Christian Lotz

In The Capitalist Schema, Lotz argues that Kant’s idea of a mental schematism, which gives the human mind access to a stable reality, can be interpreted as a social concept, which, using Marx, the author identifies as money. According to the author, money and its “fluid” form, capital, constitute sociality in capitalism and make access to social reality possible. Money, in other words, makes life in capitalism meaningful and frames all social relations. Following Marx, the author argues that money is the true Universal of modern life and that, as such, we are increasingly subjected to its control. As money and capital are closely linked to time, Lotz argues that in capitalism money also constitutes past and future “social horizons” by turning past and future into “monetized” horizons. Everything becomes faster, global, and more abstract. Our lives, as a consequence, become more mobile, “fluid,” unstable, and precarious. The author presents analyses of credit, debt, and finance as examples of how money determines the meaning of future and past, imagination, and memory, and that this results in individuals becoming increasingly integrated into and dependent upon the capitalist world. According to Lotz, this integration and dependence increases with the event of electronics industries and brain-science industries that channel all human desires towards profits, growth, and making more money. In this way, the book offers a critical extension of Adorno’s analysis of exchange and the culture industry as the basis of modern societies. Lotz argues, paradoxically, with and against Adorno, that we should return to basic insights of Marx’s philosophy, given that the principle of exchange is only possible on the basis of more fundamental social and economic categories, such as money.

This book presents the first philosophical investigation of, arguably, one of the most popular and important painters working today, Gerhard Richter. From monochrome painting and photo realism to conceptual art and gesture-expressive painting, Richter has transformed the spectrum of 20th-Century painting. Building upon Gadamer’s notion of ‘formed images’, the book outlines elements of a hermeneutics and a phenomenology of images and paintings. Moreover, the hermeneutic approach to art is combined with the crucial question of how paintings and photographs are related to each other for Richter. The author suggests that paintings “open up” the fixed relation and intentionality of photographs by idealizing and essentializing the content of the photographs. By relying upon a hermeneutical and phenomenological approach, rather than working from abstract theory, The Art of Gerhard Richter provides philosophical insights developed out of Richter’s works of art. Uncovering key philosophical aspects of Richter’s work, the author’s reflections discuss the relation between appearance and essence, the role of faith and hope, the dialectic of distance and nearness, the issues of death and terror, and the role of beauty and landscapes in Richter’s paintings.Special attention is paid to the following paintings: First Look into the Inside of an Atom in the introduction, Window, Secretary, and Abstract Painting in chapter three, Youth Portrait in chapter four, Reader in chapter five, Moritz, Dead, Man Shot Down, Strontium and Betty in chapter six, as well as Country Path, Clouds, and Forest in chapter seven.

Befreiung von der Arbeit durch Technologie oder Herrschaft der Technologie über die arbeitenden Individuen? Enthält der Kapitalismus den Keim einer befreiten Gesellschaft in sich, oder führt er zur Zerstörung von Arbeit und Erde? Worin besteht dieser grundlegende Widerspruch des Kapitalismus, und was hat das mit der Arbeitszeit und intelligenten Maschinen zu tun? Die Befreiungs- und Unterwerfungspotentiale der Produktivkraft Maschine hat Karl Marx bereits in seinem „Maschinenfragment“ vor rund 150 Jahren brillant analysiert. Christian Lotz zeigt in seiner Einleitung, wie Marx darin nicht nur die heutigen Widersprüche der kapitalistischen Unterwerfung des geistigen Eigentums, sondern auch der Aneignung von Patenten, Wissen, Informationen und biotechnologischen Entwicklungen, die das Leben selbst vom Kapital abhängig machen, erkannt und analysiert hat.

The main argument of Husserl’s Phenomenology Revisited is developed in three steps: [1] In the first part of the book, I present reconsiderations of certain basic terms that Husserl introduces in his philosophy. I first show that phenomenological activity can be re-interpreted in anthropological terms. What Husserl calls his “phenomenological method,” which includes reflection, eidetic variation, and the performance of the epoche, is, I claim, an abstract development of concrete life-world experiences such as imagining, playing and wondering. By discovering the concrete anthropological horizon of central Husserlian methodological terms (which have confused readers from the beginning on), their foundation in certain experiences, and the way in which they can be regarded as abstractions from those experiences, is shown. [2] In the second part of the book, I show how subjectivity, in the phenomenological sense according to which it is an area of investigation, evolves out of the sensual sphere, and that as such, subjectivity should not be analyzed apart from the lived body or apart from world experience, as some commentators have suggested. As I show, affectivity and the “openness of the subject” towards what is other than itself, is tied to the experience of other subjects, to proto-ethical experiences, as well as to the lived body. [3] In the last part of the book, I turn to the experience of the past and future, in order to establish them as the most important features of the self’s constitution. In sum, by proceeding in these three steps I am able to outline (in a non-abstractive way) three of the most important levels of human experience and its phenomenological investigation, from Husserl’s point of view.

This book investigates the topos of a phenomenological ethics by focusing on the practical subject, its practical experience, and its actions. The author develops this project on two levels, which critically explore the practical implications of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s theories. Special attention is paid to unexplored resources in Husserl’s thought on practical topics. The argumentation is structured through two steps: [i] A first level of practical experience can be found in the actions that we perform within our surrounding world: [ii] A second level can be found in our ontological self-understanding that prepares us to perform self-determined actions. It is extensively argued that Heidegger’s theory is not very helpful in finding an appropriate concept of Umwelt action. The main reason for this can be seen in Heidegger’s lack of a center for these actions. In regard to [ii], however, the author argues that Husserl’s theory fails because his notions of action and decision are too weak. Here it is Heidegger’s thought that reveals the self-understanding through which the possibility for taking action at all is rendered.

Obgleich Heideggers Philosophie und die Kritische Theorie auf den ersten Blick als unvereinbar erscheinen, besteht zwischen ihnen eine enge Verwandtschaft. So führt die ontologische Technikanalyse bei Heidegger zu einer Diagnose ihrer Genese durch menschliche Praxis und zu einer pessimistischen Einschätzung der Erkenntnisfähigkeiten des Menschen, während die Kritische Theorie, von einer gesellschaftskritischen Analyse sozialer Praxis ausgehend, zu einem ontologischen Begriff der Verdinglichung gelangt. Sowohl die Technikkritik bei Heidegger als auch die Verdinglichungsthese der Kritischen Theorie bleiben jedoch erläuterungsbedürftig. Aus diesem Grund setzt sich Ding und Verdinglichung mit dem Begriff der Verdinglichung im Zusammenhang mit der Technikphilosophie und der Sozialphilosophie auseinander.

The question of the relation between human and non-human animals in theoretical, ethical and political regards has become a prominent topic within the philosophical debates of the last two decades. This volume explores in substantial ways how phenomenology can contribute to these debates. It offers specific insights to the description and interpretation of the experience of the non human animal, the relation between phenomenology and anthropology, the relation between phenomenology and psychology, as well as ethical considerations.

In diesem Aufsatzband sind philosophische Relektüren und Reinterpretationen einschlägiger Positionen zum Thema „Erinnerung“ versammelt. Die lange Traditionslinie von Platon, über John Locke und Friedrich Nietzsche, bis hin zu Henri Bergson und Ludwig Wittgenstein wird mit systematischen Perspektiven hinsichtlich der kognitiven und ethischen Bedeutung des Erinnerns verknüpft. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit wird dabei den aktuellen Debatten um die Medialisierung und Politisierung von Erinnern und Vergessen gewidmet. Sowohl der Zusammenhang zwischen neuro- und kognitionswissenschaftlicher Theoriebildung und medialer Technologisierung als auch die wechselseitige Beeinflussung natur- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Fragestellungen lassen es nämlich als zweifelhaft erscheinen, ob es sich bei diesem komplexen Problemfeld überhaupt um ein einheitliches Phänomen handelt. In jedem Fall bedarf es aber bei der gegenwärtigen Konjunktur der Erinnerung in wissenschaftlichen und öffentlichen Diskussionen einer Reflexion auf den Zusammenhang von Zeit und Geschichte, Identität und Kultur.

Der vorliegende Band versammelt Beiträge von Philosophen und Philosophinnen innerhalb der phänomenologischen Forschung, speziell derjenigen Husserls. Die Beiträge zeichnen sich durch ihre innovative Kraft aus, da sie Neuland betreten und der phänomenologischen Forschung neue Wege eröffnen. Die Beiträge repräsentieren den gegenwärtigen Forschungsstand auf internationalem Niveau. Forscher und Forscherinnen aus Österreich, Deutschland, Dänemark, Japan, Taiwan, Italien und den USA sind versammelt. Dieser Band enthält fünf Beiträge in englischer Sprache.

Die Aufarbeitung der Philosophiegeschichte gehört zu den wichtigen Aufgaben der Philosophie. Dennoch läuft man bei zu einseitiger Ausrichtung auf diesen Zweig der Wissenschaft Gefahr, das Philosophieren selbst zu vernachlässigen. ,Transzendentalphilosophie’ kann – ihrem eigenen Anspruch nach – nicht ausschließlich als bloß historische Position verstanden werden. Transzendentalphilosophisches Denken und Argumentieren ist vielmehr auch eine Methode, ein Denkwerkzeug, mittels dessen weitergedacht werden kann und muß, und zwar sowohl ethische, erkenntnistheoretische als auch ästhetische Probleme betreffend. So sollen in diesem Band grundlegende Probleme der menschlichen Existenz in einem historischen Umfeld verfolgt sowie in einen aktuellen Diskussionshorizont gehoben werden. Damit kann gezeigt werden, daß transzendentalphilosopische Denk- und Argumentationsweisen ihre Relevanz nicht verloren haben. Die vorliegende Aufsatzsammlung ist daher dem Bestreben verpflichtet, welches, die Herkunft nicht verleugnend, das Philosophieren lebendig erhalten will.

In this chapter I offer a critical re-reading of the Frankfurt School’s concept of culture industry by arguing that this concept can only be understood in connection with the goals of critical theory [1] as a theory of society, [2] as an extension of Marx’s critique of political economy, as well as [3] as a materialistic theory of subjectivity. These three dimensions of the concept of culture industry are tied together by Kant’s concept of schematism that Adorno and Horkheimer turn into a social-material concept in order to analyze capitalist social relations.

As one of very few authors in the Anglo-American tradition Andrew Feenberg has pointed out, the early development of critical theory and Lukacs’ philosophy cannot be understood without reflecting on the historically rich network between phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism, and social theory. Moreover, in contradistinction to many contemporary critical theorists, Feenberg, following Lukacs, is not hostile to epistemological and ontological questions in social theory. In this vein, the main terms that Feenberg introduces in his interpretation of Lukacs is Gegenständlichkeit (objectivity). Although I agree with Feenberg’s claim that this term is central for understanding Lukacs’ understanding of social entities as culturally meaningful entities, I argue that we can find this broader social meaning of entities already foreshadowed in chapter one of Marx’s Capital if we read Capital as a theory of society. Unfortunately traditional Marxist discourses tend to reduce Capital to an “economic” theory and Feenberg seems to follow this tradition, i.e., he seems to dismiss the critique of political economy as the primary horizon for a critical theory of society. However, as I will demonstrate, Marx’s project cannot be reduced to a labor theory of value and, instead, it should, from the beginning on, be understood as a social theory based on social categories and Gegenständlichkeit as the central element for translating epistemological concepts into social concepts.

In this chapter I give an overview of “Post-Marxism.” Primary attention is paid to what should be considered the core of Post-Marxism in relation to Marxist and Non- Marxist critical theory, namely, its conception of the social. This shift is of importance for the overall post-Marxist philosophical vision of society, theory, and politics. Theorists discussed include Badiou, Honneth, Ranciere, Laclau/Mouffe, Foucault, Gorz, and Hardt/Negri.

In my paper I briefly examine three popular mystifications of the concept of capital, before I further argue that the concept of fetishism should be conceived of as a process of social forgetting. I argue that we are living in a fetishistic society insofar as fetishism is not only collective but also objective. However, I am not opening up totally new territory here, since, for example, Zizek argued that commodity fetishism is " the unconscious of the commodity form, " and Jameson expanded the idea of the objective quality of commodity fetishism towards what he calls the " historical amnesia " of consumer societies. However, I hope that my reflections can be seen as an extension of these positions in two important respects: first, they go beyond the concept of commodity and tie the concept of fetishism back to the concept of capital, and, second, they tie the problem of amnesia and fetishism back to Marx's method.

In this essay I argue that Marx’s philosophy does not commit us to Worrell’s and Krier’s claim that a post-capitalist society will be a social formation in which all social relations appear unmediated to their agents. Quite the opposite is true: given his Hegelian background, which Marx never gives up, social relations are in principle to be mediated by the results of human productive acts, and although a socialist society no longer is mediated by capital, it still cannot be thought without a legal, ethical, and political form of these relations. Those meditations (which Worrell and Krier do not separate clearly from social-economic aspects) will be universal. Accordingly, the author’s claim that Marx is opposed to the concept of the universal is baseless. In addition, I demonstrate that Worrell’s and Krier’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of alienation as a romantic concept is misguided and, instead, that we would do well to focus on the concept of private property. Finally, I show that they do not properly grasp Marx’s concepts of democracy and communism.

Instead of defining money as a means or tool for social communication and exchange, Marx determines money as the really existing universal and as existing form of an abstract social mode of domination. His conception is the consequence of transforming Kant’s concept of “thinghood” into a social and material concept, which most scholarship overlooks. As such, it confronts us with the problem of how we should think of really abstract social relationships and a form of social reproduction that is itself abstract because social reproduction depends upon the money form. In this paper I first analyze Marx’s early concept of money as the thing itself, after which I reconstruct how this aspect is finally turned into a social concept in the Grundrisse.

In this essay I present critical reflections on Antonio Negri’s attempt to break out of central aspects of the Marxian legacy, in particular Marx’s concept of value. As I demonstrate, Marx’s theory of value cannot be reduced to the problem of labor time and issues related to measurement, as these terms in Marx’s mature theory indicate a specific mode of how society is constituted as a totality, which includes exchange and money. As such, we need to make distinctions between value and value form, money and money form, capital and capital form, etc. As a theory of the form of capitalist social relations, Marx’s philosophy can help us not only critically engage with Negri’s theory of (immaterial) labor, but also correct certain reductions, in Negri’s thought, such as the reduction of capital to power and control, as well as his over-idealized notion of the general intellect

In this essay I briefly analyze why the concept of class has disappeared in recent social philosophy, such as in the philosophies of Badiou, Negri/Hardt, and Honneth. I argue that a change in the foundations of their social ontologies has led to the dismissal of the concept of class and, in addition, I argue that these changes are unwarranted, since they lead to a loss of a critical concept of society. Then, in a second part, I argue that the concept of class deserves a systematic status within a theory of capitalist sociality, especially since the concept of class can be traced back genetically to violent social relations that are derived from the capitalist social order.

In diesem Beitrag lege ich dar, warum der normative „turn“ der Frankfurter Schule, insbesondere sichtbar bei Habermas und Honneth, in Engpässen endet, da eine substantielle Kritik des Kapitalismus durch den alleinigen Fokus auf Kommunikation, Normativität und Moral verhindert wird. Dagegen werde ich argumentieren, dass wir zu einer Neuaufnahme und Re-Aktualisierung einer bei Marx schon zu findenden „immanenten Kritik“ im Sinne einer Analyse der gesellschaftlichen Totalität und eines substantiellen Arbeitsbegriffes zurückkehren sollten. Das Verlassen des Produktionsparadigmas dazu führt, dass die Genese der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft und ihrer Konsequenzen vernebelt werden. Mit dem Verschwinden des Arbeitsbegriffes aus der „offiziellen“ kritischen Theorie verschwindet auch ihr kritischer Stachel. Dieser Beitrag kann als eine Erweiterung meines Beitrages in Prokla 176 (Lotz 2014b) verstanden werden.

The thesis of my remarks is that Piketty’s overall position understands capital as something that exists within society, whereas I submit (on the grounds of Marx’s theory of society) that capital is the main category that determines the existence of capitalist society. Put differently, capital in the form of valorized labor determines the specific social form of capitalist society. Whereas Piketty’s position is built upon a positivistic concept of capital, I argue that capital is not “some-thing;” rather, capital is the central category of capitalist social reproduction. Capital, in other words, must therefore describe the functioning of a social totality as a whole and cannot be related to a single aspect of it. Accordingly, though the focus on inequality is important, it tends to hide the real social organization of capitalist society.

I argue that the culture industry chapter in DE cannot be properly understood if one does not take Adorno’s interpretation of the Kantian schematization concept into account, as Adorno claims that schematization of objecthood is a function of labor, which, in turn, depends upon [a] capitalist commodity exchange and [b] the “real abstraction” that occurs in exchange, which establishes value and the abstract nature of capitalist social totality. My thesis, accordingly, is that Adorno’s concept of schematization remains faithful to Marx’s Capital. Schematization of objecthood does not occur in the mind of the subject; rather, it occurs in social reality.

In diesem Aufsatz versuche ich zu zeigen, dass Adorno und Heidegger die Kants Gedanken der Gegenstandskonstitution durch den Schematismus aufnehmen und in ihren Theorien materialistisch bzw. ontologisch wenden. In einem ersten Schritt zeige ich, dass Adornos These ist, dass der Bezug auf Gegenstände eine soziale Funktion ist, die von der sich durch Individuen hindurch reproduzierenden Gesellschaft bestimmt wird. Je mehr diese Reproduktion sich im Sinne der kapitalistischen Warentausch-Logik vollzieht, umso mehr vollzieht sich auch die Schematisierung der Welt innerhalb dieser Logik, da der Warentausch die Bedingung der Möglichkeit nicht nur von Vergesellschaftung im allgemeinen, sondern auch von gegenständlicher Erfahrung ist – und letztendlich die Erfahrung außerhalb dieses Schemas – d.h. der Zukunft und des Andersseins – unmöglich macht. Der Warentausch regelt und schematisiert also den Gegenstandsbezug. In einem zweiten Schritt zeige ich, dass Heideggers These ist, dass im Schematismus vor allen Dingen Kants Begriff der Gegenständlichkeit zum Vorschein kommt. Dieser Begriff der Gegenständlichkeit aber ist nach Heidegger schon aus der Logik der Subjektivitätsphilosophie geboren, die wiederum auf der den Zugang zum Seienden bestimmenden Technik fußt. Daher ist Technik bei Heidegger imgrunde ein ins Ontologische gewendeter Schematismus, bei dem unsere Erfahrung durch eine als Wirkung und Effekt verstandene Zweck-Mittel-Kausalität es uns nicht mehr erlaubt, die Dinge als Dinge, d.h. als etwas Besonderes, und das heißt als etwas sich ereignendes Wesenhaftes, zu erfahren. In einem dritten Schritt versuche ich zu zeigen, dass Heideggers „Lösung“ einer Schematisierung moderner Erfahrung als Technik nicht überzeugt. Auf der einen Seite nämlich behauptet er, dass die moderne Technik der Rahmen aller Erfahrung ist, auf der anderen Seite aber kann er die Phänomene, die er im Blick hat, nämlich die dynamischen Phänomene des Kapitalismus, nicht mehr aus der Annahme eines metaphysisch verstandenen Gestells ableiten. Ich komme daher zu dem Schluss, dass der materialistische Ansatz – solange man seine Prämissen übernimmt – überzeugender ist.

By now it has become the central aim of French post-Marxist thought and critical theorists of the Frankfurt School alike to develop critical theory further towards overcoming central features of Marxian theory, especially his critique of political economy. What is at stake in both schools is the rejection of a dialectical conception of society that operates with strong assumptions about both the reconstruction of the totality of society as well as the foundations of social ontology in social-economic terms. Two other foundations of the being of the social have been put forward, namely, on the one hand, the claim found in post-structuralist inspired thought that the social is founded on the political, and, on the other hand, the claim advanced in recent Frankfurt School inspired thought that the social is founded on the ethical. This turn, I claim, leads to the consequence that Marx’s conception of the capitalist world as a historically-specific world constituted by the value form gets lost and is replaced by universal and, at least tendentiously, a-historical concepts. As a consequence, the critique and analysis of capitalism is no longer the central task, since the principle of valorized labor gets replaced by universalist principles. As a consequence, a substantial concept of the social gets lost.

In this essay I critically examine David Graeber’s concept of “everyday communism.” Graeber claims that that all societies are ultimately based and founded upon what he calls the “communism of the senses.” This “two-level” version of social reality, as I intend to show in what follows from a Marxian standpoint, should be rejected, as it operates with a descriptive concept of society that posits as the center or “essence” of society its universal and a-historical “human” base, on top of which hierarchical and economic relations are posited as “superstructures.” Graeber favors a theory that posits an ahistorical base underneath the historical. As a consequence, society disappears underneath an empty and abstract concept of the ethical. This image of society, I will argue with Marx and Engels, overlooks the categorical form of social relations, which cannot be reduced to an empty and abstract concept of sociality as “human” ethical relations. This is especially visible in the case of capitalist socialization.

Love, as I try to develop in this essay, is not the ontological or ethical basis from which all other elements of society emerge, but it is tied to a social form that depends upon the categorial system of reproduction, which is the way in which love concretely exists under existing relations of production. Love, taken here as the sensual form of being social (which in turn depends upon reproduction), remains, accordingly, in distance from religious, romantic, anthropological or legal conceptions of love. Against such reductionisms we must maintain that love is a form of being social in which the sensual life is as complex as the social world, and not an abstraction from the latter. As Marx states in The Holy Family: love “cannot be construed a priori, because its development is a real one which takes place in the world of the senses and between real individuals” (MEW 2, 23). Love, then, is tied to real individuals and cannot be seen in an ahistorical fashion, though it needs to be grasped in its specific, i.e., its categorial form. I will first present reflections on love in pre-Marxian terms, as Marx’s break with essentialist conceptions of love depends upon his critique of Feuerbach; I will then reconstruct Marx’s early philosophy of love as a philosophy of sensuality, expanding this position by taking the “standpoint of reproduction” (Althusser) into account, before I finish with contrasting the social-material theory of love with what I conceive as regressive position in recent political philosophy, such as Negri’s and Badiou’s philosophies of love.

Heidegger’s claim that the being of beings has been reduced to standing reserve through modern technology seems to be the best expression of Marx’s concept of reification as a result of the commodity form. In my paper, after briefly criticizing Honneth’s recent reconceptualization of reification as [1] psychological and [b] non-economic, I will outline the problem of reification from the perspective of Marx, which will prepare the confrontation that I shall present between Heidegger and Marx, for the real issue is whether reification is the result of technology (which I will call “causality form”) or the result of the “commodity form.” Though I am unable to present a “final” solution for this confrontation, I claim, against Heidegger, that Marx’s concept of the commodity form is not based on subjectivity and, in addition, that Heideggerian ontology is unable to explain the connection between “enframing” and the capitalist structures that Heidegger implies in his descriptions of modern phenomena. Accordingly, this essay tries to open up a new path towards what has recently been called “Heideggerian Marxism.”

I argue that both Jaspers and Heidegger miss the essential dimension of van Gogh’s art, namely, the role of materiality in painting. Van Gogh’s art is characterized by the attempt to preserve a certain non-representational quality of the sensational experience of the world in and through paint, but this gets lost in Heidegger’s attempt to eradicate all traces of subjectivity in van Gogh. Heidegger’s thesis that the work of art establishes a unique synthesis of earth and world ignores the role of the painting in van Gogh’s painting. Regarding Jasper’s psychologist and existentialist view of van Gogh’s art, his thesis that van Gogh’s change of style during the late 80s goes back to his schizophrenic illness ignores the fact that van Gogh’s change of style emerged out of his materialist vision of painting, which leads to a new conception of paintings as a synthesis of drawing and painting.

We find the problematic relation between the socially visible and the socially invisible reflected in (critical) art and aesthetics; in particular, in the critical tradition of art and aesthetics in the 20th and 21st century, which includes Brecht, Eisenstein, Kluge, Benjamin, Adorno, and, more recently, Rossler, Farocki, Sekula, and Pagen. All of these artists, and perhaps art as such, are confronted with the problem of visibility and invisibility because art works cannot remain within the conceptual and theoretical realm alone, insofar as they are in need of the sensual presence of meaning. The problem becomes more difficult, however, when artists either explicitly work from a critical and Marxist standpoint (such as Farocki and Sekula do) or implicitly want to address capital, capitalism, globalization, economic issues, etc. in their work. The question, then, is very simple: how can something that is as such socially and really abstract, such as money, capital, exchange, global structures, trade flows, banks, financial speculations, etc. be made perceptible? Put plainly, how can that which is invisible be rendered visible? After introducing the problem of how to represent capital(ism) and after renewing the concept of mimesis and representation for critical purposes, I deal with two contemporary artists, Alan Sekula and Edward Burtynsky. As I will indicate, a critical concept of mimesis and a new realism is needed to further develop critical aesthetics in a Lukacsian spirit; for however one approaches the overall problem of the (socially) invisible, the following is clear: without a strong concept of contemporary realism, which is opposed to post-structuralist relativisms, the problem of how to represent capital in the arts cannot be tackled.

With very few exceptions, phenomenologists have not been very interested in reconstructing some of the leading ideas in the phenomenological tradition with respect to their origin into the culture within which they emerged. This lack of interest is even more surprising if we take into account that central concepts that phenomenologists have elucidated, such as empathy (Einfühlung), were employed in aesthetics and in the art world at the beginning of the 20th Century. My essay attempts to overcome this neglect and seeks to demonstrate how one of the most prominent ideas in phenomenology, namely, Husserl’s concept of eidetic insight and the “intuition of essences” are “echoed” by an aesthetic culture in Germany during the first decades of the 20th Century. In my contribution, I will focus on the fine arts and argue that Husserl’s eidetic variation and eidetic intuition can be understood from an aesthetic point of view and that they can be applied to art, especially to the German Expressionist tradition of graphic arts and wood cuts. The overall thesis of my essay is simple: the attempt by German Expressionist artists to reveal the essence of the world in their art (particularly artists of the “Bruecke” movement) should be seen as a kind of eidetic intuition that gives the viewer direct access to the truth of that which is depicted. Expressionist art, at least the movement that I have in mind, does not “apply” phenomenology; rather, in its core, it is phenomenological.

In this essay I analyze one of the later works of art by Joseph Beuys entitled Das Kapital Raum 1970-1977 (housed in Hallen für neue Kunst in Schaffhausen) in relation to his ideas on social plasticity, human sensuality and creativity within a non-capitalist social horizon. As I demonstrate, Beuys’ ideas can be traced back to Feuerbach’s and Marx’s humanism, which includes central Marxist concepts such as alienation, value, and human productivity. In order to develop this philosophical background and to make Beuys’ conception of the work of art as a critical device and a process of social-political transformation visible, I will exclusively focus on his late work Das Kapital Raum 1970-1977. Beuys’ work is based on a conception of images as plastic images [Gebilde], i.e., the idea that an image organically contains its genesis and brings out its own formation as an inner result. Accordingly, the work of art is here understood as a process and as becoming. As I argue, Das Kapital Raum 1970-77 as a multi-dimensional, multi-media, and multi-sensual installation should be understood as a Denk-raum, i.e., as “spatialized thought” and a “room” that opens up and contains a vision of a non-capitalist form of social existence and social activity. As such, it should be understood as a vision that is against the abstractions of (capitalist) value.

In this essay, I offer thoughts on the constitution of images in art, especially as they are constituted in painting and in photography. Utilizing ideas from Gadamer, Derrida, and Adorno, I shall argue that representation should be conceived as a performative concept and as an act of formation; i.e., as a process rather than as something “fixed.” My reflections will be carried out in connection with a careful analysis of Gerhard Richter’s painting “The Reader” (1994), which is a painting of a photograph that depicts a female who is reading. I demonstrate how a close analysis of this fascinating painting leads us deeper into the problem of painted images, insofar as it enacts what it is about, namely, the constitution of itself as an image by means of a complex and enigmatic relationship between seeing, reading, memory, inner, outer, gaze, and blindness.

In this paper I shall present an argument against Deleuze’s philosophy of painting. Deleuze’s main thesis in Logic of Sensation is twofold: [1] he claims that painting is based on a non-representational level; and [2] he claims that this level comes out of the materiality of painting. I shall claim that Deleuze’s theses should be rejected for the following reasons: first, the difference between non-intentional life and the representational world is too strict. I submit that the non-intentional relation that painting opens up is itself part of and emerges out of the representational force of painting. If this would not be the case, then the criterion for differentiating between paintings and other objects cannot be developed. Indeed, Deleuze fails to give us a criterion. Second, Deleuze’s way of dealing with materiality in painting remains unsatisfactory, insofar as he is unable to take into account how materiality is charged with an “attitude towards the world.” In sum, materiality can only be painting’s materiality if we understand it as being formed and disclosed in representation.

In this paper, I will present an argument against Husserl’s analysis of picture consciousness. Husserl’s analysis of picture consciousness (as it can be found primarily in the recently translated volume Husserliana 23) moves from a theory of depiction in general to a theory of perceptual imagination. Though I think that Husserl’s thesis that picture consciousness is different from depictive and linguistic consciousness is legitimate, and that Husserl’s phenomenology avoids the errors of linguistic theories, such as Goodman’s, I submit that his overall theory is unacceptable, especially when it is applied to works of art. Regarding art, the main problem of Husserl’s theory is the assumption that pictures are constituted primarily as a conflict between perception/physical picture thing and imagination/picture object. Against this mentalist claim, I maintain, from a hermeneutic point of view, that pictures are the result of perceptual formations [Bildungen]. I then claim that Husserl’s theory fails, since it does not take into account what I call “plastic perception” [Bildliches Sehen], which plays a prominent role not only within the German tradition of art education but also within German art itself. Inn this connection, “plastic thinking” [Bildliches Denken] was prominent especially in Klee, in Kandinsky, and in Beuys, as well as in the overall doctrine of the Bauhaus. Ultimately, I argue that Husserl’s notion of picture consciousness and general perceptive imaginary consciousness must be replaced with a more dynamic model of the perception of pictures and art work that takes into account [a] the constructive and plastic moment, [b] the social dimension and [c] the genetic dimension of what it means to see something in something (Wollheim).

I argue from a hermeneutic point of view that formal elements of poetry can only be identified because poetry is based on both the phenomenon and the conception of poetry, both of which precede the attempt to identify formal elements as the defining moment of poetry. Furthermore, I argue with Gadamer that poetry is based on a rupture with and an epoche of our non-poetic use of language in such a way that it liberates “fixed” universal aspects of everyday language, and that through establishing itself in a new, self-referential and monologue unity, it individualizes speech. From the hermeneutic position, poetry is a form of speaking rather than a “fixed” object. As such, I will try to make sense of what Paul Celan said in his famous “Meridian” speech: namely, that the poem is “actualized language, set free under the sign of a radical individuation, which at the same time stays mindful of the limits drawn by language, the possibilities opened by language.”

Roland Barthes’ essay Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography is probably the most famous essay written on photography after WWII. Barthes’ essay is usually taken as a theory of realism, especially since Barthes claims that a photograph is “somehow co-natural with its referent” (Barthes 1982, 76). This thesis, however, as I intend to show in my paper, is misunderstood if we understand it to imply a simple form of causal realism; for almost all major commentators, overlook that Barthes’ essay is written in a phenomenological spirit. In my paper, I intend to correct the aforementioned view of Barthes’ position as a simple causal realism by arguing that the relation between photograph and referent should instead be understood as a relation between the looking subject and the referent, which will lead to a non-naturalist thesis about the relation between photography and referent. I shall first demonstrate that Barthes’ essay is primarily not about photography taken as an object; rather, Barthes tries to describe the experience of photograph, which comprises both the noetic and the noematic part of what I will call the photographic attitude. The photographic attitude is the consciousness of photographs. I, finally, argue that a phenomenological theory remains ultimately unsatisfactory because the mentalist underpinnings of this approach to photography do not permit us to understand photographs as a medium.

Gadamer’s conception of “image” is of interest for a general philosophy of images and imaging in particular for the following reason: in contradistinction to most contemporary accounts of images, Gadamer does not give up the traditional horizon indicated by concepts such as “eidos” and “essence.” In this paper, I will first reflect on this general notion of image and the German term “Bild,” after which I will more concretely deal with the process by means of which images are constituted. I will conclude my reflections with a brief confrontation of the hermeneutic project with one of the more recent and for phenomenological theories important theories of pictures, namely, Richard Wollheim’s analysis of “seeing-in.” Gadamer’s main idea, as I will claim and briefly elucidate, ultimately leads to a theory of images that is superior to Wollheim’s account.

Der 20.Juli ist in Deutschland dem Andenken des deutschen Widerstandes während der Nazi-Diktatur gewidmet. Er ist aber auch dem gewidmet, was wir das „Gewissen“ nennen, weil es beim deutschen Widerstand sich um einen extremen Konflikt von Gesellschaft und Individuum handelt. Wenn sich Individuen entscheiden, nicht nur gegen einen Teil, sondern gegen die Gesellschaft als Ganze sich zu verhalten, werden sie automatisch in einen inneren – moralischen – Konflikt getrieben. Diesen Konflikt hat Graf Stauffenberg in seinen berühmten Sätzen so ausgedrückt: „Derjenige, der etwas zu tun wagt, muss sich bewusst sein, dass er wohl als Verräter in die deutsche Geschichte eingehen wird. Unterlässt er jedoch die Tat, dann wäre er ein Verräter vor seinem Gewissen.“ In meinem Beitrag analysiere ich den Begriff des Gewissens in Hinsicht auf seine existentiellen, moralischen, und religiösen Aspekte.

The last decades have seen superb scholarship related to the development of Heidegger’s philosophy and an increased interest in Heidegger’s intellectual roots in Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard. Almost all central concepts of Being and Time (1927), as we know now, are derived from Heidegger’s re-readings of these theologians and philosophers whom he discussed in his lecture courses between 1919 and 1923. Luther plays a central role in Heidegger’s early lecture courses at the University of Freiburg, before he took over a chair of philosophy at the University of Marburg in 1923. This entry gives an overview of the influence of Luther on Heidegger.

In this essay, I shall attempt to shed light on central practical concepts, such as action and decision, in Heidegger’s existentialism and in Fichte’s idealism. Both Fichte and Heidegger, though from different philosophical frameworks and with different results, address the practical moment by developing [1] a non-epistemic concept of certainty, in connection with [2] a temporal analysis of the conditions of action, which leads to the primacy of future in their analyses. Both [1] and [2] shed light on their concept of the self, and on the concept of freedom. In addition, my paper offers a further clarification of what was called before Fichte’s “proto-existentialism” (G. Zöller, D. Henrich). The ontological framework of both philosophies and their concept of the practical self, finally, leads to the proposal to merge both perspectives into what I would like to call “existential idealism.” Fichte’s and Heidegger’s practical philosophies can be taken as two sides of the same coin.

As is well known, Augustine begins his Confessions by doing something very unique: the first paragraph is directly addressed to God, which is to say, to the other of himself. This essay will lay out the beginning part of this text in a “phenomenological” manner, insofar as my reading of Augustine’s text tries to uncover the general experience of otherness that underlies Book One. Augustine’s opening reflections contain several ideas that my essay will discuss: [1] that they come in the form of an address, [2] that they focuses on the focus to the performative, and [3] how they introduce the self as well as Augustine’s reflections of the self as a response to the other. The first part of the essay deals with the performative dimension of book one, whereas the second part deals with the resulting responsive dimension of the text. However, the essay does not deal with the question of performance as it comes to the forefront in Book 11, namely in the form of the contrast between God’s word and human language; rather, the following considerations are restricted to considerations of the aforementioned problem of otherness that we discover in Book I and with what will be called “responsive life.”

In my paper I show how Heidegger interprets and reformulates Kant’s practical philosophy as an existential problematic, and I argue that by carefully considering this reformulation we are provided with a fuller understanding both of Heidegger’s own project as well as of the ontological dimension in Kant’s practical philosophy. In order to show this, I first explain Heidegger’s general concept of subjectivity and self-awareness, and second, the special status that affectivity has in his conception of self-awareness. I then show, more specifically, how Heidegger transforms Kant’s idea of respect (feeling) into his own idea of angst (disposition). Angst, I conclude, is the ontological interpretation of respect, which Heidegger tries to conceive as a mode of existence of the self, through which we appear to ourselves as self-determined, resolute beings, in the Kantian sense. I finally suggest that we could, in fact, use Heidegger’s analysis as a description of the moral actor who is presupposed in the Kantian theory.

Fichte claims that conscience is the very relation of oneself through which one understands one’s own being as something that has to be realized in this world through one’s being. Whereas theoretical knowledge can be doubted, knowledge of our own ability to be moral and, therefore, of our own being, cannot be doubted. Thus we are forced to change our conception of self-knowledge; for it can no longer be analyzed as (propositional) knowledge. Here another form of certainty comes into play for at this juncture Fichte introduces faith as a type of non-theoretical knowledge within his search for an alternative conception of the self and the knowledge that it has of its own being. In this paper, I shall [i] briefly introduce the Kantian concept of conscience, reveal [ii] Fichte’s conception of conscience and faith, taking especial care to [iii] uncover the existential dimension of this conception.

Levinas claims that prior to any being-affected from the outside by any kind of causal influence, and thus prior to any “hetero-affection,” sensing is open to the Other. Rather surprisingly, Fichte develops a similar perspective on otherness in his – quite phenomenological – analysis of feeling, sensing, and being-affected. Further analysis should lead us to conclude that Fichte is attempting to think affectivity in terms of openness. Indeed, it is through the alien element of feeling, that the ego is radically opened up to what is other than itself, and thus it is characterized precisely through being affected by this internal “othering,” as having an alien element within itself. In my paper I uncover this primitive concept of otherness, which precedes any level of “recognition.”

Conscience for Luther is, as Hoffmann puts it, the “pure point” of subjectivity that remains absolutely inaccessible from the outside. It is precisely this important insight into the absolute nature of subjectivity that found its way into the epistemological and ethical doctrines of German Idealism, such as Schelling’s, Fichte’s, and Hegel’s philosophies. So although these successors of Kant did not always explicitly refer to Luther as one of their central influences, we can easily see how Luther’s doctrines made their way into German Idealism, especially Fichte’s version of it, in the following two aspects: [1] Luther’s principle of conscience is displaced and transformed into a theory of moral subjectivity and “inner certainty” thereby connecting theoretical and practical reason, and [2], Luther’s reflections on the relation between individuals and the state found its way into Fichte’s political theories and reflections on the German nation. In this paper, I deal exclusively with the first aspect.

Against a stream of culturally oriented scholars some scholars in aesthetics, such as Arthur Danto and Noel Carroll, have maintained that there is a sense of “seeing” and visual recognition that does not depend upon historical and cultural practices. This essay shows that Danto’s assumption of a difference between a “core” and an “extended” form of perception and visual recognition should be rejected. The underlying argument of my considerations in this essay is the following: the distinction between a “pure” and an “extended” perception or visual perception is untenable, since, as a phenomenological reflection can reveal, our normal mode of perception is always extended. In this vein, it is argued here that there is, after all, only one mode of perception and that Danto’s position is based on abstractions from the real phenomenon. Consequently, whereas Danto maintains that it makes sense to talk about a “natural” form of seeing, this essay argues that “seeing” is itself a culturally defined way of comportment, and that assumptions about naturalistically defined perceptual core processes turn out to be idealized constructions.

I explore one central aspect of a phenomenology of memory, namely the relation between recollection and mourning. I will claim that Husserl’s analysis of recollection and retention lends itself to the inclusion of Non-Husserlian topics, such as [a] a fundamental absence in consciousness, not within the lived present, but within one’s past, which leads us to the consequence that [b] indeed, as Derrida claims, transcendental subjectivity cannot be thought of as the possibility of full self-presence, as well as that [c] it must lead us to an inclusion of concepts such as mourning, and especially death.

Husserl was confronted with the revival of anthropology through thinkers such as Scheler, Heidegger, Plessner, Driesch, von Uexkuell and Butendijk. This historic network affected his thinking more than we are able to see if we only examine the surface of transcendental phenomenology. In my paper I shall elucidate Husserl’s claims about animals and the “anthropological world.” To do this, I shall first consider Husserl’s Ideas II, since in my view not only is the current research on this text misguided, but when we attend to it closely, we find much to work in it with regarding the “animal question,” including Husserl’s claim that animal consciousness is not personal but psychic. Second, I will briefly explore Husserl’s “intersubjective approach” to animals, which is found in some of his as yet untranslated manuscripts. I will conclude with the thesis that the intersubjective approach to the problematic shifts us back, ultimately, to Husserl’s considerations in his Ideas II.

Heidegger claimed that we are caught in a general representational framework, within which it seems to be impossible to develop a non-identificatory relationship to what escapes any attempt to represent it. According to Heidegger’s analysis, to which I turn in this essay, philosophy must give up its metaphysical heritage if it does not want to repeat and affirm devastating attitudes of world reduction that invisibly rule all of our relationships as well as our world-understanding. The question is, then: is there something that escapes the structure of representation in a fundamental sense? As we will see, we can understand certain attempts within “postmodern” philosophy, such as Heidegger’s and Derrida’s reflections on language, as attempts to re-discover a thinking that positions itself outside of the representational framework. This leads these post-modern thinkers back to theories that attempted to do the same within more traditional lines of Western thought, such as negative theology. Negative theology becomes interesting again because it seems to articulate an experience that presents an alternative to identificatory thinking.

In this paper, I will perform a “step back” by showing how Derrida’s analysis of forgiveness is rooted in Kantian moral philosophy and in Derrida’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s concept of decision. This will require a discussion of the distinction that Kant draws in his Groundwork between price (the economic) and dignity (the incomparable), as well as a discussion of the underlying notion of singularity in Kant’s text. In addition, Derrida universalizes Kierkegaard’s concept of the agent so that, with this perspective in view, the interpretation of Kantian morality as something that must be described in a paradoxical way, becomes fully transparent. Whereas the interpretation of Kantian morality will provide us with a concept of morality that remains a “blind spot” for the agent, with the help of Derrida’s Kierkegaard interpretation we can see that the concept of decision remains ultimately ambivalent. In conclusion, both (a) the deconstructed concept of morality and (b) the concept of decision, will finally (c) let us understand Derrida’s radical concept of forgiveness, which is both a non-economic act of morality in the sense explained and an unpredictable, uncontrollable decision and event.