The practical absolute: Fichte’s hidden poetics

The following paper argues that J.G. Fichte, despite his apparent philosophical neglect of art and aesthetics, does develop a strong, original, and coherent account of art, which not only allows the theorization of modern, non-representative art forms, but indeed anticipates Nietzsche and Heidegger in conceiving of truth in terms of art rather than scientific rationality. While the basis of Fichte’s philosophy of art is presented in the essay “On Spirit and Letter in Philosophy,” it is not developed systematically either in this text or anywhere else in his writings, but must be reconstructed through a broad consideration of all his works, including, above all, his political and economic writings. For Fichte, the art-work does not exist as an object possessing “aesthetic value” and which can, in turn, be possessed, consumed, and enjoyed through the subjective act of aesthetic experience. Rather, it involves a mode of praxis which, grounded in a radical and original power of imagination, creatively discloses possibilities for future forms of existence, experience, and political community that cannot be theoretically anticipated. While Fichte cannot himself theorize specific forms of art, since the art that concerns him belongs to the future, we can, however, retrospectively try to understand non-representational painting and non-mimetic dance as concrete realizations of Fichte’s art-work of the future. In this way, Fichte’s philosophy of art ultimately suggests an alternative to Heidegger’s understanding of the work of art as a projective institution of truth. Fichte suggests that the human body, rather than human language, is the fundamental medium of art.

Phenomenology in Lithuania

The article deals with phenomenology in Lithuania. The main thesis of the article is this: phenomenology is a living tradition in need of both development and interpretation. The minor thesis follows from the main one: the Western phenomenological tradition and Lithuanian philosophy interact and develop in tandem with one another. According to the authors, the contact between poetics and philosophy is the dominant form of phenomenology in Lithuania. The phenomenological tradition is treated as creative and living philosophical thought.

A comparative study of the subject in Jacques Lacan and Zhuangzi

Jacques Lacan has creatively grafted Zhuangzi’s concept of the subject on the Western tradition of Logo-centrism. Lacan rewrites the triangle positions of the subject as the Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, expresses them in the vocabulary of detective stories, and achieves his scholarly reputation. The insufficiency of his theory could be redressed by Zhuangzi’s idea of ‘the poetics of oneness.’ For Zhuangzi, a man can forget his ‘Social I’ and ‘Corporeal I,’ arrive at the phase of ‘the equality of things’ in his symbiotic fusion with the surrounding things. These two thinkers complement each other and enrich our understanding of the subject.     

Novel poetic protest: What Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist offers geographers writing to evoke rather than convey

This paper is a call to geographers, a call for evocative understandings of complicated places and times, for writing practices that foreground feelings, embrace experiential considerations, and privilege embodied relationships with text during periods of struggle, protest, and resistance. I anchor this call in a formalist reading Sunil Yapa's Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist. Drawing from poetic impulses, my formalist reading of the novel includes attention to the novels' grammatical structures and lineated assemblages: I extend my reading of the novel into a call for geographers to experiment and emote in our writing practices, whatever those practices might be. The paper also draws on poet Don Paterson's writing about textual work done by the lyrical and the lyric. Paterson suggests poetry offers opportunities to make writing an ingestible project, one with the potential of being physically manifest in a reader. In this paper, I suggest there is much potential for social change if geographers consider emotionally evocative writing and knowledge as opposed to information being conveyed in expected forms. Ultimately, and circling back to Yapa, I call to geographers to consider our writing as activist work, with the emotional potential of making a new and better world.