Since the 1970s, the incorporation of European critical theory into the academic discipline of art history within the Anglophone context has become an established scholarly convention. This article ...aims to attend to one example of this institutionalised referencing practice: Michel Foucault's notion of the 'author function' as explicated in the famous essay, 'What is an Author?' From Craig Owen's attempt to develop a 'materialist cultural practice' to Caroline Jones's recent exploration of the 'artist-function' in the reception of Robert Smithson's work, Foucault's concept has proved to be a rich source for art historians. That being said, the deployment of 'author function' has, as I will show, come at the price of a more careful examination of Foucault's essay - one that does not permit the seamless reproduction, via a citational practice, of a concept from one study to the next.
The last decade has witnessed a steady increase in scholarly work within the Anglophone context that takes as its point of departure a reappraisal of the institutionalized set of intellectual ...practices that are codified and unified by the capacious category of “critical theory.” Grounded in large part on Bruno Latour’s essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” this reappraisal has focused on the limits of critique and its legacies as instantiated in the works of mostly German and French thinkers of the interwar and postwar period. Some academics have called for a rethinking of the responsibility and purview of critical thinking, whereas others have argued for the necessity of situating critique within a broader set of intellectual orientations—as simply one mode of thinking within a vast array of other modes.
The 'Introduction' to the Phenomenology of Spirit has enjoyed a long and rich critical reception in the history of Hegel scholarship. Distinguished from the famous 'Preface' in that it introduces the ...particular ambitions of the Phenomenology as opposed to Hegel's philosophical enterprise as a whole, the opening section of the 1807 work has been understood as the exposition of a paradoxical structure of philosophical science (Wissenschaft): the path of philosophical science emerges from out of the analysis of the immanent dialectical unfolding of an introduction to this same philosophical science. Hegel's Phenomenology does not start solely from the premise of an idealised interrogation of modern theories of cognition - idealized by assuming a historical body of knowledge that one could totalize as 'modern epistemology' - but also from a socially and historically and specific object, one that contains within itself the processes that allow it to appear as an ideal, isolatable, generalized form.
It is often noted that G.W.F. Hegel offers the modern academic discipline of art history its first methodological model of scholarly construction. This essay offers a critical analysis of some ...salient moments in the art historical reception of Hegel’s ‘dialectical method’ and, against that reception, to provide a reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis of method in the short yet dense ‘Introduction’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Drawing on the recent renewed interest in Hegel in art history, I show that Hegel does not fabricate a ‘dialectical method’ but develops, instead, a sophisticated negation of method. This negation, however, is not a total annihilation. Strangely, it yields a deeper, more bewildering philosophical claim: that we are both the object and subject of philosophical analysis. In the context of the Hegelian legacy of art history, this extraction of the ontology of social being from out of the limits of philosophical methodology opens up some difficult questions, questions that concern, in the last instance, what the subject of art historical scholarship is.
As I have tried to show in this essay, the reception of Hegel's philosophy in art history--within the Anglophone context, especially-proposes inadequate understandings of the method of the ...philosopher's work. What art history fails to appreciate is that, according to the opening philosophical manoeuvre of the Phenomenology, Hegel proposes a powerful dialectical negation of the very injunction to elaborate a method that comes before recognition that thought is always already in the movement of philosophical knowledge. In this sense, Hegel has no method, at least not in any strict theoretical sense of the term (the axiomatic rules and regulations that allow a subject to perceive and know an object). Rather, the philosopher develops a speculative social ontology that articulates the movement of being and its truth-in other words, a profoundly metaphysical endeavour, but one in which metaphysics is fully mediated by non-metaphysical processes. Perhaps, then, art history should neither turn to Hegel's Philosophy of History nor his Aesthetics-each one offering the discipline a model for thinking the two terms that render it intelligible (history and art) but should, rather, turn to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit when considering issues of methodology.
Philosophical explorations of the concept of Aufhebung (sublation, supersession) immediately prior to its formulation in Hegel's work have remained relatively absent within the context of both Hegel ...scholarship and German Idealism studies. Hegel is often simply represented as the originator of the concept and the latter is understood almost exclusively within his oeuvre. This essay addresses this lack by offering an exposition of the notion as it unfolds in two works from 1795-1796: Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and Novalis' Fichte Studies. In these works, we find distinctive examinations of Aufhebung understood as the name of a process in which a subject comprehends itself in relation to its own processual development. My guiding premise is that without an adequate comprehension of the way in which Aufhebung is constructed and comprehended in the last years of the eighteenth century, we cannot establish the vantage point from which to reconstruct Hegel's early conception of the notion, a conception which begins to emerge in his earliest Frankfurt writings in 1797, as a contribution to the constellation of post-Kantian conceptions. Keywords: Aufhebung, Schiller, Novalis, Aesthetic Education, Fichte Studies
This thesis explicates what I term the ‘productive disunity’ of Hegel’s philosophy: the dialectical permeation of the ‘dialectical movement’ of aufheben and the ‘speculative self-movement’ of ...sichaufheben. It begins by examining the abstract positing of the ‘task of philosophy’ as it emerges in Hegel’s early Jena writings via an analysis of the development of the concept of aufheben in a constellation of texts from the years 1795-7. Special attention will be paid to Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) and Novalis’ Fichte Studies (1795-6). I argue that through Schiller’s conception of aufheben, Hegel grasps an initial ‘model’ of aufheben as the internal structure of the speculative whole, a whole that is, in the early Jena writings, comprehended within the strict coordinates of epistemological opposition in terms of the unity of subject and object. From this, I provide an exposition of the two central philosophical forms of conceptual movement in Hegel’s philosophy: first, the phenomenological form – through a detailed explication of the concept of experience as it unfolds in the Phenomenology of Spirit; and second, the logical form – through an explication of the movement of speculative thinking in the Science of Logic. It is through an exposition of the logical movement of speculative thinking that the delicate conceptual distinction between aufheben and sichaufheben is retroactively determined and comprehended. In the final chapter, this distinction is complicated through an examination of the temporal forms that articulate spirit in its self-comprehended, absolute form: the form of the perfect present (spirit qua ‘always already’ actual) and the form of the future anterior (spirit qua ‘not yet but will have been’ actualized) as expressed in the relation between the movement of philosophy, ‘time’ and history. It is through the dialectical reflection of the inter-relation of the two temporal forms of spirit that the third form of speculative temporalization of philosophical reconstruction is yielded. The delicate distinction between dialectical aufheben and speculative sichaufheben of spirit provides the basis for a transformation of Hegel’s philosophical enterprise and its relation to the philosophical problem of the comprehension of the speculative whole of the present.
This thesis explicates what I term the ‘productive disunity’ of Hegel’s philosophy: the dialectical permeation of the ‘dialectical movement’ of aufheben and the ‘speculative self-movement’ of ...sichaufheben. It begins by examining the abstract positing of the ‘task of philosophy’ as it emerges in Hegel’s early Jena writings via an analysis of the development of the concept of aufheben in a constellation of texts from the years 1795-7. Special attention will be paid to Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) and Novalis’ Fichte Studies (1795-6). I argue that through Schiller’s conception of aufheben, Hegel grasps an initial ‘model’ of aufheben as the internal structure of the speculative whole, a whole that is, in the early Jena writings, comprehended within the strict coordinates of epistemological opposition in terms of the unity of subject and object. From this, I provide an exposition of the two central philosophical forms of conceptual movement in Hegel’s philosophy: first, the phenomenological form – through a detailed explication of the concept of experience as it unfolds in the Phenomenology of Spirit; and second, the logical form – through an explication of the movement of speculative thinking in the Science of Logic. It is through an exposition of the logical movement of speculative thinking that the delicate conceptual distinction between aufheben and sichaufheben is retroactively determined and comprehended. In the final chapter, this distinction is complicated through an examination of the temporal forms that articulate spirit in its self-comprehended, absolute form: the form of the perfect present (spirit qua ‘always already’ actual) and the form of the future anterior (spirit qua ‘not yet but will have been’ actualized) as expressed in the relation between the movement of philosophy, ‘time’ and history. It is through the dialectical reflection of the inter-relation of the two temporal forms of spirit that the third form of speculative temporalization of philosophical reconstruction is yielded. The delicate distinction between dialectical aufheben and speculative sichaufheben of spirit provides the basis for a transformation of Hegel’s philosophical enterprise and its relation to the philosophical problem of the comprehension of the speculative whole of the present.
