The Trace

Hermes (detail) 470-480 b.c.e.

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:23:51 -0400

Hermes (detail)

470-480 b.c.e.

"We get readings of Nietzsche as ‘… engaged not so much in the hermeneutics of suspicion as in the..."

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 10:56:11 -0400

“We get readings of Nietzsche as ‘… engaged not so much in the hermeneutics of suspicion as in the aesthetics of play: Beckett becomes a Nietzschean who takes the ‘immense framework of planking of concepts’ that we call Western metaphysics and then ‘smashes [it] to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic fashion.’”

- http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/reloading-becketts-philosophical-libraries-2-the-nietzschean-hedonist/

Photo

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:23:09 -0400

The value of art is that it provides interpretive practice for and services as an analog to life.

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:22:34 -0400

We learn to understand ourselves in and through it because the artwork is not a timeless present for a pure aesthetic consciousness (i.e., it is not an encounter with an object for which one can only express feelings of pleasure or displeasure), but rather, a real encounter with a world that presents itself historically. The self-understanding that occurs in relation to the experience of art, Gadamer tells us, is only possible when our experiencing is not discontinuous with “the unity and integrity of the other.”

James Risser

Life as Text

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:21:43 -0400

A text is literally a textus, a work of texture and tissue as that which has been woven, textere. Every text presents the reader with a woven fabric, and in being woven together produces a con-text, a relational event of meaning…..

In all discourse, as in the making of a life, a weaving is undergone, one directed by the force of the bond in relation to an incalculable measure, producing what one can rightly call the intelligibility of hermeneutic experience.

James Risser

“I decided that this text was a trap…that everything about it, in its form, was ambiguous, implied, convoluted, complicated, suggested, murmured….I deployed all my resources to uncover a range of meanings fanning out from each sentence, each word.”

Derrida

On being situated

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:18:39 -0400

“It is the very dialectic of the One and the Many which establishes the finite limits of human discourse and insight—and our fruitful situation halfway between single and multiple meaning, clarity, and ambiguity”

James Risser

"To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he..."

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 09:13:09 -0400

“To approach the Other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity. But this also means: to be taught. The relation with the Other, or Conversation, is a non-allergic relation, an ethical relation; but inasmuch as it is welcomed this conversation is a teaching. Teaching is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain. In its non-violent transitivity the very epiphany of the face is produced.”

- Emmanuel Levinas