Contingent Motion

This chapter examines fluttering leaves, swirling dust, and rippling waves as one of cinema’s earliest and most significant forms of motion. While most theorists maintain that such phenomena attracted early spectators because their unplanned appearance flaunted the indexical realism of cinema’s indiscriminate recording, this chapter shows how this attraction is part of a broader visual appeal of “contingent motion” that precedes the cinematic image and persists in the age of digital animation. Specifically, the chapter juxtaposes phenomenological insights about such phenomena in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, early spectators’ reactions to such phenomena in “wave films,” and contemporary spectators’ reactions to synthetic versions of such phenomena in computer-generated cartoons like Frozen (2013). In revealing a phenomenological consistency across these three different ways of encountering such phenomena, the chapter shows how early spectators’ astonishment at fluttering leaves and rippling waves cannot be explained with theories of the photographic index. Instead, this chapter argues, the visual reproduction of contingent motion involves its own logics of visual pleasure distinct from the marvels of the photographic process.

The Exemplarity of Particulars: Arendt on Validity

When Hannah Arendt delivered her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in 1970, she held a seminar on Kant’s Critique of Judgment to explore aspects of her lecture course in greater detail. This essay probes Arendt’s seminar notes with an eye to the concept of ‘exemplary validity,’ which is at the core of her theory of judgment. Notably, her analysis repeatedly draws on the force of examples, that is, the force of ‘exemplary validity.’ Her theorization of judgment, itself inevitably subject to her own judgment, can be understood as an enactment of and commentary on the very matter she discusses. It is not by chance but rather symptomatic that her argumentation is permeated by strategically placed examples that seek to persuade us by dint of their exemplary validity.

Poética de la culpa y la confesión en El libro vacío, de Josefina Vicens

The Empty Book (1958), by Josefina Vicens (1911-1988), has attributes which define it as a confessional work. This article analyzes the assertions of the protagonist of the novel José García when he experiences a deep guilt and appeals to be ambiguously forgiven for trying to write a perfect book. The guilt and the confession, predominant in the text, are tackled through the following: the rhetorical technique captatio benevolentiae; the narrator’s larval state and stripping (La Confesión. Género literario, by María Zambrano); the silence’s imposition and unfathomable condition (The Writing of the Disaster, by Maurice Blanchot); the summit of being and the incompletion as a goal (Notebooks, by Paul Valéry); the ghost novel (The Preparation of the Novel, by Roland Barthes); and the dependent or conditioned beauty, as well as the free or self-sufficient beauty (Critique of Judgment, by Immanuel Kant).

“Only God Can Be”: Aleksandr Vvedensky, Kant, God, and Time

This article discusses the place of God in the poetic system of Aleksandr Vvedensky. Vvedensky’s famous pronouncement on his “poetic critique” is more throughgoing than Kant’s critical enterprise, and invites a comparison between the movement of Kant’s thought in the Critique of Judgment, and what Vvedensky’s recourse to senselessness aims to achieve. Time in Vvedensky poetics may be seen as a radical extension of Kant’s philosophical system where it ultimately resides in an equally inaccessible realm on which its entire edifice is founded.

I. Kant: perfection within the structure of the aesthetic field of metaphysics

The subject of this research is the interrelation between aesthetics and metaphysics as it is reflected in the Kantian transcendentalism. In the “Critique of Judgment”, Kant assumes that the representation of perfection does not correlate with such on the sense of delight; thus, in the first introduction to the “Critique of Judgment”, he is far from considering the solutions to the problem of interrelation between perfection and aesthetic sense of delight persuasive. However, the attitude towards perfection transforms in Kant's later works, the analysis of which demonstrates that the idea of perfection, in essence, is conceived as the method for founding the entire aesthetics, its initial category of the beautiful that coincides with the meaning of the aesthetic perfection the beauty is genuine. The metaphysics of perfection, contained in considered Kant’s work, offers a new perspective on the categorical apparatus of Kantian aesthetics, formed in the “Critique of Judgment”, and broadens the representation on Kantian aesthetics as part of transcendental metaphysics. The concept of perfection implies various aspects of metaphysical research, retaining its immanent qualities in the aesthetics. In predication as an act of modern aesthetic expression, it is difficult to determine any stages and structures that can correlate specifically to perfectionism. The question concerning the field of such correlations remains controversial, inclusive of modern Russian philosophy.

Mathematically and dynamically sublime in fine arts

Taking into account the intriguing fact that Kant in his Critique of Judgment, when the category of sublime in arts is concerned, mentions the examples of the sublime in art just in the field of fine arts, specifically - architecture, and only in the context of mathematically sublime, author organizes research in this text in two directions, i.e. raises two important questions: 1 ) What are the possible philosophical reasons why Kant does so and 2) Is it, if at all, and by what means, possible to discuss dynamically sublime in the fine arts.