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René Magritte: La Tentative de l'Impossible
(Der Versuch des Unmöglichen), 1928
Head
Prof. Dr. Winfried Menninghaus
Research Associates
Dr. Armen Avanessian / Dr. Jan Völker
Student Assistants
Olga Katharina Schwarz / Tom Wohlfarth
Objective
Representational devices aimed at creating the impression of “life” permeate classical rhetoric, as well as Renaissance reflections on art. In the 18th century, these devices were introduced into philosophical aesthetics, thereby undergoing a far-reaching transformation. In this context, traditional metaphors related to the generation of deceptive presence bordering on “life” met and to an extent blended with the literal semantics of “life” that emerged in the historical sciences of life, and finally in biology. Taking Kant as its systematic point of reference, this project is devoted to offering multiple perspectives onto the (modern) issue of aesthetic “liveliness.” The issues addressed include an epistemological discourse analysis of the concept, its implications for modern critical theory, and its rereading in the context of today’s evolutionary aesthetics.
Kant’s Critique of Judgment is by far the most influential text of traditional philosophical aesthetics. From the early Romantics and all the way to poststructuralist ‘appropriations’ (Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze), this primary reference in matters of aesthetics has proved its inexhaustibility in numerous rereadings. An exegesis of Kant in the narrower sense, though, is not the purpose of this project. Instead, we pursue three different avenues that take Kant’s notion of an aesthetic “furthering of life” as their common point of reference.
Subproject 1: The Quest for Knowing “Life”.
On the Co-Emergence of Aesthetics and Biology in the 18th Century
(Dr. Jan Völker)
The first subproject addresses the historical horizon of theorizing aesthetic liveliness in epistemological and discourse-analytic terms. By the mid-18th century, there emerged, in various areas of thought, a conceptual space focused on coming to terms with “life” and “liveliness” per se. This development resulted in establishing the discipline of biology as the science of life and in defining life primarily as autopoesis. According to the core thesis of this subproject, ‘aesthetics’ and ‘biology’ participate in the same epistemic rupture. This rupture displaces the old rhetorical-poetical semantics of lively representation in the direction of self-formation and self-strengthening as central characteristics of aesthetic liveliness.
The project will scrutinize the connections between biology and aesthetics. This includes not just the positive assertions regarding life, but likewise blind spots inscribed in the knowledge of life, spots which appear to be unrepresentable in the discursive practices. An initial hypothesis adopted by this project is based on the assumption that these blind spots in the space of rational knowledge can retroactively be distinguished as the hidden ‘core’ of the descriptions of ‘beauty’ and ‘life’.
Subproject 2: Aesthetic Configurations of Space and Time in Modernist Literature
(Dr. Armen Avanessian)
The second subproject takes up a particular version of aesthetic 'liveliness' that is based on the spatiotemporal interchanges and differentiations found in Lessing's Laocoon and definitions of space and time developed in Kant's critiques. The project translates the metaphoric qualities of illusory, aesthetic 'liveliness' into operations, derived from physiology, that are designed to enhance intensity. This philosophical understanding of intensive space-time, then, will be investigated by considering its literary treatment in Hölderlin, Musil and Simon.
The concept of aesthetic 'liveliness' also has a bearing on certain space-time relationships as emphasized by the visual arts (specifically the transformation of space into imaginary time and vice versa). In this context, aesthetic liveliness can be understood as the result of operations which intersect and/or transgress the boundaries of space and time. This makes it possible to establish connections between the discourse of 'liveliness' and 18th and 19th centuries debates on intensity. A related critical investigation of the distinction between the spatial and temporal arts is intended to identify new facets of the mutual interpenetration, starting in the 19th-century, of the individual arts (and their resultant hybridisation).
The overarching aim of the project is to develop a new approach to literary-aesthetic experience within the modern 'aesthetic regime of the arts' (as identified by Jacques Rancière), an apporach that is at the same time relevant to broader issues in art theory.
Subproject 3: What is Art for?
Negotiating Transcendental and Evolutionary Aesthetics
(Prof. Dr. Winfried Menninghaus)
This project revaluates functional hypotheses of classical aesthetics – such as those developed in the context of eighteenth century anthropology and primarily in Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) – by having recourse to models and findings of today’s evolutionary psychology. Both transcendental and evolutionary approaches to art share the assumption that the pleasure we take in aesthetic production and reception “advances life” (Kant); this claim regularly includes the affective investment of imaginary beings, worlds and values that is often concomitant with aesthetic practices. The project will compare and renegotiate the arguments offered for the benefits supposedly provided by art. In Kant’s language, the hypotheses subjected to scrutiny bear primarily on the following desiderata: 1) “the advancement of the feeling of life” on the part of the “subject” engaging in aesthetic judgment; 2) aesthetic judgment as a medium of a “sensus communis”; 3) the theory of paranormal states of mind and capacities (“genius”); 4) “the free interplay” of our diverse “capabilities”; 5) the cognitive and affective rewards inherent in aesthetic “pleasure.” The functions of the aesthetic, promoted in these terms in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, will be discussed in various theoretical idioms in a comparative and interdisciplinary fashion. The objective is to give these functions a new weight that goes beyond the relatively narrow disciplinary contexts of transcendental aesthetics and evolutionary psychology. The project is thus aimed at stimulating reflection on the foundations of those disciplines which are concerned with aesthetic phenomena.
