In this article, I argue against negativism in critical theory. Negativism holds that critical theory should avoid appealing to explicit positive normative standards (“the good”) in its social critique. I distinguish between two types of negativism prevalent in critical theory. While dialectical negativism claims that we can approach the good in a negative way, radical negativism rejects such appeals entirely. I then review three motivations for negativism: that appealing to the good is epistemically precarious, normatively inadequate, and unimportant for the (...) project of critical theory. I contend that the arguments for negativism are largely unsuccessful. Some reliable knowledge of human goods is possible, appeals to the good need not be undemocratic or paternalistic, and positive normative standards are crucial for grounding critique and guiding transformation. I conclude that critical theory’s emancipatory aims are undermined by negativism, and that it should embrace appealing to the good in its social critique. (shrink)

Der Versohnung dient Dialektik. Das Konzept der negativen Dialektik lasst sich als das Vorhaben verstehen, Dialektik durch dialektische Mittel zu uberwinden. Doch wie geht die radikale Kritik gesellschaftlicher Verhaltnisse und traditioneller Denkformen, eine Fundamentalkritik des falschen Ganzen, zusammen mit einem emphatischen Begriff von Utopie, mit der Idee einer Versohnung von Menschheit und Natur? In dieser Frage kommt ein Spannungsverhaltnis zum Ausdruck, das das gesamte Werk Adornos pragt und sich in paradoxalen und aporetischen Gedankenfiguren ausdruckt. Diese Untersuchung rekonstruiert das negativ-utopische Denken (...) Adornos, indem es dessen Leitmotive in ideengeschichtlichen Konstellationen transparent macht. (shrink)

It is one of the attractions of Greek syntax that it provides an abundance of usages which require careful discrimination, if we are to appreciate their value; and which at the same time present problems of interpretation which have not been completely solved. This is particularly the case with the use of the negatives, and it is one of these constructions with which we are concerned here.

Rousseau's exposition of negative education in Émile is explored through its relation to the concept of a negative theory of education developed by the author as a continuation of some crucial insights of early critical theory. Thus, the essay elaborates different aspects of negation and negativity in relation to educational theory and practice. The author defends thereby the actuality of Rousseau's philosophy of education for a critical understanding of the modern phenomenon of educationalization.

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort: Introduction: A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics Stefano Micali: Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology René Rosfort: Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics Mads Peter Karlsen: The Past >Has Us Before We Have.

Keine Freiheit ohne Wahlfreiheit. In dieser Ansicht stimmen Isaiah Berlin und der vorliegende Artikel überein. Aber Berlin kann den Wert der Wahlfreiheit nicht angemessen erläutern, weil er die negative Freiheit der positiven gegenüberstellt, als wären sie zwei verschiedene Werte. Die negative Freiheit hat einen Wert aber nur im Bezugsrahmen einer Idee von Selbstbestimmung, die Freiheit an Vernünftigkeit knüpft, ohne sie auf Vernünftigkeit zu reduzieren.

Gegenwärtig werden häufig politisch-moralische Ansprüche an die Kunst gerichtet. Dieser Aufsatz tritt ihnen unter Verweis auf ihren grundsätzlichen Konflikt mit ästhetischen Ansprüchen entgegen. Anhand von Oscar Wildes ästhetisch-theoretischen.

Der Beitrag kontrastiert die beiden Freiheitsbegriffe einer ,,negativen" und ,,positiven Freiheit", hinter denen die divergierenden Positionen des Liberalismus und Kommunitarismus stehen. Isaiah Berlins Konzept der ,,negativen Freiheit" entpuppt sich insofern als Irrtum, als Freiheit nur in einem triadischen Modell hinreichend bestimmt werden kann: Weder als rein negative Abwesenheit von sozial externen Freiheitsschranken noch als möglichst breites Spektrum an beliebigen Handlungsoptionen . Wie Charles Taylors Gegenmodell aufweist, setzt Freiheit positiv gefasst als ,,Freiheit wozu" vielmehr höherstufige Wünsche oder Ziele voraus. Diese gründen (...) letztlich in einem normativen Selbstentwurf, der nur in Interaktion mit der sozialen Außenwelt stabilisiert werden kann. (shrink)

In this paper, I will address a question that has long overshadowed T.W. Adorno?s critical theory, namely, the question of whether or not it is possible to account for normativity within his negativistic philosophy. I believe that we can answer this question in the affirmative, but in this paper my aim will be more limited. I will clarify the problem and lay out the response strategies that are open to those hoping to defend Adorno?s theory. And I will argue that (...) the problem cannot be dismissed as easily as is sometimes suggested, namely, by those who claim that Adorno?s theory is not normative. (shrink)

Metaphysics is, as Adorno once notes, the nuisance of philosophy. On the one hand, metaphysics is the reasons of philosophy's existence; on the other hand, it is nearly impossible to characterise metaphysics precisely. This tension is reflected with reference to the contemporary political and cultural situation in Adorno's "Meditations on Metaphysics", the last part of his opus magnum *Negative Dialectics*. The essays in this volume are devoted to different facets of Adorno's examination of metaphysics. They do, however, not only concern (...) themselves with Adorno's metaphysical reflections in a narrow sense, but also extend to other themes Adorno relates to metaphysics: critique of concepts, history, truth, and materialism. Thereby, they render a hardly investigated topic of the *Negative Dialectics* accessible. -/- Contributors: Emil Angehrn, Dirk Braunstein, Peggy H. Breitenstein, Gunnar Hindrichs, Axel Hutter, Philip Hogh, Christian Iber, Julia Jopp, Guido Kreis, Ansgar Martins, Brian O'Connor, Mario Schärli, Marc Nicolas Sommer, Tilo Wesche. (shrink)

In this essay I reconstruct what I take to be Adorno's metaphysics of moral solidarity in the moment of its fall. At its heart lies a materialist idea of humanism, and a moral notion of human solidarity. I put this reconstruction to work, answering Michael Theunissen's challenge, namely that Adorno must, but cannot, justify the positive premise of his negativism of what ought not to be, and that he must, but cannot justify his minimal deontological morality. In my view, properly (...) interpreted, Adorno once equipped with this moral notion of human solidarity, can answer Theunissen's challenge, in a way that makes best sense of his (Adorno's) epistemological and metaphysical negativism, and in a way that is consistent with his critique of Kantian morality. (shrink)

The thesis is that Adorno has a normative ethics, albeit a minimal and negative ethics of resistance. However Adorno’s ethical theory faces two problems: the problem of the availability of the good and the problem of whether a normative ethics is consistent with philosophical negativism. The author argues that a correct of understanding the role of the ineffable in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics solves both problems: it provides an account of the availability of the good that is consistent with his philosophical (...) negativism. The author counters the prevalent objection that Adorno’s aporetic philosophy, like some negative theology, leads to irrationalism and mysticism. The parallel with negative theology is developed by means of a comparison with Nicholas of Cusa. Drawing on Wittgentstein’s saying/showing distinction and Adrian Moore’s work the author argues that Nicholas and Adorno can be seen to share a philosophically defensible notion of ineffable knowledge. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the approach to the study of political and legal phenomena that can be defined “critical realism” and with its apparent paradox. By “critical realism” I understand a way of looking at political and legal phenomena that combines a blunt analysis of social reality with a transformative, non-resigned critical attitude towards the status quo. I argue that this is the approach that inspired Danilo Zolo’s lifelong reflections on politics and law. The same approach, moreover, is in my (...) opinion shared by authors such as Raymond Geuss and Bernard Williams, who, since the beginning of the new millennium, have contributed to re-shape the international debate on the methods of political philosophy. Inherent in this approach is a paradox that can be encapsulated in the following two questions. First, if the theoretical analysis should not start from ideals and principles, but must instead take as point of departure the social and political situation in which we are inescapably entangled (both central assumptions of the critical realism), how is it possible to gain the distance necessary for criticisms? Second, if we cannot transcend our societal reality and cannot therefore rely on external and objective values, on which basis is it possible to suggest “better” alternatives to the status quo? The mentioned authors could not explain convincingly, in my opinion, how these two questions can be answered. However, and this is the central claim of the article, the paradox is not unresolvable. The two questions mentioned above can be answered, so my argument, by recurring, respectively, to the negativism characteristic of Judith Shklar’s approach to political and legal theory and to the concept of “immanent critique” as understood by Rahel Jaeggi. Shklar convincingly shows that the critique of the status quo can be made not notwithstanding the blunt analysis of social reality, but exactly in reason of it. In order to recognise abuses of power and injustices, so her argument, we do not need an ideal theory of justice or of the perfect state. On the contrary, nothing better than history and the analysis of contemporary social reality can show us that injustices and abuses of power are a recurring and ever possible characteristics of politics. Jaeggi’s concept on immanent critique, moreover, indicates how it is possible to build an alternative to the criticized situation that is not anchored on transcendent principles and yet can plausibly explain why the suggested alternative is “better” than the status quo. Finally, I argue that both Shklars’ negativism and Jaeggi’s concept of immanent critique operate implicitly in Zolo’s approach, but that they, having not being made explicit, could not develop their whole potential. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue on Judith N. Shklar starts with a brief outline of her early life, her emigration, and the academic circumstances of and influences on her major works. A second part elucidates how the negativism and skepticism that constitute the central tenets of her political thought can best be described as a “phenomenology of the vulnerability of the Other.” Her empha- sis on active historical remembrance, wariness towards communitarianism, and distrust of overly harmonious models of society (...) puts her in the company of recent theories of political dissensus. A final look at the problems arising from her nega- tivism identifies the weak spots in Shklar’s argument, drawing out the difficulty of institutionalizing such a position and the internal incoherence of a perspective that historically is aimed at the twentieth century and theoretically at the seventeenth. (shrink)

Negativity in Psychoanalysis examines the role of negativity in psychoanalytic theory and its application in clinical settings. While theories around negativity and death drive have become routinized within philosophical interpretations of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, they often mask an inherent positivity. This volume assembles highly esteemed psychoanalytic theorists and clinicians for an in-depth discussion on the topic. It features comprehensive introductions to Freudian and Lacanian perspectives, alongside contemporary clinical and cultural issues. The book also investigates how psychoanalytic negativity influences and (...) is influenced by social, theological, and philosophical dialogues. This work will prove invaluable for practicing psychoanalysts and those in training, while also appealing to academics and scholars in critical and cultural theory, continental and post-continental philosophy, and sociology, especially those whose research intersects clinical and theoretical traditions. (shrink)

While philosophical questions about health and disease have attracted much attention in recent decades, and while opinions are divided on most issues, influential accounts seem to embrace negativism about health, according to which health is the absence of disease. Some subscribe to unrestricted negativism, which claims that negativism applies not only to the concepts of health and disease as used by healthcare professionals but also to the lay concept that underpins everyday thinking. Whether people conceptualize health in this manner has (...) implications for medical care and public health, and so we set out to examine this claim in two studies. Participants were asked to assess and compare the health states of two people presented in two vignettes. We found that both lay people and medical students conceptualize health as something more than the absence of disease. We argue that our findings highlight a need to rethink unrestricted negativism and indicate a need to rethink the way the debate has traditionally focused on disease. (shrink)

First I argue that the prohibition of linguistic self-reference as a solution to the antinomy problem contains a pragmatic contradiction and is thus not only too restrictive, but just inconsistent (chap.1). Furthermore, the possibilities of non-restrictive strategies for antinomy avoidance are discussed, whereby the explicit inclusion of the – pragmatically presuposed – consistency requirement proves to be the optimal strategy (chap.2). The central question here is that about the actual reason for antinomic structures. It turns out to be a form (...) of negative self-conditioning (chap.3). This makes it necessary to clarify the status of negative concepts (chap.4). The generalization of these considerations (chap.5) leads to the actual analysis of the antinomic basic structure (chap.6): Decisively for the pragmatics of the concept is that it positively owns a meaning, so that positivity is always constituted by the concept qua concept. Thus a negative concept is characterized by a fundamental ambivalence: From a semantic point of view it has negative character, in its pragmatic status as a concept, however, it has positive character. If the meaning is especially that of a negative self-reference, the ambivalence leads to the antinomic constellation of a negative self-condition – that is the crux of the matter here! The concept thus possesses the property defined by it exactly when it does not possess it and vice versa. A closer analysis shows that the function of reflective structures for the occurrence of antinomies has to be judged much more differentiated than previous opinions suggest. Not only are four forms of reflectivity to be distinguished in this context – ontic, semantic, pragmatic reflectivity, and especially the form of negative self-condition; but it is also apparent that these are intertwined with each other in a way that is difficult to be understood. The astonishing variety of relationships associated with this makes the irritation that has always emanated from the antinomy problem appear more comprehensible. In the developed pragmatic perspective furtheron parallels to the structure of self-consciousness become visible (chap.7). I conclude with considerations about the significance of the antinomic structure for the problem of dialectics, especially for the synthesis formation of mutually exclusive terms (chap.8). ---------- Zunächst wird gezeigt, dass das Verbot sprachlicher Selbstreferenz als Lösung des Antinomienproblems einen pragmatischen Widerspruch enthält und damit nicht nur zu restriktiv, sondern geradezu inkonsistent ist (Kap.1). Ferner werden Möglichkeiten nicht-restriktiver Strategien zur Antinomienvermeidung diskutiert, wobei sich die explizite Einbindung der – pragmatisch präsupponierten – Konsistenzforderung als optimale Strategie erweist (Kap.2). Zentral ist hier die Frage nach dem eigentlichen Grund antinomischer Strukturen. Er erweist sich als eine Form von negativer Selbst-Bedingung (Kap.3). Dies nötigt zu einer Klärung des Status negativer Begriffe (Kap.4). Die Verallgemeinerung dieser Überlegungen (Kap.5) leitet über zur eigentlichen Analyse der antinomischen Grundstruktur (Kap.6): Entscheidend zur Pragmatik des Begriffs gehört, dass ihm eine Bedeutung positiv zukommt, sodass durch den Begriff qua Begriff stets auch Positivität konstituiert ist. Dadurch ist ein negativer Begriff durch eine prinzipielle Ambivalenz gekennzeichnet: In semantischer Hinsicht hat er negativen Charakter, in seinem pragmatischen Status als Begriff hingegen positiven Charakter. Ist die Bedeutung insbesondere die eines negativen Selbstbezugs, führt die Ambivalenz zur antinomischen Konstellation einer negativen Selbst-Bedingung – das ist hier der springende Punkt! Der Begriff besitzt so die durch ihn definierte Eigenschaft genau dann, wenn er sie nicht besitzt und umgekehrt. Die nähere Analyse zeigt, dass hierbei die Funktion reflexiver Strukturen für das Auftreten von Antinomien weitaus differenzierter zu beurteilen ist, als bisherige Auffassungen nahelegen. Nicht nur dass in diesem Kontext vier Formen von Reflexivität – ontische, semantische, pragmatische Reflexivität und insbesondere auch die Form negativer Selbstbedingung – unterschieden werden müssen; es zeigt sich auch, dass diese in schwer durchschaubarer Weise ineinander verschränkt sind. Die damit verbundene erstaunliche Beziehungsvielfalt läßt die Irritation, die seit je vom Antinomienproblem ausging, begreiflicher erscheinen. In der entwickelten pragmatischen Perspektive werden ferner Parallelen zur Struktur von Selbstbewußtsein sichtbar (Kap.7). Ich schließe mit Überlegungen zur Bedeutung der antinomischen Struktur für das Problem der Dialektik, insbesondere zur Synthesebildung einander ausschließender Bestimmungen (Kap.8). (shrink)

This article aims at conceptualising the notion of embarrassment as a negativistic figure of thought that takes the experience of one’s own non-sovereignty as a starting point and emphasises an engagement with situations of not-knowing. This consideration is clarified in discussion with the figure of Socrates or with the philosophical attitude of Socrates. Because the negativistic thrust of the conceptualisation undertaken is reminiscent of irony, the paper then addresses the question of what distinguishes embarrassment understood as a figure of thought (...) from irony. For this purpose, Kierkegaard’s reading of Socratic irony is drawn upon. It is shown that irony is inherently a negativism, which in the last consequence aims at a retention of rights; but this is exactly what embarrassment avoids, because, as the article shows, it is not a negativism of strength, but of weakness. (shrink)

Kritische Theorie und Philosophische Anthropologie gelten noch immer als grundsätzlich einander widerstreitende Strömungen. Die Philosophien Helmuth Plessners und Theodor W. Adornos jedoch lassen sich, so die These dieses Buches, unter dem Namen der negativen Anthropologie zusammenführen. Edinger begreift negative Anthropologie im systematischen Sinn als strukturell negativ verfasstes Konzept, um elementare und exklusive Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen Adorno und Plessner sichtbar zu machen. Neben den grundsätzlichen Überlegungen, u.a. zum Konzept der Anthropologie bei Sonnemann und Gehlen, widmet sich der Autor auch beispielhaft den Motiven (...) der Kritik der Moderne und die Kritik der Geschichtsphilosophie durch Plessner und Adorno. Damit erreicht er eine neue Sicht auf das Verhältnis der beiden philosophischen Richtungen, die die gemeinhin akzeptierte unversöhnliche Frontstellung von philosophischer Anthropologie und Kritischer Theorie aufhebt. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungZwischenfälle, Behandlungsfehler und tragische Verläufe können im Medizinalltag schwerwiegende Auswirkungen auf Patientinnen und Patienten haben, aber auch auf beteiligte Gesundheitsfachpersonen. Don Berwick, ehemaliger Leiter des Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, hob in einem Interview die Unterstützung von „second victims“ als „ethische Angelegenheit“ hervor. Es besteht aber keine Klarheit darüber, was darunter zu verstehen ist. Der vorliegende Beitrag unternimmt eine Klärung dieser Frage aus der Perspektive der Organisationsethik. Ausgehend von Daten aus der Literatur zur Wirksamkeit der Unterstützung von „second victims“ (...) werden Herausforderungen beschrieben und aus organisationsethischer Sicht beurteilt. Es gibt Hinweise, dass Angebote der Unterstützung von „second victims“ zwar bestehen, aber nicht wirksam genug sind, um die psychischen Folgen von unerwünschten Ereignissen zu bewältigen. Dies wirkt sich auf betroffene Fachpersonen negativ aus und kann zu einer erneuten Gefährdung der Patientensicherheit führen. Angesichts dieser Befunde bedarf es eines organisationsethischen Ansatzes, um Don Berwicks Forderung nachzukommen, den Umgang mit „second victims“ als „ethische Angelegenheit“ wahrzunehmen. Dieser Ansatz fördert die Kongruenz zwischen den deklarierten und den faktisch gelebten Werten der Organisation. Sein normatives Fundament besteht in den Fürsorgepflichten der Organisation, gegenüber Patientinnen, Patienten und Mitarbeitenden. Die Organisationsethik ermöglicht es, die Unterstützung von „second victims“ verbindlich und sichtbar in der Sicherheitskultur der Organisation zu verankern. Sie konkretisiert sich in ihrer Verpflichtung, für die Mechanismen der Entstehung des Phänomens zu sensibilisieren und Ressourcen bereitzustellen, die einen effektiven Umgang damit ermöglichen. Dazu gehören evidenzbasierte ethische Leitlinien, standardisierte Prozesse, Schulungen sowie niederschwellige Coaching-Angebote. (shrink)

Die Proklamation der "Postmoderne" hatte mindestens ein Verdienst. Sie hat bekannt gemacht, daß die moderne Gesellschaft das Vertrauen in die Richtigkeit ihrer eige nen Selbstbeschreibungen verloren hat. Auch sie sind jeweils anders möglich. Auch sie sind kontingent gewor den. Wie in der risikoreichen Welt des New Yorker U-Bahn-Netzes drängen sich jetzt die, die darüber reden wollen, an dafür bestimmten Plätzen unter heller Be leuchtung und bei laufenden Fernsehkameras zusammen. Es scheint ums intellektuelle Überleben zu gehen. Aber offenbar nur darum. Und (...) währenddessen geschieht, was geschieht, und die Gesellschaft evoluiert im Ausgang von dem, was erreicht ist, in eine unbekannte Zukunft. Vielleicht hatte das Stichwort der Postmoderne nur eine andere, variantenreichere Beschreibung der Moder ne versprechen wollen, die ihre eigene Einheit nur noch negativ vorstellen kann als Unmöglichkeit eines meta recit. Aber das ließe dann möglicherweise zu viel zu angesichts zahlreicher aktueller Dringlichkeiten, die auf fallen. Wir mögen gern konzedieren, daß es keine ver bindliche Repräsentation der Gesellschaft in der Gesell schaft gibt. Aber das wäre dann nicht das Ende, sondern der Beginn einer Reflexion der Form von Selbstbeob achtungen und Selbstbeschreibungen eines Systems, die im System selbst vorgeschlagen und durchgesetzt werden 7 müssen in einem Prozeß, der seinerseits wieder beob achtet und beschrieben wird. (shrink)

Der Begriff »Race«, aus den universitären Kulturwissenschaften stammend, will unbewusste Rassifizierungsprozesse beschreiben, die wir unweigerlich vornähmen und denen wir zugleich ausgesetzt seien. Der vorliegende Beitrag will diesen Begriff für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie fruchtbar machen. Zwei Fallvignetten illustrieren, welche Fallstricke für Psychoanalytiker und Patienten bereit lägen, wenn »Race« in Übertragung und Gegenübertragung verleugnet werden müsse. Tauchen negativ konnotierte »racial« Phantasien auf, könne die Angst, rassistisch zu denken oder zu agieren, zum Stillstand und sogar Scheitern einer Behandlung führen. Da rassifizierte Projektionen nach (...) Ansicht der Autorin unvermeidbar seien, sieht sie die Entstehung des Gefühls einer »racial Melancholia« als Möglichkeit, dem drohenden Stillstand entgegenzuwirken. (shrink)

This paper focuses on 3 features of Freyenhagen's Aristotelian version of Adorno. (a) It challenges the strict negativism Freyenhagen finds in Adorno. If we have morally relevant interests in ourselves, it is implicit that we have a standard by which to understand what is both good and bad for us (our interests). Because strict negativism operates without reference to what is good, it seems to be detached from real interests too. Torture, it is argued, is, among other things, a violation (...) of those interests. (b) Freyenhagen identifies the “impulse” in Adorno as an untutored yet moral reaction to morally demanding situations. The plausibility of this primitivism and its compatibility with Adorno's general worries about immediacy are considered. (c) The disruptive character of Adorno's version of the categorical imperative, its willingness to complicate action through wholesale reflection on the norms of what we are committing ourselves to, is set in contrast with Freyenhagen's Aristotelian claim that certain notions, such as “humanity,” cannot be intelligibly questioned. (shrink)

La question du risque transparaît dans toute l’œuvre de Kierkegaard. En plus de lui apporter dynamisme et profondeur, elle permet au penseur danois d’articuler philosophie de l’existence et philosophie de la foi. Précisément, le risque chrétien, en tant que risque « intellectuel » et « existentiel », oriente l’individu vers soi-même, et plus exactement, vers ce paradigme de l’identité qu’est le Christ en tant qu’homme-Dieu. Nous nous proposons donc ici d’analyser cette notion éminemment kierkegaardienne en insistant notamment sur deux modalités (...) du risque : le risque comme catégorie « polémique », vis-à-vis de la chrétienté en tant qu’avatar de la mondanité, et le risque comme catégorie « théologico-existentielle », en ceci qu’il détermine, positivement ou négativement, l’existence de l’individu. (shrink)

Die Bezeichnung „alt“ hat sich zu einem Wertbegriff negativer Konnotation gewandelt, so dass er synonym für alle möglichen Defizienzen bzw. als Chiffre für Defizienz schlechthin steht. Alt zu sein ist nun nicht länger eine Sache der Jahre, sondern von (verloren gegangenen) Qualitäten. Positiv ist daran, dass (fast wieder alles) möglich ist, negativ ist, dass gerade deshalb auch (fast) wieder alles ermöglicht werden muss. Denn der Alte ist selber schuld und will er es nicht bleiben, muss er etwas daran ändern. Die (...) Krankschreibung des Alters ruft seine Behandlung hervor, was nichts anders bedeutet als dass das Alter, das als Krankheit begriffen wird, kuriert werden muss, wobei die Kur nicht in seiner Heilung, sondern in seiner Überwindung, d.h. seiner Abschaffung besteht. Das Anti-Aging verfolgt eine radikale Abkehr vom Menschen, wie wir ihn kennen. Gerade am Alter lässt sich aber zeigen, dass der Mensch mit Mängeln leben kann, häufig trotz seiner Mängel glücklich wird und mit ihnen sogar seinen Frieden macht. (shrink)

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research-and process-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser), seeks to develop interactions between artists, theorists and audiences. Eight, maybe, nine or ten 40 litre bags of potting compost lie strewn about the floor of a high-ceilinged white washed hall. Dumped, split (...) open, the soil mixed with iridescent specks of green, blue and red glitter. On the walls hang large black and white photographic images—negative and positive prints barely clean, hardly sharp, scavenged from the world and presented half processed. On a third wall, hangs a framed golden and charcoal surface. Finally, a huge stain of black dye runs down a wall that descends into a sunken quarter of the Kaskadenkondensator gallery space. The results of a collaboration between Oliver Minder and Walter Derungs reflect on themes addressed in the recent Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference held by the department of English, University of Basel. In particular, the joint show questions how an aesthetic experience may be other than a human-world interaction, hinting at the withdrawal and veiling that objects perform, while demanding that different works engage with each other and play out this game under the non-supervisory eyes of a human audience. Things here are becoming—sometimes it’s a movement towards a more complete ontic whole in a projection of finality, other times it’s a dispersal, an atrophy to rather disarrayed entities. Yet, in the moment and place in which the objects are, we take them as here and now. Let’s get to the material of the stuff that Minder and Derungs have assembled. Oliver Minder employs organic materials—potting earth, cuttlefish ink secretion, rice, and insects; yet his works hardly seem natural in the sense of a harmonic relation between material and the form they are constrained into, the objects they are compelled to occupy. For the substrates on, through, or within which these natural materials are mediated are harshly inorganic substances—Plexiglas, safety glass, acrylic resin, boat varnish, spray paint. Minder, thus, generates a conflict within the materiality of his work between two polar opposites—from the human perspective—in the contiguity of materials engaging with each other in a thrown together formation that nonetheless appears to keep the materials and the objects they make in happy accidental relation to each other. Let me expand a little: on the one hand, the things Minder makes query our belief in substance as belonging in a particular domain, an environment suited to precisely that stuff. We are focused on thinking categorically where things belong, both in terms of natural place and natural relations they might extend to each other. Hence, we are driven to think of environment and order. On the other hand, while extracting things from their conventional place and arranging them within awkward constellations that we as observers feel isn’t quite right, Minder manages to persuade the viewer that the materials are nonetheless “doing alright.” So, simultaneous to our awareness of the appropriateness of the world according to our global notions of accord and uniformity, we are forced to accept the local discrepancies of disassociation, inappropriateness and misplacement. The tension between these two vectors generates a vacillation that intensifies Minder’s work. In the Kaskadenkondensator works, then, it is vital to first consider the material of Minder’s works: potting compost—what is it doing here in the first place?—seems to enjoy being “polluted” by sparkly glitter. Glitter has a long history, used in cosmetics by the Egyptians, and in cave paintings, too, earlier made of beetle shells and mica, nowadays glitter is made of plastic cut to minute sizes down to 50 microns. So what’s the point here? Well shiny bits of dust-like material are actually generated from ultra-thin plastic sheets and are normally cut into shapes that fit contiguously on a two-dimensional surface: squares, triangles, hexagons etc. What then appears to be totally random, chaotic decoration, is actually an array of extremely regular identifiable objects. 1 Of course scale has a role to play here. The minuteness of the dimensions means the regularity is beyond our recognition—all we see are the twinkling surfaces of the multi-coloured grains of plastic. In contrast, potting compost, which appears to be unary in its dull unresponsive lumpen disposition, is in fact an amalgam of a variety of organic and inorganic materials: peat, bark, mushroom compost, and sand and perlite, and should perhaps be more proactively exciting to the viewer because of this complexity. Yes; we can (if we care to) identify different textures, different sizes in the mixture of the medium, but I claim that we tend to treat this organic/inorganic assemblage as just a simple substance. Further and crucially important to our consideration here is that the medium is partially contained, but also partially spilling from the split plastic bags in which it is sold in garden centres. That the compost spills out gives it a movement suggesting life; that the bags are cast here and there in a random fashion by Oliver Minder, lying like discarded carcasses, hacked torsos, dismembered bodies, suggests a horrific murder scene, a Tatort. 2 The glitter flourishes in the medium, lies happy and decorative; that is simply what it does, how it is—always already broken, made-for-scattering, designed to be incomplete; the taken-to-be-natural compost, in contrast, cannot rest content but is forced to speak to us metaphorically in its abject overflowing of violence and rupture. While Oliver Minder’s elements in the installation direct our attention to material, Walter Derungs’ works raise questions around seeing and making in photography. There is a simultaneous flicker between the materials and their use in the production of a sense making representation, on the one hand, and on the other the very notion of what is worthy of picturing, framing, representing on the other. Derungs' images are of non-places. Ranging from archaic decaying monster buildings, buildings that have gone far beyond the ravages of a time that we can safely associate with the genteel preservation of a Bernd and Hill Belcher post-industrial decline, to the background “noise” of an urban world that is falling apart, and to which we most of the time seem to pay little attention, and habitually just pass by. In this respect, their non-ness differs somewhat from the conventional association of the term with Marc Augé 3 , where emphasis is on the specifics (if we do care to examine them for their non-placedness) of the spatial or place containment in which movement between multimodal coordinates occurs in supermodern late capitalist post-urban spaces. In other words, we might be in an Augéian non-place and (not) experience—be impervious to—that environment, or we might in Derungs’ manner look out from such a position at the “scenery” around us. I claim scenery, as this is what Derungs seems to do with his partial photography—construct a very purposefully articulated, symmetric, flat world of image. Mostly depopulated, his images construct a space in which the direction of time is uncertain: are these partial structures falling apart, or perhaps terminated in a never-to-be-completed state, or are they a few steps from final completion? Temporal and spatial dimensions figure large in Derungs’ image-making: his world, and perhaps this is in fact the only way for it to be registered photographically, is already image before it is photographed. A key combination of images in this show is a matrix of six black and white negative prints measuring 300 x 215 cm that form the image of a semi-derelict (or is it yet incomplete) church, and adjacent on a perpendicular wall, a single black and white positive print 150 x 250 cm of two bricked-up windows of a late-Victorian industrial building. What are we led to believe that we see here? In the negative print, the conditions of perception 4 are sufficiently reproduced for us to recognise the structure of the building, to distinguish ground and form, to relate some partial elements of narrative, and to recognize symbols such as the alter cross and figure of Christ, a looming crane, a traffic cone, and banks of tiered seating. We piece the image together both from the individual forms which we recognize despite the tonal reversal, and we piece the six prints together as a whole, the matrix of lines between them emphasizing our purview onto the world. While we recognise the forms at work in the image and might possibly relate the negative reversals to other figurations such as Vera Lutter’s camera obscura exposures, we cannot but avoid seeing the partialness of the image in the sponge marks of the developer that was spread by hand across the prints. 5 Derungs’ thus intervenes with our usual conception of photography as the mimetic realist vehicle sine qua non , by exposing the viewer to tonal reversal and incomplete or over developed areas of the print. We thus confront both the idiom of such image making and its raw (chemical) materiality at once in the simultaneity of the recognition of what the image pictures and the recognition that it is in the act of picturing. The church image, taken from the series “BW Negativs 2011,” thus orients us towards how we see things in the world via photographs. The single image of the bricked-up wall presents us with a completely different visuality that relates to a faciality 6 which we cannot easily escape from. We look, or rather try to look with no success, through the face of the windows, through the classic Albertian screen 7 which has already been given to us in the church matrix beside. Yet although we should be able to make more of these concealed windows because they are a positive print, because they are complete, because they approach us on a more realistic scale, reproduced at life size, we cannot. The objects pictured here withdraw from us; furthermore, they merely mock our blindness at not seeing how we look. Blocked up with quite a hint of paned glass behind, one window is blanked out with a white blind, the other simply blankly dark. The apertures look like eyes with teeth in them, or a Dogon mask, or even Man Ray’s Noire et Blanche (1926) if we want to get really perverse. The height of elegant modernist chauvinist beauty thrown against the vacuity of post-industrial decline. Derungs thus catapults us consciously into a world enfolded with and through images, but in such a way that the images themselves become objects that stand resistant to us, impervious to our gaze, indifferent. We—and indeed they—do not attempt to reach out to a real that is beyond, rather the images play in a world that is just theirs, and we can only enter that world if we too submit to their regime: tonal reversal, segmented, partial, inadequate, still, wrenched out of time. In contemplation, in the flood of the image “falling” off the wall, we too become image-object. Perhaps enough has now been said about the works, yet enough can never really be said, we know the image will always exceed the word—let’s accelerate the critique: Derungs’ work continues in a second space partially partitioned from this first room. Opposing three more “BW Negativs” which figure yet more quotidian aspects of the world is Minder’s gold spray paint and cuttlefish secretion mix: things that just shouldn’t work together do in the dialogue between stuff that Derungs and Minder have constructed. Minder makes things; Derungs makes images; together they make objects which inhabit their own world which we can approach and sensually engage with and come to grips with only on those objects’ own terms. This is best summarised by a final work made by Oliver Minder which on a third wall faces these two semi-partitioned spaces. A deep black stain about 100 X 200 cm with streak marks running down a further 2 metres hovers positioned to observe the whole work, and also to be part of this installation, too. This liminal flat suzerain lies in/out of the whole work. The stain of cuttlefish secretion resonates with Derungs’ sponge strokes on the church image; it mirrors the iris of an all-seeing eye; it combines material in situ with the situation itself. Where Minder’s other works have material and medium or substrate upon which the material is exercised, this single black hole is image which sucks everything up into itself. It draws the viewer, who must otherwise look away attentively at the floor work, and imagine horror, or smile at the ironic play of glitter. Look away at the image constructions that suggest how it is we too look to our world. See the play of thing and image in a third area. Or, finally return to the base of the pyramid that triangulates, to realise the stuff-image that unlocks it all for us. Black on white, organic on inorganic, material to substrate, that which in the falling out of one on the other, in its running down the wall simply gives form to both content and expression in one direction, and content and expression to form in another. NOTES In fact, glitter is used as associative forensic evidence: the 20,000 or so varieties are all uniquely identifiable. Joel Sternfeld, Tatorte: Bilder gegen das Vergessen (München: Schirmer/Mosel, 1996). Marc Augé, Non­places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 2006). An echo of the uneven paint strokes of light­sensitive chemicals in the paper preparations made by Henry Talbot some 170 years ago in the first sun drawings that also often pictured architectural forms. It was Talbot’s surprising discovery that where a weaker chemical solution was more thinly spread, greater light sensitivity was actualized, yet this virtual image had then to be chemically developed in a second step. Thus, Derungs unevenly finished spongings suggestively trace back to this originary technology (although his sweeps are the stains of uneven development and not those of the initial preparation of light–sensitive material). Umberto Eco, “Critique of the Image” in “Articulations of Cinematic Code” Cinematics 1, 1970. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Geoffrey Batchen, Burning With Desire: the Conception of Photography (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999). (shrink)

Emotionen haben als menschliches Phanomen schon fruh bei Philosophen und Dichtern grosses Interesse geweckt. Fur manche Denker waren sie nur negativ, andere dagegen sahen sie als unentbehrlicher Bestandteil der menschlichen Seele. Seit der Antike versucht man, die primaren Emotionen von abgeleiteten zu unterscheiden, um sie besser erforschen zu konnen. Jahrhundertelang galten Emotionen als der Vernunft entgegengesetzte, das logische Denken storende und aus den tiefsten und unreinsten Teilen der Seele hervortretende Krafte. Der Autor betrachtet verschiedene Theorien uber Emotionen sowohl aus einer (...) geschichtlichen als auch aus einer moderneren wissenschaftlichen Perspektive. Daruber hinaus versucht er, Emotionen nicht nur im Lichte theoretischer Uberlegungen zu sehen, sondern sie auch auf Grund seiner Erfahrungen als Arzt und Psychotherapeut zu verstehen. Dabei ruckt er die fur die Psyche wesentliche Wechselwirkung zwischen Denken und Fuhlen in den Vordergrund.". (shrink)

Les démocraties s’articulent autour de deux pôles qui ne se réduisent pas l’un à l’autre, mais qui doivent communiquer constamment : la société civile et l’État. Or, l’équilibre à rechercher entre ces deux éléments est mis à mal par la consolidation de l’État administratif qui tend à autonomiser son action par rapport au reste de la société ; la société civile y est d’ordinaire exclue des prises de décisions. Cette exclusion peut toutefois être considérée positivement ou négativement. Comme il sera (...) discuté à partir des philosophies de John Dryzek et d’Iris Marion Young, on devrait tenter de penser à la fois l’inclusion de la société civile dans certaines prises de décisions étatiques et son indépendance pour favoriser sa dimension critique envers l’État. De là, l’État administratif peut être considéré simultanément comme une opportunité de démocratisation et comme une évolution de l’État à surveiller et à critiquer. (shrink)

Résumé La première lettre d’Arnauld à Leibniz, le 13 mars 1686, fut écrite peu de temps après la publication de ses Réflexions philosophiques et théologiques contre le Traité de la nature et de la grâce de Malebranche, dans lesquelles il critique la manière dont l’oratorien rend compte de la nature et de l’étendue de la providence divine. Or, bien que les premiers échanges entre Arnauld et Leibniz semblent privilégier la question de la liberté divine, le problème de la providence est (...) lui aussi bien présent. J’essaie de montrer que les positions d’Arnauld sur la providence, d’abord dirigées contre Malebranche dans les Réflexions, aident à jeter une lumière nouvelle sur ce qui constitue l’objet principal de ses préoccupations quand il réagit négativement au sommaire de l’article XIII du Discours de métaphysique, et que les réponses de Leibniz aux objections d’Arnauld ont elles-mêmes été influencées par sa connaissance précise de la controverse entre Arnauld et Malebranche. (shrink)

Guang Yangs Arbeit nimmt die zentrale Frage des heideggerschen Denkens nach dem Wesen des Logos und der Sprache wieder auf, verbindet sie aber mit dem Begriff der Dynamis. So erweist sich der Logos als diejenige Kraft, die zwischen Bewegung und Ruhe vermitteln und damit die Bewegtheit des Seins in sich versammeln kann. Mit dieser in sich gesammelten Kraft hängt auch das Phänomen der Ruhe zusammen, welches die Bewegung auffängt und entsprechend aufgewertet werden muss. Dieser in der Heidegger-Forschung selten beachtete Gedanke (...) der Ruhe deutet auf die privative Dimension des Seins hin, die auch bei Phänomenen wie räumlicher Leere und der Stille zum Tragen kommt und dabei nicht negativ zu fassen ist. In dieser Untersuchung wird zudem - mit und gegen Heidegger - der Möglichkeitscharakter des Seins hervorgehoben, der nicht allein in der vollzugshaften Bewegung aufgeht. (shrink)