This essay considers the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on touch as a model for a conception of the musical body. More than a re-emphasizing of the tactile, though, it is possible to show that Nancy’s work enables an understanding of music as touch. The significance of this re-thinking lies in the counterweight it provides to the degradation of music entailed in its digitalized de-materialization. Hegel is seen to be complicit in this degradation.

The text tries to make plausible the necessity in every thought of time to think an un-time—a 'field' without the form of time that only allows for conceiving of time as a form.

The text tries to make plausible the necessity in every thought of time to think an un-time—a 'field' without the form of time that only allows for conceiving of time as a form.

This book brings the poet and philosopher Novalis into dialogue with the work of Martin Heidegger, demonstrating that both should be understood principally as thinkers of relation.

This essay is a consideration of Hegel's account of the voice. Responding, in the first instance, to Derrida's discussion of what he terms Hegel's 'semiology,' the article attempts to map out complexities in Hegel's account of voice that tend to resist absorption into the trajectory that Derrida has outlined. Hegel's discussion of music in the Aesthetics will be the focus, and an attempt is made to link the emergence of the musical voice to the fundamental determinations of time and of (...) sound in the Philosophy of Nature . Finally, the essay will connect Hegel's understanding of music with the primordial appearance of voice in the anthropology of the Philosophy of Spirit. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to re-consider the aesthetics of tragedy in the work of the seventeenth-century dramatist Jean Racine. The purpose of the essay is twofold. On the one hand, the intention is to re-invigorate the reading of a dramatist whose work is too easily buried beneath labels such as “French Classicism.” On the other, an attempt is made to use this re-reading to cast new light on some of the central questions of representation, pleasure and tragedy that were (...) to become fundamental to later developments in aesthetic theory in the century that followed. We could cast Racine’s rejection of his mentor Pierre Nicole in familiar terms, describing it as the rejection of a repressive theological moralizing in favor of a hard-won “expressive freedom.” However, a closer examination of both Nicole’s aesthetics and Racine’s dramatic art reveals a different picture. As this paper will show, Nicole’s critique of seventeenth-century aesthetic practice is complex, nuanced, and trenchant. It is a critique that succeeds in posing significant questions about representation, self and other, and about the mechanics of “tragic pleasure.” In turn, Racine’s more private reflections (in his notes on Aristotle) as well as the development of his dramatic practice, indicate not a rejection, but a serious attempt to appropriate this critique, and transform his own dramatic practice in response to it. (shrink)

A gradual intertwinement of beauty and concept can be seen to determine, in no small measure, the direction of the first half of the Critique of Judgment. This paper considers the decisive influence of this intertwinement on the work of Hölderlin. Links are forged between the productive indeterminacy of the “aesthetic ideas” and the development of Hölderlin’s poetics, particularly in regard to his understanding of the relation between the natural world and its naming. The focus of attention will be on (...) certain passages of the novel Hyperion, and later, too, on the emergence of the figure of Empedocles. (shrink)

A gradual intertwinement of beauty and concept can be seen to determine, in no small measure, the direction of the first half of the Critique of Judgment. This paper considers the decisive influence of this intertwinement on the work of Hölderlin. Links are forged between the productive indeterminacy of the “aesthetic ideas” and the development of Hölderlin’s poetics, particularly in regard to his understanding of the relation between the natural world and its naming. The focus of attention will be on (...) certain passages of the novel Hyperion, and later, too, on the emergence of the figure of Empedocles. (shrink)

In this text, a dialogue about the difficult task of seizing the sense of history today is presented. The point of departure is the difficulty of the times to begin and the necessity to rethink the difference between historiography and historicity, and further between events, the event and the advent. The dialogue proposes to revisit the meaning of beginning from out the experience of improvisation and to reflect upon the possibility of developing improvisation as a sense of history.