesthetic the-
ory and repeatedly brings the sun, together with light and see-
ing, into play (or leaves it in play) over the further course of his
argument? I would argue that Plato is using the sun as a figure
of thought. The central question here is: what do we mean by
figure of thought? This question is even more urgent in light of
the term’s increasing importance over the last decades in the
humanities (especially in the German-speaking world), where it
is still poorly defined and requires clarification.8
We can arrive at a tentative definition on the basis of the
analysis of Plato’s foundational act, a definition which I will
attempt to clarify and make more concrete in the following. In
contrast to a simple metaphor, where a “non-actual” expres-
sion (like the sun) stands for something else which is “actually
meant” (the idea of the good), through which the meaning of
the expression is communicated, reproduced, sensualized, and

8 This reluctance to find a remedy is also the undertaking of a

series of publications: Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit. Walter
Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch,1997); Eva Horn and Michèle Lowrie, “Vorwort,” in Eva
Horn and Michèle Lowrie, eds., Denkfiguren. Für Anselm Haverkamp
(Berlin: August, 2013); Caroline Torra-Mattenklott, “Denkfiguren,”
in Joachim Küpper et al., eds., The Beauty of Theory. Zur Ästhetik und
Affektökonomie von Theorien (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2013), pp. 59–76;
Ernst Müller, “Denkfiguren,” in Roland Borgards et al., eds., Literatur
und Wissen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2013),
pp. 28–32. Further literature on the topic of the figure of thought can be
found in the following, especially the reference to the conference of the
Berlin Graduiertenkolleg on “Schriftbildlichkeit” on February 25–26,
2011: Was sind Denkfiguren? Figurationen unbegrifflichen Denkens in
Metaphern, Diagrammen und Kritzeleien.

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Benno Wirz

illustrated, I understand a “figure of thought” to be a theoretical

vehicle which can be used for the formation of concepts, the elabo-
ration of systematic relations between these concepts, and for the
constitution of acts and ways of thinking, where these processes
of formation are repeatedly performed anew without arriving at
a point of conclusion. They originate in an image-related and
thus figural material, as in the case of the sun and the idea of
the good.9 Over the course of these processes of formation, this
material is processed into concepts, systems, and ways of think-
ing (as in Plato’s arguments from the analogy of the sun), enters
into them, and, as a part of this constellation, remains available
as potential which is open to being processed further, with the
result that the concepts and systems formed and defined by way
of this potential can be continually reformulated and redefined.
The figure of thought sets in motion interminable processes of
formulation and definition from which traditions of thinking
emerge and then vanish, are revived and then forgotten, only in
order to be reactivated and reconstructed again.
Taking this provisional definition of the figure of thought
as my starting point, I would like to offer several further aspects
which could contribute to the concept of the figure of thought,
while constantly keeping Plato’s foundational act of theory in
mind. As a first step, I will examine its “operativity.” This allows
me to bring the concept of the figure of thought into fruitful
conversation with Eugen Fink’s notion of “operative concepts.”
As a second step, I will add two further programmatic aspects to
this conception which should help better understand both the
figural and the cognitive dimensions of the figure of thought.

9 Wolfram Groddeck, Reden über Rhetorik. Zu einer Stilistik des Lesens

(Basel: Strömfeld, 2008), pp. 185–202; Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle
Peters, “Einleitung,” in Gabriele Brandstetter and Sibylle Peters, eds.,
De figura. Rhetorik – Bewegung – Gestalt (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2002),
pp. 7–31; Daniel Müller Nielaba, Yves Schumacher et al., “Figur/a/tion.
Möglichkeiten einer Figurologie im Zeichen E.T.A. Hoffmanns,” in
Daniel Müller Nielaba, Yves Schumacher et al., eds., Figur, Figura, Figu-
ration: E.T.A. Hoffmann (Göttingen: Königshausen & N ­ eumann, 2011),
pp. 7–14.

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The operativity of thought figures (Eugen Fink)

In Eugen Fink’s text Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenom-

enology, figures of thought are not an explicit matter of discus-
sion.10 But with the concept of “operativity,” he describes a cen-
tral characteristic which can be fruitfully read together with the
concept of the thought figure. What does Fink mean by opera-
tive concepts?
His remarks begin with the difference between thematic
and operative concepts. Thematic concepts are concepts in the
usual sense of the word, where all possible content is fixed and
defined.11 Operative concepts, in contrast, play a decisive role in
the formation of concepts:

But in the formation of thematic concepts, creative think-

ers use other concepts and patterns of thought, they operate
with intellectual schemata which they do not fix objectively.

10 Eugen Fink, “Operative Concepts in Husserl’s Phenomenology,”

in William R. McKenna, Robert M. Harlan and Laurance E. Winters,
eds. and trans., Apriori and World: European Contributions to Husser-
lian Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1981),
pp. 56–70. (In German: Eugen Fink, “Operative Begriffe in Husserls
Phänomenologie,” in Franz-Anton Schwarz, ed., Nähe und Distanz.
Phänomenologische Aufsätze und Vorträge (Freiburg, Munich: Karl
Alber, 1976), pp. 180–204.) The text is a transcript of a talk Fink gave in
1957 at the 3rd Colloque International de Phénoménologie in Royau-
mont. The talk was highly influential in France while largely ignored
in the German-speaking world. Jean-Pierre Schobinger referred to Der-
rida’s fruitful reading of Fink: “The talk is a key text in understanding
Derrida’s deconstructive form of reading, which he developed in the
1960s.” Jean-Pierre Schobinger, “Operationale Aufmerksamkeit in der
textimmanenten Auslegung,” Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und
Theologie 39 (1982): pp. 5–38, here p. 19. For more on Derrida’s reading
of Fink, see Jean-Claude Höfliger, Jacques Derridas Husserl-Lektüren
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995).
11 As examples of thematic concepts, Fink lists a number of famous
philosophical terms which have entered into the history of philosophy
along their creators’ names: Plato’s idea, Aristotle’s ousia, dynamis, and
energeia, Leibniz’s monad, Kant’s transcendental, Hegel’s spirit or abso-
lute idea, Nietzsche’s will-to-power, or Husserl’s transcendental subjec-
tivity. Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59

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Benno Wirz

They think through certain cognitive presentations towards

the basic concepts which are essentially their themes. Their
understanding moves in a conceptual field, in a conceptual
medium that they are not at all able to see. They expend
intermediate lines of thought to set up that which they are
thinking about. We call that which is in this way readily
expended and thought through in philosophical thinking,
but not considered in its own right, operative concepts.12

This difference results from the different way it treats con-

cepts. “Creative thinkers,” as Fink calls them, use concepts in
an operative way as cognitive material for the formation of con-
cepts where the respective cognitive content becomes subject
matter. What can function as material in this process is deter-
mined by its usability. It is not restricted to conceptual content
alone: content of every kind comes into consideration, giving
rise to the question of whether “operative concepts” can even
be referred to as concepts.13
Fink himself mentions “other concepts and thought mod-
els,” “intellectual schematas,” and “cognitive ideas,” thus tar-
geting everything which can be used in concept formation as
a “conceptual field” or “conceptual medium” or in the form of
“lines of thought.”14 The formation of thematic concepts thus
takes place in the use of the cognitive material which provides
the operative concepts. Fink refers to this work as operating.
Here we see a first trait of “operativity”: operative concepts have
the character of a medial dia, indicated by Fink’s notable use of
the prepositions “through…towards” (durch…hindurch) as well
as the German prefix “ver-,” indicating a process of becoming.15

12 Ibid.
13 One reason for this is that the material provided by operative con-
cepts does not per se exist but is instead always material for thematic
concepts as concepts in the common sense of the word.
14 Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59.
15 Dieter Mersch, “Meta / Dia. Zwei unterschiedliche Zugänge zum
Medialen,” Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung 2 (2010): p. 185–

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Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought

Operative concepts are instruments or tools used to pro-

duce cognitive content. Fink accordingly defines them as “read-
ily expended and thought through” and then lists a second trait
of operativity, calling it that which is “not considered in its own
right” in philosophical thinking. The assimilation of the mate-
rial into specific content takes place in the formation of con-
cepts, without, however, needing to be thematically or specifi-
cally reflected upon. The material becomes, on the one hand,
an encountered material; on the other, it enters into the content
which is formed from it. Operative concepts are, with respect to
thematic concepts, prior and simultaneous instruments: they
are the starting point of this conceptual process and that which
the process concerns as well as that which enters into the result
of the process. With the concept of operativity, then, Fink exam-
ines a pre- and non-conceptual layer which precedes thinking
with concepts and which remains effective even after the pro-
cessing of the material into specific content. It is, according to
Fink, “metaphorically speaking, the shadow of a philosophy.”16
With this formulation, Fink expands his remarks on opera-
tivity, marking the difference between thematic concepts as
“clarified, shadowless”17 and operative concepts as “shadow[s]
of thought.”18 By making this contrast, he reactivates the Pla-
tonic use of the sun as a figure of thought in the foundational
act of theory and emphasizes the rhetorical and aesthetic qual-
ity of the unreflective and productive “dark side” in this new
interpretation. Fink also refers to a further analogical argument
which Plato introduces in his analogy of the sun. The light radi-
ating from the sun can be blocked, becoming shadow, at night
for example, or due to an obstruction, which leads to the event
of sight becoming, not impossible, but negatively impacted
(508c). In this argument by analogy, shadow functions as a

208, here p. 201–202.

16 Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.

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Benno Wirz

­ eficiency of light, which Plato uses to (dis)qualify becoming

d
as a deficient form of being, and varying opinions as deficient
forms of knowledge (508d), in contrast to the light of the ideas
as the highest forms of being and knowledge.
With his comments on shadow, however, Fink is doing more
than just emphasizing the pre- and non-conceptual essential
feature of operativity, where conceptual thought is only possible
through the processing of pre-existent material which is itself
not comprehended. He also reverses the deficiency in capacity
to the degree that the material provides the possibility of deter-
mining specific content: “The clarifying power of a way of think-
ing is nourished by what remains in the shadow of thought. […]
Thinking itself is grounded in what remains unconsidered. It
has its productive impetus in the unreflective use of concepts
which remain in the shadow.”19
With the term “operativity,” Fink thus has in view the stra-
tum from which definition can emerge in the performance of
conceptual thinking. It is the layer of definability.20 The suffix
“-ability” indicates both the foundation of “what remains uncon-
sidered” in the sense of a matrix from which specific content can
emerge through the processing of preexisting material, as well
as dynamics which inhere in this process as a development of
the potential in the material into concepts with specific content.
Fully in the tradition of Plato, Fink sees this capacity of
operativity as equally characterized by a certain deficiency. For
both the productivity of the matrix and the dynamics of concept

19 Ibid.
20 Samuel Weber emphasized the relevance of the suffix -ability in
the context of his readings of Benjamin. Weber sees the formulation
of a sense of possibility there which is also manifest elsewhere in Ben-
jamin with respect to “translatability” and “recognizability.” These are
names for potentiality. In this respect, it is the writable hyphen, and not
the audible one, which is decisive, which allows the suffix -ability to be
linked with highly different entities: “A Bindestrich […] does not bind it
to anything in particular and yet requires it to be bound to something
else.” Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s -abilities (Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008), p. 3.

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Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought

formation remain separate from conceptual thought itself.

The multilayered “shadowing” (Verschattung)21 of operativity
is a fundamental trait of conceptual thinking, which cannot be
overcome with work on and with concepts, whatever content
they might have. Fink does grant that this “shadowing” can to
a certain extent be overridden, although “operative shadows”22
always remain behind. This makes operativity an almost
unbearable fact of conceptual thinking: “For philosophy itself,
this is a constant scandal and a disconcerting embarrassment.
Philosophy tries again and again to jump over its own shadow.”23
Fink determines that “the central concepts” of Western philo-
sophical thinking “remain in the twilight” to the extent that
they are “used more operatively than they are thematically
clarified.”24 He continues: “The presence of a shadow is an
essential feature of finite philosophizing. […] Only God knows
without shadows.”25
Fink also applies this perspective, which opens up by means
of the concept of operativity, to Plato, pointing to the interac-
tion of theory and aesthetics in the foundational act of theory.
While the idea of the good appears in the “radiance of the sun,”
everyday objects are “declared […] to be a mere shadow-image of
the idea.” 26 For Fink this means that “Plato took the conceptual
means through which he devaluated earthly reality from that
sensuous world itself; it is in the sphere of sensuous light that
there are shadows. He referred operatively back to the ‘horatos
topos’ [ὁρατός τόπος] while he transgressed it in the theme of
his thought.”27 In this way of reading, the visual and cognitive
spheres merge to the extent that the former is interpreted as the
operative layer of the latter. Despite this transgression, theory

21 Fink, “Operative Concepts,” p. 59.

22 Ibid., p. 66.
23 Ibid., pp. 59–60.
24 Ibid., p. 69.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.

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Benno Wirz

remains connected to vision and thus to “aesthetic theory.” The

aesthetic functions as the “operativity” of the theoretical.

Aspects of a conception of the figure of thought

Fink’s remarks on operativity add the moment of shadowing to

the provisional definition of the figure of thought as a vehicle
for the formation of concepts, systems, and ways of thinking.
It is a pre- and non-conceptual tool which is unreflectively used
in the endless, inconclusive processes of formation. As such, it
has the status of definability and accompanies the concepts,
systems, and ways of thinking formed through it as a produc-
tive, material matrix and as a driving and renewing force.
In the shadowing of operativity, we already notice that the
figure of thought possesses a genuinely aesthetic and a specifi-
cally theoretical moment which I would like to briefly address
in conclusion. This moment aims at better understanding the
figural and cognitive dimensions of the figure of thought and
thus also at grasping the interplay of aesthetics and theory
which has been part of Western thought since Plato’s founda-
tion of theory.
The figure of thought has the character of manifestness.
It gives occasion for thinking and makes sense because it
possesses an aesthetic dimension which constitutes the fig-
ural element of the figure of thought. The figure of thought is
aesthetic in a double sense. First, it infuses sensual material
into theoretical thought through the process of concept and
system formation. The process thus does not take place on a
purely conceptual level: instead, the concepts are always rein-
forced and enriched with sensual components and continually
interact and engage with them. Second, the figure of thought
is thoroughly “artistic”: like an artistic figure en miniature, in
that a representation or mise en scène takes shape on its mate-
rial basis which addresses both the senses and the understand-
ing and allows an excess of sense to be produced. The figure of

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Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought

thought should thus be referred to as aesthetic not only on the

basis of its sensual material but also its “artistically” processed
material, which it provides for the formation of concepts and
systems and which enters into them in a processed form.
The aesthetic can be found in the material which is figural
to the extent that it exists in a concretion whose sensual and
cognitive potential can be used for the formation of concepts
and systems. The latter do not emerge via discursive processes
of definition but rather by attaining representation in the con-
tent, structures, and dynamics of the image or figure. The fig-
ural dimension of the figure of thought is thus the fact that it is
a form of representation whose potential can give rise to con-
cepts, systems, and ways of thinking.
Plato’s sun excellently manifests the aesthetic dimension of
the figure of thought. It is the representational form of the idea
of the good where, in a sequence of processing steps, theoreti-
cal thinking is established, the structure of its basic concepts
outlined, the dynamic of its thought processes developed, and
the foundation of this thought rooted in the idea of the good.
But this sequence is neither concluded nor exhausted with
the foundation of theory. Plato refers back again at the end of
the analogy of the sun to the representational form of the sun,
in order to again reconceive of the foundational character of
the idea of the good. For this purpose, he reshapes the figural
concretion of the sun by moving from an image of the sun as
an inexhaustible source of light, whose brightness enables all
vision without itself being able to be seen, to an image of the
sun as the foundation of all emergence into being and passing
out of being, a foundation which itself never emerges or van-
ishes. Starting from this figure, Plato gives another twist to the
privileged position of the idea of the good, to the extent that
all being and knowledge originates in this idea while “the con-
dition which characterizes the good must receive still greater
honor” (509b).
Other thinkers after Plato have also repeatedly taken up
this sequence set into motion by the foundation of theory,

249
Benno Wirz

emphasizing other aspects of the sun for the formation of con-

cepts, the production of systems, or the constitution of ways of
thinking. They constitute a specific tradition of the persistent
reformulation of the sun as representational form. The aes-
thetic dimension imprints and provides a sensual-artistic foun-
dation for the concepts and systems formed with the figures of
thought. It also provides them with a history characterized by
the continual movement, renewal, and change of thinking with
its concepts and systems.
On the basis of its aesthetic dimension, the figural element
of the figure of thought causes a specific kind of ambivalent
thinking. As theoretical vehicles, figures of thought help in
forming concepts where thought determines and defines its
own content. Its function of definability lends them an affir-
mative character. As pre- and non-conceptual tools, figures of
thought remain, however, notably indeterminate. That is the
basis of their negativity. As a tool, they enable definition with-
out themselves being defined. An irresolvable indeterminacy
remains: a surplus, a capacity, something unclear, incoherent,
something disorderly, unstructured, something resistant or
incongruous which cannot be defined by a concept or brought
into a system. This lends figures of thought an uncontrollable
character which is not only precedent to and involved in con-
cepts and systems but which proliferates and contaminates
that within which they reside. In their ambivalence, figures of
thought have a simultaneously foundational and unfathom-
able character for the thinking of theory. They are foundation
(Grund) and abyss (Abgrund) in one.
Part of their negativity is also that figures of thought do not
appear directly or immediately. They function subliminally, as
Fink writes: they “operate” to the extent that they themselves
are integrated into concepts and systems and to the degree
that they provide the material for their formation. Plato’s foun-
dational act of theory is in this respect unique: we can follow
step by step how the thought figure of the sun is processed and
remains effective, how it impacts and develops the concepts

250
Shadows of Theory: Figures of Thought

related to it, a self-differentiated system, a way of thinking with

specific structures and dynamics.
Figural analysis is often restricted to retrospectively follow-
ing the traces of the figure in the concepts, orders, structures,
and systems formed by it, and ultimately in all possible strat-
egies. The analysis of figures of thought should, however, not
be restricted to the retroactive reconstruction of their mate-
rial’s processes of development into concepts and systems in
theoretical thought. This analysis should also be interested
in breaking up entrenched, even calcified formations, defini-
tions, constitutions, and structures, in regaining the potential
of their definability in the material of the figures of thought, for
the purpose of continually shifting, translating, and inventing
the conceptual, systematic, and cognitive elements of theory so
that this potential can again be updated and reformulated in
each respective present.
The analysis of figures of thought is simultaneously re-
and deconstruction. It requires a doubled form of attention
which can be called, in a reformulation of Fink, “operational
attention.”28 For whoever analyses figures of thought focusses
equally on the content-related specifications which occur in
concepts and systems with respect to definition, as well on all
factors29 which are at work in the development and expression
of these content-related specifications, e.g. the aesthetic-fig-
ural in this case. Accordingly, the perspective opened up by the
analysis of figures of thought is not foreign to theoretical think-
ing. It corresponds entirely to its leading interests, although it
adds an aesthetic-reflexive angle to it. The analysis of figures of

28 This expression, and the connected mode of reading of opera-

tionally-attentive interpretation, was influenced by Jean-Pierre Scho­
binger. See Jean-Pierre Schobinger, “Operationale Aufmerksamkeit,”
in Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie 39 (Fribourg,
Switzerland: Aschendorf, 1992), pp. 5–38.
29 Following Fink, Schobinger calls them “operative factors.” Ibid.,
p. 6. These are “textural factors” (ibid.) which form an “operative layer”
(ibid.) in a text which may be referred to as textuality.

251
Benno Wirz

thought enables theory to reflect on its own praxis of thinking,

on its treatment of conceptuality and systematicity, and opens
up a space of possibility for its concepts, systems, constitutions,
structures, and orders to repeatedly gain new relevance.
By founding theory in the sun and, as Fink emphasizes,
in shadow, Plato provided Western thought with an aesthetic
turn which is repeated again and again. In this ever-turning
dynamic, a tradition of thought emerges which will not end
with the analysis of figures of thought. Operational attention
to figures of thought does, however, open up a perspective on
Western thought through which we will be able to investigate
the aesthetic potential of theory and the theoretical potential of
the aesthetic with respect to the formation of concepts, ­systems,
and ways of thinking.

252
Sandra Frimmel

Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

The paintings in Yuri Albert’s series Paintings for Stenographers

intentionally provoke doubt about art. The large format color
canvases with their scrawl-like, clumsy, and indecipherable
lettering can be seen as abstract art or, if we are able to read
stenography, as statements about art. On the surface of the
paintings we read I love contemporary painting (Fig. 1), I like art
very much (Fig. 2) or I hate the avant-garde—statements about
art which consciously play with simple affirmations and nega-
tions. Two further canvases are, however, both a commentary
on the series and also its theoretical foundation: Incomprehen-
sible in form, comprehensible in content (Fig. 3), and Comprehen-
sible in form, incomprehensible in content (1989) (Fig. 4). Both
of these inscriptions draw attention to the reception dilemma
of the series: some of the viewers, likely the majority, see the
works as abstract forms, not able to understand the text; the
others—those few who can read (Russian) stenography—see a
text which for them is not necessarily art.
The works are part of an extensive series called Elitist-Dem-
ocratic Art. Yuri Albert began working on this series in the late
1980s and addressed it to both the Soviet public and to interna-
tional art theory. Apart from Paintings for Stenographers, there
are also Art for the Deaf and Dumb, Paintings for the Blind, and
Art for Sailors. All of these works not only satirize the classical,
oft-posed question “What did the artist mean to say by that?”1—
they also stimulate doubt about art through art.
It is exactly this doubt which Yuri Albert sees as the driving
force of contemporary art and thus also the impetus for his figu-
rative thinking. The question of art’s status as art becomes itself
a work of art: “If a work, an action, or anything else provokes

1 Also the title of a work from the series Art for the Deaf and Dumb.

253
Sandra Frimmel

Fig. 1: Yuri Albert: I love contemporary painting, 1987.

doubt and discussion among the viewers about whether it is art

or not—then that is art, without a doubt.”2 Doubt about what
has been seen is also, he argues, that which distinguishes “true”
art from “contemporary” art. With respect to “true” art, he
claims—Paul Cézanne or Vincent van Gogh for example—the
observer (today at least) does not have the opportunity to doubt
the works’ status as works of art; in the case of “contemporary”
art, however, the opposite is true. Yuri Albert thus attempts to
create “skeptical”3 art, art which intends nothing other than
simply being art, thus demonstrating the range of thought in
figures and through figures.
When Yuri Albert began to work as a conceptual artist in the
late 1970s in the unofficial Soviet art scene, there was not yet a
public for this art. Conceptual art was excluded from the state-
run culture industry, i.e. from the official museum and exhibi-
tion space infrastructure. The public was at the same time also
prevented from seeing unofficial art. It was essentially the same
group of friends and acquaintances who had the opportunity
to see these artworks, to comment on them, interpret them,

2 Yuri Albert, “Prolog,” in Sandra Frimmel, Sabine Hänsgen and

Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, eds., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische
Kunst (Vaduz: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 2018), pp. 11–15, here
p. 14. All translations into English by Brian Alkire.
3 See Yuri Albert, “Facebook-Einträge 2012–2018. Auswahl,” in
Frimmel et al., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 259–294,
here p. 274.

254
Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

Fig. 2: Yuri Albert: I like art very much, 2017.

and criticize them. This led to a situation where the processes

of presentation, commentary, and theoretical reflection them-
selves became part of artistic practice, as well as where the miss-
ing audience became a theme and subject of art. Sometimes,
according to Yuri Albert, it was enough to simply say what you
had intended for a potential work for it to be seen as complet-
ed.4 Artwork and commentary combined with each other to a
point of indistinguishability: texts became artworks, and art-
works often existed solely as texts.
In their form, these artworks resembled their conditions
of production in cramped communal apartments or the coun-
tryside around Moscow: their format was small, made of easily
obtainable materials like paper or plywood, easy to store and
easy to hide, almost ephemeral.
The Paintings for Stenographers series emerged starting in
1987 as a reaction to a changed reception situation. With the
start of perestroika, previously unofficial art could suddenly be
shown in larger exhibitions accessible to the public. Observ-
ers who had for decades, in obligatory exhibition debates and
through entries in visitor books, become used to and internal-
ized the values of Socialist Realism—an orientation towards
“the people,” ideological loyalty, class consciousness, and

4 See Albert, “Prolog,” p. 14.

255
Sandra Frimmel

Fig. 3: Yuri Albert: Incomprehensible in form, comprehensible in content,

1989.

i­dealism—in the form of disputes,5 were now confronted with

an art that could hardly be recognized as such, which was at first
glance incomprehensible and which they first needed to learn
to read. Yuri Albert vividly describes this phase of change:

When I started to occupy myself with art, exhibitions of

contemporary art were still illegal in the Soviet Union.
The observer as mass phenomenon thus did not yet exist.
My friends functioned as observers—and I was in turn an
observer of their works. The issue was just that no one had
had the opportunity to see forbidden contemporary art.
Only after perestroika, at the time of the first legal exhibi-
tions of contemporary art, did the first “real” observers
appear who did not know me personally. With them arose
the problem of a broader public’s “not understanding” con-
temporary art. Those who grew up with the paradigm of “Art
must be realistic and comprehensible” asked us: “We don’t
understand. How is that art?” Only a very narrow circle of
insiders did not ask questions like that.6

5 See also my text “Beurteilen oder Verurteilen? Vom Richten über

Kunst und Künstler im sowjetischen Kunstbetrieb,” in Zeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte (forthcoming).
6 Yuri Albert, “Elitär-demokratische Kunst,” in Frimmel et al., Yuri
Albert: Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 144–145, here p. 144.

256
Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

Fig. 4: Yuri Albert: Comprehensible in form, incomprehensible in content,

1989.

Although the works were now able to be seen by many people, it

was still the same few friends and acquaintances who acknowl-
edged and “understood” what was shown. Yuri Albert’s series
Paintings for Stenographers ironizes this situation. It produces a
new, different “elite” in the reception of art, which is not based
on belonging to a social class or to an artistic underground,
but instead on a system of signs and images which is otherwise
completely irrelevant to art: stenography.

Elitist-democratic art

For Yuri Albert, contemporary art is a “mechanism which serves

to create a new elite by dividing the public into those who under-
stand and those who do not”:7

Imagine an “average” sort of person who finds himself at

an exhibition opening. He sees strange things: more or less
smoothly painted surfaces, giant canvases with messy brush-
strokes, geometric figures, photographs. People with wine
glasses in their hands wander around exchanging impres-
sions and judgments. They seem, in short, to more or less
understand these strange objects. They are able to “read”
the artist’s message. The average person from the street of

7 Albert, “Prolog,” p. 15.

257
Sandra Frimmel

Fig. 5: Yuri Albert, What did the artist mean to say by that?, 1987.

course feels like a complete idiot in such a situation. This

was the exact situation I tried to reverse. The “insider” will
interpret these works as traditional artistic messages in the
language they are used to: Action Painting, geometrical or
monochromatic abstractions, conceptual photography. But
the “insider” is wrong of course: this time he is the idiot, as
only a stenographer can understand these works.8

In Paintings for Stenographers, the initiated connoisseurs of con-

temporary art who like to think of themselves as an elite are now
lacking the requisite knowledge for understanding the works—
instead, a group of people normally considered distant from art
is in possession of the initiated knowledge. Starting with this
one non-artistic professional language, Yuri Albert expanded
his humorous attempts to produce alternative artistic elites to
other codes like braille, shipping signs, and sign language. “At
first glance, all of the works in this series have an effect similar
to works in recognized schools of art […]. They look like works of
art, and that is very important.”9 Art spectators immediately rec-
ognize the formal language of Abstract Expressionism or Neo-
Geo, for example. But only those who understand sign language
can ask the question together with Yuri Albert: “What did the
artist mean to say by that?” (Fig. 5). And only those who are in
a position to read braille will be able to decipher the following

8 Albert, “Elitär-demokratische Kunst,” p. 145.

9 Albert, “Prolog,” p. 15.

258
Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

Fig. 6: Yuri Albert: Is it possible to create an absolutely incomprehensible

work of art?, 2017.

Fig. 7: Yuri Albert: How should this work look for you to like it?, 2017.

259
Sandra Frimmel

Fig. 8: Yuri Albert: I understand nothing, 1988/2001.

questions—as integral components of the artwork—with their

hands: “Is it possible to create an absolutely incomprehensible
work of art?” (Fig. 6) or “How should this work look for you to
like it?” (Fig. 7)
Yuri Albert subjects both the individual semiotic systems
and art in general, their comprehensibility and accessibility, to
analysis. This is only an apparent democratization of art, how-
ever, its reception revoked from elite circles and transferred to
other groups of observers, as the attempt to break down the for-
mation of elites simply leads to a deceptive understanding of the
artworks and to new elites. Who, that is, understands what? And
how do we bring the various levels of understanding together? In
Yuri Albert’s thoughts on art there is thus a third term between
understanding and not-understanding: a “proper not-under-
standing” which turns the observers into the artist’s co-authors
and keeps conversation about art going in a perpetuum mobile.
In the work I understand nothing from 1988/2001, (Fig. 8)
from the series Art for Sailors, for example, understanding
and not-understanding coincide in a unique way in the above-
mentioned “proper not-understanding”: whoever cannot read

260
Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

this flag-waving alphabet understands nothing, but those who

understand this alphabet also understand nothing, or under-
stand that they understand nothing, leading to an interpreta-
tion where “elite” and “democratic” understandings of art
essentially coincide. Yuri Albert’s works thus always reflect the
situation of their readability and observation, which the con-
crete observers must inevitably take an attitude towards. In the
artistic work, then, an intentional reception emerges which the
actual observer cannot leave out of account. Yuri Albert as artist
consequently becomes a stand-in for the observer, and prefer-
ably an observer who, as he puts it, “doesn’t like contemporary
art and doesn’t understand it.”10

Art as a form of reflection on art

Reflection on art, the continual incorporation of the observer

into the artwork, and the always humorous interrogation
of his own position as artist also characterize another work
of Yuri Albert’s which emerged in the continuation of the
­Elitist-Democratic Art series: 1995’s Self-Portrait with Closed
Eyes. (Fig. 9) This installation consists of 88 descriptions of
paintings and drawings by Vincent van Gogh from his letters to
his brother Theo. The descriptions are presented on the wall as
white text panels and the texts are printed in braille. This is in
a sense an actual Van Gogh for the Blind, as the descriptions are
from van Gogh himself. In this installation, various observers
encounter each other, “or more precisely: various forms of not-
understanding,”11 as Yuri Albert put it. Furthermore:

The experienced museumgoers are unable to read the texts

in braille, but they are probably capable of c­ ategorizing the

10 Ibid., p. 14.
11 Yuri Albert, “Selbstporträt mit geschlossenen Augen,” in Frimmel
et al., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 180–181, here p. 180.

261
Sandra Frimmel

Fig. 9: Yuri Albert: Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes, 1995.

exhibition in the context of modern art. The blind v­ iewers

in turn, who presumably do not often go to museums, can
indeed read van Gogh’s texts but will misinterpret them
as the main event of the installation. Finally, I cannot
even imagine how van Gogh’s impressive and picturesque
descriptions could be received by people who are unable to
distinguish between colors. What sort of incomprehensible
images will be born in their consciousness?12

This also reflects the significance of narratives about art in

the unofficial Soviet context, specifically of narratives about
one’s own art, which, as already mentioned, often constituted
the work itself, as well as of narratives about contemporary
art beyond the Iron Curtain. Information about art from non-
socialist states was hard to obtain. Some catalogues and books
were transported in diplomatic luggage, but first needed to
be translated and interpreted. Because the artists were not
­familiar with the conditions of the Western art market, there

12 Ibid., p. 180f.

262
Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

Fig. 10: Museum Tour with Blindfolded Eyes, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein,

Vaduz, November 4, 2018.

were a large number of translation and interpretation errors, as

Yuri Albert comments: “The fact that we were only familiar with
contemporary art in Moscow through stories, imprecise trans-
lations, caricatures, and blurry reproductions played an impor-
tant role in the development of my working methods.”13
Confronted with this situation, Yuri Albert set about look-
ing for the ideal observer: one who becomes aware of his own
not-understanding and thus his own status as observer. Here
he goes beyond the Soviet context of his works and attempts in
a very general way to stimulate art in the heads of the observ-
ers: “I was always of the opinion that art that you imagine or
remember is better and more interesting than art which you
can actually see.”14 His body of work includes a performance
where the participants are thrown back onto exactly this ques-

13 Albert, “Prolog,” p. 13.

14 Yuri Albert, “Museumsführung mit verbundenen Augen,” in
­Frimmel et al., Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst, pp. 188–189,
here p. 188.

263
Sandra Frimmel

tion, the Museum Tour with Blindfolded Eyes (Fig. 10). Over the
course of an hour, a museum guide who is able to see describes
and explains works of art while the temporarily blinded per-
formance participants attempt to imagine or remember these
works of art. The attempt to understand art again produces art:
shifted and blurred but significant and legitimate images in
one’s mind. The reception process is not just a part of the work:
the work is the reception process.
The emphasis on the significance of talking about or tell-
ing stories about art instead of the observation of works of art
causes the borders between art, art criticism, and art theory to
blur in Yuri Albert’s oeuvre: “I have always considered the type
of art which I occupy myself with as a practical experiment in the
field of art criticism, art theory, and art history. And vice-versa:
I see many of my theoretical and critical texts as artworks.”15 In
his works, Yuri Albert the art historian reflects the works of Yuri
Albert the artist through the texts of Yuri Albert the art critic.
For him, art is thus always also a form of reflection on art: what
remains of art in the narrative, both the narrative of eyewit-
nesses and in the narrative of those who only repeat others’ nar-
ratives? Can one only speak about works which exist as tangible
objects, or also of works which only exist in the mind? Must art
take on a material form or does the concept alone suffice? Is an
artist who talks about works which he or she has planned but
not realized a worse artist than one who has already realized the
work? In this sense, van Gogh’s letters are not worse than his
paintings, according to Yuri Albert: “To what degree does art
consist of visual impressions and to what degree is it an intel-
lectual construct? What do you need to know to understand a
work of art? Do you even need to understand it? Or is it better
for it to remain incomprehensible?”16

15 Yuri Albert, “Predislovie,” in Yuri Albert and Ekaterina Degot,

eds., Čto etim chotel skazat’ chudožnik (Moscow: Moscow Museum of
­Modern Art, 2015), pp. 11–14, here p. 11 (exh. cat.).
16 Ibid., p. 12.

264
Notes on the Cover: Yuri Albert’s Figurative Thinking

Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes ultimately attempts, like

Paintings for Stenographers, to combine two groups into one
by excluding one group of viewers (the seeing art connois-
seurs) and including another (blind people and/or those who
can read braille), which should hopefully occur in conversation
about their respective impressions in observing and/or touch-
ing the art. It also manifests Yuri Albert’s childhood dream of
being a “true artist with a romantic biography like Vincent van
Gogh”17 until he was dissuaded from this by the models of Soz
Art and Moscow Conceptualism. The installation is ultimately
the self-portrait of a “contemporary” artist through the work of
a different, “true” artist (who was himself once a “contempo-
rary” artist, however). To this day, the opposition between true
and contemporary art, separated primarily by the presence of
doubt, is fundamental to Yuri Albert’s artistic work.

The productivity of doubt, or art as a form of reflection

on more than just art

Who is in a position to make doubting what one has seen pro-

ductive for engagement with art (and more than art)? In an unex-
pected update to this question, Russian society is also currently
searching for answers. Since perestroika, following the decades-
long hegemony of Socialist Realism, language purists, moral-
ity police, and orthodox Christians are attempting to read and
understand contemporary art. Each of these groups perceives
only one part of art. In contrast to the stenographers, sailors,
blind people, and deaf people in Yuri Albert’s Elitist-Democratic
Art, who can only partially experience art due to bodily disability
or a specialized professional knowledge, the language purists,
morality police, and orthodox Christians are limited in their
perception by political blinders. They only see what they take
for offensive: religious symbols used in a non-religious context,

17 Albert, “Prologue,” p. 12.

265
Sandra Frimmel

the representation of “non-traditional sexual relationships,” or

the use of swear words.
Instead of using their not-understanding in Yuri Albert’s
sense, which makes dialogue with art productive and allows
something new to emerge, to expand the horizons of their own
understanding, these groups introduce new restrictions on
artistic freedom and other civil rights through new laws based
on their not-understanding. Here, not-understanding leads
not to doubt and conversation but to a supposed knowledge
of how things—art, morals, social order, the relations between
the sexes, etc.—are supposed to be. In this moment, aesthetic
judgment turns into political judgment. The relationship
between art and politics, between the aesthetic and the politi-
cal, between artistic and political freedom is of major impor-
tance to Yuri Albert, as reflection on art is for him always also
reflection on society and its political and legal condition. It is
for just this reason that his works are simultaneously art and
(aesthetic) theory. Artistic freedom is allegedly only made use
of by an elite of specialists. But in fact, political freedoms and
rights are needed by all. How artistic freedom is handled is in
this sense always a symptom of the condition of society—which
art and theory in turn react to.

266
List of illustrations

Klaus Müller-Wille
Fig. 1: Text pages from the original edition of Held og hasard; Fig. 2: Cover
of the original edition of Held og hasard; Fig. 3: Cover of the second edition
of Held og hasard; Fig. 4: Text page of the second edition of Held og hasard.
All images © Donation Jorn, Silkeborg/2019, ProLitteris, Zürich.

Fabienne Liptay
Fig. 1: William Kentridge: Parcours d’atelier, 2008, drawing, mixed media,
19,6 x 26 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York.
Fig. 2a, 2b, 2c und 2d: William Kentridge: Film stills from Tabula Rasa
II, 2003, from the 7-channel installation 7 Fragments for Georges Méliès,
16mm and 35mm film transferred to video, black and white, silent, 2 min.
10 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Fig.
3: William Kentridge: Practical Epistemology, 2012, silkscreen ink on pages
from Septem Linguarum Calepinus (1746), 37,47 x 50,48 cm, edition of 16.
Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York. Fig. 4a, 4b, 4c,
4d, 5a, and 5b: William Kentridge: Film stills from Weighing … and Want-
ing, 1997–98, 35mm film transferred to video and laserdisc, color, sound,
6 min. 20 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery.

Julia Gelshorn and Tristan Weddigen

Fig. 1–9: Camille Henrot, Still from Grosse Fatigue, 2013, Video (color/
sound), 13 min, Original music by Joakim, voice: Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh,
Text written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg, Producer: Kamel Men-
nour, Paris/London; with the additional support of: Fonds de dotation
Famille Moulin, Paris; Production: Silex Films. All illustrations: © ADAGP
Camille Henrot, Courtesy the artist, Silex Films and Kamel Mennour, Paris.

Barbara Naumann
Fig. 1: Poster for the installation Manifesto. Fig. 2: Manifesto: Official Instal-
lation View, The Armory Show, New York. Fig. 3: Blanchett as Clochard.
Fig. 4: Primary school teacher. Fig. 5: Primary school teacher in the class-
room. Fig. 6: Housewife. Fig. 7: Housewife and table scene. Reproduction
of Figure 2 with the kind approval of James Ewing: © James Ewing/OTTO.
All other reproductions in this essay with the generous approval of Julian
Rosefeldt and VG Bild-Kunst: © Julian Rosefeldt / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn
2018.

267
List of illustrations

Rahel Villinger
Fig. 1: “A long breath in the tempo of feeling,” in: Alexander Kluge, Die
Kunst, Unterschiede zu machen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003),
p. 48. Courtesy of Alexander Kluge.

Sandra Frimmel
Fig. 1: Yuri Albert: I love contemporary painting, 1987, from the series Paint-
ings for Stenographers, oil on canvas, 100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection, Foto:
Yuri Albert. Fig. 2: Yuri Albert: I like art very much, 1987, from the series
Painting for Stenographers, oil on canvas, 100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection,
photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 3: Yuri Albert: Incomprehensible in form,
comprehensible in content, 1989, from the series Painting for Stenographers,
acrylic on canvas, 100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri
Albert. Fig. 4: Yuri Albert: Comprehensible in form, incomprehensible in con-
tent, 1989, from the series Paintings for Stenographers, acrylic on canvas,
100 × 300 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 5: What
did the artist mean to say by that?, 1987, from the series Art for the Deaf and
Dumb, black-and-white photographs on hardboard, acrylic, 5 parts, each
100 × 350 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 6: Yuri
Albert: Is it possible to create an absolutely incomprehensible work of art?,
2017, from the series Paintings for the Blind, wood and enamel on hard-
board, 120 × 200 × 4,8 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert.
Fig. 7: Yuri Albert: How should this work look for you to like it?, 2017, from
the series Paintings for the Blind, wood and enamel on hardboard, 120 × 200
× 4,8 cm, artist’s collection, photograph by Yuri Albert. Fig. 8: Yuri Albert:
I understand nothing, 1988/2001, from the series Art for Sailors, inkjet print
on paper, hardboard, 10 × 120 cm, A. Chilova, Photography by Stefan Alten-
burger Photography, Zürich. Fig. 9: Yuri Albert: Self-Portrait with Closed
Eyes, 1995, embossing on paper, mounted on hardboard, 88 parts, various
sizes between 10 × 27 cm und 40 × 81 cm, installation photographs from
Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, exhibition copy, location of origi-
nal unknown, photography by Stefan Altenburger Photography, Zurich.
Fig. 10: Museum Tour with Blindfolded Eyes, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein,
Vaduz, November 4, 2018, performance and photograph by Yuri Albert. All
reproductions courtesy of Yuri Albert.

268
About the authors

Frauke Berndt is Professor of German Literature at the University of Zurich.

Her research interests include literary theory, literary mediology (rhetoric,
poetics, aesthetics), and literature and ethics (gender and queer studies).
Publications include: (with Lutz Koepnick) Ambiguity in Contemporary Art
and Theory. Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft,
Special Issue 16 (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2018) and Facing Poetry: Alexan-
der Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Literary Theory, translated by Anthony Mahler
(forthcoming, 2020).

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English at the University of Zurich.

Research interests: Shakespeare and serial television, crossmapping and
visual culture, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Publications include:
Hollywood und das Projekt Amerika. Essays zum Kulturellen Imaginären einer
Nation (Bielefeld: transcript, 2018); Mad Men (Zurich: diaphanes, 2015) and
Crossmappings. Essays zur visuellen Kultur (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess,
2009).

Sandra Frimmel is an art historian and the research coordinator of the

Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) at the University of Zurich.
Research interests: Russian art, art and power/law/society. Publications
include, as editor: Yuri Albert. Elitär-demokratische Kunst (Vaduz: Kunst-
museum Liechtenstein, 2018); Kunst vor Gericht. Ästhetische Debatten im
Gerichtssaal (Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018); as author: Kunsturteile. Geri-
chtsprozesse gegen Kunst, Künstler und Kuratoren in Russland nach der Per-
estroika (Cologne: Böhlau, 2015).

Julia Gelshorn is Professor of Art History at the University of Fribourg.

Research interests: art from the 18th century to the present, processes of
artistic appropriation, repetition and translation, artistic concepts of
subjectivity and authorship, images of the body. Publications include, as
author: Aneignung und Wiederholung. Bilddiskurse im Werk von Gerhard
Richter und Sigmar Polke (Munich: Fink, 2012); as editor: Legitimationen.
Künstlerinnen und Künstler als Autoritäten der Gegenwartskunst Kunst­
geschichten der Gegenwart, Vol. 5 (Bern: P. Lang, 2005).

Fabienne Liptay is Professor of Film Studies at the University of Zurich.

Research interests: aesthetics and iconicity of film, interrelations between
the visual arts and media, format as a theoretical and aesthetic category,
exhibition practices and contexts of films, models and processes of aes-
thetic production. Publications include, as author: Telling Images. Studien
zur Bildlichkeit des Films (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2016); as editor:

269
About the authors

Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2015);
Artur Żmijewski. Kunst als Alibi (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2017).

Dieter Mersch is Professor of Aesthetic Theory and Director of the Institute

for Theory at the University of the Arts Zurich. He has been a guest profes-
sor at the universities of Chicago, Vienna, Budapest, São Paulo. Research
interests: contemporary philosophy, philosophical aesthetics, art theory,
image theory, philosophy of music, and philosophy of media. Recent pub-
lications: Ordo ab Chao / Order from Noise (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes,
2013); Epistemologies of Aesthetics (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2015),
and essays on media philosophy, art theory, artistic research, image theory,
musicology and digital criticism.

Klaus Müller-Wille is Professor of Nordic Philology at the University of

Zurich. Research interests: Scandinavian Romantic literature, avant-garde
and neo-avant-garde, theories of text and writing, scissors as an instrument
of writing. Publications include, as author: Sezierte Bücher. Hans Christian
Andersens Materialästhetik (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2016); as editor: Skan-
dinavische Schriftlandschaften (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2017).

Barbara Naumann is Professor of German Literature at the University of

Zurich. Research interests: literature and the arts (interart), conversation and
gossip in 19th century literature, physiognomy and portrait in literature and
other media. Publications include, as author: Bilderdämmerung. Bildkritik
im Roman (Basel: Schwabe, 2012); Musikalisches Ideen-Instrument. Das Musi-
kalische in Poetik und Sprachtheorie der Frühromantik (Stuttgart: Metzler,
1990); as editor (with Alexandra Kleihues and Edgar Pankow), ­Intermedien.
Artistische und kulturelle Dynamiken des Austauschs (Zurich: Chronos, 2010).

Boris Previšiƈ is the Swiss National Fund (SNF) Professor of Literature and
Cultural Studies at the University of Lucerne. Research interests: intercul-
turality, comparative literature, theory of space, alpine spaces, Austria-
Hungary, and musical paradigms in literature. Publications include, as
author: “Es heiszt aber ganz Europa…” Imperiale Vermächtnisse von Herder
bis Handke (Berlin: Kadmos, 2017); as editor: Musikalisches Erschreiben.
Topographien der Literatur (Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge 2/2017); Stim-
mungen und Vielstimmigkeit der Aufklärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017).

Sylvia Sasse is Professor of Slavic Literature at the University of Zurich.

Research interests: literature and performance art in the 20th century, liter-
ary and theater theory, literature/theater and law. Publications include, as
author: Michail Bachtin zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 2010); S ­ ubversive
Affirmation (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2019); as editor: Nikolai Evreinov:
“The Storming of the Winter Palace” (Zurich and Berlin: diaphanes, 2017).

270
About the authors

Dorota Sajewska is Assistant Professor of Interart (Eastern Europe) at the

University of Zurich. Research interests: hybridity in contemporary figura-
tive art, performativity of artistic archival processes, historicization of the-
ater anthropology, decolonization of knowledge. Publications include: Pod
okupacją mediów (Warsaw: Książka i Prasa, 2012); Necroperformance. Cul-
tural Reconstructions of the War Body (Zurich: diaphanes, 2019).

Rahel Villinger is Research Assistant in German Literature at the University

of Basel. Research interests: aesthetics; poetics; reality, fictionality and the
capacity of judgment in contemporary literature; the imagination of ani-
mals since the early modern period; nature in modernism; ecocriticism.
Publications include: “Gedankenstriche. Theorie und Poesie bei Novalis,” in
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte
(DVjs) 86:4 (2012); “Tod von oben. Naturgeschichtliche Poetik der Einbil-
dungskraft in Novalis’ Hymnen an die Nacht,” in Poetica 48 (2016); Kant und
die Imagination der Tiere (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2018).

Tristan Weddigen is Director of the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck

Institute for Art History in Rome) and Professor of Modern Art History at
the University of Zurich. Research interests: Early modern Italian art and
art theory, history of art theory. Publications include, as author: R
­ affaels
­Papageienzimmer (Berlin: Imorde, 2006); as editor: Heinrich Wölfflins Ge­­
sammelte Werke (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2019).

Benno Wirz is the Coordinator of the Cultural Analysis program at the Uni-
versity of Zurich and Co-Coordinator of the doctoral program “Epistemolo-
gies of Aesthetic Practices.” Research interests: cultural analysis of philos-
ophy, the turn to media, material, theater and politics in thought, sensual
knowledge and aesthetic epistemologies. Publications include, as editor:
Wiederkehr und Verheissung. Dynamiken der Medialität in der Zeitlichkeit
(Zurich: Chronos, 2011); Philosophische Kehrseiten. Eine andere Einleitung
in die Philosophie (Freiburg and Munich: Karl Alber, 2014); Leben verstehen.
Zur Verstrickung zweier philosophischer Grundbegriffe (Weilerswist: Velbrück
Wissenschaft, 2015).

Sandro Zanetti is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of

Zurich. Research interests: literature and art of the avant-garde, literary
writing processes, processes of translation and transmission. Publications
include, as author: Avantgardismus der Greise? Spätwerke und ihre Poetik
(Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2012); as editor: Schreiben als Kulturtechnik. Grun-
dlagentexte (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2012); Transaktualität. Ästhetische Dauer-
haftigkeit und Flüchtigkeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2017).

271