Tag: phenomenology

“Even in Another Time”: Benjamin, “Sappho,” and the Phenomenology of Aura

In this essay, Liv Evans takes an encounter with a Pompeiian fresco often associated with Sappho as an opportunity to place Walter Benjamin’s better-known and more polemical account of aura in conversation with his other writings on translation and history, as well as with a broader tradition of queer scholarship concerned with how we relate to an absent and fragmentary past. By complicating the apparent opposition between aura and reproducibility, Evans explores the possibilities that arise from reconceiving their relation as entangled and generative, suggesting that reproduction may be understood to emerge from and itself become a site of auratic distance. As this exploration unfolds, Sappho becomes both the imagined subject of the painting and a philosophical voice through which to think about the ethical and political significance of aesthetic and temporal relations, and about what auratic distance, when freed from institutional authority, might offer: the possibility of re-encountering, re-creating, and remembering, “even in another time.”

Quietist Speech and the Phenomenological Sign

Ludwig Wittgenstein offers a novel and cutting criticism of philosophical realism. The ‘quietist’ critique finds fault with the discipline’s misuse of concepts outside of their relevant ‘language games.’ Instead, it calls for a philosophy that forgoes positing any form of explanation and, in lieu of doing so, limits itself to pure description. In practice, this is often taken up by withholding any positive theses about the ontological ‘state of things,’ and simply stating things ‘as they are.’ In this essay, Mikel van Dyken extends upon John McDowell’s and Paul Davies’ proposals of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl, respectively, as philosophers who manage to avoid the quietist critique. Van Dyken argues that while Kant and Husserl are largely successful in constructing a purely descriptive philosophy, they each make certain dogmatic explanatory assertions. Van Dyken then proposes Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the lived experience of the world as a productive philosophy which succeeds in avoiding the quietist critique.