Alltägliche Dinge im philosophischen und literarischen Schrifttum der Moderne

Abstract

Ever since Rilke, modern writers, philosophers, and artists have increasingly turned their attention to commonplace, inconspicuous objects, whether man-made or not (Ponge, Robbe-Grillet, Handke, collages, assemblages, entassements, Pop Art, junk art etc.) Roger-Pol Droit, philosopher and essayist, analyzes the meaning of commonplace things we use as to their deeper significance for the human user (Derrieres nouvelles des choses [2003]) whereas Roger Caillois attempts in several texts to read and interpret the␣hieroglyphs and quasi-mimetic images exhibited by the cut surface of minerals as mysterious messages about the universe. The German writer Klaus Luttringer (Die Ruckkehr der Steine [1999]) sees simple rocks as witnesses of an archaic age in which humans lived a happier pre-rational and pre-civilized life. He hopes for a new era, the “return of the stones”. Finally, Virginia Woolf, in her story Solid Objects (1921) writes about a man whose encounter and obsession with worthless small objects induces him to abandon his career and his life as a member of a modern Western industrial society.