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Openness and Intensity:Petrarch’s Becoming Laurel in <i>Rerum vulgarium fragmenta</i> 23 and 228
Get PDFOur paper offers a comparative reading of Rvf 23 and 228, which describe the poetic subject’s transformation into (23), or implantation with (228), the laurel tree that normally represents the poet’s beloved, Laura. Bringing Petrarch’s poems into dialogue with philosophical works that consider the nature of plant existence as a form of interconnectedness and porosity to the outside, we argue that the becoming tree these poems stage is a form of desire to be understood not as lack but as intensity
The Book Half Open:Humanist Friendship in Holbein’s Portrait of Hermann von Wedigh III
Get PDFA small, blind-tooled volume sits on a table covered in green baize: one clasp is open, the other is closed; and a slip of paper emerges from it reading Veritas odium parit (truth breeds hatred). This detail occurs in the foreground of a portrait by Hans Holbein of a young man identified as the Cologne patrician Hermann von Wedigh III (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A study of the physical features of the book and of the history of the brief text — actually an ancient and then Erasmian adage — leads to a new interpretation of the painting in the context of humanist friendship. The book is seen to be a multivalent simile for the work of art authored by the artist as well as for the sitter himself, raising questions about the implications for these of a medium that can be opened and closed. The half-open condition of the book is understood to reflect the complementary pressures of openness and closedness, accessibility and intimacy, that characterized the Renaissance republic of letters
The Concept of Mind and its Relationship with the Body and Consciousness:A Perspective from Severino’s Indication
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Self-Reflection and Reduction in the Language of Lyric
Get PDFLyric is the language of self-reflection – and is self-reflexive language – par excellence. The question will be: Is self-reflection necessarily a reduction to the self? or, How can self-reflection effect a dissolution of the self and a breaking open to the Other? Lyric, above all in its modern, I-centered form, has often been viewed as a reduction to the self in its self-enclosure or even to the prison house of language about language that is obsessed only with itself. In this paper, William Franke considers how in lyric language the filtering of reality through the experience of the ‘I‘ or of highly self-reflective language can actually turn into a powerful way of opening the world into a dimension of infinite self-revelation and of revelation of the Other – which might be the other person, or the other of language, or the Other to thinking itself, or even some kind of divine or absolute otherness. He explores how precisely reduction, especially in the form of self-reflection, leads to discovery of something that is irreducible. He aims to demonstrate this in the case of lyrical language. The dialectic of reduction leading to and revealing the irreducible emerges exemplarily in the case of lyric language. But this is only an example of a dialectic that can be charted more generally as determining the entire course of modern secular culture. William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University and was concomitantly Professor of Philosophy at University of Macao (2013-16). He is a research fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and has been Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology at the University of Salzburg. His apophatic philosophy is directly expressed in On What Cannot Be Said (2007) and A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014). It is extended into a comparative philosophy of culture in Apophatic Paths from Europe to China (2018) and applied to address current controversies in education and society ranging from identity politics to cognitive science in On The Universality of What is Not: The Apophatic Turn in Critical Thinking (2020). As a philosopher of the humanities with a negative theological vision, he elaborates a theological poetics in books including Dante’s Interpretive Journey (1996), Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (2009), Dante and the Sense of Transgression: ’The Transgression of the Sign‘ (2012). He traces the ramifications of Dante’s theological poetics forwards in modern poetry (Secular Scriptures: Theological Poetics and the Challenge of Modernity, 2016) and backwards towards Dante’s own sources (The Revelation of Imagination: From the Bible and Homer through Virgil and Augustine to Dante, 2015). In 2021 he published three speculative monographs revolving around Dante: The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso: The Metaphysics of Representation (2021); Dante’s Vita Nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation (2021): Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection (2021)
Inbuilt Errans:What Is and Is Not ‘Radical Indifference’
Get PDF‘Inbuilt errans’ points to the core of the concept, namely the semantic entanglement of errantry and error. Errans as the erroneous wandering or the drifting error complicates the celebration of movement, fluidity, flexibility, or even ‘queering’. The rigid or stubborn aspect of errans, its erroneousness on the other hand not only accompanies but also enables its errancy. The ‘rigidity’ (as rigidity in flux) requires scare quotes in order to mark the ways in which these qualities might collapse when a question of ‘to whom?’ is posed. Through an eclectic errantry through a personal anecdote, a meme video, an ethnographic note, as well as medical history and queer theory, this text theorizes, with the help of the ‘inbuild errans’ of the human body, that is, its orifices, a ‘radical indifference’ that points to an unplanned, ambiguous, and weak while at the same time strategic, rigid, and powerful form of resistance