In thinking with the Critique of Judgment, we aim to know the text from inside, but not because w... more In thinking with the Critique of Judgment, we aim to know the text from inside, but not because we wish to remain in its grip. We start with conspicuous concepts—pleasure, taste, beauty, art, genius, and a few others—and let them take us as far as they will go, because in understanding what the text says we hope to develop an intimacy with the world in which what it says makes sense.
One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in st... more One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in strange conceptions, is that of aesthetic ideas. Even by the standards of common sense, the idea of an idea being aesthetic is not immediately intelligible. We grant that ideas can bring forth feelings, perhaps also aesthetic feelings, but that still leaves us at a loss about what it would mean for them to be aesthetic, just as we are perplexed by the idea animating the essays in this volume, namely that thinking may in some sense be poetic. The perplexity only deepens when we try to find a place for this conception on Kant’s fastidious philosophical chart, where the word “idea” is expressly reserved for those concepts “whose object simply cannot be encountered in experience.”1 For Kant, there are, on the one hand, the concepts of the understanding, which forge intuitions into experience, and, on the other, the pure concepts of reason— the ideas—that can never be melded with any intuitive ...
Der Eindruck kann manchmal entstehen, das der romantische Dichter weit entfernt davon, an der Bru... more Der Eindruck kann manchmal entstehen, das der romantische Dichter weit entfernt davon, an der Brust der Natur oder, wenn die gerade nicht zur Hand ist, an einem Schreibtisch nach Inspiration zu suchen seine poetischen Produkte in Reagenzglasern, Schmelztiegeln und Phiolen anmischt. So soll die romantische Poesie bei Friedrich Schlegel bekanntlich „Poesie und Prosa, Genialitat und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen"; sie soll „die Formen der Kunst mit gediegenem Bildungsstoff jeder Art anfullen und sattigen" (KA II, 182, Nr. 116). In ihr seien Realismus und Idealismus „innigst verschmolzen" (KA XVIII, 342, Nr. 248). Poesie, so notiert er in seinen Philosophischen Lehrjahren, finde an dem Punkt statt, „wo Vernunft und Unvernunft sich saturiren und durchdringen" (KA XVIII, 162, Nr. 471), Philosophie dort, ,,[w]o [Poesie und Praxis] sich ganz durchdringen und in eins schmelzen" (KA II, 216, Nr. 304). Der Verdacht, das der Poesie ...
One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in st... more One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in strange conceptions, is that of aesthetic ideas. Even by the standards of common sense, the idea of an idea being aesthetic is not immediately intelligible. We grant that ideas can bring forth feelings, perhaps also aesthetic feelings, but that still leaves us at a loss about what it would mean for them to be aesthetic, just as we are perplexed by the idea animating the essays in this volume, namely that thinking may in some sense be poetic. The perplexity only deepens when we try to find a place for this conception on Kant’s fastidious philosophical chart, where the word “idea” is expressly reserved for those concepts “whose object simply cannot be encountered in experience.”1 For Kant, there are, on the one hand, the concepts of the understanding, which forge intuitions into experience, and, on the other, the pure concepts of reason— the ideas—that can never be melded with any intuitive elements and thus remain beyond the ken of experience. What are some examples? In the
Taking Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella "The Marquise of O" as a case study, the ... more Taking Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella "The Marquise of O" as a case study, the essay argues that cognitive and affective--i.e., bodily--responses to literature heavily constrain the range of interpretations that, based on the text alone, ought to be available to readers. Thus the near-unanimous understanding of the central conundrum of the novella is not due to an evaluation of evidence, but thanks to certain bodily investments that are largely immune to modification by rational means. The essay argues that the scene of rape imagined by the reader is so affectively charged that in effect it forecloses interpretive paths opened by a formal reading.
The great virtue of David Bindman's Ape to Apollo is that it opens a number of different path... more The great virtue of David Bindman's Ape to Apollo is that it opens a number of different paths of inquiry into the same question: why did aesthetics and race theory, two major yet seemingly incompatible achievements of the European— and especiaUy German—eighteenth century, intersect so frequently? How to explain the recurring reUance of race theories on aesthetic criteria and, perhaps odder stiU, of aesthetics on racial categories? Bindman's book is an admirably lucid, wide-ranging, and instructive introduction to the main issues informing these questions (besides being beauttfuUy designed and richly Ulustrated). It is also frustratingly shy about making conceptual claims and advancing strong readings of texts and images. Its strength lies not in putting forward a thesis guiding the whole book, but in its parts, each of which assesses an aspect of the topic carefuUy and knowledgeably. The book's opening chapter provides us with a summary of how inteUectuals manage the evidence of external human differences before the powerful concept of race takes hold Ui the later eighteentii century. Bindman assembles a gaUery of (mainly British) exhibits from the early part of the century to show how the representation of non-Europeans oscUlates, as one might expect, between ideaUzing and demonizing diem. By drawing on noveUsts (Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe), painters (WUUam Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds), and philosophers Gohn Locke, David Hume), he suggests that there is a certain logic to this osculation, for where the Noble Savage makes an appearance, his counterpart, the Savage Savage, is never far behind. (This would have been a good place to explain why, in some detaU.) Bindman also provides a review of the two main theories that at the time were taken to be scientific accounts of human variety. The more consequential of the two, put forth by the Comte de Buffon, anchors differences among humans Ui differences in climate; the other, argued by Hume, reUes on a four-stage model of human development corresponding to four modes of subsistence.
Among the many problems plaguing the field of cultural studies, one of the least pressing yet mos... more Among the many problems plaguing the field of cultural studies, one of the least pressing yet most consequential is that a sense of looming crisis so thoroughly governs discussions about the field as to block virtually all paths of reflection. Given the magnitude of our woes, this mental paralysis is not entirely surprising. Departments of cultural studies, especially those focused on foreign languages, are confronted with an array of by now fa miliar difficulties: undergraduate students find ever fewer reasons to ac quaint themselves with languages other than English; our field, like much of the rest of the humanities, has lost considerable prestige and clout; its institutional status in the university remains uncertain; and the increasing replacement of its faculty by a seasonal labor force drains programs and clouds the prospects of the next generation of scholars. Sometimes it seems the field is being dismantled before our very eyes. Still, I would like to bracket discussions of these pressing problems, because, like an immense magnet, they reorient all thought and all speech in their vicinity toward the goal of protecting what is taken to be under attack: enrollments, faculty positions, entire domains of knowledge. This defensiveness hampers our ability to recognize not only what is of value in our field but also problems that may be less urgent but are ultimately more important. Let me begin with what is good. Rather than cite statistics or reports from professional organizations, I rely instead on my admittedly subjective
THE MAIN DIFFICULTY IN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE POLITICS OF ROmanticism has thus far been seen to... more THE MAIN DIFFICULTY IN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE POLITICS OF ROmanticism has thus far been seen to lie in the discrepancy that opens between the manifest political claims of many of the romantics and the social and political implications of that part of their writings that does not overtly address political issues (most prominently, their poetry). These implications, often murky and contradictory, maintain an uneasy relationship with the manifest political claims, an unease that critics have found difficult to tolerate; thus they have either pressed explicit and implicit claims into harmony, or, in more recent practice, insisted on their disharmony: we are shown how well-meaning political views are belied by a sinister aesthetic ideology that shows its true face in poetic practice, or--vice-versa--how sinister views are upended by a euphoric social model encoded in the poetry. Both of these strategies overlook the possibility that the link between artistic practice and political ideology may be weak or entirely absent; both strategies therefore find themselves unable either to consider or to test the hypothesis that one of the crucial accomplishments of romanticism may lie precisely in the weakening or breaking of this link. This is not to suggest that the romantics did not hold political views, nor that their poetic works do not engage important political questions. It does suggest that their most radical innovations in poetic practice and aesthetic theory can only be recognized and absorbed by later writers if those innovations are not constrained by the demands placed upon a political theory or social model. The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be. In what follows, I attempt to describe the complex process of differentiation not from the vantage point of sociology (though I borrow the term from that discipline (1)) but rather by means of textual analysis. A close examination of intra-literary structures reveals to what an extent the literariness of literature forestalls an allegorical or metaphorical transfer of its terms to historical practices. I shall focus on an analysis of the writings of one member of the so-called Romantic School, Friedrich Schlegel. His case promises to repay close scrutiny not only because he is, in Isaiah Berlin's excited words, "the greatest harbinger, the greatest herald and prophet of romanticism that ever lived," (2) nor because of the impressive political somersault he performed in his lifetime (from fervent supporter of the French Revolution to Metternich's amanuensis, in less than two decades), but because his poetic and aesthetic writings do not shy away from establishing analogies with social theory. Yet I will argue that these analogies, followed with some rigor, threaten the very integrity of the political toward which they appear to point, for just those features that make the poetic theory rich and innovative would, if pursued to their end, provoke a complete social breakdown. I "It would hardly be hyperbolic to say ... " Paul de Man has claimed, "that the whole discipline of Germanistik has developed for the single reason of dodging Friedrich Schlegel." (3) Though less sweeping in tone, Ernst Robert Curtius (like de Man not a Germanist) comes to a similar conclusion in an essay from 1932. He traces the deep and persistent suspicion with which Schlegel's life and work have been received by academic literary criticism to the awkward intersection of biography, poetics, and political program that I noted earlier: If one examines the reproaches directed at Friedrich Schlegel in the usual literary histories, one ends up with a strange collection. First of all, he is reproached for being lazy; second, for being impudent, because he defended laziness in writing and had written in praise of idleness. …
The essay argues that Kleist's Penthesilea stages a profound response to the philosophic... more The essay argues that Kleist's Penthesilea stages a profound response to the philosophical terms that sustain Kant's third Critique. The play literalizes the metaphor of taste, and thereby implicitly questions the status of a prohibition, central to Kant, against representing what is ...
Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener De Gruyter | 2021 DOI: h... more Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener De Gruyter | 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719 Poetic critique – is that not an oxymoron? Do these two forms of behavior, the poetic and the critical, not pull in different, even opposite, directions? Taking Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of "poetische Kritik" as its starting point, this volume reflects on the possibility of drawing these alleged opposites closer together. In light of current debates about the legacy of critique, the essays here gathered explore the poetic potential of criticism and the critical value of art and literature. Contents Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener What Is Poetic Critique? | 1 Jennifer Ashton Why Adding ‘Poetic’ to ‘Critique’ Adds Nothing to Critique | 7 Michel Chaouli Schlegel’s Words, Rightly Used | 19 Amit Chaudhuri Storytelling and Forgetfulness | 35 Jeff Dolven Poetry, Critique, Imitation | 45 Alexander García Düttmann “Echo Reconciles” | 57 Jonathan Elmer On Not Forcing the Question: Criticism and Playing Along | 65 Anne Eusterschulte La Chambre Poétique | 79 Joshua Kates The Silence of the Concepts (in Meillassoux’s After Finitude and Gottlob Frege) | 105 Bettine Menke Theater as Critical Praxis: Interruption and Citability | 125 Walter Benn Michaels Historicism’s Forms: The Aesthetics of Critique | 145 Yi-Ping Ong Poetic Criticism and the Work of Fiction: Goethe, Joyce, and Coetzee | 155 Simon Schleusener Surface, Distance, Depth: The Text and its Outside | 175 Contributors | 203
In thinking with the Critique of Judgment, we aim to know the text from inside, but not because w... more In thinking with the Critique of Judgment, we aim to know the text from inside, but not because we wish to remain in its grip. We start with conspicuous concepts—pleasure, taste, beauty, art, genius, and a few others—and let them take us as far as they will go, because in understanding what the text says we hope to develop an intimacy with the world in which what it says makes sense.
One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in st... more One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in strange conceptions, is that of aesthetic ideas. Even by the standards of common sense, the idea of an idea being aesthetic is not immediately intelligible. We grant that ideas can bring forth feelings, perhaps also aesthetic feelings, but that still leaves us at a loss about what it would mean for them to be aesthetic, just as we are perplexed by the idea animating the essays in this volume, namely that thinking may in some sense be poetic. The perplexity only deepens when we try to find a place for this conception on Kant’s fastidious philosophical chart, where the word “idea” is expressly reserved for those concepts “whose object simply cannot be encountered in experience.”1 For Kant, there are, on the one hand, the concepts of the understanding, which forge intuitions into experience, and, on the other, the pure concepts of reason— the ideas—that can never be melded with any intuitive ...
Der Eindruck kann manchmal entstehen, das der romantische Dichter weit entfernt davon, an der Bru... more Der Eindruck kann manchmal entstehen, das der romantische Dichter weit entfernt davon, an der Brust der Natur oder, wenn die gerade nicht zur Hand ist, an einem Schreibtisch nach Inspiration zu suchen seine poetischen Produkte in Reagenzglasern, Schmelztiegeln und Phiolen anmischt. So soll die romantische Poesie bei Friedrich Schlegel bekanntlich „Poesie und Prosa, Genialitat und Kritik, Kunstpoesie und Naturpoesie bald mischen, bald verschmelzen"; sie soll „die Formen der Kunst mit gediegenem Bildungsstoff jeder Art anfullen und sattigen" (KA II, 182, Nr. 116). In ihr seien Realismus und Idealismus „innigst verschmolzen" (KA XVIII, 342, Nr. 248). Poesie, so notiert er in seinen Philosophischen Lehrjahren, finde an dem Punkt statt, „wo Vernunft und Unvernunft sich saturiren und durchdringen" (KA XVIII, 162, Nr. 471), Philosophie dort, ,,[w]o [Poesie und Praxis] sich ganz durchdringen und in eins schmelzen" (KA II, 216, Nr. 304). Der Verdacht, das der Poesie ...
One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in st... more One of the stranger conceptions in Immanuel Kant’s writings about aesthetics, which is rich in strange conceptions, is that of aesthetic ideas. Even by the standards of common sense, the idea of an idea being aesthetic is not immediately intelligible. We grant that ideas can bring forth feelings, perhaps also aesthetic feelings, but that still leaves us at a loss about what it would mean for them to be aesthetic, just as we are perplexed by the idea animating the essays in this volume, namely that thinking may in some sense be poetic. The perplexity only deepens when we try to find a place for this conception on Kant’s fastidious philosophical chart, where the word “idea” is expressly reserved for those concepts “whose object simply cannot be encountered in experience.”1 For Kant, there are, on the one hand, the concepts of the understanding, which forge intuitions into experience, and, on the other, the pure concepts of reason— the ideas—that can never be melded with any intuitive elements and thus remain beyond the ken of experience. What are some examples? In the
Taking Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella "The Marquise of O" as a case study, the ... more Taking Heinrich von Kleist's 1808 novella "The Marquise of O" as a case study, the essay argues that cognitive and affective--i.e., bodily--responses to literature heavily constrain the range of interpretations that, based on the text alone, ought to be available to readers. Thus the near-unanimous understanding of the central conundrum of the novella is not due to an evaluation of evidence, but thanks to certain bodily investments that are largely immune to modification by rational means. The essay argues that the scene of rape imagined by the reader is so affectively charged that in effect it forecloses interpretive paths opened by a formal reading.
The great virtue of David Bindman's Ape to Apollo is that it opens a number of different path... more The great virtue of David Bindman's Ape to Apollo is that it opens a number of different paths of inquiry into the same question: why did aesthetics and race theory, two major yet seemingly incompatible achievements of the European— and especiaUy German—eighteenth century, intersect so frequently? How to explain the recurring reUance of race theories on aesthetic criteria and, perhaps odder stiU, of aesthetics on racial categories? Bindman's book is an admirably lucid, wide-ranging, and instructive introduction to the main issues informing these questions (besides being beauttfuUy designed and richly Ulustrated). It is also frustratingly shy about making conceptual claims and advancing strong readings of texts and images. Its strength lies not in putting forward a thesis guiding the whole book, but in its parts, each of which assesses an aspect of the topic carefuUy and knowledgeably. The book's opening chapter provides us with a summary of how inteUectuals manage the evidence of external human differences before the powerful concept of race takes hold Ui the later eighteentii century. Bindman assembles a gaUery of (mainly British) exhibits from the early part of the century to show how the representation of non-Europeans oscUlates, as one might expect, between ideaUzing and demonizing diem. By drawing on noveUsts (Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe), painters (WUUam Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds), and philosophers Gohn Locke, David Hume), he suggests that there is a certain logic to this osculation, for where the Noble Savage makes an appearance, his counterpart, the Savage Savage, is never far behind. (This would have been a good place to explain why, in some detaU.) Bindman also provides a review of the two main theories that at the time were taken to be scientific accounts of human variety. The more consequential of the two, put forth by the Comte de Buffon, anchors differences among humans Ui differences in climate; the other, argued by Hume, reUes on a four-stage model of human development corresponding to four modes of subsistence.
Among the many problems plaguing the field of cultural studies, one of the least pressing yet mos... more Among the many problems plaguing the field of cultural studies, one of the least pressing yet most consequential is that a sense of looming crisis so thoroughly governs discussions about the field as to block virtually all paths of reflection. Given the magnitude of our woes, this mental paralysis is not entirely surprising. Departments of cultural studies, especially those focused on foreign languages, are confronted with an array of by now fa miliar difficulties: undergraduate students find ever fewer reasons to ac quaint themselves with languages other than English; our field, like much of the rest of the humanities, has lost considerable prestige and clout; its institutional status in the university remains uncertain; and the increasing replacement of its faculty by a seasonal labor force drains programs and clouds the prospects of the next generation of scholars. Sometimes it seems the field is being dismantled before our very eyes. Still, I would like to bracket discussions of these pressing problems, because, like an immense magnet, they reorient all thought and all speech in their vicinity toward the goal of protecting what is taken to be under attack: enrollments, faculty positions, entire domains of knowledge. This defensiveness hampers our ability to recognize not only what is of value in our field but also problems that may be less urgent but are ultimately more important. Let me begin with what is good. Rather than cite statistics or reports from professional organizations, I rely instead on my admittedly subjective
THE MAIN DIFFICULTY IN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE POLITICS OF ROmanticism has thus far been seen to... more THE MAIN DIFFICULTY IN COMING TO TERMS WITH THE POLITICS OF ROmanticism has thus far been seen to lie in the discrepancy that opens between the manifest political claims of many of the romantics and the social and political implications of that part of their writings that does not overtly address political issues (most prominently, their poetry). These implications, often murky and contradictory, maintain an uneasy relationship with the manifest political claims, an unease that critics have found difficult to tolerate; thus they have either pressed explicit and implicit claims into harmony, or, in more recent practice, insisted on their disharmony: we are shown how well-meaning political views are belied by a sinister aesthetic ideology that shows its true face in poetic practice, or--vice-versa--how sinister views are upended by a euphoric social model encoded in the poetry. Both of these strategies overlook the possibility that the link between artistic practice and political ideology may be weak or entirely absent; both strategies therefore find themselves unable either to consider or to test the hypothesis that one of the crucial accomplishments of romanticism may lie precisely in the weakening or breaking of this link. This is not to suggest that the romantics did not hold political views, nor that their poetic works do not engage important political questions. It does suggest that their most radical innovations in poetic practice and aesthetic theory can only be recognized and absorbed by later writers if those innovations are not constrained by the demands placed upon a political theory or social model. The line of reasoning I propose assumes that romanticism, far from furthering a mutual implication of art and politics (or art and religion, or art and philosophy), promotes their differentiation. With romanticism, art (and not politics, religion, or philosophy) increasingly decides what art should be. In what follows, I attempt to describe the complex process of differentiation not from the vantage point of sociology (though I borrow the term from that discipline (1)) but rather by means of textual analysis. A close examination of intra-literary structures reveals to what an extent the literariness of literature forestalls an allegorical or metaphorical transfer of its terms to historical practices. I shall focus on an analysis of the writings of one member of the so-called Romantic School, Friedrich Schlegel. His case promises to repay close scrutiny not only because he is, in Isaiah Berlin's excited words, "the greatest harbinger, the greatest herald and prophet of romanticism that ever lived," (2) nor because of the impressive political somersault he performed in his lifetime (from fervent supporter of the French Revolution to Metternich's amanuensis, in less than two decades), but because his poetic and aesthetic writings do not shy away from establishing analogies with social theory. Yet I will argue that these analogies, followed with some rigor, threaten the very integrity of the political toward which they appear to point, for just those features that make the poetic theory rich and innovative would, if pursued to their end, provoke a complete social breakdown. I "It would hardly be hyperbolic to say ... " Paul de Man has claimed, "that the whole discipline of Germanistik has developed for the single reason of dodging Friedrich Schlegel." (3) Though less sweeping in tone, Ernst Robert Curtius (like de Man not a Germanist) comes to a similar conclusion in an essay from 1932. He traces the deep and persistent suspicion with which Schlegel's life and work have been received by academic literary criticism to the awkward intersection of biography, poetics, and political program that I noted earlier: If one examines the reproaches directed at Friedrich Schlegel in the usual literary histories, one ends up with a strange collection. First of all, he is reproached for being lazy; second, for being impudent, because he defended laziness in writing and had written in praise of idleness. …
The essay argues that Kleist's Penthesilea stages a profound response to the philosophic... more The essay argues that Kleist's Penthesilea stages a profound response to the philosophical terms that sustain Kant's third Critique. The play literalizes the metaphor of taste, and thereby implicitly questions the status of a prohibition, central to Kant, against representing what is ...
Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener De Gruyter | 2021 DOI: h... more Eds. Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener De Gruyter | 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110688719 Poetic critique – is that not an oxymoron? Do these two forms of behavior, the poetic and the critical, not pull in different, even opposite, directions? Taking Friedrich Schlegel’s idea of "poetische Kritik" as its starting point, this volume reflects on the possibility of drawing these alleged opposites closer together. In light of current debates about the legacy of critique, the essays here gathered explore the poetic potential of criticism and the critical value of art and literature. Contents Michel Chaouli, Jan Lietz, Jutta Müller-Tamm, and Simon Schleusener What Is Poetic Critique? | 1 Jennifer Ashton Why Adding ‘Poetic’ to ‘Critique’ Adds Nothing to Critique | 7 Michel Chaouli Schlegel’s Words, Rightly Used | 19 Amit Chaudhuri Storytelling and Forgetfulness | 35 Jeff Dolven Poetry, Critique, Imitation | 45 Alexander García Düttmann “Echo Reconciles” | 57 Jonathan Elmer On Not Forcing the Question: Criticism and Playing Along | 65 Anne Eusterschulte La Chambre Poétique | 79 Joshua Kates The Silence of the Concepts (in Meillassoux’s After Finitude and Gottlob Frege) | 105 Bettine Menke Theater as Critical Praxis: Interruption and Citability | 125 Walter Benn Michaels Historicism’s Forms: The Aesthetics of Critique | 145 Yi-Ping Ong Poetic Criticism and the Work of Fiction: Goethe, Joyce, and Coetzee | 155 Simon Schleusener Surface, Distance, Depth: The Text and its Outside | 175 Contributors | 203
These lines came too late to be included in the printed copies of the book. I was at a loss of wh... more These lines came too late to be included in the printed copies of the book. I was at a loss of what to say in the afterword, until one afternoon, long after the manuscript was in the printer's hands, my friend Eyal Peretz basically told me what the book is about. He also said that authors are among the last to comprehend what they have written, which made me feel better. If you have read the book, compare your own sense of its trajectory with the one sketched here. If you haven't, then these last words will be your first taste; with luck you will want to keep reading backwards. — Michel Chaouli A few hundred pages ago, we set out fresh and full of resolve, like mountaineers at their base camp, so brimming with vigor that we felt we might dash all the way to the top. Things turned out differently of course. We soon found ourselves slowing down. Here and there, we got stuck, and when we did move again, it was sometimes in circles. Even now, we remain in doubt if we ever managed to scale the summit. Why, then, are we not weighed down with disappointment? Whence the elation we feel? It may be a good time to admit to something that we—you and I—have long known, but have left unspoken: when we set off, we had no more than a rough map, no worked-out route to the peak, nor any certainty that there even is a point affording a view of the totality of the Critique of Judgment, revealing its truth. The paths that others have taken did not tempt us. We sought to understand what we read neither by the lights of Kant's philosophical oeuvre nor in the shadows that his words cast on his thoughts—no reconstruction, nor a deconstruction. We followed neither the orderly trajectory of concepts nor the tangle of tropes and figures of speech. We brushed the text neither along nor against the grain, and saw in it neither pure philosophy nor pure literature. But this neither-nor does not testify to indecisiveness or confusion; if we failed to follow an established method of interpretation, we were also not casting about aimlessly. Rather, we sought to learn from the text how to behave in the company of its ideas, gaining a closeness with its world. This did not require us to submit to its every demand, nor did we work to establish mastery over it. Rather, we practiced moving with its movements, thinking with it as we picked up its way of thinking. This form of engaging the text is itself not a strategy we had settled on at base camp, but a behavior we learned as we explored the book's terrain. " Thinking with " is what it teaches, what it taught us. But is it not true of every book worth our attention that it asks us to think with it? Perhaps, yet to have a grip on us, that truth needs to be felt anew every time. In making our way through the third Critique, it took us a while to sense how it urges us to think with it. Its early sections behave as though they belonged to a systematic philosophy, careful to remain within the grid of concepts. Soon, though, we took note of textual oddities—addenda, remarks, examples—for which we failed to find a place on the conceptual map. But the decisive, irreversible shift occurs in the sections on art, a shift that changed not only how we thought of the earlier parts of the book, but also our very attitude as readers. There philosophical thought comes face to face with a mode of making—poetic making—that occasions a different form of thinking—call it poetic thinking. We saw that art " stimulates so much thinking that it can never be grasped in a determinate concept, " that " it gives more to think about than can be grasped and made
In thinking with the Critique of Judgment, we aim to know the text from inside, but not because w... more In thinking with the Critique of Judgment, we aim to know the text from inside, but not because we wish to remain in its grip. We start with conspicuous concepts—pleasure, taste, beauty, art, genius, and a few others—and let them take us as far as they will go, because in understanding what the text says we hope to develop an intimacy with the world in which what it says makes sense.
Bringing to light an unexpected encounter between the natural sciences and the theory of poetry a... more Bringing to light an unexpected encounter between the natural sciences and the theory of poetry at the end of the eighteenth century, this book argues that some of romanticism's most daring and enduring innovations owe their form and substance to the subject of chemistry. By focusing on the work of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), The Laboratory of Poetry demonstrates the degree to which romantic poetics, in its language and concepts, relies on the chemistry of its day.
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