Verschwinden

Warum, so fragt klassischerweise die Ontologie, ist überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts? Die dieser Frage zu Grunde liegende Dichotomie von etwas und nichts, Sein und Nichtsein, ist aber selbst voraussetzungsreich und keineswegs zwingend selbstverständlich. Sie ist schon als Frage selbst etwas, das auch nicht sein könnte.

The article presents an in-depth analysis of Benjamin’s use of the German term Medium, in order to show how his entire media theory may be interpreted as centered on the interaction between the historically changing realm of the technical and material Apparate, and what he calls in the artwork essay the »Medium of perception«: the spatially extended environment, the atmosphere, the milieu, the Umwelt in which sensory experience occurs. This notion of »Medium of perception« is then located within the long, post-Aristotelian tradition of the media diaphana, whose traces can be found in the 1920s and 1930s in the writings of authors such as Béla Balázs, Fritz Heider, and László Moholy-Nagy.

The early sixteenth-century Enclosed Gardens or horti conclusi of the Augustinian Hospital Sisters of Mechelen, Belgium, form an exceptional part of late medieval world heritage. Most Enclosed Gardens have been lost, through the ravages of time exacerbated by lack of understanding and interest. No fewer than seven Enclosed Gardens, however, were preserved until the late twentieth century in their original context: the small community of Augustinian nuns in Mechelen. Like ›sleeping beauties‹, they remained secluded in the sisters’ rooms as aids to devotion. In this paper I discuss these gardens as a symbolisation of Paradise and the mystical union, as a sanctuary for interiorisation, as a sublimation of the sensorium (particularly smell), as horticulture that gains meaning in the making process and as a paradigm for the nest.

Drawing on American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce’s »phaneroscopy«, and particularly on its point of disjunction from more orthodox phenomenology concerning the status and necessity of reception, this article argues that today’s databases phenomenalize the aesthetic dimension of worldly sensibility. Although database phenomenalizing explicitly substitutes for the phenomenalizing performed by consciousness on standard accounts of phenomenology, the important point is that it does so without severing contact with human experience. What is ultimately at stake here is the status of the phenomenon itself: insofar as it hosts the self-manifestation of the world without necessarily manifesting it to anyone or anything, the phenomenon can be disjoined from its subjective anchoring in consciousness (or any of its avatars) and ascribed to the operationality of worldly sensibility itself.

Posthumanism has established itself as a new paradigm of theory. Like all social discourses, it is a sum of power struggles, subject positions, identities – and thus full of conflict. In this discourse, which includes mainly contemporary and hence techno cultural motifs, but which of course also has a long history, there is no agreement about what the posthuman actually is, that is if it is the best or the worst that could happen to man, to his humanity, to mankind and the humanistic tradition in general. Neither is there agreement as to whether posthumanism is inevitable, already a reality or just a mirage; or whether it is politically, culturally, socially progressive or to the contrary perhaps even regressive; whether it is solely produced by technological change or mainly constructed and thus ideologically motivated. The debate between Stefan Herbrechter and Karin Harrasser explores the reasons for the career of posthumanistic motives as well as related fears and hopes.

Sowohl für die Kunsttheorie als auch für die Kunst des Beschreibens ist es zweifellos von Nutzen, sich zunächst, bevor es ans Eigentliche des Themas geht, einige Elemente der philosophischen Reflexion ins Gedächtnis zu rufen, welche die Problematik der Repräsentation der Malerei und die Probleme ihres Rahmens behandeln: Wäre es nicht angebracht, ohne dabei in eine sinnlose Mise-en-abyme zu verfallen, in einem Vorwort den philosophischen Rahmen des Rahmens der malerischen Repräsentation zu umreißen? Im Dictionnaire universel von Furetière aus dem späten 17. Jahrhundert findet sich im Eintrag zum Verb »représenter«,…

Am 18. November 1902 erschien in der bei August Scherl in Berlin verlegten Zeitung Der Tag ein hegelianisch gefärbter Essay Georg Simmels. Dieser trug den Titel Der Bilderrahmen. Ein ästhetischer Versuch und unternahm es, den Rahmen gemalter Bilder nicht bloß als zierendes Beiwerk zu verstehen, sondern als konstitutives Element einer bestimmten Art von Bildlichkeit, die eine kontemplative Betrachtungsweise fordert und die Walter Benjamin knapp drei Jahrzehnte später als »auratisch« bezeichnen würde. …

Some fragmentary reflections, in a poetic and philosophical way, about appearance and disappearance.

No epoch of the visual arts has treated the relation of disappearance and appearance as explicitly as surrealism. Especially Giorgio de Chirico’s The Enigma of the Oracle and Man Ray’s The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse can be used as examples. Framed by a manifesto on the role of the dream, Man Ray’s Enigma was printed on the first page of the first issue of the journal La révolution surréaliste. In this paper I show how in surrealism, the relation of disappearance and appearance is not only visualized, but dissected in an analytical and at the same time sensual way.

While, during the 19th century, the ›white spots‹ disappear from the maps, a peculiar figure appears in the geographical imagination: the figure of a researcher who has been lost. However, the disappearance takes place under observation, it is organized in narratives and maps, it is inscribed in protocols that make the disappearance perceptible and simultaneously form the perception of a homogeneous geographical space and the conditions of its representation.

The article deals with the figure of thought »appearance in disappearance« at the interface between phenomenology and semiotics. The interest in this figure of thought manifests itself in the phenomena of the trace, the ellipse or the secret, especially in French philosophy since the 1960s. The main question is: Is there an appearance that appears only in its disappearance?

The article deals with the specific materials that enabled the Magician and cinema pioneer Georges Méliès to produce his illusions. The materiality that accomplished the illusions created by him on stage and screen consists equally of the use of electricity, mechanics, pneumatics, optics, acoustics and chemistry. The use of these resources can not be divided into theater illusions and screen illusions; on the contrary, any reflection on Méliès’ effects of disappearance has to consider the co-presence of theatrical and cinematic techniques.

As entrances and exits, appearance and disappearance are physical and symbolic operations, which refer to the border between onstage and backstage that constitutes the scene and with it the action on stage. To make an entrance is thus a risky and unstable operation between appearance and disappearance. Using the example of contemporary explorations of the conditions of theater that use the stage as a structure of various presentation areas and -spaces, the dependence of the theatrical presentation on an Elsewhere produces a specific pun on disappearance: that which ›disappears‹ here is somewhere else.