Heidegger's Essay Research Articles

A Poetic History of the Oceans. Literature and Maritime Modernity. SørenFrankAmsterdam: Brill, 2022, 447 pp.

A Poetic History of the Oceans. Literature and Maritime Modernity. SørenFrankAmsterdam: Brill, 2022, 447 pp.

Street Smart or Smart Street?

In its first part the essay reflects on an ongoing transformation in the history of power relations by commenting on a short passage from Elfriede Jelinek's 2013 theater text Die Schutzbefohlenen (Charges: The suppliants). Reading Jelinek's words as a play on Martin Heidegger's essay "Die Zeit des Weltbildes" ("The Age of the World Picture") but also on his concept of the "Gestell", the essay discusses a current crisis of pictorial framing which corresponds today's reshaping of the logics of production by digital network technologies. The essay argues that one of the most significant symptoms of this development is an extensive "deterritorialization of the street" and its milieus which for historical reasons has a great impact on contemporary theater. Finally, the processes at stake are described as effects of an increasing implementation of "environmental governmentality", a term which the essay traces back to its Foucauldian roots. The second part then focusses on "Flinn Works'" 2017 performance Global Belly which engages the audience in semi-documentary scenes on the phenomenon of surrogate motherhood, for which today sperm and egg cells are transported, mixed, discharged and returned around the globe in global operations. As will be shown here, this performance deals in fact remarkably with all the three issues developed in the first part of the essay.

Hannah Arendt e a Terra

A referência ao envio de um objeto terrestre (earth-born) que introduz o prólogo de A Condição Humana constitui uma referência importante para o entendimento do Prólogo da obra. Mais notadamente, sobre o conceito de Terra, cuja aparição ao longo do Prólogo da obra não é explicada. Para tanto, nós nos propomos argumentar neste ensaio que o conceito de Terra como a expressão da condição humana exposto no Prólogo, “replica” uma discussão de Husserl e Heidegger em torno do conceito de Terra nos idos de 1935 na Alemanha. Para retraçar este paralelo, duas referências serão fundamentais: em primeiro lugar o texto de Husserl La terre ne se meut pas; em segundo lugar, o ensaio de Heidegger L’origine de l’oeuvre d’art. À luz da posição de Husserl e Heidegger, a posição de Arendt constitui um ponto de vista relevante dentro do debate político do pós-guerra, notadamente se a compararmos com a leitura de Heidegger sobre a Terra no contexto da técnica contemporânea

Heidegger, Art, and the Overcoming of Metaphysics

In this paper, I advance a new interpretation of Heidegger's reflections on art as we find them in his essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. I begin, in Section 1, by uncovering the fundamental concern that motivates Heidegger's essay. I show that Heidegger's reflections on art are part of his attempt to uncover a path beyond the history of metaphysics. I then suggest, in Section 2, that while Heidegger does think that art may allow for the overcoming of metaphysics, recent interpreters [Dreyfus (2005), Thomson (2011), and Young (2001)] have mistook the kind of art that Heidegger has in mind here. The kind of art that can allow for the overcoming of metaphysics, I argue, is not art that simply thematizes and/or reconfigures cultural worlds (as these interpreters have argued). It is instead what Heidegger calls ‘primal poesy’. After discussing the nature of primal poesy, I show in more detail how this kind of art may be capable of getting us beyond the history of metaphysics in Section 3. Finally, in Section 4, I reconsider the more common reading of ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in light of the interpretation I've offered in Sections 2 and 3.

Music ethics politics

In the twenty-teens, music has been wrapped up in politics and ethics in several prominent events, including violent attacks at the Bataclan theatre in Paris and the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, and the profiling of musical listening habits in the French governments "stop jihadism" campaign. Significant scholarship exists on music and politics, and interest in music and ethical philosophy is growing. More work, however, is needed in theorizing the connections between music, ethics, and politics. In 1951, Heidegger's essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" lists the words in the title without punctuation in an attempt to show how these three terms are intertwined even though they are often considered separate. While these words and concepts are not interchangeable, each relies upon or invokes the other. My title structurally mirrors Heidegger's, and my aim here is to elucidate how music is intertwined with ethics and politics.

‘The Origin of the Work of Art’: Heidegger

Professor Max Charlesworth and I worked, at Deakin University, on a course, 'Understanding Art'. Max was interested in the Social History of Art and in art as: 'giving form to mere matter'. Here 'form' might be read as 'lucid', 'exemplary', 'beautiful' etcetera. I am an Aristotle Poetics 4 man '… imitating something with the utmost veracity in a picture', and an Aristotle and John Cage man: 'Art is the imitation of nature in the manner of operation. Or a net'. (Cage) (See Aristotle Meteorologica, 381b Book iv.) I was invited by the University of Melbourne to lecture on The Philosophy of Art, which I did for five delightful years. There I included the Heidegger essay, giving it as favourable a reading as I could. Unfortunately I have mislaid my marked-up copy and was forced to re-visit the essay, cold. My new reading lacks - in most respects - my former geniality. Kant's Aesthetic Ideas give us more than Heidegger does. So: I stuck with Aristotle, Cage and Kant.

Heidegger among dryads: on the origin of the female work of art

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine a lacuna in Heidegger's “The Origin of the Work of Art”, that is, that it does not consider that such “origin” might be gendered. Originally published in a collection entitled Holzwege, which in the Cambridge (2002) edition is translated as Off the Beaten Track, Heidegger explains, “Wood” is an old name for the forest. In the wood there are paths, mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is untrodden. They are “Holzwege”.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is written within a philosophical tradition and seeks to examine Derrida's lengthy deconstruction of Heidegger's essay and Irigaray's elegant gender critique, which are among works attesting to the importance and controversy The Origin has provoked among post‐structuralist thinkers.FindingsThe paper considers The Origin as an auto‐deconstructive text, through which other voices (one, or more, not Heidegger's) are heard; voices calling him, through him, as him; which he cannot identify or silence. They disrupt and confound his thinking and writing; he tries (unsuccessfully) to mend the discrepancies, assuage the violence, but ultimately leaves the essay in limbo, intuiting something even he cannot comprehend, an alien writing, that its internal contradictions be reserved for others to puzzle over.Originality/valueThe paper offers a reading of The Origin against the Classical male hegemony excluding women from their proper participation in architecture, art in general, aesthetic hermeneutics and philosophy of art. These circuits of exclusion being integral to the phallocentric orthodoxy inherited from the Ancient Greeks.

Technology, Communication, and Society: From Heidegger and Habermas to Feenberg

In this article, I examine the nature and impact of modern technologies, as discussed in three seminal texts. These three pieces are: Martin Heidegger's essay "The Question Concerning Technology" published in 1954 in a collection of his lectures and essays; Jrgen Habermas's essay "Technology and Science as "Ideology" that first appeared in his book Toward a Rational Society in 1971; and, finally, Andrew Feenberg's piece "Between Reason and Experience," which appears both in the Danish Yearbook of Philosophy (2007) and in his text Between Reason and Experience: Essays in Technology and Modernity published in 2010. I begin this essay with a brief overview of all three pieces and describe their connection to the field of communication. I then examine three distinct themes around which each text revolves-particularly with respect to how they take up the problem of technology. I also speak to how the historical and theoretical movement between these pieces reflects changing positions in technology and communication studies.

Heidegger, Creativity, and what Poets do: On Living in a Silent Shack for Three Months and not Going Mad

This article reflects on a three-month solitary writing retreat, and contains a poetics based on Heidegger's essay, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. I investigate Heidegger's distinction between the world's framing essence, poetic dichtung, and the manifestation of dichtung in poetic language, what the philosopher names poesie. I arrive at a range of insights through reflecting on my season in an isolated shack, deep in the Australian Alps; Heidegger's essay helps clarify some of the creative processes at work while there. This cross-disciplinary article identifies how creativity and theories of creativity can connect and interrelate, and explores how theories like Heidegger's can benefit creative thinkers and writers.

The Pendulum of Poetry: Metaphor and Mediation in Rilke's Duineser Elegien

In his essay, Poesie et pensee abstraite, French Symbolist poet Paul Valery describes poetry as a pendulum swinging between philosophical ideas expressed (la Pensee) and sonorous qualities of language (la Voix) : Entre la Voix et la Pensee, entre la Pensee et la Voix, entre la Presence et l'Absence, oscille le pendule poetique (1333). The same oscillation occurs in critical writing on poetry, with some critics paying closer attention to ideas explored in poems, and others focusing on linguistic expression of these ideas, on such devices as rhythm, assonance, and alliteration, as well as on use of figurative language. While, for Valery, swinging of poetic pendulum between sound and meaning (son and sens) unifies these two aspects of language that are separated in everyday discourse, for critics of Rilke's poetry pendulum of criticism has swung unevenly towards side of ideas. Since Martin Heidegger's 1946 essay, Wozu Dichter? tendency has been to interpret Rilke's poetry in a philosophical context. While Heidegger's essay shows great sensitivity to Rilke's poetic voice in attempting to determine place of poetry in modern world,1 some critics have taken this philosophizing tendency to a greater extreme, believing that Rilke can be interpreted without reference to original German, i.e., that sonorous qualities of language are incidental and not an integral part of poetry's meaning. Even when Rilke's poetry is read in German, critics have tended to translate his dense metaphors into philosophical language.2 Paul de Man noted this tendency and, in Allegories of Reading, attempted to move pendulum of criticism towards linguistic dimension of Rilke's poetry (25). Since then, some critics have followed his lead in emphasizing this aspect of Rilke's poetry and prose works.3 Others have turned philosophical mode of criticism in a more literary direction by focusing on Rilke's links with such movements as Romanticism, Symbolism, and Modernism.4 De Man's readings introduced a new direction into Rilke studies. He argues that poetry's overt assertions are contradicted by its linguistic structure. Thus, promise of finding significance in poetry coexists with lie, or loss of referentiality in figural language (47-55). For de Man, Rilke's notion of Figur differs from a traditional metaphor, which suggests the potential identification of tenor and vehicle (46). Rilke's Figuren, on other hand, are characterized by renunciation of stable meaning (47).5 My reading differs from de Man's in that it demonstrates how metaphor escapes very dichotomy of promise and lie on which de Man bases his analysis. Recent work on metaphor by linguists, philosophers, and literary critics has suggested that this trope eludes such categories entirely: to speak or write metaphorically is to make a statement that is neither literally true nor false.6 Metaphors cannot be characterized as lies, but they can possibly change way in which we view human beings, concepts, or relationships.7 I argue that it is this potential of metaphor to simultaneously bring together and separate two terms (objects, persons, concepts) that is highlighted and expanded in Rilke's poetry.8 He expands this potentiality through use of subjunctive mood in his metaphors and similes and thus creates a mode of existence outside categories of truth and falsehood, presence and absence, being and non-being. While Rilke employs subjunctive as well as other modes that escape dichotomies of truth and falsehood, such as imperative and interrogative, throughout his poetry, they are most noticeably present in his Duitteser Elegien. Many critics have remarked, in passing, on Rilke's use of these modes;9 however, an analysis of function and effect of these distinctively Rilkean linguistic features in conj unction with metaphor is still lacking. …

Isto é um cachimbo

Partindo do quadro de René Magritte, La trahison des images (Ceci n'est pas une pipe), este texto pretende tecer um comentário sobre as relações entre arte e realidade. Visando esse objetivo, tentarei interpretar a obra do pintor belga à luz do ensaio heideggeriano sobre a "Origem da obra de arte", não sem antes passar em revista alguns resultados da análise contida no livro de Michel Foucault, assim como algumas reflexões do filósofo da arte norte-americano Arthur Danto.

A Field Guide to Heidegger: Understanding ‘The Question Concerning Technology’

This essay serves as a guide for scholars, especially those in education, who want to gain a better understanding of Heidegger's essay, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’. The paper has three sections: an interpretive summary, a critical commentary, and some remarks on Heidegger scholarship in education. Since Heidegger's writing style is rather opaque, the interpretive summary serves as a map with which to navigate the essay. The critical commentary offers a careful analysis of some of the central concepts in the essay. These concepts, which include bringing‐forth, challenging‐forth, and gestell, are intriguing but problematic. The problems and possibilities of these ideas are analyzed, and an overall assessment of Heidegger's ideas on technology is offered. In the final section, the work of several scholars in education is examined. Some of this work is excellent, but there is also a significant amount of confused and confusing scholarship.

Postmodern Theory of Technology: Agendas

From the standpoint of today's cultural studies, three central texts for postmodern theory of technology are Heidegger's essay Question Concerning (1953), Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), and Haraway's Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985). Each illustrates that the postmodern moment in the philosophy and history of technology arrives when pressing ethicopolitical questions erupt about collective well-being, freedom, security, and sustainability. This postmodern rupture comes in the wake of mounting postwar critiques of modern scientific technology for its faults, especially its frenzied utilitarianism; its reification of life; its abetting of social domination; its nondemocratic mode of operation; and its dangerous transformation of human rationality into instrumental reason. The standard definitions of technology include the utilitarian, anthropological, and social constructionist ones.1 In the first, technology is regarded as an instrument, a neutral means to an end. In the second, it is conceived as an inventive activity inherent to human beings. And in the third, it is construed sociohistorically as communally constructed, involving numerous agents and constraints. Technology in ordinary conversation evokes equipment, tools, machines (things manufactured and used) as well as artif actual solutions to problems and needs. Yet, following Foucault and Haraway, the body (notably the docile body) is a technology, an unsettling notion that collapses the conventional binary opposition organism/ machine and that renders the meaning and extent of technology undecidable. By common consent modern technology starts during the Enlightenment period when the widespread scientization of technology and technologization of science occur. Heidegger, Foucault, and Marx, particularly in the latter's memorable chapter on Machinery and

Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work (review)

Reviewed by: Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work Gereon Kopf Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. By Reinhard May. Translated with a complementary essay by Graham Parkes. London and New York:Routledge, 1996. Pp. xviii + 121. Reinhard May's Ex Oriente Lux: Heidegger's Werk Unter Ostasiatischen Einfluss (1989), translated into English by Graham Parkes as Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, makes a significant contribution to the growing body of work that explores the intellectual connections between early twentieth-century German philosophers and Chinese classical texts on the one side and contemporary Japanese philosophers on the other. In particular, May explores similarities [End Page 122] between the work of Martin Heidegger and contemporary translations of Taoist writings available to and known by Heidegger such as Martin Buber's Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse (1910), Richard Wilhelm's Laotse: Tao te King: Das Buch des Alten vom Sinn und Leben (1911), Jan Ulenbrook's Lao Tse: Tao te King: Das Buch vom Rechten Weg and von der rechten Gesinnung (1980), and Paul Shih-yi Hsiao's translation of the Tao te Ching. Hsiao himself describes the latter project in his "Heidegger and our Translation of the Tao te Ching," which was published in Graham Parkes' Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987). On the basis of this comparative reading, May argues that Heidegger's essay "Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache," published in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1953/1954), constitutes a fictionalization of the conversation he had with the Japanese Germanist Tezuka Tomio and, ultimately, a confession of his indebtedness to Chinese and Japanese philosophy. May's argument evolves in four steps. In chapter 1, he establishes Heidegger's familiarity with the above-cited German translations of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi as well as with the fundamental Taoist concepts. May cites Heidegger's correspondence with Hsiao on their collaborative translation of the Laozi as well as commentaries by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet and Otto Pöggeler, who document Heidegger's familiarity with the translations by Buber and Ulenbrook, and thus establishes Hei-degger's knowledge of fundamental Taoist ideas and writings. In his second chapter, May reads Heidegger's "Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache" in light of Tezuka's own account of their conversation and concludes that Heidegger poetically constructs his version in order to support his own philosophy and, ultimately, as May argues in chapter 5, to confess his intellectual debt to the Japanese philosophical tradition. May suggests that a note at the end of Unterwegs zur Sprache, which claims that the conversation that "has remained unpublished for some time, originates in 1953/4, and was occasioned by a visit from Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University in Tokyo" (p. 14), is "clearly incomplete and inaccurate" (p. 14). In addition, May cites discrepancies between the accounts of Heidegger and Tezuka with regard to crucial aspects of their conversation: while Tezuka observes "that the kind of indefiniteness conveyed by this film [Rashmon] concerning our knowledge of reality may have intrigued Heidegger as an East Asian phenomenon," Heidegger makes his Japanese interlocutor say that "[w]e Japanese are not disconcerted when a conversation leaves indefinite [im Unbestimmten] what is really meant" (p. 14). Similar discrepancies can be observed in their accounts of passages dealing with the Japanese rendition of the Heart Sūtra's shiki soku ze kū and the Japanese word kotoba. Tezuka's own report furthermore emphasizes Hei-degger's tendency to force similarities, as in the case of Heidegger's rendition of kotoba as Ding. Confronted with these "indications," May concludes that Heidegger did not report a conversation but rather presented a fictionalized conversation in such a way as to enable the readers to mistake it for the historical record. In chapter 3, May meticulously identifies similarities between Heidegger's work and the German translations of the Laozi and Zhuangzi to which Heidegger had access. Thus Heidegger paraphrases von Strauss' observation "that one is only [End Page 123] through the other" as "the Other to it [Being] is simply Nothing"; "Being and Nothing are not given beside one another. Each uses itself on behalf of...

The Genius Loci of Hamar

Theory A Phenomenology of the Genius Loci This paper is inspired by the work of Christian Norberg-Schulz who has brought back the ancient notion of the genius loci or "spirit of place" into architecture. In his earlier works Intentions in Architecture (1963) and Existence, Space, and Architecture (1971), Norberg-Schulz had already thought and written about experiential and psychic notions such as "existential foothold" and "existential space," but it was not until 1979 that he began to make use of the notion genius loci. As I will try to show below, this concept is not only relevant for architecture but for ethnography and anthropological theory as well. But first let me recapitulate the ideas outlined in Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (Norberg-Schulz 1980). People strive to create meaningful existential spaces where they can get a foothold, where they can dwell. Norberg-Schulz has taken the concept of "dwelling" from Heidegger's essay "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1971) and has related it to the concept of genius loci as follows: "Man dwells when he can orientate himself within and identify himself with an environment, or, in short, when he experiences the environment as meaningful. Dwelling therefore implies something more than 'shelter.' It implies that the spaces where life occurs are 'places,' in the true sense of the word. A place is a space which has character. Since ancient times the genius loci, or 'spirit of place' has been recognized as the concrete reality man has to face and come to terms with in his daily life" (Norberg-Schulz 1980, 5). [End Page 85] Places are qualitative totalities where events "take place," where the different components relate to each other in a meaningful Gestalt, and where the whole is experienced as more than its constituent parts: "A place is therefore a qualitative, 'total' phenomenon, which we cannot reduce to any of its properties, such as spatial relationships, without losing its concrete nature out of sight" (1980, 8). From here follows an interesting turn towards anthropology and a break with functionalism and international style in architecture: "'Taking place' is usually understood in a quantitative, 'functional' sense, with implications such as spatial distribution and dimensioning. But are not 'functions' inter-human and similar everywhere? Evidently not. 'Similar' functions, even the most basic ones such as sleeping and eating, take place in very different ways, and demand places with different properties, in accordance with different cultural traditions and different environmental conditions. The functional approach therefore left out the place as a concrete 'here' having its particular identity" (1980, 8). The "here" where people "dwell" goes beyond the house, and comprises the whole world they inhabit. Again Norberg-Schulz turns to Heidegger who has defined "dwelling" as: "The way in which you are and I am, the way in which we humans 'are' on earth, is dwelling . . . the world is the house where the mortals dwell" (Norberg-Schulz 1980, 10). To this he adds: "In other words, when man is capable of dwelling the world becomes an 'inside.' In general, nature forms an extended comprehensive totality, a 'place' that according to local circumstances has a particular identity" (1980, 10). This identity is meant by the genius loci or, less evocative, by the notion of "character." All places have character, that is, distinctive features, for example, "festive," "solemn," or "protective" for buildings, or "barren," "fertile," "threatening," etc., for landscapes. Character also emerges from modes of construction or, as anthropologists would say, from modes of production and consumption, which in turn may change in time (1980, 14–15). People perceive the characteristics of their environment as a kind of "environmental image" that provides them with an orientation and a sense of security. Following Lynch (1960), Norberg-Schulz therefore [End Page 86] argues that "all cultures have developed systems of orientation, . . . spatial structures which facilitate the development of a good environmental image" (1980, 19). To a large extent orientation is based on or derived from given natural features, and...

On the Borders of Language and Death

On the penultimate page of the Gesamtausgabe edition of Heidegger's essay "Das Wesen der Sprache" ("The Essence of Language"), we find the following brief and enigmatic passage: Die Sterblichen sind jene, die den Tod als Tod erfahren konnen. Das Tier vermag dies nicht. Das Tier kann aber auch nicht sprechen. Das Wesenverhaltnis zwischen Tod and Sprache blitzt auf, ist aber noch ungedacht. Es kann uns jedoch einen Wink geben in die Weise, wie das Wesen der Sprache uns zu sich belangt and so bei sich verhalt, fur den Fall, dass der Tod mit dem zusammenghort, was uns be-langt. [Mortals are they who can experience death as death. Animals cannot do so. But animals cannot speak either. The essential relation between language and death flashes up before us, but remains still unthought. It can, however, beckon us toward the way in which the nature of language draws us into its concern and so relates us to itself, in case death belongs together with what reaches out for us, touches us.]1 The unthought announced here, the "essential relation between language and death," still remains largely unthought today. In his book, Language and Death,2 Giorgio Agamben attempts to begin to think through this relation between language and death, and to explore the implications that a thinking of this unthought might have for a new and different understanding of the ethico-political. Our task in the present essay is not simply to reconstitute the argument of Agamben's text, but to interrogate his thought concerning the essential relation between language and death from the perspective of the question of the animal. Specifically we wish to inquire about the status and the place of the animal in a thought of community that attempts to understand the relation to language and death otherwise. Man's Ethos Beyond Voice and Negativity The introductory section of Language and Death opens with the quotation from Heidegger's On the Way to Language that we have cited above. Agamben isolates one phrase from this quotation by repeating it in italics: "The essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought" (LD xi). He then proposes a thematic investigation of this relation between language and death, not only in Heidegger's text, but also in decisive places in the history of western metaphysics, specifically in Hegel, medieval grammatical thought, and modern linguistics. The structure of Agamben's task is fitting since throughout Western metaphysics man's essence has consistently been determined through the possession of one or another distinct abilities or faculties, prominent among them being the capacity for language (e.g., man as noon logon echon in Aristotle) and the capacity for death (e.g., Fahigkeit des Todes in Hegel). Is there any essential connection between these two specific capacities? Anticipating the method and conclusion of Agamben's argument, we can say here at the outset that this question will be investigated through an interrogation of the place of negativity in metaphysical theories of language and death, and that the problem of the Voice will be the clue that leads to the discovery of a common negativity at the core of both of the these capacities. Beginning with an examination of the place of negativity in metaphysics, Agamben looks to Heidegger's discussion of death in paragraphs 50-53 in Sein and Zeit. Here, Heidegger radically reverses the common notion that death is simply an accident that befalls human beings by arguing that death is essential to Dasein's existence. Dasein is not related to death like some chance occurrence that happens to come its way; rather, Heidegger insists, death is Dasein's "ownmost possibility," and as long as Dasein exists it has an essential relation to dying in the form of Being-towards-death. The anticipation of death as the possibility of the impossibility of any existence as such is witnessed or attested to in the call of conscience (Ruf des Gewissens). …

BEING TECHNOLOGICAL: HEIDEGGER AND MASS-PRODUCED HOUSES

The design of industrially mass-produced houses was something of a unifying doctrine among early Modem Movement architects. This translated into the development of many mass-production prototypes and often into full scale industrial production of either whole buildings or kits of parts which could be assembled into various house configurations. “By 1965, there were 224 industrialised building systems available in Britain from 163 developers, 138 of them specifically recommended for housing.”1 This paper develops an ontological critique of this major architectural phenomenon based on Martin Heidegger's essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”2 The purpose of this critique is to develop an insight into the appearance of these buildings which is not addressed by critical acclaim of the period or more recent technical reviews.

The Temptation of New Perspectives

Let me begin by offering three rather disparate characterizations of tlese remarks.' They constitute, first, a sort of story about an interest literary theory might take or discover in art history; as such they sketch out if not an actual intellectual and institutional itinerary then something of the underlying logic of one. It is, I think, important here that this is not a story about the portability of theory or method but more a story about the way in which what is sometimes called theory reshapes or rediscovers itself within its new occasion. My remarks might also be described as a sort of oblique introduction to certain writings by Jacques Derrida. Under this description, it will be a significant feature of my presentation that it falls somewhat short of its goal. Martin Heidegger produced, beginning in 1935, a piece of aesthetics under the title The Origin of the Work of Art. In the late 1960s Meyer Schapiro threw his considerable professional weight behind a sharply administered art-historical correction to Heidegger's treatment of a particular van Gogh, with the clear intent of disposing of the apparent more general interest of Heidegger's speculations. In the mid '70s Derrida took up this argument in a complex polylogue called Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing that seems aimed at least in part at renewing the philosophic interest of Heidegger's essay.2 One question one might have about this sequence of writings is whether or not it is of any conceivable interest to art history; I want to suggest that it is, and I want to do so by a