Varia: Beauty and/(n)or Truth: A (Hermeneutic) Rhetoric of the Aesthetic

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ekaterini Douka-Kabitoglou ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
John Keats ◽  
Emily Dickinson ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Divine Encounters ◽  
De Man ◽  
Hans Georg Gadamer

“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –,” a line of poetry by the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson can be used as a signpost for this article, which attempts a hermeneutic regress from the postmodern to the archaic, in search of a rhetoric for the aesthetic. In this textual tour, some of the master narratives of our culture examining various versions of the story of beauty and truth are visited, and more specifically (always in backward motion), the work of the postmodern theorists Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, the German philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, the English Romantic poet John Keats, the Greek philosophers Plato and Parmenides, and, last but not least, the Greek poet Sappho. Paul de Man, the “sad” patriarch of postmodernism, who engaged deeply with the cardinal problem of the truth of poetry and its relation to reality, contests that all language is figurative and rhetorical, and hence unable to represent the real. De Man demystifies aesthetics exploding a whole tradition of aesthetic theory based on the ontology of language, that is, the relation between “word” and “thing.” Along the same lines, the deconstructive critique of Jacques Derrida supports that linguistic figurality contaminates not only literature but philosophy as well, playing mimetic games of seduction that limit reality to a textual frame. On the far side of deconstruction, the hermeneutic theory of Hans- Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger give figurality an overwhelming power by establishing a rhetoric of ontology and presence. Heidegger’s radical reformulation of truth as aletheia and its conjunction with beauty, not only reflects the romantic identification of “beauty is truth,” as best expressed by the poet John Keats, but also points back to Plato who “aporetically” devoted a lifetime to a search for the beautiful and the true, coming up with multiple and contradictory views. As we move into archaic times, the whispering voice of Parmenides unexpectedly recommends the rhetoric of persuasion as the way to truth, while Sappho, celebrating presence and union, employs an erotic rhetoric that names not only human, but natural and divine encounters of beauty and truth.

Double Thoughts

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Dean
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cape Town ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Literature And Philosophy ◽  
De Man ◽  
University Of Cape Town ◽  
The University

Coetzee’s interest in destabilizing the boundaries of literature and philosophy is most evident in later fictions such as Elizabeth Costello. But as Andrew Dean argues in this chapter, this interest in moving across boundaries in fact originates much earlier, in Coetzee’s quarrel with the institutions and procedures of literary criticism. Coetzee used the occasion of his inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Cape Town (Truth and Autobiography) to criticize the assumption that literary criticism can reveal truths about literature to which literary texts are themselves blind. Influenced in part by such figures as Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Coetzee posed a series of challenging questions about the desires at stake in the enterprise of literary criticism. Developing these thoughts, Dean explores the way in which Coetzee’s earlier fiction, including such texts as Foe (1986), is energized by its quarrelsome relationship with literary criticism and theory, especially postcolonial theory.

The Critical-Linguistic Critique of the Aesthetic Ideology in the Late Writing of Paul de Man

Labyrinth ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 9
Author(s):  
Jeremy Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Aesthetics And Politics ◽  
Property Relations ◽  
Aesthetic Ideology ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man ◽  
The Relationship

The focus of this essay is Paul de Man's provocative antipathy towards the category of the aesthetic in his late writings on philosophical aesthetics. I introduce de Man's critique of what he terms aesthetic ideology – a form of ideological communication – which he considers manifest in the aesthetics of Schiller in particular but also in more scrupulously critical philosophers. I begin the essay with Benjamin's well known observation that twentieth century fascisms aestheticized political practice as part of a defence of existing property relations. I introduce de Man's critique of aesthetic ideology as a way of developing or elaborating on what are relatively sketchy comments on the relationship aesthetics and politics in Benjamin's earlier essay.

Contexts (II)

2020 ◽  
pp. 95-132
Author(s):  
John Scholar
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
De Man

Chapter 3, continuing Chapter 2’s intellectual history of the impression, begins by exploring British aestheticism and its roots in Kant and romanticism (Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, Immanuel Kant, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth). It then turns to twentieth-century theories of performativity, which, it argues, combine elements of the empiricist and the aesthetic (J. L. Austin, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Judith Butler, J. Hillis Miller). James followed Pater in resurrecting the ‘impression’. Pater found in Hume’s impression a role for the imagination at the heart of consciousness. But the interpretive excesses of James’s protagonists’ cognitive impressions must also be understood alongside the more flamboyant aestheticism of Pater’s disciple Wilde, and his ‘critic as artist’. The most active of James’s impressions, however, are performative: they are impressions made, not received. Performativity helps frame an account of the impression that encompasses both the receiving and making of impressions, and the confusion between the two.

scholarly journals A justa medida da morte: O nascimento e a morte do eu em El olvido que seremos de Héctor Abad Faciolince

2019 ◽  
pp. 139-157
Author(s):  
Guilherme Belcastro de Almeida
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
De Man

Este trabalho procura ler El olvido que seremos, de Héctor Abad Faciolince, a partir da articulação de três eixos teóricos principais: a autobiografia, o luto e os relatos de filiação. Com relação ao problema da autobiografia, a leitura aproxima-se de Paul de Man (1991) e Jacques Derrida (2009), que tocam diretamente na relação entre autobiografia e morte, o que leva à questão do luto, lida junto à Freud (2011) e Allouch (2004). A hipótese de leitura é que o romance precisa acrescentar um terceiro elemento à essa discussão: os relatos de filiação (Demanze, 2012; Premat, 2016).

Die Dekonstruktion

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter V. Zima
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Harold Bloom ◽  
De Man

Zima stellt die Theorien von Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman und Harold Bloom in ihrem philosophischen und ästhetischen Kontext dar. Seine Kommentare zu konkreten Textanalysen schlagen eine Brücke von der Theorie zur Praxis der Dekonstruktion. In der Neuauflage wird u. a. die Subjektproblematik bei Derrida und Deleuze ausführlicher kommentiert und der Dialog auf feministische Theorien ausgedehnt, von denen sich einige an der Dekonstruktion orientieren, um den Subjektbegriff in Frage zu stellen, während andere an diesem Begriff festhalten.

Deconstruction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Norris
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Critical Path ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Philosophical Debate ◽  
Knowledge Logic ◽  
Relativist Approach ◽  
Modernist Project ◽  
A Charge ◽  
De Man

Although the term is often used interchangeably (and loosely) alongside others like ‘post-structuralism’ and ‘postmodernism’, deconstruction differs from these other movements. Unlike post-structuralism, its sources lie squarely within the tradition of Western philosophical debate about truth, knowledge, logic, language and representation. Where post-structuralism follows the linguist Saussure – or its own version of Saussure – in espousing a radically conventionalist (hence sceptical and relativist) approach to these issues, deconstruction pursues a more complex and critical path, examining the texts of philosophy with an eye to their various blindspots and contradictions. Where postmodernism blithely declares an end to the typecast ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘modernist’ project of truth-seeking rational enquiry, deconstruction preserves the critical spirit of Enlightenment thought while questioning its more dogmatic or complacent habits of belief. It does so primarily through the close reading of philosophical and other texts and by drawing attention to the moments of ‘aporia’ (unresolved tension or conflict) that tend to be ignored by mainstream exegetes. Yet this is not to say (as its detractors often do) that deconstruction is a kind of all-licensing textualist ‘freeplay’ which abandons every last standard of interpretive fidelity, rigour or truth. At any rate it is a charge that finds no warrant in the writings of those – Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man chief among them – whose work is discussed below.

Afterword

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-158
Author(s):  
Erin Graff Zivin
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Paul De Man ◽  
Legal Proof ◽  
De Man ◽  
The University ◽  
The Way

The Afterword asks after the role of the university in the age of Trump, in the so-called post-truth era. Specifically, it pursues the possibility of a defense against inventions and untruths that does not, or does not only, rely upon scientific or legal, proof-based knowledge, but also, crucially, that would advance a notion of knowledge, or truths, that pertain to the logic of testimony and witnessing, but which are themselves unprovable in an empirical sense. It may seem a strange moment to turn, or return, to figures such as Jacques Derrida or Paul de Man, thinkers that have been wrongly accused of relativizing truth, or of doing away with truth altogether, but whose work in fact point the way to a different, but no less radical, commitment to the idea of truth.

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