"The Origin of the Work of Art"

Origin here means that from and by which something is what it is and as it is. What something is, as it is, we call its essence or nature. The origin of something is the source of its nature. The question concerning the origin of the work of art asks about the source of its nature. On the usual view, the work arises out of and by means of the activity of the artist. But by what and whence is the artist what he is? By the work; for to say that the work does credit to the master means that it is the work that first lets the artist emerge as a master of his art. The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist. Neither is without the other.

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artifacts could always be imitated by men. Replicas were made by pupils in practice of their craft, by masters for diffusing their works, and, finally, by third parties in the pursuit of gain. Mechanical reproduction of a work of art, however, represents something new. Historically, it advanced intermittently and in leaps at long intervals, but with accelerated intensity.

"Reason Against Itself: Some Remarks on Enlightenment"

The collapse of a large part of the intellectual foundation of our civilization is to a certain extent the result of technical and scientific progress. Yet this progress is itself an outcome of the fight for the principles which are now in jeopardy, for instance, those of the individual and his happiness. Progress has a tendency to destroy the very ideas it is supposed to realize and unfold. Endangered by the process of technical civilization is the ability of independent thinking itself.

"Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet"

The Object Ophelia

As a sort of come-on, I announced that I would speak today about that piece of bait named Ophelia, and I'll be as good as my word.
Our purpose, as you remember, is to show the tragedy of desire as it appears in Hamlet, human desire, that is, such as we are concerned with in psychoanalysis.
We distort this desire and confuse it with other terms if we fail to locate it in reference to a set of co-ordinates that, as Freud showed, establish the subject in a certain position of dependence upon the signifier.

"Is Art Lighthearted?"

The prologue to Schiller’s Wallenstein ends with the line, “Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst”—life is serious, art is lighthearted. It is modeled on a line from Ovid’s Tristia: “Vita verecunda est, Musa jocosa mihi” (II, 354), or “My life is modest and sober, my muse is gay.” Perhaps one may impute an intent to Ovid, the charming and artful classical writer. He, whose life was so lighthearted that the Augustinian establishment could not tolerate it, was winking at his patrons, composing his lightheartedness back into the literary gaiety of the Ars amandi and repentantly letting it be seen that he personally was concerned with the serious conduct of life.

"The Phenomenological Theory of Being"

If to be means to exist the way nature does, then everything which is given as refractory to the categories and to the mode of existence of nature will, as such, have no objectivity and will be, a priori and unavoidably, reduced to something natural. The characteristics of such objects will be reduced to purely subjective phenomena which, with their multifarious structure, are the products of natural causality. Let us illustrate this with an example.

"Martin Heidegger and Ontology"

In its most general form, the problem of the theory of knowledge has a critical significance. It consists in delineating a domain where knowledge can be certain and in determining the criteria for the legitimate scope of knowledge. But this problem, as normal and as simple as it may appear, has deeper roots.

"The Modern Concept of History"

HERODOTUS, who has been rightly called the Father of Western history, tells us in the first sentence of the Persian Wars that the purpose of his enterprise is to preserve that which owes its existence to men (ta genomena ex anthropon), lest it be obliterated by time, and to bestow upon the glorious, wondrous deeds of Greeks and Barbarians sufficient praise to assure their remembrance by posterity and thus make their glory shine through the centuries.

"Beliefs for Sale: 1900-1950"

The living subject I mean to discuss could be called The Self-Made Intellectual Man of the Twentieth Century. I refer by that phrase to a social fact which I think is rather new in the history of our Western heritage. A boy is born on a farm in Ohio, or a city in Georgia, is raised through the public school system, and unless he is determined to avoid it, is eased up into college. There, as the result of the elective system and the wooing methods of his teachers, he enjoys every opportunity of choosing for himself among a great variety of beliefs—philosophical, political, social, artistic, and religious. This is something new.

"The Death of the Author"

In his story Sarrasine, Balzac, speaking of a castrato disguised as a woman, writes this sentence: “It was Woman, with her sudden fears, her irrational whims, her instinctive fears, her unprovoked bravado, her daring and her delicious delicacy of feeling” Who is speaking in this way? Is it the story’s hero, concerned to ignore the castrato concealed beneath the woman? Is it the man Balzac, endowed by his personal experience with a philosophy of Woman? Is it the author Balzac, professing certain “literary” ideas of femininity?

"Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?"

This is a period of slackening — I refer to the color of the times. From every direction we are being urged to put an end to experimentation, in the arts and elsewhere. I have read an art historian wh o extols realism and is militant for the advent of a new subjectivity. I have read an art critic wh o packages and sells 'Transavantgardism' in the marketplace of painting. I have read that under the name of postmodernism, architects are getting rid of the Bauhaus project, throwing out the baby of experimentation with the bathwater of functionalism.

"Plato and the Simulacrum"

What is meant by the "overthrow of Platonism"? Nietzsche thus defines the task of his philosophy, or more generally, the task of the philosophy of the future. The phrase seems to mean abolishing the world of essences and the world of appearances. Such a project would not, however, be Nietzsche's own. The double objection to essences and appearance goes back to Hegel, and further still, to Kant. It is unlikely that Nietzsche would have meant the same thing. Further, this way of formulating the overthrow has the drawback of being abstract; it leaves the motivation for Platonism obscure.

"Language to Infinity"

Writing so as not to die, as Maurice Blanchot said, or perhaps even speaking so as not to die, is a task undoubtedly as old as the word. The most fateful decisions are inevitably suspended during the course of a story. We know that discourse has the power to arrest the flight of an arrow in a recess of time, in the space proper to it It is quite likely, as Homer has said, that the gods send disasters to men so that they can tell of them, and that in this possibility speech finds its infinite resourcefulness; it is quite likely that the approach of death—its sovereign gesture, its prominence within human memory—hollows out in the present and in existence the void toward which and from which we speak.

"What is Enlightenment?"

Today when a periodical asks its readers a question, it does so in order to collect opinions on some subject about which everyone has an opinion already; there is not much likelihood of learning anything new. In the eighteenth century, editors preferred to question the public on problems that did not yet have solutions. I don't know whether or not that practice was more effective; it as unquestionably more entertaining.
In any event, in light with this custom, in November 1784 a German periodical Berlinische Monatschrift, published a response to the question: Was ist Aufklärung? And the respondent was Kant.

"Simulacra and Simulations"

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

   Ecclesiastes

If we were able to take as the finest allegory of simulation the Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory (but where, with the decline of the Empire this map becomes frayed and finally ruined, a few shreds still discernible in the deserts - the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction, bearing witness to an imperial pride and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, rather as an aging double ends up being confused with the real thing), this fable would then have come full circle for us, and now has nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

"Modernity"

Modernity is neither a sociological concept, nor a political concept, nor exactly a historical concept. It is a characteristic mode of civilization, which opposes itself to tradition, that is to say, to all other anterior or traditional cultures: confronting the geographic and symbolic diversity of the latter, modernity imposes itself throughout the world as ahomogeneous unity, irradiating from the Occident. Nevertheless, it remains a confused notion, which connotes in a global manner any historical evolution and change of mentality.

"White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy"

PHILOSOPHY. . . and from philosophy, rhetoric. From a book- roughly and more or less a book-to create a flower, and to create it here, to bring it forth, to mount it, rather-to let it mount and find its dawning (and it turns aside as though of itself, revoluted, some grave flower). Following the reckoning of a lapidary, we learn to cultivate patience. . . .

"The Peculiar History of Scientific Reason"

"Foucault’s Untimely Struggle Toward a Form of Spirituality"

In his series of essays on Kant written during the 1980s, Michel Foucault attempted to discern the difference today made with respect to yesterday. As his essays as well as his lectures (especially at the Collège de France and Berkeley) during the early 1980s demonstrate, he was drawn– and devoted the bulk of his scholarly efforts to a renewed form of genealogical work on themes, venues, practices and modes of governing the subject and others – to experiments in new forms of friendship, sociability and transformations of the self and others that he saw taking shape, or imagined were taking shape around him.

"Midst Anthropology's Problems"

In Les Mots et les choses (1966) Michel Foucault identified three arenas of discourse that in their (unstable and incomplete) coalescence at the end of the Classical Age constituted the object called man (I'homme). This figure emerges at the intersection of three domains-life, labor, and language-unstably unified around (and constituting) a would-be sovereign subject. The doubling of a transcendental subject and an empirical object and their dynamic and unstable relations defined the form of this being. In 1966 Foucault held an epochal view of man and of modernity. In his conclusion, Foucault intimated the imminent coming of a new configuration of language about to sweep the figure of man away like "a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea" (1966:398, my translation).

Richard Taruskin was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California Berkeley and formerly a Professor of Historical Musicology at Columbia University. He is the author of many books including the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music (2005), Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (1997), and the two-volume Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions (1996), and his essays have appeared in collections such as The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (2008), Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (2018), and most recently, Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices (2020). In 2017, Taruskin was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy.

"Is There a Baby in the Bathwater? (Part I)"

As my patient respondent, Prof. Riethmüller, can attest, it took me a very long time to gain a purchase on the topic of this lecture series and this talk. Not that it was in any way new to me: like many musicologists, I have been thinking and writing about aesthetic autonomy for many years. As your propaedeutic states, aesthetic autonomy has undergone a serious interrogation in the past two or three decades among historians of the arts, and among music historians I am one of the more notorious interrogators?—obviously, else why would you have invited me to address you?