Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft

The essay addresses Heidegger’s language in two distinct yet interrelated ways: in terms of his understanding of language as well his own jargon. The analysis is based on a close reading of the preamble to ›Being and Time‹ (›Sein und Zeit‹), which serves as an exemplar and is representative of the suggestive language-games that are characteristic of Heidegger’s philosophy. Therefore, the analysis focuses on the use of a single word, the adverb ›eigentlich‹. In a second step, the article examines the nominalized form of inauthenticity and questions its source and shows to which extent Husserl’s understanding of language serves as a contrast to Heidegger’s own understanding of language. In conclusion, it is demonstrated how Heidegger employed two distinct exoteric languages and why ›Being and Time‹ can be regarded as a critique of language.

Husserl’s analyses of time consciousness have proved to be one of the more intricate challenges of his phenomenology. The article addresses his writings on time consciousness not with the aim of discussing or solving the epstemological problems that arise, but instead is interested in the descriptive procedure with which Husserl approaches them. The concept of ›Darstellung‹ serves as a starting point for this, a concept which Husserl takes up in order to describe the unified constitution of temporal objects ›vis à vis‹ the continuity of their temporal givenness. Thus importing a traditionally poetological-rhetorical vocabulary – in rhetoric ›Darstellung‹ denotes vivid representation in language – into the analysis of temporal consciousness, it points to Husserl’s own descriptive project as potentially working in a similar manner. In Husserl’s writings, a ›Verlaufspoetik‹ (transitory poetics) comes into view, in which the textual flow of the descriptive process seems to match the stream of experience of temporal consciousness.

Hans Blumenberg’s late idea of thoughtfulness, which the philosopher presented as an acceptance speech on the occasion of the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose awarded to him in 1981, formulates a (seemingly) simple claim: thoughtfulness means a reduction of the self-evident – beyond the limiting horizon of methodological regulations and conceptuality. But how can we dismantle what is self-evident? How can we describe what is reminiscent of the life-world in the preliminary stage of a concept? This article takes up these open questions and, based on them, attempts to take thoughtfulness seriously as a poietic form of thinking. It becomes clear that Blumenberg’s thoughtfulness is not merely the (self-)reflective reaction to the »speech situation« of a philosophy committed to unambiguity. Rather, it relies – conversely – on the philosophical production of ambiguity.

The essay reexamines the famous scene from Proust’s ›In Search of Lost Time‹ about the death of the writer Bergotte. In pointing out that the notorious ›patch of yellow wall‹ Bergotte claims to have discovered in Vermeer’s ›View of Delft‹ does not exist in the real painting, the article’s aim is to show that the scene is not to be read as an autobiographical recollection, but rather as a reflection on ›mimesis‹, i.e. on the transcendental conditions of perception and representation. As such, it can be considered to have in large measure inspired the reorientation of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s later phenomenological oeuvre towards a new ontology. On the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s recently published lecture notes, the essay locates the common concern of the writer and the philosopher in the idea of remembrance not as a derivative phenomenon, but as an originary mode of givenness.

On September 10, 1918, from Bernau in the Black Forest, Edmund Husserl writes a letter to Martin Heidegger. Surprisingly, preluded only by the letters »NB«, ›nota bene‹, Husserl near the end of the text points out the following: »NB. I also have Hölderlin, whom I love very much but know very little, with me here; thus, we will, in him, touch each other reading. / Regards / Yours / EHusserl.« The paper attends to this passage – the only passage in the whole of Husserl’s oeuvre mentioning the name »Hölderlin« – in a threefold manner, developing a philological, a psychoanalytical, and a phenomenological reading.

This article proceeds on the observation that although literary research and theory always emphasize the importance of genres, they often neglect their concrete role in text constitution and thus also miss the implications that this role has for the term and the concept of genre itself. Building on Roland Barthes’s concept of »code« as developed in ›S/Z‹, the aim of the article is to develop a theoretical framework that makes it possible to grasp the complex interaction between genres on the one hand, and individual texts and their techniques on the other. Genres are understood as codes that determine the methods of narration and are simultaneously influenced by these methods. This model is intended to help explain the generic ambiguity that is not only understood as a sign of modern literature par excellence, but also characterizes the concept of »genre« itself.

The last third of the twentieth century brought about cultural changes, including the rapid scientific progress and the informatization that began in the 1960s. Artists of this period, especially the progressive artists of New York, responded to the changes by integrating the digital reality and a new scientific understanding of the universe into their oeuvre. Such art projects were based on the pure data comprised of facts, instead of subjective ideas, and conveyed in a strongly reduced non-semiotic form. I define this trend as informational art to describe a shift from the verbal, visual and conceptual cognition toward the data-oriented thinking. This pivotal moment in Western history has not been given enough scholarly attention yet. For this reason, the achievement of Walter De Maria and his colleagues in the placement of scientific principles at the foundation of contemporary art has not been fully appreciated. In my paper, I aim to highlight the role of informational art in the advancement of the modern scientifically based ›Weltanschauung‹.