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Background: © Christian Obst
Just like Shakespeare's plays, paintings such as Bruegel's The Fight Between Carnival and Lent depict a "polyrama" of characters (John Bayley, The Uses of Division), depicting the world as the wild arena where human beings roam -- a 'natural theater,' as Lenz suggests.
I ask and interrogate a question that has always accompanied all kinds of modes of human intellectual and creative undertaking: What is the Human? What kind of animal, what type of creature is the human animal? In addition to engaging with various historical attempts at both formulating and answering this question, from philosophy and literature, I also explore the implications about human nature at work in various texts, ranging from Aristotle to Lessing, from Jakob Lenz to Karl Marx, and from Walter Benjamin to Goethe.
My publications
My publications
“Demonic Ambiguity, Natural Philosophy, and Poetic Justice: Marx and Benjamin on Law and Language” (accepted with revisions at The Germanic Review)
Abstract
Abstract
Both Walter Benjamin’s Towards a Critique of Violence and Karl Marx’s Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood present critical examinations of the concept of justice, motivated by a keen awareness of its categorical difference from the law. They recognize that this difference cannot be elucidated without grasping their foundation in language. This paper traces affinities between their respective approaches to critiquing the role teleological ideas about language – as a means to an end – play in justifications of the sphere of laws. At the center is Benjamin’s concept of ‘demonic ambiguity,’ to which Marx’s philosophically circumspect polemics against injustices stemming from legislative overreach against poor people give ample definition. This is precisely achieved through a radical critique of how the drive towards unambiguous terms and definitions – the foundations of legal categories – becomes complicit in a subversion of justice. Marx’s journey off the beaten paths of legal philosophy and beyond its underlying metaphysical limitations eventually leads towards a non-teleological concept of justice, here tentatively called ‘poetic justice.’ Here, he crosses paths with Benjamin, whose ideas about pure, immediate, and de-posing violence reveal the a-poetic, afformative foundation underlying any kind of poiesis, be it that of physis or techne.
The Leaping Pig. Pigs and boars were traditionally associated with Epicurus. The forests in the Rhineland that Marx is writing about were also used for fattening semi-wild boar populations. The animals would roam the forests, looking for acorns, thus connecting Marx's discourse about poor people looking for wood with the ancient philosopher, performing a 'pig leap into the past.' The significance of the pig also underscores that the enjoyment of life is a free gift from nature.
"Ugliness, Loquaciousness: Ekphrasis, Fetishism, and the Poetry of Tuvia Ruebner" (in progress)
Abstract
Abstract
In a series of ekphrastic poems, titled A Molten and A Graven Image, the poet Tuvia Ruebner relates in his poetic praxis to a corresponding series of drawings of (para-)angelic figures by the painter Paul Klee. Most notably, his genre-conscious approach to ekphrasis, the poetic description of visual artifacts, interprets and recasts this genre by giving it a ventriloquistic turn: the poems are not so much descriptions, but ascriptions, namely of a voice, which is given to several individual angel-like figures sketched out by Klee. Ruebner's poems thus ostensibly purport to render their inner monologue, thus not simply making the (visually) absent present in the imagination of readers and listeners, but even giving access to the figures' own (self-)imagination and authentic self-speech. But in doing so, the poems escalate the illusionary nature of poetic speech, staging the categorical difference between poem and picture, or ‘voice’ and ‘phenomenon.’ In thus disrupting what Derrida calls the “essential link between logos and phone,” the poems, conscious of the problematic status of the (self-)referential function of language, highlight the complicated philosophical relationship between consciousness and language, encapsulated in the word logos itself. Meaning both 'word' and 'reason,' with 'reason’ in turn connected to the eidos, the (real or ideal) image, the ‘logicity’ of the logos seems to depend on the mind's ability to describe to itself what it contemplates in its philosophical anamnesis: to articulate its ideas, with this descriptive articulation signifying the full recovering of the idea. Through the lens of Ruebner's poems, this paper will trace how the discourses on ekphrasis, between Horace and Lessing, give testimony to this vexed relationship between the ‘visual’ and the ‘linguistic’ in Western thinking, as outlined by Derrida in his critique of Husserl.
Paul Klee: Angel, Still Ugly (1940)
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