Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee 9780804772990

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Crescent Moon over the Rational

Crescent Moon over the Rational Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee

Stephen H. Watson

Stanford University Press Stanford, California

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Stephen H., 1951Crescent moon over the rational : philosophical interpretations of Paul Klee / Stephen H. Watson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-6125-3 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Klee, Paul, 1879-1940--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Klee, Paul, 1879-1940--Influence. 3. Aesthetics, Modern--20th century. 4. Art criticism --History--20th century. 5. Philosophy, Modern--20th century. 6. Art and philosophy. I. Title. N6888.K55W38 2009 760.092--dc22 2009024651 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond

Contents

List of Figures: Works of Paul Klee

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts

xi

Introduction: Interpreting Klee: Fusing the Architectonic and the Poetic

1

1 On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful: Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee

11

2 Gadamer, Benjamin, Aesthetic Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Allegory: The Relevance of Klee

35

3 Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism, and Philosophy: Toward a “Nonprosaic” Conception of Consciousness

59



4 Heidegger, Klee’s Turn, and the Origin of the Work of Art

93



5 “Fiscourse / Digure”: Of Nomadism, the Specter of Oedipus, and the Remnants of the Sublime

117

6 The Rapture of Sensuousness: “Color Possesses Me . . . I Am a Painter”

151





Notes

183

Index

213

List of Figures: Works of Paul Klee



1 Constructive-Impressive

xxii



2 Park near Lu(cerne)

10



3 Signs Clustering

23



4 Ancient Harmony

34



5 Angelus Novus

45



6 Approximative Man

58



7 Make Visible

88



8 Death and Fire

92



9 Twittering Machine

116

10 “Hovering” (Before the Ascent)

147

11 Rapture

150

Acknowledgments

A number of the chapters in this book appear here in revised form from their previous publication. Chapter 1 appeared in Chiasmi International Vol. 5 (2003). It originated as an invited paper at the American Philosophical Association, which was the catalyst for the project. Chapter 2 appeared in Research in Phenomenology, Vol. 34 (2004). Chapter 3 appeared in Pol Vandevelde ed., Issues in Interpretation Theory (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2006). Chapter 4 appeared in the Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 60, no. 2 (December 2006). I thank all the editors—not only of these initial versions but also those in the final Stanford version, including Norris Pope, Emily-Jane Cohen, Tom Finnegan, and Mariana Raykov. I also thank Heidi Frautschi and the staff of the Klee Foundation for their help.

ix

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts

Works by Theodor W. Adorno

AT Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)



DE Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (with Max Horkheimer), trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002)



Meta Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000)



ND Negative Dialectics, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)

Works by Georges Bataille

AM The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, trans. Michael Richardson (New York: Verson, 1994) BatNiet On Nietzsche, trans. Bruce Boone (New York: Paragon House, 1992) IE Inner Experience, trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988)

Works by Walter Benjamin

AP The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland, Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999) xi

xii  Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts



B Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Verso, 1983)



IL Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969)



T The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: New Left Books, 1977)

Works by Maurice Blanchot

BR The Blanchot Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell’s, 1995) GO The Gaze of Orpheus, trans. Lydia Davis (Tarrytown, N.Y.: Station Hill Press, 1981)



IC The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992)



WF The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995)

Works by Gilles Deleuze

AO Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977)



DR Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)



F The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)



FB Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003)



KCP Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts  xiii



LS The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)



Neg Negotiations, 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joghin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995)



NP Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983)



PI Pure Immanence, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001) S Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1990) TP A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massummi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987) WP What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson, Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994)

Works by Jacques Derrida

FK “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)



G Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976)



MB Memoirs of the Blind: The Self Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Nass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)



R Resistances: Of Psychoanalysis, trans. Peggy Kamuf, PascaleAnne Brault, Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)



SP Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays of Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973)



TIP The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington, Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

xiv  Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts





US “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, ed. Jacques Derrida, Paule Thevenin, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998) WD Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978)

Works by Michel Foucault

AME Aesthetics, Methodology, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Heard (New York: New Press, 1997)



LCP Language, Counter Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard, Sherry Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977)



OT The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon, 1970)



TNP This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983)

Works by Hans-Georg Gadamer

EPH On Education, Poetry, and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld, Graeme Nicholson (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992)



PH Philosophical Hermeneutics, trans. and ed. David E. Linge (Berkeley: California University Press, 1976)



RAS Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981)



RB The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986)

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts  xv



TM Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., rev. trans. Joel Weinsheimer, Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1990)

Works by Martin Heidegger

AS “Art and Space,” trans Charles H. Seibert, Man and World, Vol. 6, 1973, pp. 3–8



B Contributions to Philosophy (from Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad, Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999)



BP The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)



BT Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie, John Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962)



DT Discourse on Thinking: A Translation of Gelassenheit, trans. John Anderson, E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper & Row, 1966)







FCM The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. William McNeill, Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) H “The Theory of Categories and Meaning in Duns Scotus,” trans. Roderick M. Stuart, John van Buren, in Martin Heidegger, Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002) HCT History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985)



KN “Die nachgelassenen Klee-Notizen (Zusammengestellt von Günter Seubold),” Heidegger Studies, Vol. 9, 1993, 5–14



KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)



M Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad, Thomas Kalary (New York: Continuum, 2006)

xvi  Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts



MFL The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)

N I, II, III Nietzsche, translated into English in four volumes (of which three are cited in this book). Vol. 1: The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979). Vol. 2: The Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984). Vol. 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). Vol. 4: Nihilism, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982)

OWA “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)



Par Parmenides, trans. Andre Schuwer, Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992)



PIA Phenomenological Interpretations of Aristotle, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001)



PLT Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971)



PR The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991)



PT The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart, John C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976)



QCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Levitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)

Schelling Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985)

Soph Plato’s Sophist, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)



TB On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972)



WCT What Is Called Thinking? Fred D. Wieck, J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968)

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts  xvii

Written Works by Paul Klee

D The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918, trans. Pierre B. Schneider, R.Y. Zachary, Max Knight (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964)



N Notebooks, Vol. I, The Thinking Eye, trans. Ralph Manheim (London: Lund Humphries, 1978); Vol. II, The Nature of Nature, trans. Heinz Norden (London: Land Humphries, 1978).

Works by Jean-François Lyotard

ADev “Adorno as the Devil,” Telos, Vol. 19, 1994 ASA “The Psychoanalytic Approach,” in Main Trends in Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art, ed. Mikel Dufrenne (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1979)



DF Discours, Figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971)



DP Des dispositifs pulsionnel (Paris: Union Générale d’éditions, 1973)



Drift Driftworks, ed. Roger McKeon (New York: Semiotext(e), 1984)



HJ Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel, Mark S. Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)



LE Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993)



LR The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989)



MP Misère de la philosophie (Paris: Galilee, 2000)



Notes “Notes on the Return of Capital,” Semiotext(e), Vol. 3, No. 1, 1978 PE “A la Place de l’Homme, l’Expression,” Esprit, July–August 1969

xviii  Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts

Works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

AD Adventures of the Dialectic, trans. Joseph Bien (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973)



EM “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964)



HLP Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor, Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002)



IP L’Institution. La Passivité. Notes de cours au Collège de France (1954–1955), ed. Dominique Darmaillacq, Claude Lefort, Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Éditions Belin, 2003)



IPP In Praise of Philosophy, trans. John Wild, James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1965)



Nat Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003)



NC Notes de cours 1959–1961 et 1960–1961, ed. Stéphanie Ménasé (Paris: Gallimard, 1996)



PhP Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith rev. by Forrest Williams (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962)



PW The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973)



S Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964)



SNS Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus, Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964)



Themes Themes from the Lectures at the College de France, 1952–1960, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970)



VI The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968)

Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Texts  xix



WP The World of Perception, trans. Oliver Davis (London: Routledge, 2004)

Works by Jean-Paul Sartre

BN Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966)



EH “Existentialism,” in Existentialism and Human Emotions, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957)



Mal Mallarmé, or, The Poet of Nothingness, trans. Ernest Sturm (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988)



NE Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992)



NM “Un Nouveau Mystique,” Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947)



PI The Psychology of Imagination, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Washington Square Press, 1968)



TE Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams, Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1971)



WL What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1978)

Others

P Heinrich Weigand Petzet, Encounters and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad, Kenneth Maly (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)

Crescent Moon over the Rational

Figure 1  Constructive-Impressive (Constructiv-impressiv), Paul Klee, 1927, 32. Oil on cardboard; original frame 58 x 44 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Introduction Interpreting Klee: Fusing the Architectonic and the Poetic Philosophy, so they say, has a taste for art; at the beginning I was amazed at how much they saw. For I had only been thinking about form, the rest of it followed by itself. . . . [But] the formal has to fuse [muss verschmelzen] with the Weltanschauung. Paul Klee (D: 374) Do not define today, define backward and forwards, spatial and many-sided. A defined today is over and done for. Klee (N: 59)

The empowering experiencing of living experience that takes itself along is the understanding intuition, the hermeneutical intuition, the originary phenomenological back-and-forth formation of the recepts and percepts from which all theoretical objectification, indeed every transcendent positing, falls out. . . . Life is historical. Martin Heidegger1 There are, in the flesh of contingency, a structure of the event and a virtue peculiar to the scenario. These do not prevent the plurality of interpretations but in fact are the deepest reasons for this plurality. They make the event into a durable theme of historical life and have a right [droit] to philosophical status. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (EM: 179)

Paul Klee wrote in a 1902 diary entry, “Now, my immediate and at the same time highest goal will be to bring the architectonic and poetic painting into a fusion or at least to establish a harmony between them” (D: 125). If, as he put it elsewhere, “art plays in the dark with ultimate things and yet it reaches them,” rarely did the results of this synthesis of 1

2  Introduction

the architectonic and the poetic achieve such brilliance. No painter of his time achieved such results more eloquently or provocatively and always by means of what he himself termed the experiments of “cool Romanticism” and his attempts to work his way out of the “ruins” of tradition (D: 314). The works and writings of Paul Klee have been unique among painters of the twentieth century for the scholarly and critical scrutiny they have sustained by critics and philosophers alike. His theoretical interlocutors read like a litany of twentieth-century aesthetics itself: figures as diverse as Heidegger, Adorno, Gadamer, Benjamin, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Klossowski. All of these thinkers privileged his “constructive-impressive” venture in their analyses of art and philosophy; in some cases, they constructed their own philosophy on its basis (Figure I-1). Thus, ascertaining Klee’s influence on these thinkers is not only a historical matter but also a philosophically significant task. Indeed, the sequence of these philosophers’ interpretations of Klee reads like the descent of twentieth-century philosophy itself. In the same way, critics’ readings of Klee’s work reflect the history and permutations of modern criticism. While commentators have focused on Klee’s art, little attention has been paid to their common interpretive project, the relationships between them, the differences constituted in their midst, and the philosophical implications of the enterprise that is divided between them. Insisting on such differences has led often enough instead to skepticism and claims of textual incommensurability. Where in this multiplicity of interpretive standpoints would the facts lie? What could be more problematic than to enter into this plurality, to insist on several paths into a history in which they ultimately diverge? Still, intertwined in the plurality of these theoretical positions is something of the history or tradition they articulate, not simply in their texts but precisely in the event and the scenario of interpretation itself, truly a theatrum philosophicum.2 We are reminded that the history at stake here involves not only the tradition of Klee interpretation and criticism but also the contested issues of twentieth-century philosophy, in both cases internally divided. Martin Heidegger read Klee to be thinking something similar to his Denkweg. In 1954 Will Grohmann, Klee’s friend and interpreter, agreed, claiming that Klee’s 1923 Wege des Naturstudiums, a Bauhaus book chartering a pathway beyond the optical, had articulated the “quartering” of artist and object, earth and cosmos “long before Heidegger.”3 Had Klee

Interpreting Klee  3

attempted this, and was it the same? Heidegger recognized the importance of Klee; he reportedly stated in 1959 that “in Klee something has happened that none of us grasps as yet” (P: 150). But Heidegger continually invoked the limitations of abstract or technological art. He would not be alone in this condemnation. On the other hand, no less a Klee historian than Otto Werckmeister claimed that Walter Benjamin was close to Klee’s account of abstraction in associating his own understanding of the tragedy of messianic history with Klee’s 1920 watercolor Angelus Novus; indeed, “Benjamin was able to gather Klee’s fundamental idea solely from his picture, as he related the picture to his own thinking.”4 As these names and dates attest, at stake is not simply a metahistory theoretically constructed but, between them, history itself. In their plurality they articulate and differentiate the events of their mutual history. It is this history, the history that conjoins philosophy to its time in a mise-en-scène that often belies it, that conjoins thinkers too often distinguished. Historically this is true of both common and violent examples, as is testified by such notorious agonistics as those, for example, dividing Husserl and Natorp, or Heidegger and Carnap—or more recently, Derrida and Searle. In the case of Klee’s interpreters, there are sufficient issues ciphering differences between thinkers less remote: the differences, for example, between the interpretations of phenomenologists and critical theorists, existentialists and surrealists, hermeneuts and poststructuralists, neo-Marxists and neo-Thomists. In Klee’s case, this plurality reflects less the failure of transcendental necessities than the force of circumstance, the simple empirical facts. Indeed, Klee’s interpreters emerge from all of these positions and more. Perhaps no painter of the twentieth century provoked such a plurality of voices (“entrietiens,” to invoke Blanchot’s term) or revealed such perspective multiplicity. Moreover, Klee himself belongs here; in seeking a fusion between the architectonic and the poetic, he looked to philosophy itself when attempting to transcend the formal. Not only was his self-interpretation up to his interrogators’, arguably emerging from and transforming the same aesthetic archive in classical German thought, but these thinkers themselves heavily relied on its transformation in Klee’s own writings.5 Whatever else one wants to say about the relation between philosophy and painting, Klee’s work reminds us that philosophers and painters, knowingly or not, do not lead separate lives. Historians and philosophers, artists and critics find themselves sharing a similar lot, their mutual expertise always at risk.

4  Introduction

As a result, no one-sided adjudicative perspective will suffice. The hope for a successor theory that might unite or reject all these competitive positions in revealing the meaning of Klee’s work is internally undone: granted the differences out of which such claims would emerge, which might be held to definitively survive the agon of refutation unscathed? The hope for simple rational analysis or resolution seems to have waned. Against this there seems to be only the melancholia of withdrawal, to cite the title of a 1925 work by Klee, a Crescent Moon over the Rational (see the cover of this book). Here the constructivist requisites of the Bauhaus are employed to articulate their own incompleteness, limit, and finitude, once again a synthesis of the poetic and the architectonic that complicates interpretation whenever it arises.6 Such complications have led many to abandon the task of interpretation for the high ground of pragmatic or received professional wisdom or disciplinary standards.7 Such reductions seem equally implausible however—and in any case not simply a matter of pragmatics. Here too, observations remain theory-laden. The leading critics are evidence that the separation of the critical historical and the philosophical task is mythical. Even were we to limit the argument to formal standards (or, to speak the language of neo-Kantianism on which it relies, the “form” of received knowledge), the results would remain tautological and leave the question of interpretation begging.8 The interpretive protocols of thinkers no less contested than Heideg­ ger and Benjamin have already intervened against such attempts to purify or professionalize the standards or form of knowledge. There would be others. Gadamer would argue for the renewal of the classical aesthetic tradition in Klee’s work, while Adorno would find in it evidence for the neo-Marxist criticism of modernity. Sartre, on the other had, aligning Klee with the surrealism Klee influenced, would see in his work the failure of artistic modernity to engage its own history. Merleau-Ponty would invoke the complicated relation between the poetic and the architectonic in Klee’s work as a model for enriching the phenomenology and the imaginary symbolics of embodied experience. Deleuze instead invokes Klee’s ironies to contest such self-sufficient “organics,” while Lyotard focused on what he called the figure-matrix in Klee’s work, whose exhibitions of the unconscious contested the imaginary symbolics of Phenomenology’s lingering Romanticism. And Foucault invoked Klee’s work to contest the similitudes of classical resemblance in general.

Interpreting Klee  5

The list obviously could be extended. Heidegger apparently found Klee’s writing too neo-Kantian. If neo-Kantians or positivists themselves seemed too disconnected from “particularism” to be concerned with a painter such as Klee, even these found effect in such critics as Herbert Read and Clement Greenberg. Read, on the one hand, emphasizing Klee’s formalism, compared Klee’s writings to Newton’s accomplishments in physics and referred to them as the Principia Aesthetica of a new era.9 On the other hand, if Greenberg famously understood modern painting through the tenets of purity, abstraction, and the scientific, he claimed that one has to bring in “the history of German idealist philosophy . . . in order to account for him. Multum in parvo: Klee is a beautiful example to refute those who talk about modern art’s poverty of content.”10 As will become evident, Klee refused to choose between form and content, the architectonic and the poetic. As a result, it is astounding how so many figures, with so many theoretical protocols and agenda, would invoke Klee on their behalf. In the specter of contemporary debates, the interpretation of Klee’s work thus must embrace both this plurality and the concrete, denying the antinomies of form and content, universal and particularism outright. Such antinomies miss the complexity of the problem raised by the interpretation of the works of art. Among other things, some will argue, this overlooks the significance of the materiality or sensuousness on which it relies. The problem of the sensuous cannot be mistaken for the instantiation of a concept, token of some type; classically understood, the link between the mimetic and the sensuous remains more complex, overdetermined not only by history and concept but by power and desire. The problem inherent in art’s sensuality thus cannot be divorced from all that remains unsayable in such rationalist reductions, nor from the violence that seemed to accompany them. This was Klee’s explicit understanding of abstraction, linking it (as had Worringer before him) to the “ruins” of history: “The more horrible this world (as today, for instance), the more abstract our art” (D: 313). The task of interpreting Klee thus relies, as did many of the these figures for whom Klee became so significant, on the difference and the virtue of the particular.11 Beyond the antinomies of the universal and the particular or form and content, this task relies on the particular not in order to derive what the former account seeks, namely decidability and objectivity, to the extent that we can have it. Moreover, it does not deny that the concrete is

6  Introduction

contestable and underdetermined, that is, multiple, as these interpretations bear witness. Nor, finally, should such appeals to the concrete be confused with the myth of the given, to immediacy—or even Phenomenology’s die Sache selbst. Doubtless the phenomenology of lived experience, however necessary for understanding the art work, involves an appeal to the concrete. The contrast is that not only are such matters not intuited but interpreted; they are multiple and historically divergent and constructed. But what does this entail? Undertaking an analysis of Klee’s work in isolation becomes as futile as attempting to find a successor theory or final interpretation. To read Klee only through Benjamin, or only through Heidegger, or Adorno or any one perspective, would be insufficient. As Wittgenstein famously put it, “interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning.”12 Thinking so ignores the multiplicity out of which each author writes; thoughts encroach on one another, contest one another, and respond to one another, knowingly or not. In this encroachment they echo or refute, extend and deepen each other, adding new insight and challenge to one another’s viewpoints. Like any linguistic expression, such encroachments in this way link them to meanings beyond their initial context, even beyond their initial natural language or cognitive grasp. In this respect, the particular and the concrete are never isolated, nor given independently or unconditionally, an abstractum. The particular is never particular simpliciter— even when the universal is problematic. To isolate figures, to subsume Klee beneath the unity of an oeuvre, is no less mythic than to isolate facts. With Klee’s musicological tropes in mind, granted his denial of painting as a spatial art, the task at stake involves less the construction of a timeless propositional space than the articulation of the history and the multiplicity constituted in these figure’s “interludes.”13 This is not to claim that such a history is devoid of formal implication. Thinkers from Husserl to Badiou have insisted that such multiplicity becomes a formal or structural matter. As will become further evident, humanists’ models of dialogue consequently would be as incapable of capturing this structural difference as scientists’ models of reduction or explanation.14 Both realms dodge the problem of the plural as well as its adjudication. Instead, it would be necessary to articulate a concrete and structural plurality originating in the very diversity and contestability itself. To use Klee’s language, rather than simply isolatable individuals, we will need to articulate such a multiplicity through the tension (Span-

Interpreting Klee  7

nung) of its “dividuals” (N: 239).15 In doing so, to return to a term of Klee’s Romantic predecessors, we will confront the Wechsel or series of exchanges that Klee’s work outlines in its interpreters, one to which it is not only (legitimately) susceptible but also uniquely sustains.16 In this regard, Klee’s work exemplifies what Merleau-Ponty, following Kant’s account of aesthetic experience (provoking thought without culminating in a final determination), sought to justify.17 As for the history of art works, if they are great, the sense we give to them later on has issued from them. It is the work itself that has opened the field from which it appears in another light. It changes itself and becomes what follows; the interminable reinterpretations to which it is legitimately susceptible change it only in itself. And if the historian unearths beneath its manifest content the surplus and thickness of meaning, the texture which held the promise of a long history, this active manner of being, then, this possibility he unveils in the work, this monogram he finds there— all are grounds for a philosophical meditation. (EM: 179)

Such assertions wax metaphysical. Still, what Adorno aptly calls the hieroglyphic character of Klee’s work, one he in turn generalized to characterize all works of art, justifies at least an instance for such characterization, the multiplicity it entails and the history that opens and develops through it (AT: 124). The Wechsel such a development presupposes was never very far from the interpretive renderings (and the problem of reading itself ) in many of Klee’s interpreters. Arguably, their various claims concerning the interpretation of Klee’s art continuously depended on it. The remnants of this Wechsel can be seen in claims such as that regarding the circularity of intuition and concept, or the forehaving (Vorhabe) of tradition and its reinterpretation. But it can perhaps still be found more remotely in discussion of Klee’s art in the issues of the withdrawal and particularity of the sensuous in relation to the abstractions of instrumental rationality in Heidegger or Adorno, or the “oscillation” that Lyotard claimed takes place in Klee’s work between the primary processes of the unconscious and their artistic exhibition. The figuration and decipherment of such contextual interdeterminations is a task that is critical both to art and philosophy. This book thus approaches its task within a certain polyvalence of both figures and levels; the texture of its subject matter is thus structured and divided between the history of concepts and facts. There is the task of interpreting Klee himself. There is the task of differentiating the diversity of voices, or “polylogue,” to use Julia Kristeva’s term, in which Klee’s

8  Introduction

works became intelligible. Finally, there is the very problem of interpretation, which subtends and outlines the task of adjudication. None of these take place in analytic isolation. It emerges less, as is standardly thought, as a matter of the analysis of problems and figures than as a different history, an operative history that emerges in and through figures as historical as Klee himself. Logically, it means we can no more rest easily with the history of ideas than we can with the factual history of painting or thinking. While we do not, for example, usually think of figures such as Adorno and Merleau-Ponty together, we discover after reading their mutual analyses of Klee that we should. The same is true of thinkers equally thought to be distinct: Gadamer and Benjamin, Heidegger and Deleuze, or Sartre and Bataille. Such considerations reveal a general phenomenon concerning the difference between the rationality of our ideas and the history of ideas; our philosophical attempts to carve up the history of twentieth-century philosophy by figures, schools, and nations or continents makes for stable but incomplete history. Klee’s various interpreters reveal that too. Their mutual works do not reveal the simple facts and categories of historical analyses but (again to cite Merleau-Ponty’s terms) outline an encounter and a relationship of “thicker” identity. Clarifying or adjudicating the differences at stake requires, to use Klee’s own terms, precisely the interplay of the poetic and the architectonic. And perhaps we would do well to let the problem that Klee’s work itself opens sustain us here too.

Figure 2  Park near Lu(cerne) (Park bei Lu[zern]), Paul Klee, 1938, 129. Oil and colored paste on paper on burlap; original frame 100 x 70 cm. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

1 On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Paul Klee In paintings themselves we could seek a figured philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (EM: 168) In recent aesthetic debates, especially in the fine arts, the concept of écriture has become relevant, inspired probably by Klee’s drawings, which approximate scrawled writing. Like a searchlight, this category of modern art illuminates the art of the past; all artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Theodor Adorno (AT: 124)

In one of his culminating writings ,

Time and Being, Martin Heidegger referred to two of Klee’s final works, Saint, from a Window (1940 56, in Klee’s own catalogue numbering—work number 56 of 1940) and Death and Fire (seen at the opening of Chapter 4 of this book). Standing before them, he said, we “should abandon any claim that they be immediately intelligible” (TB: 1). He immediately adds we would no more demand that they be intelligible than we would of the theoretical physics of Werner Heisenberg. No more than these complex works, we should not expect Heidegger’s to be immediately accessible, nor to provide worldly wisdom, nor even a way to the blessed life. Heidegger did not pick these two figures (as well as the poetry of Trakl) accidentally. Though he published little on either Klee or Heisenberg, it is clear that Heidegger was preoccupied with the works of both and their relation to his own thought for a number of years. Indeed, he had contact with Heisenberg in the composition of The Question Concerning Technology, and his interest in Klee was strong enough that he may well have considered a new version of “The Origin of the Work of Art” centered on Klee’s work.1 That Heidegger joined the issues of contemporary science and painting in his itinerary beyond phenomenology and metaphysics, attempting 11

12  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

thereby to think beyond technology, was not unique to his thought. That Klee came to the forefront in these endeavors may not be accidental either. Klee’s importance was more than a promissory note for many other major thinkers in the mid-twentieth century in their attempts to grasp the importance of artistic modernism. I begin to examine this confluence in the works of Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, two thinkers not usually so conjoined. As shall become apparent, the interpretation of Klee’s work will call such distinctions into question. We can provisionally suggest reasons for being suspicious of thinking them distinct. Both undertook radical revision or criticism of the classical phenomenological research program and did so by explicitly connecting Husserl’s and Heidegger’s work. While Heidegger attempted strictly to distinguish his own Denken from the metaphysical tendencies of Husserlian egology, at the end of his life he still defended the phenomenological account of rational motivation and its explication of experience against reductivist causal accounts. This is crucial in accounting for the nondiscursive and indemonstrable character of art, factors to which both Adorno and Merleau-Ponty appeal in their accounts. Merleau-Ponty attempted a certain revisionist synthesis of Husserl’s and Heidegger’s work, explicitly from the outset of his Phenomenology of Perception. Recently published manuscripts reveal anew the effect of this ongoing synthesis. Adorno, on the other hand, wrote steadily on Husserl over the course of four decades, beginning with his doctorate in 1924 and culminating with his book on Husserl, a work he described, next to Negative Dialectics, as his most important.2 Throughout his work it is clear that Heidegger and Husserl are being thought of (and criticized) together. Merleau-Ponty, initially seemingly a fellow traveler of Husserl, ultimately distanced himself in passing once more through the later work of Heidegger. Both Adorno and Merleau-Ponty criticize the lack of historical reflection in Husserl’s program on the basis of the dialectical critique that Adorno traced at least as far back as Fichte (AT: 343). In accord with an attempt to elaborate the inseparability of the conceptual and aconceptual that had accompanied the itinerary of Phenomenology since its origins in classical German thought, both argued for an account of interpretation that involved the mutual envelopment of imagination and thought, a movement that amounted to less a simple return to lived experience (Erlebnis) than its development (Erfahrung; AT: 346). If there were essences (and this if was, in many respects, a strong one for both), they would be less scientifically in-

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  13

tuited than conceptually elaborated; as Merleau-Ponty put it, they would need to be “read” (IPP: 19; PhP: 108). The question will be what separates them in this step beyond the Idealism of the past. Both Adorno and Merleau-Ponty privileged the aesthetic (via the work of Klee), but both criticized the account of instrumental or operational rationality that has precluded our grasping the truths of the aesthetic dimension. Notwithstanding standard interpretations of these authors that would divide them by language, tradition, and culture and construe them philosophically to represent different schools, we need to think of them as belonging to a much closer “constellation,” to use Benjamin’s term. Their mutual accounts enable us to say something not only about the lingering status of phenomenological discourse but about its links with modernity, or aesthetic modernity and the problem of the work of art. In this we can witness the very issue of traditionality reconstituted in their midst, or perhaps between them. Adorno put the point directly in these terms: the critical question Kant omitted is how a thinking “obliged to relinquish tradition might preserve and transform tradition” (ND: 54–5); Merleau-Ponty claimed, even somewhat more ironically, that “establishing a tradition means forgetting its origins” (S: 159). In both cases the irony betrayed a complicated relation to German Romanticism. The German Romantics, perhaps especially after the Schlegels, found the concept of the Beautiful both problematic and everywhere “mannered.” This is the chief instance of the fragmentation of their complicated postenlightenment status: both “believing in tradition and always straining at new insanities.”3 Klee would not be far removed from this. Praising Kandinsky early on (1912), Klee stated, “The currents of yesterday’s tradition are really becoming lost in the sand . . . and I hail those who are working toward the impending reformation” (D: 266). What is divided between them is less the differences of external perspectives than a rendering of the truth of the aesthetic, and, ultimately, what it implies for the truths of philosophy. In this regard, Adorno was clear that even the most archaic of philosophemes concerning art, the concept of the Beautiful itself, should not be discarded, dispensed with altogether, or “placed on the Index”— even if, for both political and historical reasons, he placed it in abeyance (AT: 50).4 For Adorno, this brings us closer to the account of the sublime, in which Kant anticipates the spiritualization and the emancipatory task latent in the artwork (AT: 92). While readers of Merleau-Ponty would

14  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

search in vain for an overriding application of the concept of the Beautiful, this does not mean that he simply emphasized the sublime. His whole enterprise is summed up by reference to primordial, embodied intentional experience, the unity of imagination, and the understanding “before the object” and prior to conceptual subsumption as modeled on the account, in Kant’s third Critique, of reflective judgment of art (PhP: xvii).5 Kant’s retrieval of the symbolics of the Beautiful always hovers near Phenomenology of Perception’s attempts to articulate a new transcendental aesthetic. Husserl’s account of operative intentionality, on which this book further relies, is said to “take up again the Critique of Judgment” and is criticized when Husserl returned to a constitutive or analytic reflection for its basis (PhP: xvii, 243n). While the importance of artistic expression for grasping prereflective experience nascently accompanied all of his work, in the late period it became paradigmatic, and Klee a paradigm of its paradigm. Merleau-Ponty later attempted to articulate this new transcendental aesthetic by turning back to Schelling and classical German thought—as did Adorno and Klee in different ways. He argued specifically against Malraux’s view—invoking Klee (and Cézanne)—that “because painting is no longer for faith or Beauty, it is for the individual” (S: 51). It will involve, instead, a matter of figuring transcendence otherwise. The Beautiful, as construed in terms of a classical theory of aesthetics, became for both of these thinkers, to use Adorno’s term, “sterile.” As Klee put it, the modulations of Beauty and Ugliness are relative terms, like dark and light.6 The Beautiful cannot simply be identified with pleasure, or the Good, with Truth or with Being, all “the topical preferences of philistine culture” (AT: 93). Even construed philosophically, this equation violates historically and logically the (analogical) differential of the transcendentals that it latently evokes. This reduction denies the Beautiful any relation with nonbeing, with what, against the metaphysics of representation and truth, by a certain radiance (ekphanestaton), cannot be presented. It equally denies in pain (or death) the truth that is the ugly, the falsity of illusion and the event in which, to use Adorno’s terms, the radiance has turned dark (AT: 50). None of these thinkers could rest easily with this. To use the terms of Nietzsche that so struck Heidegger, there remains a “raging discordance” between Truth and the Beautiful (N I: 142f). Still, the oppositions are fragile and require further analysis. If Heidegger denied to Beauty the transcendence of form, he did not deny its earthly character, even if he gave few indications of its material event.

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  15

He did not, as explicitly as Adorno, see metaphysics “slip into material existence” (Meta: 117). Nor did he meditate on the idea of transcendence as a matter of sensuousness as emphatically as Merleau-Ponty (VI: 219). Adorno’s infamous attempt to preclude speculative philosophy, “After Auschwitz,” itself modeled on the Kantian imperative, belongs here too: “The true basis of morality is to be found in bodily feeling,” that is, “the moment of aversion to the inflicting of physical pain on what Brecht once called the torturable body” (Meta: 116). If this is not to say that philosophy returns to the flesh, as did Merleau-Ponty at the end of his career, it surely cannot be claimed to be far from it. While Adorno may not have been as critical of Merleau-Ponty as he was of Heidegger “abstractions,” he surely would not at first glance have found there the materialist account of art he himself sought—even if, it could be argued, the two thinkers’ politics were closer than might appear prima facie. The question is whether such differences are critical—whether such emphases and lacunae are ultimate, speak to a certain denial, or are, to use Foucault’s terms, matters of “local intervention” on particular theoretical issues.7 Provisionally, it might be said that at issue here is less the restoration of an old philosopheme and more the articulation of the event at stake within it. The invocation of the Beautiful and the invocation of its imperative exposes an old modern philosopheme that is continually mined by (and doubtless in turn undermines) much of contemporary aesthetics: the figure of transcendental imagination. Following the surrealists, the existentialists, beginning with Sartre’s book on the imagination (L’Imaginaire), devoted a good deal of research to this issue.8 MerleauPonty similarly focused on the imagination, though always distancing himself from Sartre’s more dualist, Cartesian view. From Phenomenology of Perception onward, Merleau-Ponty specifically attempted to articulate transcendental experience through its bodily incorporation, the body as schematism (PhP: 326f). In “Eye and Mind,” the published text in which Klee figures so prominently, Merleau-Ponty articulates the problem of painting as “a figured philosophy,” the expression of a continuous birth and a “primordial historicity” that is found at the heart of the visible (EM: 168, 161). While the appeal to such an origin, along with the question of the transcendental it carries with it, may still smack of the ancient transcendentals of metaphysics, Merleau-Ponty is strict; after the purge of modern science, “nothing is left of the oneiric world of analogy” (EM: 171). Was there anything left to say of transcendence at all?

16  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

What Adorno saw in the transcendental imagination may be more complex; like Merleau-Ponty with respect to the Beautiful, he almost never invokes the term. This demurral might go hand-in-hand with his criticism of Heidegger, who, following the post-Kantians, elevated transcendental imagination in their speculative venture, what Hegel called the speculative faculty par excellence.9 Adorno’s attempt to materialize the Beautiful, as well as his account of imagination and interpretation, circulates through its archive. It is here the crucial role of imagination combines finitude and history, reason and unreason. Critically, Adorno and Horkheimer, in their analysis of the culture industry, spoke of the “withering of imagination” within “the schema of mechanical reproducibility” (DE: 100). Not without irony, they claimed that in this schema the secret mechanism of the Kantian schematism “has now been unraveled” (DE: 98). Adorno claimed this meant that the “transcendental moment” could no longer be tied to a “point-like subjectivity” but was linked to traditionality. That is, tradition itself is “what Kant called ‘the mechanism hidden in the depths of the soul,’ ” giving rise to a renewal of the critical question (ND: 54–5). Art here becomes exemplary as an event of fragmented or fractured transcendence (AT: 126). It is perhaps not accidental that Klee forms an interstice for these thinkers and the issues that unite them. His work unites the collisions and transitions between aesthetic modernity and its past; he remained, from very early on, one of its most thoughtful theoreticians. Like many philosophers, in his accounts Klee directly provides protocols for much in ­Merleau-Ponty’s own interpretations, interpretations aimed at articulating both works of art and more broadly the world from which they emerge. This double strategy was not a new one. It accompanied Merleau-Ponty’s work almost from the outset and was essential to the resulting conceptual accounts. Arguably, Cézanne provided the schemata for the attempt by Phenomenology of Perception to articulate the inextricably concrete essences of the perceived world and its irreducible “physiognomy of things,” attempting to present a phenomenology of concrete appearance (PhP: 322). In his later works, he extended this account to grasp precisely what, beyond the phenomenal image, is more original in its adherence to what remains invisible: the unpresentable at the heart of appearance (VI: 249). It would involve less, that is, a simple disclosure of the physiognomy of concrete appearance rather than an articulation of the event of its emergence, the intertwining of the visible and the invisible.10 Correlatively, Merleau-Ponty increasingly questioned the op-

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  17

position of percept and image of the classical phenomenological account (defended by Sartre). Instead, he began to envision a figurative or productive event anterior to both, outlining the Wechsel or reversibility between the visible and the invisible. For Klee, abstraction was a requirement imposed on the process of creating a work; for Merleau-Ponty, this productive figuration was increasingly viewed as original to our (epistemic) adherence to the world—and Klee was one of its models.11 “Art,” as Klee famously put it, “does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible” (N: 76). From the outset, Klee, like his Bauhaus colleague Kandinsky, linked modernism to the spiritual.12 He still remained proximate to Cézanne’s Romanticism, at a remove from Impressionism. Yet Klee understood the task of art to require a change in optics; it would be less an optics of outer appearance than an optics of “inner being” (N: 66f). He construed the spiritual in art by means of a more cosmological articulation. In the 1923 Bauhaus book Wege des Naturstudiums, Klee sketched—as Grohmann noted, “long before” Heidegger’s account of the fourfold in “The Origin of the Work of Art”—a “quartering [Geviert] of artist and object, earth and cosmos.”13 Grohmann’s work was a decisive source for Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Klee. While Merleau-Ponty would later use Heidegger to understand Klee (and vice versa), Grohmann himself claimed that Klee remained closer to Novalis than to Heidegger.14 As will become further evident, recent scholarship has called these oppositions into question. For now, it suffices to stress, with Grohmann, Klee’s insistence on the artist’s connection with Nature: “The artist is man, nature himself and a piece of nature” and the artist’s hand emerges out of originary chaos, beyond the limits of representation (N: 66f). If painting concerns the inner being (“reality” and not merely the visible, as he puts it), it is not then merely a matter of expressivism. Even if painting were divorced from the traditional optic of perspective, Klee’s Notebooks detail the emergence of painterly significance originating from its formal elements: dot, line, plane, and space. Rather than simply being Platonic forms or mathematical projections, these elements, Klee claimed, are “inevitably charged with energy of various shapes.” These “graphic elements are constituent parts” of every picture, but “this does not mean, however, that a picture must consist of nothing but ‘elements.’ Rather the elements must produce shapes. . . . And they do so because of their intrinsic energies.” What Klee claimed is that far from being frozen or simply spatial, far from being simply a representative tabula rasa, the “picture”

18  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

is all energy and movement. It is precisely this inherent movement that makes it figurative, giving the graphic line “the schematic fairy-tale quality of the imaginary” (N: 76). Hence originates Klee’s objections against the classical view of Lessing (and Hegel, we should add) that painting is a spatial and not a temporal art (N: 78). This view reduces painting to a matrix of dots rather than Klee’s conception by which it emerges, like nature itself, everywhere as movement and as genesis, the articulation of an inner realm antecedent to spatial stasis, an interplay of rhythms (N: 169). We can note, provisionally, in turn, that this further links Klee’s art less to form (pure architectonics) than to music. Merleau-Ponty found the event of figuration and the legacy of the faculty of synthesis in modern philosophy, productive imagination, famously formulated in Kant’s first Critique here. Transcendental imagination synthesized the manifold of inner or outer sense, making their contents, to invoke terms that Heidegger emphasizes, “fit to be joined” into concepts.15 Apart from it, human intellection has no relation to content; the spontaneity of imagination, its “originality (as distinguished from imitative production”) involved an exhibitia originaria.16 How Klee belongs here and how he transforms it becomes apparent against the backdrop of the classical doctrine. In a famous passage Kant states: We cannot think a line without drawing it in thought, or a circle without describing it. We cannot represent the three dimensions of space save by setting three lines at right angles to one another from the same point. Even time itself we cannot represent, save in so far as we attend, in the drawing of a straight line (which has to serve as the outer figurative representation of time), merely to the act of synthesis of the manifold whereby we successively determine inner sense, and in so doing attend to the succession of this determination in inner sense.17

Fichte, with the passage in mind, attempted to fill out the full implications of the self ’s action and idealization within it. In contemplation [Anschauung] reason (or the Ego) is the productive power of imagination. Through the seeing [Schauen], or contemplating, something is thrown out from the Ego, as it were, somewhat in the manner that the painter throws out from his eye the completed forms on the canvas (looks them [hinsiecht] so to speak on the canvas), before the slower hand can draw their outlines.18

Fichte understands the ego’s activity as a “line drawing” ultimately generating the appearances of space and time out of this ego as the painter

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  19

(again, thus conceived) generates the figures on the canvas by means of the “slower hand.” Klee’s account resonates with this archive in his search for the truths of inner reality and the truths of the cosmos. On the one hand, his thought remains a vestige of the archive of idealism. On the other hand, his rupture with respect to it is radical. In classical idealist aesthetics, from Kant to Hegel, the graphic line still functions as the sign of thought. It represents according to the requisites of knowledge. It is the application of a concept, subsumption, that models the account. In Kant, the drawing of the line enables thought to think the description of the circle in its representation, or drawing the figurative representation of time. The representation fills in a concept. In Fichte’s idealizing projection of this faculty of representation using the image of the line drawing, the world is first visualized and then projected into space and time by the slower hand, a tool of the transcendental Kosmostheoros. Klee understands this circuit otherwise. He agrees that “all figuration relates the general to the particular” and that for this “the imaginary is indispensable” (N: 71; 59). The graphic line, however, is truly an ­exhibitia originaria; rather than being restricted to the eye’s projective Schauen, the line is originary. In his “Creative Credo,” Klee states: “A certain fire flares up; it is conducted through the hand, flows to the picture and there bursts into a spark, closing the circle whence it came: back into the eye and further (back to one of the origins of movement, of volition, of idea)” (N: 78). It is often noted that Klee’s graphic line constituted a significant origin for his art and his aesthetics in general. It has then much to import. Understanding it requires a newer account of the artistic relationality than the idealist’s self-projection. Philosophically, we need a new account of the intentionality that it reveals, inter alia one without reflection as its foundation.19 To use Heidegger’s terms, “the gathering of the gesture” is not simply reducible to the functional role of a tool for the implementation of judgment—a mere matter of application.20 Greenberg emphasized how Klee “would begin drawing with no definite subject in mind, and let the line go of its own accord until it was captured by accidental resemblances; these would be improved upon, perhaps, and elaborated.” This process, he claimed, “recapitulates the primitive history of graphic art as it developed out of aimless scrawling into the depiction of recognizable images.”21 In it the transcendental is as much an event as an act, and perception is not

20  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

simply a reflective unification but also a field of experience in which it is imaginatively figured, explicated, expressed, or invented. Without denying reflective identity, we can say that reflection itself here is always a kind of return, always already, if you will an in-flection, a figuration rather than an immanent presence of the self. The imaginary is indispensable, not simply as a bridging principle but as both an originary and a figurative synthesis. The work of art, Klee states, “begins logically with chaos” and as such is an event before which “I often stand trembling and hesitant” (D: 176). To use Schelling’s term, anticipating surrealist accounts, the artwork then overtakes or “surprises” the artist, “brings an element of the unintended to that which was begun with consciousness and intention.”22 The concept (or conceptuality) has not been abandoned in all this. Clearly, Klee’s graphic line was influential in the dadaists’ rupture with the mimetic. His graphic line was seen by the surrealists as a form of automatic writing—even anticipating Pollock, Greenberg claimed.23 The manuscripts collected in Klee’s Notebooks are pedagogical instruments, but they also claimed to articulate “exact experiments in the realm of art” that would conceptually lay “the foundations for a science of art” (N: 70). Similarly, Merleau-Ponty sought in their explication “a secret science” (EM: 161). In both cases, we might worry about the reverse effects of positivism in such “scientific” claims. Alternately, we might wonder about the importance of Schelling lingering in the background, and the complicities between art and science, even the sublation of theory in art. Despite Greenberg’s claim that Klee’s drawing recapitulates the primitive history of graphic art, his modernism (and his Kantian commitments) may have betrayed him.24 The history Greenberg outlines remains Kantian, a history that proceeds from intuition to object recognition. Klee’s own scientific commitments were more nuanced and often confounded his commentators. As Werckmeister noted, even when Klee set out theoretically to “reconstitute the entire realm of painting from its simplest elements, both in its formal techniques and in its thematic range . . . the extreme reduction whereby he tried to accomplish this task appears as a critical, ironic distortion of the European grand tradition of painting as a universal visual science.”25 This issue comes to a head in Heidegger’s attempt to link Klee’s experimentalism to his critique of technological thinking. For now it is enough to note that, beyond construction, Klee claimed intuition and style, genius and imagination will be equally required. Klee refers elsewhere to the contrast between the static and the dynamic aspects

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  21

of the pictorial mechanism as a contrast between Classicism and Romanticism.26 The articulemes and practical strategies in Klee’s step beyond the formal might, in this regard, still be thought to retain the aura of Romanticism: longing after transcendence, a step beyond the mathematical, the irony and tension between opposites. Notwithstanding the mythemes of transcendence by which he construed the “higher realm,” he continued to insist: “we have found parts but not the whole” (N: 95). The resulting transitions between the poetic and the architectonic thus remain complicated. Despite its continuing Romantic aura, Klee’s task required the “cool Romanticism of abstraction”—a matter that, as shall be seen, Merleau-Ponty confronted in the formalism of Saussure’s linguistics (D: 313). Still, in introducing the term cool Romanticism, Klee insisted that this abstraction also belongs to our history, a history he described as “our tormented times”: “The more horrible this world (as today for instance), the more abstract our art” (N: 95). Merleau-Ponty did not fail to note this text (NC: 55). Abstraction (or construction) was a necessary moment in the attempt to exhibit inner being; it was invoked by the endless need to distance oneself from the impressionist immanence of the present, and in so doing, “to work my way out of my ruins” (D: 315). But this brings up a critical issue: if Klee identifies himself as a philosopher in these texts, how is philosophy, and in particular the language of philosophy, the “analog” of art (N: 92)? Klee realized, when considering the “inner being of things” and “the multidimensionality of appearance,” that seemingly “in language there is no way of seeing many dimensions at once” (N: 86). After all, what would a language be like for what is contained by no concept—or contained only qua multiplicity? Do we not encounter here the limits of the propositional frame, of what can be referentially fixed, and of what consequently can be said? In phrasing the issue in these terms, we are obviously solidly back into the mainstream of issues in twentieth-century philosophy. What would “a figured philosophy” look like, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term? Since his text on Klee is the last text Merleau-Ponty saw published, it might be replied that we don’t have his final words, but only preliminary indications of an unfinished project. His transformation of Klee’s “polyphonic” account into his attempt to reveal “a polymorphous Being, which justifies all without being fully expressed by any,” is in certain respects clear however (EM: 17). In it we can see that Merleau-Ponty is reading Klee through the most ancient of questions, the question of Being (“Being

22  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

is said in many ways”) and in proximity to his synthesis of Husserl and Heidegger. A certain retrieval is at hand, however, in just the ways noted above, that is, as fragmented; we have the parts but not the whole. Is there an analogue to the graphic line in philosophy, a use of language that, beyond all simple construction or formality, might still “muse” (EM: 183)? Here we might hear Hegel lingering; even his Science of Logic invokes the need for “a plastic discourse [that] demands a plastic receptivity and understanding on the part of the listened.”27 After Frege and Husserl it is difficult to believe that this speculative discourse could obey the conventions of truth. Sooner or later, even speculative discourse must have something to do with convention and norm, if assertibility is a possibility at all. His colleague, Jean Cavaillès, gave Merleau-Ponty reason to believe this “indefinite plasticity” was formally inherent to the rational.28 On the other hand, poetry cannot be its replacement, a form of Romanticism equally bankrupt for the rational task at hand. Here, too, our Romanticism must be cooler. Like the graphic line, this figured philosophy would not be the whole of philosophy. It maintains its links with construction and the laws of truth but is not reducible to it. Here the philosopher’s explications would exceed by means of a certain “symbolic rhythmics” that might not preclude the saying of what has not been said, where translation, interpretation, and inventions—in short, figuration—are essential to the rational.29 Klee remarked that, granted his account of the line, there can “no longer be a question of truly elementary representation,” that significance here is all rhythm and energy (EM: 184). Merleau-Ponty chose Parc bei Lu(zern) to illustrate his essay “Eye and Mind,” a work Klee’s commentators (for example, Franciscono) have distinguished because of its “decorative Matisse-like foliage”30 (see Figure 2, opening this chapter). As such it reveals Klee’s complicated relation to and synthesis between painterly abstraction and the decorative.31 Grohmann stresses both Klee’s abstraction and multidimensionality in considering this work and relates it to a series of late paintings, “a handwriting consisting of bars.”32 Like Grohmann, Merleau-Ponty’s commentators (among them Galen Johnson) noted this work’s “hieroglyphic” character, emphasizing its broader importance for Merleau-Ponty.33 Granted Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on the use of painting to understand the expressive capacities of a figured philosophy, he might also have concentrated on another thematic of Klee’s work, one that has its origin in

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  23

his earliest production but comes to fruition only in the 1920s. This thematic more explicitly announces a certain “equivalence” between drawing or painting and writing (Figure 3). Here, that is, we might equally emphasize Klee script pictures. As has been noted, what Klee’s other work implies “the script pictures explicitly state.” They take as their very subject matter “the equivalence of writing and drawing, of poem and picture.”34 The fusion between the architectonic and the poetic becomes writ large. In these works, lines and letters interact without fixed mimesis or reference, precisely bearing witness to the bond between the painter’s hand and the philosopher’s text. To use a term of Kristeva’s, this reveals the event of their mutual interaction or “semiosis.”35 These paintings or drawings

Figure 3  Signs Clustering (Zeichen verdichten sich), Paul Klee, 1932, 121. Brush on paper on cardboard, 31.4 x 48.5 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

24  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

truly articulate what Merleau-Ponty calls “the effort of modern painting,” which has been “directed not so much toward choosing between line and color, or even between the figuration of things and the creation of signs, as it has been toward multiplying systems of equivalences” (EM: 182). Klee’s search for the logos of the invisible in ascent, that is, a higher world, seems to conflict with Merleau-Ponty. For Merleau-Ponty, this transcendence emerges most primordially from below, first of all in the “profound latency” of the body, in our sensibility, the invisible’s reversibility or adherence to the visible, and the earth (EM: 187). But neither Klee nor Heidegger—both, critically (like the Romantics)—are far from this stress on the polyphonic and “polymorphous being” when investigating the figure of the earth (EM: 174). Klee too spoke of finding this transcendence beneath us, in the “primordial underground” (N: 93). Such a figured language or a figured philosophy precludes the idea of a pure representation, a theoretically neutral language, without a conceptual past, devoid of metaphor. “Modern painting, like modern thought generally, obliges us to admit a truth which does not resemble things, which is without any external model and without any predestined instruments of expression, and which is nevertheless truth” (S: 57). We reencounter the issue of figuration and transcendence along with their mythemes in Adorno’s account of Klee and its thematization of spiritualization (AT: 88). For Adorno, the work of art today is its prototype. Objective idealism, credited with being the “first to stress the spiritual as against the sensual element,” falsely reified spirit, turning its origin into intuition and the product into a representative sign or expression of the spirit. It defined the graphic line as an expression of self-identical reflection. Adorno claims this view is false because it “phenomenologically attributes to art what it does not fulfill” (AT: 98). Such spiritualization lacks the immanence of idealism. It is the originating element in art, not simply as identifiable with artistic intention but what “speaks through them, or more precisely, what makes artworks become script” (AT: 87). Although Adorno claims such spiritualization is objective, it lacks the immanence of truth. In the spirit of artworks, critique recognizes their truth content or distinguishes truth content from their spirit (AT: 87–88). Such critique or interpretation, Adorno claims, must not repeat the illusions of idealism but proceed only by acknowledging the enigmatic or script character of the work of art. Spirit cannot be reified any more than it can simply be “finished” (AT: 92). In this respect, the “task of aesthetics is not to com-

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  25

prehend artworks as hermeneutic objects” (AT: 118). Adorno claims that even though spirit is not a concept, “yet through spirit artworks become commensurable with concepts” (AT: 88). What binds the painterly script and the conceptual? What connects the philosopher and the painter in the “relation” that “speaks” through both and the mutual historicity in which they participate? Devoid of its idealist metaphysics, spiritualization makes possible the intelligibility of artworks, the rational, and the emancipatory potential of the aesthetic. It does so by ensuring in principle a transition between the preconceptual and the conceptual. Hence the significance of Adorno’s critique of the denial of spirituality in works of Becket and Benjamin on the one hand, or the adequacy of Kandinsky’s “idealized” account of spirituality on the other (AT: 92, 87). The problem is grasping this script sufficiently. The point is to grasp this effect, not simply identifiable with individuality, in which the artist singularly grapples with the truth of the work of art—without ever coinciding with it. The spirit of the artwork is thus irreducible to an idiolect; the “language of the artwork is, like every language, constituted by a collective undercurrent” (AT: 86). The experiential mediates the false illusions of the collective by “deformation,” a term Merleau-Ponty uses to characterize the transformation at work in expression. Such deformation is necessary since both thinkers have denied the immanence of intention and expression within historical practices. Adorno links artistic practice to the specificity of its material history more explicitly. He stresses the need for expression to dominate (and its need for emancipation from) the specific history of its materiality. The sociology of art is explicitly linked to materialist, neo-Marxist accounts of history. Adorno again imports this model for spiritualization from Kant’s account of the sublime. He emphasizes “the autonomy of the spirit in the face of the superior power of sensuous existence and this autonomy is achieved only in the spiritualized artwork” (AT: 92). Still, this achievement is incomplete, provisional, fragmentary, and heterogeneous, its dialectic negative and unfulfilled. At the same time, Adorno does not deny the transcendence of the Beautiful (no more than does Kant). He reaffirms the work of art as a truth for philosophy. Moreover he does so, as did Merleau-Ponty, through recourse to Schelling (AT: 189). Like Schelling and Klee, who claimed that good and evil are joint concepts at the heart of Cosmos, Adorno found the concepts of the Beautiful and the Ugly inseparable (N: 79).36 For Adorno,

26  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

these concepts cannot be harmoniously reconciled, either in transcendence or as simply “fragmented,” to use Adorno’s lingering Schegelian term. Such resolution would require the subreption of organicism and illusory totality. Once works of art have been conceptualized in terms of tensions within totality, they have been destroyed (AT: 53). Adorno explicitly affirms Schelling’s insight “into the terror of the beginning,” but it is a horror that escapes the totalizations of speculative history, confronted with the pain and suffering of real events (AT: 47). Beauty is a “historical product” born of the revulsion and sacrifice before such suffering, linked always to an emancipatory yearning. This is perhaps true today more than ever, when, as Adorno puts it, the radiance historically linked to the Beautiful has turned dark. Klee noted that art becomes more abstract as our history becomes more tormented. For Adorno, it is not a question of transcendence “otherwise” or renewed but fragmented or fractured, where the imagination both attests to a truth that escapes it and articulates a reality that belies it (AT: 126). Now “it is for the sake of the Beautiful that there is no longer beauty; because it is no longer beautiful” (AT: 53). For Adorno, then, if Klee is a paradigmatic artist of modernity, he must be understood within its history. Like the best of modern art, Klee’s work remains, even in its most inarticulateness, a step beyond objectivism, pure construction, and technical reification. Indeed he is the “most remarkable example of this in the recent past.” Klee defended intuition and genius over and against the requisites of construction. Adorno claims this defense can no longer have simply to do with the humane messages or statements of classicism or humanism. Rather, Klee articulates “inarticulately” what cannot be contained either by traditionalists or objectivists, an attempt to articulate beyond their failure the latent language of things that still provoke a sense of astonishment or shudder (AT: 60). Klee’s Angelus Novus is seen as an example of this “preaesthetic” and nonhumanist astonishment “much as do the semi-human creatures of Indian mythology” (AT: 82; see Figure 5 in the next chapter). Referring to the script pictures, “which approximate scrawled writing,” Adorno states that this is another instance where a category of modern art illuminates the art light of the past: All artworks are writing, not just those that are obviously such; they are hieroglyphs for which the code has been lost, a loss that plays into their content. Artworks are language only as writing. If no artwork is ever a judgment, each artwork contains elements derived from judgment and bears an aspect of being correct and incorrect, true and false.

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  27

Yet the silent and determinate answer of artworks does not reveal itself to interpretation with a single stroke, as a new immediacy, but only by way of all mediations, those of the works’ discipline as well as those of thought and philosophy. (AT: 124)

The task of interpretation is to allow this forgotten or repressed language to speak. Like the task of dialectic in general, such interpretation “discloses each image as script” (DE: 18). Hegel claimed, already connecting the work of art to the problem of the unconscious, all art “at first is hieroglyphic.”37 Earlier, Novalis asserted that all representations of the self or the chaos of the absolute are hieroglyphic.38 In this, again, Adorno insisted, artworks express only their own disenchantment and agony. Klee’s Diaries were thought to be a telling record of this agonistic (AT: 290). Thus art expresses the truth of the tragic (as Klee also realized). Like the virtues of the tragic, this truth persists only in the withdrawal of immanence. But this raises a critical question, one that constantly returns, as will be seen. Are Klee’s Diaries only a symptom of their time, or do they also “exhibit,” to use Kant’s term, something more originary? Devoid of such immanence, what then of the Beautiful? If, as Adorno claimed, all art still begins in contemplation and articulates the inner language of things, what is its remainder? None of these accounts claim that the concept of Beautiful is a museum piece, or simply identified with the harmonies of the present, or even with neoclassical fragments that perdure. Even though Merleau-Ponty may avoid the term, his account would surely complicate Adorno’s claim that, for the sake of the Beautiful, there cannot be a Beautiful anymore; it has stopped being Beautiful. The painter, for Merleau-Ponty, still seeks “the radiation [rayonnement] of the visible” (EM: 182). As he put it in the preface to Signs, “Colors, sounds, and things—like Van Gogh’s stars—are the focal points and radiations of being” (S: 15). This reflects the luminosity of phenomenological intentionality. It involves Husserl’s notion of the “ray of the world” as a configuration of time, the past, and the imaginary (VI: 240f). Merleau-Ponty knew well that the preliminary investigations of perceptual faith were “an exercise of history” (VI: 186). But how well could Merleau-Ponty grasp the moment in which radiance has turned black, the moment in which art expresses the catastrophes of our time and experience? Even if he acknowledged “the inarticulate cry” at the origins of art, it was what “seemed to be the voice of light” (EM: 182). If, as JeanFrançois Lyotard put it, Merleau-Ponty could capture the coming to birth of the visible, did he grasp its agonized state, its “spasm” (MP: 112)? Is the

28  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

caesura of the visible only the transformation of discrete sensorial messages into the texture of being (EM: 166)? Could he grasp what Adorno called the primordial “shudder” at its origins or, to use language attributed to Heidegger, not only “the tenderness and intimacy that flourish in between Klee’s lines” but also “what is profoundly ominous” (P: 150)? Did his account of painting fully confront what he had recognized in relation to politics, as the question of “historical imagination” (AD: 16ff)? This is a problem that concerns modern aesthetics generally; as Joyce put it, “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”39 We should not deny this lacuna. Still, Merleau-Ponty did acknowledge the Worringer thesis that abstract art speaks of “a negation or refusal of the world” and insisted as well that such refusal still contains “an odor of life, even if it is a shameful or despairing life” (S: 56). If Merleau-Ponty had argued that “art is not construction or artifice,” however, he might have discovered in Klee’s prosaic line what remains missing in Adorno’s (and perhaps Heidegger’s) account. Adorno demanded not only that the Beautiful and the Ugly be thought together but, following Nietzsche’s dictum, that all good things were once terrible. He also shares Schel­ling’s original horror at the beginning of history, that this inseparability be valorized through the Ugly. If there is any causal connection at all between the Beautiful and the Ugly, it arises from the Ugly, as the origin of the Beautiful. We might wonder whether this valorization remains as speculative as the metaphysical forms Adorno criticized, losing its hieroglyphic tensions. In one sense the economy of the Beautiful and the Ugly has always been “differentially” joined, distinguished only through one another, excavating again the ruins of the ancient account of analogy. Adorno conceptualized the origin of the work of art through the economics and mimetics of desire, as the effect of repression, sublimation, and only then hope.40 This, coupled with the materialist conception of history, risked turning its “hieroglyphics” univocal. But in that case there is almost nothing at all that is original. The shudder of original Kontemplation, astonishment or seeing (theoria), which still retained traditional links with the noematic, risked being reduced to noetic (and psychologistic) shudder. When Klee defended the “childishness” of his art (or the originality of children’s art or the art of the insane), it did not take the form of an apology. He confronted again the tortured agonistics out of which art emerges. He defended such childishness (and the discipline to which he subjected it) on behalf of the originality and transcendence that occurs everywhere

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  29

in works of art. Such art was not simply a regression to the primitive or to naturalism—both of which had been transcended in his account of the line: “A work of art goes beyond naturalism the instant the line enters into an independent pictorial element” (D: 232). This defense was linked explicitly to the failure of tradition and the invention of new forms. Klee refers here to his cool Romanticism, but not simply as a truth that puts the lie to formalism, as Adorno thought. As Klee put it: “Today is a transition from yesterday. In the great pit of forms lie broken fragments to some of which we still cling. They provide abstraction with its material. A junkyard of unauthentic elements for creation of crystals” (D: 313). Through recourse to such ever-recurrent originality, we “work our way out of our ruins,” transforming Hegel’s “night-like pit” of memory through imagination—and sublimation (or repression to desublimation).41 Recourse to origins is no longer grounded in the substantive forms of the past but is itself productive and captures the productive transformation in abstraction. As Merleau-Ponty put it, “the originary is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us” (VI: 124). From the outset, Merleau-Ponty insisted on parsing formal truths not as a return to Platonist eternal ideas but rather as results of “productive imagination” (PhP: 386). He also distinguished his account from all naïve naturalist abstraction. His analysis of embodied experience yields a schematism of intelligible types as well as a vehicle of figurative or ontological synthesis, an incarnate historical venture beyond the ontic or representational optics of the visible. Thus, the experience of the lived body is inherently the institution of une histoire sauvage (IP: 179). It is not a return to primitivism or simply a return to a preconceptual foundational experience, as it looked initially. Phenomenology became the exploration of an originary domain that is figured throughout, an adventure beyond optics, beyond Husserl. The importance of this insight became more and more evident as his exploration of expression progressed. Merleau-Ponty, who saw in all this a figured philosophy, in turn, parses Klee’s line, which no longer imitates but “renders visible,” in terms of the truths of formalism. He was assisted in this by Saussurian linguistics, which became something of a model for him at points.42 The result becomes ontological in effect, “the blueprint of a genesis of things.” While Merleau-Ponty is often accused of perceptual reductionism, this misses his own “modernism.” In his analysis of Klee’s line, abstraction is neither repression nor simplification but a

30  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

language generated “syntactically” or diacritically, sui generis, out of its own history. The beginning of a line’s path establishes or installs a certain level or mode of the line, a certain manner for the line to be and to make itself a line, “to go line.” Relative to it, every subsequent inflection will have a diacritical value, will be another aspect of the line relationship to itself, will form an adventure, a history, a meaning of the line. (EM: 183)43

No more reducible to a representation, or an idea, or a form, or a discrete sign, significance arises here as an originary event that proceeds (or exceeds) them all. Klee’s line both confirms and transforms a truth Merleau-Ponty originally found in formal linguistics. Transcendentally, issues regarding syntax and semantics are “intertwined”; Being is everywhere diacritical in this sense (VI: 201). Hence the need for the figuration and refiguration of transcendence itself emerges—perhaps not without the assistance of Klee himself; “[Ceaselessly the philosopher finds himself]obliged to reinspect and redefine the most well-grounded notions, to create new one, with new words to designate them” (VI: 3). This is an apt depiction of Merleau-Ponty’s exploration in late works of the intertwining of the visible and the invisible in “the flesh.” Through this articuleme Merleau-Ponty sought to reveal the coherence between my incarnate experience and the world, the juncture between the flesh of my body and the flesh of the world—including the flesh (the time and place) of ideas (VI: 139). He invokes here terms transferred from Gaston Bachelard’s psychoanalysis of the senses. Merleau-Ponty suggested that the flesh be understood as that “element” out of which the history and exchange, the reversibility and écart between the sensible and the intelligible emerge (VI: 267). The distinction between fact and essence, the real and the ideal, remained too ossified in the classical phenomenological account. As was the case with Klee, Merleau-Ponty sought to acknowledge here our bond with nature without succumbing to physicalism, monism, or Identitätsphilosophie. The oneiric and invisible world of analogy the painter or philosopher “inscribes” (or “makes visible”) is not simply behind us, nor figured above us in some pros hen, but lies everywhere between us; Merleau-Ponty ultimately attributed this to the “poetic and oneiric powers,” the intertwining of sensibility and intelligibility, at play within the flesh itself (Themes: 130). As a result, rather than marginalizing abstraction, Merleau-Ponty

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  31

placed the event or mise en scène of figurability at the heart of the visible and our incarnate exploration of the invisible, terms whose resonance with Klee are now evident. Klee’s cool Romanticism would similarly ceaselessly belie reduction in the very moment it ultimately belies construction. His hope for a delivery to a higher world remains, as he put it early on, a matter “always to be accomplished” (D: 51). We witness again the legacy of transcendental imagination; the faculty, in bringing together sensibility and intelligibility, made them “fit to be joined.” All of these thinkers would argue that Kant remained captivated by the notion of pure form, beginning with his claim that there can be just as much objective truth in a doctrine as there is mathematics. In this joining together, in this fittingness, and the aptness it entails, we might invoke another account and another aesthetic tradition that from its beginning railed against Pythagoreanism. It is too easy to lose both the complexity of the synthesis and the segregation that results. Form and content have been neither reduced to an act nor distinguished from it. Heidegger was surely right to preserve imagination as an exhibitia originaria for transcendental imagination in his account of “laying the ground for metaphysics in its originality.” Still we should remind ourselves that Kant also called the imagination the faculty of wit and (apt) differentiation (judicium discretivum). As Merleau-Ponty claimed of the dialectic, a “difficult critique is necessary if we are to go beyond scientism without sliding back to prescience” (AD: 41). Once again, the event will not be made “immediately intelligible,” not even within the parameters of postmetaphysical Denken, as Heidegger thought; Denken will be figured through and through. As will become further evident, neither abstraction nor the technology to which it is constantly conjoined can be viewed as simply reductive or calculating. Both afford the possibility for the figurative invention of new forms out of our ruins, notwithstanding the danger that accompanies them.44 In both cases, what has been described in Klee’s case as “an attempt at the impossible—to depict / write a state of invisibility / indecipherability” requires a closer look.45 It is precisely in this sense that Merleau-Ponty construed the syntactic imagination in Saussure’s formal analysis, articulating the emergence of “living language” through its internal relations, matrix and transformation, institution and expression. Expression emerges always historically, always as “the variation of a convention” (NC: 127). This is true even when

32  On the Withdrawal of the Beautiful

in transformation (and phenomenologically) it proceeds by “the hypothesis of nonlanguage” (NC: 127; HLP: 39). Thereby he could trace in the dialectic of historical imagination an event that emerges in the interplay between figuration and form; this exploration in turn brought him closer and closer to the experiments of literary modernism. Phenomenology would no longer proceed by returning to the mythic silence of the things themselves. As is apparent in the case of “the flesh,” a concept that, he claimed, “has no name in philosophy,” it would depend on the inventive resources of language to say the things anew (VI: 147). It would depend, to use Mallarmé’s terms, on the silence in language itself (S: 44). Through such refigurations, Merleau-Ponty wagered that we might still render the things visible.46 Thus, Phenomenology’s desired contact with things “does lie not in the beginning of language but at the end of language’s effort” (PW: 110). Merleau-Ponty was taken by Bergson’s remarks concerning Leonardo— that by a kind of reading true art “will seek behind the lines one sees the movement the eye does not see.”47 Beyond the static optics of analysis and problem solving, philosophy will similarly need to read between the lines of its history to grasp the meaning at stake within it (VI: 188). Moreover, painting similarly could be understood less as a return to a mute level of perceptual radiance than as the opening of the event of historical expressivity, the fragmentation and transformation of tradition. Here too, it becomes apparent that to paint, to sketch, is not to produce something from nothing, that the drawing, the touch of the brush, and the visible work are but the trace of a total movement of Speech which goes unto Being as whole, and that this movement contains the expression with lines as well as the expression of colors, my expression as well as that of the other painters. (VI: 211)

Clearly, despite their differences, he was thinking the figures of painting and philosophy proximate to one another. Although here painting is understood as part of a total movement of speech, at one point he claimed that philosophy “paints in black and white” (S: 22). Both are variations and transformation of an expressive past. Crediting him with “attaining a beauty that is also at its limits,” Jacques Lacan argued that at such moments “Merleau-Ponty moves forward here to a field different from that of perception.”48 It is true that he came to understand the extent to which at stake is wholly a historical and oneiric af-

Adorno’s and Merleau-Ponty’s Readings of Klee  33

fair that forces us to acknowledge both that “no means of expression . . . resolves the problems of painting or transforms it into a mere technique” and that “the language of painting is never ‘instituted by nature’ ” (EM: 175). Instead the work of art emerges through and with a complicated semantics and syntactics, its reference wholly figured by the oneirics of time and image, exhibiting thereby the intertwining of the visible and the invisible.49 Still, our Romanticism may need to be cooler than even Klee emphasized. The drawing is not simply a drawing, Klee claimed, but “a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better” (D: 183). Such projection remains fragmentary, originating out of the tensions of the finite in which we have the parts but not the whole, divided once more between the symbol and the allegory. This exhibitia originaria is neither the parousia nor the simple Darstellung of the Absolute, but its figuration. It is never a simple symbol; Adorno, more aware of its irony, stressed this (AT: 82). Even a classicist such as Gadamer admitted that allegory depended on a fixed tradition, symbol on a metaphysics of the Beautiful, all of which have become at most fragmented, and interrupted.50 The question is what to make of its remainder. Adorno declared that if anything, art has become the “catastrophic fulfillment of allegory” (AT: 82). Yet he realized that the idea of the Beautiful survives even in defeat (AT: 53). It does so, if only as the question (Befrag­ ung) of the Beautiful. Merleau-Ponty translates this Heideggerean term as “interrogation.” Construed in terms of “the classical idea of intellectual adequation,” the painting (or the grapheme) will simply “leave us with the impression of a vain swirl of significations, a paralyzed or miscarried utterance” (EM: 189). Merleau-Ponty realized that none of this, strictly taken, implied the failure of philosophy, literature, painting, or the Beautiful. Closing Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty chooses his words discreetly, in accord with the judicium discretivum itself. Such skeptical claims about philosophy arise, he says, from a faux imaginaire. This tells us something about the interpretation, the interrogation and rationality of the figural; such rationality is exhibited in the endless work of change, alteration, enlightenment, deepening, confirmation, exaltation, invention, and reinvention at stake in each work (EM: 190).

Figure 4  Ancient Harmony (Alter Klang), Paul Klee, 1925, 236. Oil on cardboard, 38.1 x 37.8 cm. ©Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland. Gift of Richard Doetsch-Benziger, 1960, The Bridgeman Art Library. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

2 Gadamer, Benjamin, Aesthetic Modernism, and the Rehabilitation of Allegory The Relevance of Klee Believing in tradition and always straining after insanities; frenetically imitative and proudly independent . . . Can you guess to what great body of literature these traits correspond? August W. Schlegel1 The currents of yesterday’s tradition are really becoming lost in the sand . . . and I hail those who are working toward the impending reform. Paul Klee (D: 266)

In “The Speechless Image ,” Hans-Georg Gadamer considered the possibility that “the ancient classical relation between nature and art, that of mimesis, no longer holds” (RB: 83). Ultimately he concluded otherwise, not without a certain irony, by appealing to the Diaries of Klee. As an author who argued for a certain rehabilitation (Rehabilitierung) of allegory in Truth and Method, the irony here is a complicated affair (TM: 70). Gadamer referred to a passage in Klee’s debate with Franz Marc in which Klee “protested against the notion of theory in itself”—precisely in order to stress a return to the works themselves (D: 318). Gadamer’s gesture was overdetermined. He surely was not arguing that the classical notion of mimesis was simply dead; even though the experiments of modern art no longer take nature as their exemplary model, “the work of art does come to resemble nature: there is something regular and binding about the self-contained picture that grows from within” (RB: 91). If so, the ancient homoiosis between mimesis and Kosmos would not have been lost in modern art—nor perhaps its refiguration of Beauty (Kalon). There even remains, he concluded, something of a rehabilitation of Aristotle’s account of phronesis and its doctrine of the mean: “A proper work is one in which there is neither too little nor too much” (ibid.). 35

36  The Rehabilitation of Allegory

Not only is Gadamer’s appeal to Klee complicated by its own inner logic, like all attempts to abandon theorizing, but Klee’s theoretics are complex in themselves. Composed as a defense of the independence of Romanticism and “the divine Ego as a center,” Klee’s appeal to the works drew heavily on Marc’s accounts, refiguring a history with mixed effect.2 To this day Klee’s critics are divided about his work. Some see in it the perdurance of Classicism, the legacy of Goethe and Romanticism. Others see him not only absorbed by, but embracing, the revolutions of the avant-garde and artistic modernity’s abrupt rupture with tradition. The result was an oeuvre that, even in its reference to the past, internally alludes to this past in rupture. In either case, Klee was preeminently a theorist, both in his Bauhaus addresses, notebooks, and lectures and in his theoretically constructed Diary. The irony will not be readily resolved. If in modern art “the idea of mimesis fulfills itself with new meaning,” it does so in a way that leaves the artists themselves, to use Gadamer’s term, “speechless.” Klee’s rejection of theory is taken as evidence for the claim that “the self-interpretation of art is always a secondary phenomenon” (RB: 91). Paradoxically, Gadamer uses Klee’s theoretical stance, that is, his self-interpretation, to deny theory any but a secondary role. Such theorizing, after all, is not just a matter of the mens auctoris but of the intelligibility of the work. It is striking that Gadamer appeals to Klee’s Diary, so carefully interpreted and reinterpreted not only by its author (it was a Tagebuch in name only) but by leading philosophers of art attempting to grasp the impact of modern art. We might wonder whether, consequently, Klee had no more to say about art than that we must return to “the things themselves,” to cite that metaphor of Husserlian mimesis. The dissonance is pointed; although phenomenologists, after all, claimed that all abstract (and paradigmatically, all mathematical) entities required experiential foundation, Klee’s writings continuously speak to the necessity of making one’s way through mathematics to expression. Mathematics and physics provide a lever in the form of rules to be observed or contradicted. They compel us—a salutary necessity—to concern ourselves first with the function and not with the finished form. Algebraic, geometrical and mechanical problems are steps in our education towards the essential, towards the function as opposed to the impressional. We learn to see what flows beneath; we learn the prehistory of the visible. (N: 69)

This is, again, a critical and complicated gesture, divided between the formal and intuitional, the visible and the invisible, the historical and

The Relevance of Klee  37

the prehistoric. It involves “a very special progress that leads towards a critical striving backwards towards the earlier on which the later grows” (N: 69). If there are remnants here of Romanticism in Klee’s fusion between “the architectonic and poetic,” the only precursors might be Novalis’s strange Fichte Studies, or Jacobi’s mysterious “differentials” that link sensibility and understanding, the ontic and the ontological. In these works mathematics takes on a similar (nearly hermetic) importance, almost in anticipation of what came to be called a century later the “ontological difference.” Fichte used the mathematical analogue for understanding the self as a synthesis of interdetermination, or what will later be called dialectic. Klee’s attempts to outline the interplay and fusion between individual and “dividuals,” between structure and instance, might need to be similarly related to this “constructivist” archive (N: 238).3 Whatever we have to say about such connections, the issue veils a certain denial. That is, granted Klee’s commitment to abstraction, we might wonder whether the task at hand really involved a return to the phenomena. For Klee, as has been seen, abstraction and construction turn out not to be the danger that phenomenologists thought at times. Instead it was essential to the inner dynamism of Klee’s eruptive linearity, to the schematics of rendering the inner dynamics and energy of things’ visibility. It invokes an energetics whose very concept arguably depends on the notion of formal permutation or mathematical function. Strict phenomenological hope for returning to the things themselves would only recoil before it. This sheds light on Sartre’s remark that “the greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make a painting both sign and object” (WL: 29n). Though clearly not mathematically constructed or deduced, the lever such formalisms give Klee’s account is more a provocation than a determination. After all, this lever occurs in “the form of rules to be observed or contradicted.” Beyond mere imitative representation, beyond the mere optics of Impressionism, this prehistory of the visible is no more pretheoretical than it is preschematic. With Klee’s proviso that art does not represent but renders the invisible visible in mind, we might say that, rather than optical possibilities of representation, this schematics opens up possibilities of “rendering” visible. The optics of Phenomenology perhaps too often avoided confronting its own status as theoretical construction: the genesis of its return to the things themselves.4 One might say—indeed, Roland Barthes did so at one point, extending his old criticism of Sartre—that what had been avoided

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in such immanent appeals was their own theoretical “cubism.”5 Against this constructive moment, the appeal to the articulation of immanence or pure description of the things themselves might be construed to invoke a grammatical (self-reflexive) autoclitic that seemed always to couch (or require) hidden inferences. Gadamer too endorsed the account of phenomenological “adumbration.” To use a term of Marc Richir’s, such appeals might then betray not only a matter of transcendental illusion but a “transcendental distortion” in its optics, precisely the same way that, for Klee, the “good forms” of optical Impressionism were distortingly illusory.6 It is almost as if this return to the things themselves might have already circumscribed and veiled “thingliness.” The attempt to keep intuitions and concepts distinct seems all too evidently forced in such autoclitics, not to speak of the attempt to keep theories out of art. The argument for a return to lived experience, as opposed to the fossilized and almost “lifeless hieroglyphics” of mathematical notation, required a “plastic discourse.” As has become evident, these terms are Hegelian, already prefiguring the conflict between the symbolical and the allegorical. Hegel claimed that such a plasticity, such a concrete symbolics, was necessary if the Absolute were to be made manifest within the “peculiar restlessness and distraction of our modern consciousness.” 7 If such terms are derived from Absolute idealism, however, they accompanied Phenomenology in the guise of the problem of a transcendental language for experience. Again, not without irony, Phenomenology was initially modeled on the description of the experience that founded the concept of number itself. This attempt to found the rational beyond the formal equally was seen to be Aristotelian. Here too, however, Klee seems to confound: his writings ceaselessly appealed to theories of composition modeled on the formal aspects of language akin to how children learn letters first, then syllables, and finally how to read and write.10 This same generativity exists in pictorial theory. As the “Creative Credo” put it: “Abstract formal elements are put together like numbers or letters to make concrete being or abstract things: in the end a formal cosmos is achieved” (N: 79). In all of this, Klee seems far removed from a rehabilitation of Aristotle. Such matters seem far removed from a hermeneutic of experience based soundly on the aesthetic or the task of interpreting traditions. As such, this may seem a matter of secondary phenomena, a matter of regional ontology to the phenomenologist or a specific and troublesome hermeneutic object. But for Gadamer, who made aesthetic experience exemplary for

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his task of deriving “elements of a theory of hermeneutic experience,” this cannot do (TM: 265). Truth and Method “elevated” aesthetic experience, and it did so by presenting a certain genealogy of hermeneutics through nineteenth-century aesthetics. Truth and Method refers to this at one point as “the century of Goethe,” giving rise to charges concerning its neoclassicist bent that Gadamer continuously denied (TM: 71). This neoclassicalism, certainly as Wirkungsgeschichte, effected many of the elements of the resulting Elementlehre. The gloss on modern mimesis cited above, in which the work inwardly resembles nature, sounds as true to Goethe’s organicism as Gadamer’s own claims that Goethe’s use of the term Bildung makes him our contemporary (TM: 9). In turn, Gadamer claims that Goethe’s understanding of “adventure” underlies experience as Erlebnis (TM: 60ff). Finally and perhaps most significantly, Gadamer points out Goethe’s understanding of the symbol (TM: 76). What Gadamer calls the century of Goethe seemingly no longer perdures. The account remains, he claimed, theoretically naïve, lacking precisely an account of a hermeneutics of historical Erfahrung (hence Hegel) or an account of Being (hence Heidegger). Still, it does not seem any more simply past than the classical concept of mimesis itself, as Truth and Method had already argued (TM: 98, 113). In a summary of that work published a few years afterward, he asserted directly that “in the last analysis, Goethe’s statement ‘Everything is a symbol’ is the most comprehensive formulation of the hermeneutic idea” (PH: 103). Having dealt with the importance of Goethe two decades previously, Truth and Method’s various characterizations thus serve as a reaffirmation. All have the hold of “contemporaneity” for Gadamer, even if, as he learned from Schleiermacher and Hegel, such contemporaneity is both a task and a certain consciousness of loss and estrangement in relation to tradition (TM: 127, 16). Instead, beyond the fragmented or instantaneous (Simultaneität) of aesthetic experience (Erlebnisse), there remains a true contemporaneity (Gleichzeitigkeit) between the present and the past that constitutes authentic traditionality. Doubtless it is just this vision of the contemporary that underlies Gadamer’s insistence that Heidegger’s Dasein analysis is misread if it is taken as the claim that the temporality of Dasein precludes the “the everlasting or eternal” (TM: 99). Gadamer’s conjunction of Erfahrung as the truth of art and Heidegger’s Dasein analysis, taken as an account of hermeneutics and the historicity of understanding, permits this rehabilitation of allegory and tradition. It adds

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to the experience of symbolic presentation (Darstellung) the historicity and the intelligibility of the matrix of tradition, understood hermeneutically (TM: 98–100). Both the ontology and the intelligibility of the historical are transcendentally at stake; indeed, a glance at Kant’s transcendental categories affirms the question of simultaneity as a question of both relation and substance. The account that results, claiming that it must “do justice to the experience of art” while explicitly acknowledging both “the fragility of the Beautiful and the adventurousness of the artist,” revealed how a hermeneutic phenomenology remained relevant to the aesthetic (TM: 164). It does so precisely insofar as “it sets the task of preserving the hermeneutic continuity which constitutes our being, despite the discontinuity intrinsic to aesthetic being and aesthetic experience” (TM: 96). It is hard not to wonder about Gadamer’s citation of Klee in all this. Klee was surely a modern thinker. Yet Gadamer often seemed to have problems not only with modernity but its art, both of which, he acknowledged, made hermeneutic continuity increasingly questionable.9 Without simply rejecting method, Gadamer found its modern formulation highly problematic; Klee’s was perhaps the most methodical of modern art’s formulations. Klee scholars increasingly made evident that his work consciously retraces and refigures the steps of Gadamer’s genealogy in decisive ways that seem both to challenge and transform it. Klee not only theorizes aesthetic modernism but also does so precisely in relation to Gadamer’s post-Kantian archive. The modern artist, Gadamer insists, “is less a creator than a discoverer of the as yet unseen, the inventor of the previously unimagined that only emerges into reality through him” (RB: 91). This sounds close to Klee’s proclamation that the artist does not imitate the visible but renders the invisible visible, a formulation that, as was seen, became almost paradigmatic for Merleau-Ponty. A few sentences before his reference to Klee as assisting in the return to the works themselves, Gadamer instructs us to think of the crystal. In restoring art to nature Gad­ amer argued, “like the crystal it has its own timeless necessity” (RB: 91). The figure of the crystal and the crystalline accompanied German aesthetics at least since Schlegel, Goethe, and Kaspar David Friedrich. Even before that, it had furnished a theoretics divided between the hermetic and the mathematical.10 But this time the example is close enough to Klee to be almost question-begging. A few pages previous to Gadamer’s citation of Klee’s concern for the works themselves, Klee’s Diaries presents its own decisive account of abstraction and the crystalline. He does not

The Relevance of Klee  41

seem to have in mind either the work of art’s timelessness or the Pythagorean eternity of beautiful form. Rather, precisely here we reencounter the dynamics—ontogenetic, mnemosynic, and permutational—of Klee’s 1915 account of abstraction as cool Romanticism. One deserts the realm of the here and now to transfer one’s activity into a realm of the yonder where total affirmation is possible. Abstraction. The cool Romanticism of this style without pathos is unheard of. The more horrible this world (as, today, for instance), the more abstract our art, whereas a happy world brings forth an art of the here and now. Today is a transition from yesterday. In the great pit of forms lie broken fragments to some of which we still cling. They provide abstraction with its materials. A junkyard of unauthentic elements for the creation of impure crystals. That is how it is today. (D: 313)

Abstraction occurs out of the need “to work my way out of my ruins,” beyond the broken fragments of history. The more terrible our history the more the necessity for authentic abstraction (D: 315). Klee scholars have copiously noted the complications of Klee’s text, his refigurations of Franz Marc, Kandinsky, and Worringer.11 By invoking a world beyond the here and now, Klee seems precisely to be invoking the shock and discontinuity of both history and art that Gadamer’s hermeneutic continuity sought to overcome. Rather than something organic and natural about it, or eternal and timeless, as Gadamer suggested, this crystal is metonymically juxtaposed—almost despite itself—not with eternity but with death.12 As Klee begins the preceding passage: “The heart that beats for this world seems mortally wounded. As if only memories still tied me to ‘these’ things. . . . Am I turning into the crystalline type?” (D: 313). Hence the complications in Klee’s concept of the crystalline: “But then: the whole crystal cluster once bled. I thought I was dying, war and death. But how can I die, I who am crystal? I, crystal” (D: 313). Gadamer’s invocation of the crystal seems to have missed this metonymy, its allegorical allusion or effect. Turning its truth symbolic, it seems to have missed precisely the modernity Gadamer sought ultimately to grasp in pairing Klee with Aristotle and the doctrine of the mean. To many critics, Gadamer missed not just the truth of Romanticism; beyond even neo­Classicism, it seemed simply archaism, all but avoiding the horrors to which Klee’s text responded.

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Gadamer’s “The Relevance of the Beautiful” confronts the question of aesthetic modernity more directly than Truth and Method. Explicitly addressing the question of how to understand “trends of contemporary art,” Gadamer takes on happenings or antiart, Duchamp’s Ready Mades, the cubism of Picasso and Braque, the work of Bertolt Brecht, modern architecture, the role of dissonance in modern music, and nonobjective painting. While he is critical of “the alienation and shock” of “extreme modernity” and modern art, or “the obsessive rhythms of modern music” or “very barren forms of abstract art,” there is a strong endorsement of modern art at its best and a recognition that there is a difference at stake between it and traditional art forms (RB: 7, 51). This is true not only technically but in the relation of artist and community, where the artist “no longer speaks for the community” but “forms his own idea of community [oikumene] and challenges us to it” (RB: 39). Noting that “the concept of a work is in no way tied to the classical ideal of harmony,” Gadamer argued strongly for the continuing legacy of the “profound truth” in the Goethean notion of symbolics (RB: 25, 3). This is opposed to allegory, which “says one thing and gives us to understand something else” (RB: 37). The error of idealism is again to mistake symbolics for metaphysics: to use Hegel’s terms, “the sensuous appearance of the Absolute Idea.” It fails to grasp that “the work speaks to us as a work and not as the bearer of a message” that it merely re-presents (RB: 33). Against this, Gadamer approvingly cites Walter Benjamin’s account of the aura of the work in its uniqueness and irreplaceability (RB: 34). Still, it is not Benjamin but again Heidegger to whom “we owe the possibility of escaping the idealistic conception of sense,” recognizing the twofold movement of revealing and unconcealing as elaborated in Heidegger’s account of the Greek’s account of truth (aletheia). What perdures with respect to aletheia obtains with respect to the continuing relevance of their account of the Beautiful (Kalon). Often enough, Klee’s work invokes such homoiosis and harmony, even if only in withdrawal. It is not surprising that Gadamer found his experience of the Beautiful here: in “marked contrast with the ambiguity and instability of human affairs . . . the convincing illumination of truth and harmony which compels the admission ‘this is true’ ” (RB: 14– 15). This motivates Gadamer to argue, despite what Truth and Method called “the fragility of the Beautiful,” for its continuing relevance, which successful works of art everywhere fulfill as events themselves of fulfilled

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time, the contemporaneity of the past and the present (TM: 96, 42). This contemporaneity, Gadamer held, is precisely the riddle that the problem of art sets us. Moreover, it is exemplary for understanding the logic of traditionality (and community); the translations between past and present articulate neither simple return nor simple rupture but dictate that “something can be held in our hesitant stay.” Gadamer claims, “This is what art has always been and still is today” (RB: 53). The institution of this contemporaneity constitutes our hermeneutic task, to “produce this shared community of meaning which the work of art outlines” in which the present and the past become bound together (RB: 48). Gadamer found his own task in this perdurance: “It was one of my basic intentions of my exposition to show that in our relationship with the world and in all our creative labors . . . our accomplishment lies in retaining what threatens to pass away” (RB: 46). He reiterates aesthetically what he once said to Leo Strauss: “unlike Heidegger or Buber,” he declared, we do not live “between” worlds; “I remember instead of this the one world that I alone know, and which in all decay has lost far less of its evidence and cohesion than it talks itself into.”13 This is the final claim concerning the Beautiful’s continuing relevance: “For although modern art is opposed to traditional art, it is also true that it has been stimulated and nourished by it” (RB: 9). All of this might seem to contrast with his citation of Benjamin. In order to grasp this contrast, first it should be said that Benjamin thought himself to be advancing upon classical German thought, and in particular Goethe’s account of the symbol and the Beautiful. As he put it in the Arcades Project, in relation to Simmel: I came to see very clearly that my concept of origin in the Trauerspiel book is a rigorous and decisive transposition of this basic Goethean concept from the domain of nature to that of history. Origin—it is, in effect, the concept of the Ur-phenomenon extracted from the pagan context of nature and brought into the Jewish contexts of history. Now, in my work on the arcades I am equally concerned with fathoming an origin. To be specific, I pursue the origin of the forms and mutations of the Paris arcades from their beginning to their decline, and I locate this origin in the economic facts. (AP: 462)

As portentous as this text’s reference to Goethe is its connection to Heideg­ ger. Expounding on the notion of image that founds his account of such historical constellations, Benjamin states: “What distinguishes images from the ‘essence’ of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly through

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‘­historicity’)” (AP: 462). At stake is the death of intention. It must be grasped, as The Origin of German Tragic Drama put it, not by intention and knowledge “but rather a total immersion and absorption in it,” an absorption that depends on grasping its factical constellation for its ‘illumination’ ” (T: 36). Thus “It is not that this past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation” (AP: 463). Rather than such an interillumination or interdetermination, the resulting surreal flash of recognition is “the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded” (AP: 463). Seemingly, then, Benjamin and Gadamer could not be further apart. Gadamer hoped to avoid both “the delusion of culture” that identifies art as the already familiar and the delusions of the critique of ideology that sees art as something progressive (RB: 46). Even a more restrictedly formal Bauhaus work such as Ancient Harmony (Alter Klang), contemporaneous to Crescent Moon over the Rational, seems to exemplify precisely the truths Gadamer sought to preserve (see Figure 4 at the opening of this chapter). Indeed, precisely in the series of abstractions to which Alter Klang belongs, Grohmann again found Goethe’s symbol: here narrative drops out “and, as Goethe said, the world contemplates itself in us.”14 It does so against the depths and the withdrawal of a primordial darkness. Still, beyond the delusion of culture, the harmonies of time, nature, and history would find renewed necessity. For Benjamin, history was the recurrence of catastrophe, and allegory the experience of its mourning—as Lotze, he claimed, also recognized about history (AP: 478). It was precisely here that Benjamin prized Klee’s vision in his Angelus Novus (see Figure 5). As has been noted, leading Klee scholars affirm the Benjaminian tone of the “ambivalent, dynamic process leading from recollection to rejection of reality by which Klee, himself, as has been seen, termed ‘abstraction.’” While Benjamin himself owned the Angelus Novus painting, he could not have known Klee’s own description of abstraction, published after Benjamin’s death. Yet the similarity between Klee’s account of abstraction and Benjamin’s description of the work as the Angel of history, in which the Angel sees in the past “a single catastrophe which ceaselessly keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage,” has been affirmed as an “astonishing analogy” (IL: 257). Their metaphysical differences notwithstanding, when it came to Klee’s account of historical abstraction Werckmeister claimed “Benjamin was able to gather Klee’s fundamental

Figure 5  Angelus Novus (Angelus Novus), Paul Klee, 1920, 32. Indian ink, color chalk and brown wash on paper, 31.8 x 25 cm. ©The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York, The Bridgeman Art Library. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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idea solely from his picture.”15 On the other hand, Gadamer found in Klee’s account the recurrence or reminiscence of Greek Kalon. He found the Pythagorean vision of crystalline purity, and the perdurance of the mean that he found ubiquitous in authentic works of art (RB: 91). Returning to the symbolic, Benjamin and Gadamer collide, headon, in the “rehabilitation of allegory.” If Gadamer seemed to continuously favor the symbolic, he acknowledged that allegory had been falsely “devalued.” His own account of modern art in The Relevance of the Beautiful seemingly continues this devaluation, to the extent that it focuses on the “profound truth” of the symbolic. Noting that even the neoclassicist Winckelmann still used allegory and symbol synonymously, Gadamer wondered whether the contrast could be absolute. He wondered whether “the symbolic-making activity,” like the presence of modern art itself, was “also in fact limited by the continued existence of a mythical, allegorical tradition” (TM: 72; 81). Consequently, the elevation of the symbol, in contrast to allegory, is seen as a prejudice of Erlebnisästhetik and requires that we “revise the fundamental concepts of aesthetics” (TM: 8). The rehabilitation of allegory would reveal itself to be a hermeneutic task, precisely that of Heideggerean historicity and its “reciprocal rejoinder” with tradition that Benjamin found insufficient.16 But why? For this we can further look to their genealogy or archive. For example, both Gadamer and Benjamin centered their accounts of allegory on the problem of finitude in early medieval accounts. For Benjamin, the problem of the relation between the finite and the infinite is solved allegorically only in a certain expulsion: For it was absolutely decisive for the development of this mode of thought that not only transitoriness, but also guilt should seem evidently to have its home in the province of idols and of the flesh. The allegorically significant is prevented by guilt from finding fulfillment of its meaning in itself. (T: 224)

Only the past allows for the time of redemption and unredemption, not the parousia of the festive present and the contemporaneity of works of art that Gadamer finds fulfilled in the symbol. Gadamer’s argument stems from this archive as well, again privileging the symbol. If “the allegorical procedure of interpretation and the symbolical procedure of knowledge are both necessary,” still Gadamer claims: The concept of symbol has a metaphysical background that is entirely lacking in the rhetorical use of allegory. It is possible to be led beyond the sensible to the divine. For

The Relevance of Klee  47

the world of the senses is not mere nothingness and darkness but the out-flowing and reflection of truth. The modern concept of symbol cannot be understood apart from this Gnostic function and its metaphysical background. The only reason that the word “symbol” can be raised from its original usage (as a document, sign, or pass) to the philosophical idea of a mysterious sign, and thus become similar to a hieroglyph interpretable only by an initiate, is that the symbol is not an arbitrarily chosen or created sign, but presupposes a metaphysical connection between visible and invisible. (TM: 73)

This is what lies behind Goethe for Gadamer, and, rightly understood, what Erlebnisästhetik missed. What Benjamin finds in Goethe, then, is not what Gadamer found. “Words of Goethe express the final conclusion of wisdom: Everything that has had a great effect can really no longer be evaluated. Beauty in its relation to nature can be defined as that which ‘remains true to its essential nature only when veiled (in dem das Unzulangliche Ereignis wird )’ ” (IL: 199). This again resonates with Gadamer’s construal of mimesis in which the work of art resembles nature in having something regular and binding that “grows from within” (RB: 91). Still, what lies within for Benjamin is surely not the eternity of Kalon and the Classical, but its expulsion outside of all such eternity or contemporaneity, an expulsion that reveals any such perduring parousia illusory. Again, we find the contrast: Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocractica [sic] of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in death’s head. (T: 166)

The contrast in intelligibility could not be starker, a contrast between the sign and the hieroglyph that, for Benjamin, threatens Romantic semiotics from the outset: It is not possible to conceive of a starker opposite to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic totality, than this amorphous fragment which is seen in the form of allegorical script. In it the baroque reveals itself to be the sovereign opposite of classicism, as which hitherto, only romanticism has been acknowledged. (T: 176)

Benjamin’s evaluation of this effect within the field of the Baroque is worthy of note: In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune. Its beauty as symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The false appearance

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of totality is extinguished. For the eidos disappears, the simile ceases to exist, and the cosmos it contained shrivels up. . . . A deep-rooted intuition of the problematic character of art . . . emerges as a reaction to its self confidence at the time of the Renaissance. (T: 176)

The antinomy between Benjamin and Gadamer now seems even starker. Notwithstanding the meaningless simultaneity that both authors agree threatens the modern, was Klee’s “ich Krystal ” symbolical or allegorical? Did Gadamer misconceive the deeply problematic character of the work of art in understanding it still to be the mimetic fulfillment of nature? Like the crystal, he argued, the work of art has something of “timeless necessity” about it; “surrounded by a wealth of chaos” like the crystal, “we encounter it as something rare adamantine, brilliant” (RB:  91). This approaches Aristotle, but it is even closer to the Naturphilosophie of Goethe’s successors and their speculative Idea, which, to quote Hegel, overcomes the petrification, inertness, and abstraction of geological nature in organics, “the crystal of life.”17 It was, after all, the analogy between life and self-consciousness, which Gadamer claimed remained at stake in hermeneutics—and which, to use Heidegger’s term, “nurtures” the hermeneutic circle between interpretans and interpretandum (TM: 252). But did Gadamer fully encounter Klee’s chaos? Was the crystal falsely totalized, not a “living symbol” but petrified, dead in “this world?” The question, finally, is whether Gadamer’s attempt to cite this example of Klee’s for his account of a “beautiful” tradition itself was equally petrified. Did he miss the truth of the example’s inner allegory, unredeemed, where “the streams of tradition surge down violently” (T: 106)? To begin to answer such questions, we should be wary of false antinomies. Gadamer emphasized the experience of the negative (TM: 353). His notion of experience as openness to the other, or of the account of history as the experience of suffering, belies both the humanist self-confidence of the Renaissance and its neoclassical retrievals of the Beautiful (TM: 343, 352). He declared in Truth and Method that the antinomy between symbol and allegory was abstract, claiming that “especially in recent decades, the rediscovery of baroque poetry, together with modern aesthetic research, has led to a rehabilitation of allegory” (TM: 81). Truth and Method ’s “Theory of Hermeneutic Experience” construed itself to be in part the fulfillment of allegory’s rehabilitation; it articulated the “rehabilitated” traditionality that had problematically accompanied the symbolic. Moreover, the need for historical augmentation does not divide

The Relevance of Klee  49

Benjamin and Gadamer. Gadamer would deny that his reliance on the Beautiful or his emphasis on the symbol is simply a “timeless” present: “The pantheon of art is not a timeless present that presents itself to a pure aesthetic consciousness, but the act of a mind and spirit that has collected and gathered itself historically” (TM: 97). Gadamer invokes the potentiality for wholeness in the symbol to grasp in its historicity “not the particular but rather the totality of the experienceable world, man’s ontological place in it, and above all his finitude before that which transcends him” (RB: 33). What historically threatens such wholeness and transcendence is the reduction of experience within “modern techniques of reproduction,” leveling contemporaneity into mere simultaneity (TM:  87). Benjamin would fully concur, though the claim must be that Gadamer missed the concrete truths of history (the “economic facts”) in his symbolic investment and attempt to retain the Beautiful, which became perhaps both insufficient and irrelevant. Such a hermeneutics remains radically insufficient to the truth in allegory for Benjamin. Apart from the concrete analysis of detail and structure, “all love of beauty is no more than empty dreaming.” In the last analysis, structure and detail are always historically charged. “The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth” (T: 182). As in a flash, “here it is a question of the dissolution of mythology into the space of history”—our awakening (AP: 458). Knowledge conceived as love of the Beautiful or the symbolic totality is what must be foresworn precisely as “eluded by things,” their “enigmatic allegorical reference” dissolved in the image of organic totality. It is in this sense that it “is not possible to conceive of a starker opposite to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic totality, than this amorphous fragment which is seen in the form of allegorical script” (T: 176). Has Gadamer merely symbolized or crystallized traditionality? Gad­amer often denied his notion of tradition is simply neoclassical in any substantive sense; he denied that traditionalism has the final word. At the same time, he sought to separate himself from those who would deny the truth of tradition. He sought to affirm the truth continued in our prejudices, in hopes of remembering “the one world that I alone know.” But does he admit the unredeemed thereby, the nature (and mourning) that lies beyond symbolic redemption, even perhaps the Goethean nature that

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on Benjamin’s account the elevation of the symbol excludes? Blinkingly perhaps: Admittedly, the natural, as joint condition of our mental life, limits our self-understanding and does so by projecting itself into the mental in many forms—as myth, as dream, as the unconscious preformation of conscious life. And one must admit that aesthetic phenomena similarly manifest the limits of Dasein’s historical selfunderstanding. (TM: 96)

Gadamer claimed all of these—myth, image, and nature—lie in the background of the symbol, as Schelling had already realized (TM: 77). Schelling also realized that what lies at stake therein is the other of consciousness, the unconscious. Klee invokes this term as part of our “prehistory” as well. Benjamin’s emphasis on the explosive image clearly invests itself in an “enlarged” Freudian account of repression: “The greater the share of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more constantly consciousness has to be alert as a screen against stimuli; the more efficiently it does so, the less do these impressions enter experience (Erfahrung), tending to remain in the sphere of a certain hour in one’s life” (IL: 163, AP: 403). This explains the modern diminution of experience to simultaneity while problematizing images that render (qua shocking or provocative) experience moribund; hence the privilege of Baudelaire for Benjamin, whose stylistics recaptures the darkness inherent to medieval allegory and “that ebony to which has been likened the style of Tertullian” (B: 51). It begins to look like the quarrel between Benjamin and Gadamer—like that between Freud and his “chosen son” Jung (or that between Husserl and his chosen son, Heidegger— concerns the issue of such repression (or “inauthenticity”) and its symbolic affects. Moreover, it is worth noting that Benjamin himself saw the Arcades Project, following Adorno’s suggestion, as correcting the regressive “expressionism” of Jung’s collective unconscious (AP: 472).18 Jung’s views too were explicitly derived (in opposition to Freud’s naturalism) from post-Kantian views of the symbolic in Schiller and Goethe, Fichte and Schelling.19 Gadamer’s own notion of the requisite shock of the Beautiful, though a shattering and destruction of the familiar, remains, unlike Benjamin’s, auratic (PH: 104). Gadamer’s account of hermeneutics is, accordingly, still linked to consciousness insofar as it remains linked to the task of “self-understanding.” Like Jugendstil, Benjamin would insist, it “forces the auratic” in the attempt “to win back symbols,” but it remains regression “insofar as it loses the power of looking the everyday in the face”

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(AP:  557–558). It would remain both mythic and unconscious about its own history. Like phenomenologists from Husserl and Fink onward, Gadamer claims the notion of the unconscious remains perniciously entangled in an illicit metaphysics (of inner substance). Fink famously put it: “As long as the exposition of the problem of the unconscious is determined by such an implicit theory of consciousness, it is in principle philosophically naïve.”20 The result of such metaphysical conflicts would be just perniciously (dogmatic) metaphysics itself. Gadamer reaffirms the phenomenological claim concerning the unconscious here: “We need to cast a critical eye upon just what sort of untested presuppositions of a traditional kind are still at work” (RAS: 104). Unlike the transcendental idealist, however, Gadamer has affirmed the nature that interrupts consciousness. It disturbs the task of self-­understanding, conceived, as it was classically by Fichte, as a means of mental construction or activity, where “construction, production, generation are transcendental concepts describing spontaneity of self-consciousness” (RAS: 103). Remarkably, for Gadamer such transparency is interrupted before its own “impossibility,” almost its own “limit—experience,” to use the language of thinkers more directly influenced by surrealism. Self-understanding is always on-the-way; it is on a path whose completion is a clear impossibility. If there is an entire dimension of unilluminated unconscious; if all our actions, wishes, drives, decisions, and modes of conduct (and so the totality of our social existence) are based on the obscure and veiled dimension of the conations of our animality; if all our conscious representations can be masks, pretexts, under which our vital energy or our social interests pursue their own goals in an unconscious way; if all the insights we have, as obvious and evident as they may be, are threatened by such doubt; then self-understanding cannot designate any patent self-transparency of our human existence. (RAS: 103–104)

Gadamer adds that at stake here is not only the field of the unconscious that concerns the psychoanalyst but the world of the dominant social prejudices that Marxism claims to elucidate. In both cases, consciousness submits to a certain “reversal,” using a word that he applies to the reversal (and dialectic) of horizons that occurs in the passage from Husserl to Heidegger (TM: 257:562). Still, Gadamer claimed, “Psychoanalysis and critique of ideology are forms of enlightenment” (RAS: 104). As such, these forms of enlightenment still suffer from the myths of progressivism, and in this respect presumably from the dogmatic teleology of

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a “traditional kind” of metaphysics (RAS: 104). Here Gadamer attempts to be more critical than critical theory itself. “The Relevance of the Beautiful” asserted that “the riddle that the problem of art sets us is precisely that of the contemporaneity of the past and the present” (RB: 46). Gadamer stated in an interview discussing the early Frankfurt school, including Horkheimer and Adorno, that he did meet with these people regularly and knew their work. He had the impression that they were “very clever,” but he found them lacking in competence. The rhetoric was complicated on all sides. Gadamer also felt a certain unease about this encounter: “So all I can say is, we felt like country cousins visiting the big city. To hear us talk, you would think we had a superiority complex, and of course hidden behind that, there was an inferiority complex” (EPH: 141). Granted such dissonances, shouldn’t Gadamer’s claim to the contemporaneity of the Beautiful and the nature it invokes simply instantiate the “screen” of ideological repression? Isn’t the riddle of contemporaneity precisely the riddle of the crystal itself? Rather than organic redemption, it involves the petrification of time; it involves the “stillborn,” to use Hegel’s term for the crystalline. Doesn’t all this affect the account of traditionality itself, burdened too often with the legacy of Fichte, as Gadamer described? The commonality that underlies hermeneutics, Gadamer claims, is not metaphysical any more than the hermeneutic circle is merely formal: “But this commonality is constantly being formed in our relation to tradition. Tradition is not simply a permanent precondition; rather we produce it ourselves inasmuch as we understand, participate in the evolution of tradition, and hence further determine it ourselves” (TM: 293). All this may sound too much like the hermeneutic version of ­Fichte’s transcendental Ich, or Hegel’s Geist or Marx’s proletariat (versions of which admittedly still haunt Benjamin via Lukács), a production whose self-certainty is guaranteed precisely because we make it. Gadamer surely knew the limitations of such talk concerning self-reflexivity (“The focus of subjectivity is a distorting mirror”; TM: 276). This is especially true insofar as it concerned the question of temporal difference and its reversals (TM: 276). Gadamer himself acknowledged our distance from the past. It is almost axiomatic for Truth and Method (and distances him from those like Strauss or Husserl): “The continuity of the Western philosophical tradition has been effective only in a fragmentary way” (TM: xxiv). This forces a confrontation with the logic of such a fragment.21 The question of continuity or contemporaneity arises only in this fragmentary

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way; “the encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event [Geschehen] and is itself part of this event” (TM:  99). In that case, contemporaneity, like self-understanding, would always be fragmentary, never fully achieved. Tradition would be always already detraditionalized noncontemporaneity; allegory always already interrupts Kalonic presence. Hermeneutics would thus involve the fragmentary articulation of an historical (allegorical) encounter with an “other,” a “thou,” or a beyond that interrupts simple presence. The movement of allegorization would be no more fixed than is the tradition whose perdurance it belies as riddle or as shock. It is an open (and still interdetermined) ciphering between the ontic and the ontological. The shock would emerge through the provocative encounter with a fragmentary effect that disarticulated or transcended simultaneity or instant—an encounter, to use Klee’s term, with the prehistory of the ontic. In that case, Gadamer could no more be denying the screen that blocks consciousness than he could be affirming the transparency of its self-presence. In the event of the screen itself we would encounter a (disjunctive) synthesis between the symbolic and the allegory. To use Heidegger’s terms, this event would reveal an “exhibitive disparting,” which neither affirms nor denies appearance but rather places its interpretation in question.22 Unlike many of Gadamer’s glosses on psychoanalysis, hermeneutics here could not operate under what he calls the “prejudice of completeness” (TM: 294). Rather, it would need to shed light and meaning where both are lacking. Neither hermeneutics nor psychoanalysis would involve simply “completing an interrupted process into a full history, a story that can be articulated in language” (PH: 11). Such interruption as well as the fragmented character of its decipherment would be essential to the hermeneutics story. Such interruption, after all, was essential to some of the “oldest stories” on which hermeneutics relied and which Gadamer continually retold and refigured: those of Being or the Good or the Beautiful itself (RAS: 77). Gadamer himself (like Klee at points) grounds the Beautiful in the interplay of interdetermination of the visible and the invisible, in the prehistory that descends from the metaphysics of illumination in neo-Platonism. We have described the ontological structure of the Beautiful as the mode of appearing that causes things to emerge in their proportions and their outline, and the same holds for the reality of the intelligible. The light that causes everything to emerge in such a way that it is evident and comprehensible in itself is the light of the word.

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Thus the close relationship that exists between the shining forth (Vorscheinen) of the Beautiful and the evidentness (das Einleuchtende) of the understandable is based on the metaphysics of light. This was precisely the relation that guided our hermeneutical enquiry. (TM: 483)

Hence the final question: Does Gadamer abandon the traditional prejudices of Enlightenment for the metaphysics—we should add the allegory—of light and apparition? Despite everything, has he abandoned critique for metaphysics, Kant for Grossetest? Has his hermeneutics of application simply eliminated the critical moment in advance? Benjamin insisted on the allegorical intuition and its image as both fragment and ruin, one in which the Beautiful as symbol “evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it” (T: 176). Has Gadamer sufficiently grasped the moment in which radiance has turned dark, the image in which dialectic has been brought to a standstill and the ekstasis of the Beautiful has been transformed into mourning? Or has hermeneutics from the outset, and in particular in contesting aesthetic modernity through its genesis, its “teleology in reverse,” been a work of mourning (TM: 256)? What, finally, is the relevance of Paul Klee for all this? If Klee still sought a cosmological significance for art, if art had to do precisely with the visible and the invisible, he also acknowledged that we have the part but not the whole. This higher crystalline world will need to be constructed, synthesized from fragments. Hence the relevance of mathematics; the allegory of mathematics looms inescapably over all modern theoretics. Klee knew the limits of such constructs in the midst of fragmentation, which he understood would require intuition. Still, as has become evident, the work of art remains not simply drowned in allegory but equally ventured— and the fragments of Goethe are again not far off—as a symbol. As the “Creative Credo” concludes, its affirmation of formalism notwithstanding, “The relation of art to creation is symbolic. Art is an example, just as the earthly is an example of the cosmic” (N: 79). Even here, of course, we have the parts but not the whole, he realized. But what then is the relation between interpretation and its prehistory, its history, its historical models, not least of which are its old stories, those of Being or the Beautiful, but equally their theological and cosmological allegories? As has been noted, the Beautiful and the Ugly coexist in Klee’s writings as essentially co-related (and relative) terms. This is true for Nietzsche, whom Klee knew as early as 1904, and Schopenhauer before him, and even for Kant. Indeed, Kant’s third Critique mentions the allegorical

The Relevance of Klee  55

only once, claiming that in opposition to the Beautiful the allegorical facilitates the presentation of the Ugly. Klee had said precisely this as well.23 Previously, of course, the Beautiful and Ugly, like all transcendentals, were thought to be analogically interrelated. Again we confront the problem of critique, before what Kant already referred to as “the ruins [Ruinen] of the ancient systems.”24 Gadamer claimed that the third Critique’s discussion of the symbolic was “one of the most brilliant results of Kantian thought,” decisively rediscovering the analogia entis (TM: 75). Only by confronting “the ruins of the ancient systems” can we begin to assess what is contested in Benjamin and Gadamer’s rehabilitation of allegory and the question of interpretation that still unites them. Gadamer summed up the effect of this account in, again, claiming, “Understanding proves to be an event” (TM: 309). At stake was an encounter with the other that acknowledged the limitations of reflection or the death of intentio, to use Benjamin’s terms. Application is not a matter of mere judgment; nor can it be captured by the logic of connotations (TM: 30–31). Rather, it involves an historical encounter and ciphering of a never finally determined meaning that exceeds us. Both Gadamer and Benjamin saw, perhaps much to the chagrin of those close to them, the denial of progress that this entailed, the continual interruption of our ontic prejudices. Even if we depend factically on our prejudices, as Gadamer argued, for coherence, both truth and our epistemic capacities extend beyond such prejudices. Correlatively, legitimation emerges only through such exceeding (ekstasis). Benjamin too found truth only in this excess, in the shock of the surrealist encounter with the dialectical image, one that occurs in Gadamer in relation to the radiance of the Beautiful. What becomes most apparent, however, is that what is required here is not simply a decision between two thinkers, adjudicating their judgments or even their archives, between the Beautiful and Sublime, symbol and allegory, divided between fulfillment and catastrophic allusion. These alternatives are fragmented—even while depending analogically on one another’s intelligibility. As Gadamer’s invocation of the analogia entis acknowledged, in such differences the issue of transcendence was never far away—nor for the same reason seemingly, the remnants of the theological.25 This was true of the messianic view of redemption of the past in Benjamin’s case (and it certainly occurs in the question of the spiritual in Klee’s own work). But we should not be surprised when Gadamer asserts that his “task of redefining the hermeneutics of the human sciences” is undertaken “in

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terms of legal and theological hermeneutics” (TM: 310–311). Both thinkers, after all, have what Gadamer calls a theological understanding of this event. Understanding is itself “claimed” in the history of effects by what lies beyond ontic categorization, thereby “bridging temporal distance.” Such claims left both open to their critics. Fairly or not, Adorno charged that Benjamin’s messianic view of history remained too circumscribed. Adorno claimed that Benjamin’s view was limited “to a voluntarily installed, subjectively chosen tradition that is as unauthoritative as it accuses the autarkic thought of being.”26 On the other hand, Gadamer’s access to “eternity” through the event of (Kierkegaard’s) contemporaneity may be too indeterminate. In such notions, as he noted of the festive, Gadamer sought escape from the dispersion of simultaneity; he sought, by so doing, to release its temporality (its Jetzzeit or “fulfilled time”) from “theological justification.”27 He overlooked the complications in such contemporaneity, not only with respect to “desacrilization” but primitivism, as is noted by historians of religion such as Eliade.28 The time of the sacred remains staunchly heterogeneous, interrupted and granted the dispersions of modernity fragmented, noncontemporaneous, and plural. To use Eliade’s terms, neither hierophany nor “ontophany” will readily reduce the differences involved. Neither Benjamin nor Gadamer escapes this agonistic of understanding and the dispersion of its effects, an agonistic tossed between tradition construed either as treasure or wasteland and the Beautiful, construed either as cathartic fulfillment or ideologically illusory. At stake here is the interpretation of the allegorical resonance of what exceeds and escapes the simultaneity of (ontic) lived experience—and thereby what perdures in the “veil” of the Beautiful. These are once more the terms of Goethe, cited by Benjamin.29 Both the symbolic and the allegorical remain involved in Klee’s work—as they were in Goethe himself. Both indicate a more general—or better, dispersed—phenomenon. Klee’s work instantiates the dispersion or fragmentation of tradition itself, one that, like all fragments, is fully captured by neither Benjamin nor Gadamer. It will play out in later polemics. As commentators have noted, Klee’s Diaries is the record of this fragmentation of tradition. Alain Bonfand argues that it records Klee’s evolution from empathy and representation to abstraction, beyond exogenous space to endogenous space, from symbol to hieroglyph. Departing from the past, Klee prefers Byzantine mosaics to Raphael; condemning Euclidean and scenographic space, he moves beyond the optics of the Renaissance. His

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interest in “Islamic” colors of Tunisia, and later his interest in Egyptian iconography, reinforces this.30 All this takes place proximate to the formalism of the Bauhaus—though Werckmeister insisted on the irony in play. Or to use Adorno terms: even here Klee cheats (AT: 290). Throughout there remains the complex synthesis of the architectonic and the poetic. One wonders about the limitations of Gadamer’s reading of Klee. Notwithstanding the task of rehabilitating allegory, Gadamer’s reading awarded symbolic Darstellung a “metaphysical privilege”—and it may even confound his own “classical” reading of Heideggerean historicity as its allegorical corrective. He would not stand alone in applying this schematics to Klee’s work. Grohmann claimed, “Everything points in the direction of symbol: the symbol sums up all that has gone into Klee’s art, the thing itself, its origin and development, its meaning and metaphysical references, its merging of past, present, and future as one.”31 Again, one must wonder about this metaphysical privilege. As Grohmann acknowledged, the Goethean notion of the symbol conceals as much as it reveals. On the other hand, the allegorical (or its ruins) cannot simply supplant, let alone sublate the complex economy in which the symbolic exhibits and articulates itself. We will need to think of the Auseinandersetzung between Gadamer and Benjamin as the task of interrogating the ruins of traditionality. It will affect readings of both. Granted the remove from origins, one can perhaps only figure and refigure these ruins. Our interpretations, to use a term of Klee’s, always arise out of a tension (Spannung) among differences. The result for Klee remained a matter of idealism, one neither to be reduced nor resolved but articulated precisely through such differences. Gadamer wrote that “the true locus” of hermeneutics concerns the between that connects the familiar and the strange (TM: 295). Even this “between” too is only schematized and refigured. This is its link with tragedy, as Klee’s own figures realized. Two years after painting the Angelus Novus that influenced Benjamin’s materialist angelology, Klee wrote, in an account of “the figuration of dynamic forces”: Man’s ability to measure the spiritual, earthbound and cosmic, set against his physical helplessness; this is his fundamental tragedy. The tragedy of spirituality. The consequence of this simultaneous helplessness and mobility of the spirit is the dichotomy of human existence. Man is half a prisoner, half born of wings. Each of the two halves perceives the tragedy of its halfness by awareness of its counterpart. (N: 407)

Approximative Man (L’Homme approximatif ), Paul Klee, 1931, 157. Etching and drypoint, 17.9 x 14 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS) New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Figure 6 

3 Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism, and Philosophy Toward a “Nonprosaic” Conception of Consciousness I recognize in no uncertain terms that surrealism is the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century. Jean-Paul Sartre (WL: 190–191) Phenomenology is the only philosophy which lives. Georges Bataille (IE: 8) Perhaps in our uncertain space we are closer to those who excavate: to Nietzsche (instead of Husserl) to Klee (instead of Picasso). Breton belongs to that family. Michel Foucault (AME: 171) The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make painting both sign and object. Sartre (WL: 29n)

The relationship between philosophy and surrealism remains

unwieldy. At stake, to use Maurice Blanchot’s words, is a “strange plurality” (IC: 408). The significance of this plurality has been difficult to evaluate. Seen from either perspective, each is the site of a certain interruption. As Blanchot has noted, discussions of the issue tend typically to restrict such evaluations to an explication of sources—Breton’s or Tzara’s readings of Hegel, for example—or their relation to Bergson. The resulting analyses not only rarely rise to the level of adjudication but also rarely engage the status of surrealism as a theoretical source for other matters. Surrealism, after all, provided a resource for accounts of the primitive in anthropology, the unconscious in psychoanalysis, and even the sacred in theology. We are at risk of losing, thereby, the debates and dialectics through which 59

60  Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism, and Philosophy

surrealism might be more than simply a historical fact. Granted the complexity of these relations, it is understandable how such debates (not only between artists, but artists and critics) go largely unexplored. Like other such lacunae, the historical effects of surrealism would thus remain largely unconscious in our accounts. The relation between Picasso and Klee, for example, has similarly been described as both classical to, and inherently dialectical within, the history of aesthetic modernism; this relation involves a clash between a somewhat more vigorously inventive, systematic, engaged practice and its “cooler,” more labyrinthine, explorative demurrals. Granted the diversity of these painters’ works, any final appraisal concerning such dialectics inevitably itself remains conditional. Adding to such internal dialectics of artistic posture and commitment, the complications of philosophy only further underdetermine the issues at stake. To say all this is doubtless to say something about the uncomfortable relations that exist not only between philosophy and art but between philosophy and poetry as well. Ultimately, it forces us to confront the difficult space that separates the “hieroglyphics” of the textual and the “propositional.” In all of these cases, like much of the impact of avant-garde, the practices at stake seemed inevitably to question the contingency of the distinctions themselves. In the case of philosophy and writing, these issues—as well as the troubling status of surrealism—were certainly thematic by the time of Jean-Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature? Not incidentally, the dialectic between Picasso and Klee is also fully at work in this book. As will become evident, Sartre’s protocols form something of a legacy for the interpretation of these matters. Strikingly however, in an opening chapter (“What Is Writing?”) Picasso’s “Guernica,” often cited as an exemplar of political engagement, becomes for Sartre a certain exemplar of the painter’s muteness: “Does any one think that it won over a single heart of the Spanish cause?” (WL: 5) Having invoked Merleau-Ponty’s claim that no quale is “so bare that it is not permeated with signification,” Sartre states that in Picasso’s Guernica “something is said that can never quite be heard and that would take an infinity of words to express.” This infinity, however, speaks to a crucial problem within the Sartrean text. For Sartre, it spoke less to a wealth to be mined (as it was already in Kant’s aesthetic account) than to a limitation concerning the work of art’s conceptual determinability—and not only relevance, but also reference. Kant himself claimed that we are compelled within this infin-

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ity to ascribe reality to an aesthetic predicate “as if it were a property of things.”1 The problem that Sartre’s text raises is prefigured in his citation of ­Merleau-Ponty, where this “adventure of the aesthetic dialectic” had already begun. The question for Merleau-Ponty emerged as to the originality (and difference) between the said and the unsaid, the relation between the sensible and the intelligible. In the problem of the painterly concept, however, Merleau-Ponty had encountered not simply the problem of finite sensoriality, that is, not simply the metaphysical relation between the sensible and the intelligible, but, in their difference, the limitations of that strict distinction—and in the issue of their significative difference, precisely different domains of intelligibility itself. In this silence that speaks otherwise than the said, Merleau-Ponty argued—and would increasingly, in the wake of Sartre’s citation—there lurks a polymorphism in what Kant called the schematism, the event in which Kant argued transcendental imagination linked intuition and concepts (PhP: 326f). There lay lurking equally in this difference a certain alterity before the demands of strict theoretical determinability. Schelling, who had linked this difference to art and the unconscious, wrote that a certain surpassing or surprise, literally an “overtaking” (Überraschung) occurs in the work of art that challenged the Kantian honorifics attending cognitively determinate discourse (Erkenntnis).2 Indeed, Merleau-Ponty was willing to say that in such moments words surprise and “teach me my thoughts,” calling into question the simple link between reflection and the intention to communicate (vouloir dire). In linking himself to Merleau-Ponty’s more expressive archive in 1948, Sartre never saw the objections that would sink his simple opposition between the silent and the said. That same year, Merleau-Ponty had begun to break with Sartre, siding more and more with the advocates of literary modernism (such as Blanchot) who stressed the expressive capacities, the polymorphism of language—and what Mallarmé referred to as not yet revealed meaning that lies in the “silence” in language (WP: 100–101).3 Surrealism, later, would receive a more positive gloss as “one of the constants of our time” (S: 234). The invocation of such a polymorphism seemed nonphenomenological in the classical, Husserlian sense, where paintings are simply iteratively available as prelinguistic phenomenological Sinn. The painter signifies not differently, not through a different domain of intelligibility, but more restrictedly. The painterly Sinn remains, unlike the mathematical, bound to time and place and even the materiality of the canvas. Sartre’s account of

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the imaginary follows Husserlian premises: the imaginary is an immanent object strictly distinct from and opposed to the real. Correspondingly, the semantics of What Is Literature? strictly distinguishes between meaning and use in precisely this regard; designation or real reference and imaginary reference are two strictly distinct significative “layers.” While from the outset Merleau-Ponty rendered this distinction problematic, Sartre cites Merleau-Ponty only to note that the painterly (like the sensible) is significative, though for Sartre in strictly distinct (but analogous) manners (WL: 4–5). As his 1940 work on the Imagination declared, the image is an analgon, but it is precisely an analgon of the real on which it remains always semantically and ontologically parasitic (PI: 69). In What Is Literature? Sartre again insists on the difference, the hierarchy and its valorization. The writer’s vocation is that of responsibility, the existential speech act of engagement. The painter and the poet undertake the exploration of their media, which becomes, like the image, merely an object in itself. Here the writer’s responsibility is absolute and absolutely distinct from the irresponsibility of painting. The writer’s silence is not different, a difference among modi significandi, but rather an (irresponsible) refusal to speak (WL: 19). Hence, Sartre claims, one has the “right” to ask, “Why have you spoken of this rather than that?” (WL: 19) All this was axiomatic. There was no language and no responsibility in the painter’s exploration: “He is therefore as far as he can be from considering colors and signs as a language” (WL: 3). This obtains except in certain cases. As Sartre immediately states in a footnote, he thinks this to be true “at least in general: The greatness and error of Klee lie in his attempt to make painting both sign and object” (WL: 29). Although for the painter the color is a thing, Klee has transgressed the protocols or limits of classical Phenomenology’s painterly imaginary. This metamorphic relationship between sign and object in Klee’s work had already been noted by scholars (such as Grohmann) and critics (among them Greenberg) alike.4 Interestingly, when Greenberg published his article on American art in Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes while What Is Literature? was being composed, he claimed that Klee’s followers would now be found among Americans (for example, Tobey, and later even Pollock remotely).5 Sartre would surely not follow them in this endeavor. The writer does not (analogously) explore words, does not allow language to resonate; rather, the prose writer “makes use of words” (WL: 13). This “pro-

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saic” use removes the writer from the poetics and the imaginary of the avant-garde, leaving the writer’s discourse, meaning, and use—or responsibilities—untouched: The crisis of language that broke out at the beginning of this century is a poetic crisis. Whatever the social and historical factors, it manifested itself by attacks of depersonalization of the writer in the face of words. He no longer knew how to use them, and, in Bergson’s famous formula, he only half recognized them. He approached them with a completely fruitful feeling of strangeness. They were no longer his; they were no longer he; but in those strange mirrors, the sky, the earth, and his own life were reflected. And, finally, they became things themselves, or rather the black heart of things. And when the poet joins several of these microcosms together the case is like that of painters when they assemble their colors on the canvas. One might think that he is composing a sentence, but this is only what it appears to be. He is creating an object. The words-things are grouped by magical associations of fitness and incongruity, like colors and sounds. They attract, repel, and “burn” one another, and their association composes the veritable poetic unity that is the phrase-object. (WL: 10)

The existentialist’s speech act, instead, uses language to communicate; “he designates, demonstrates, order, refuses, interrogates, begs, insults, persuades, insinuates” (WL: 13). All this sounds like rhetorical figure, but the more basic theoretical claim is that “words are first of all not objects but designations for objects; it is not first of all a matter of knowing whether they please or displease in themselves, but whether they correctly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion” (WL: 14). The writer’s praxis is thus “action by disclosure.” The dichotomy here between poetry and prose could not be made stronger. When Foucault later analyzed the account of language as an economy of analogy, or a hermeneutics of resemblance he linked it to prerepresentational significative practices that emerged in the wake of the Middle Ages (OT: 17ff). Like Foucault, Sartre would not rest easily with such a hermeneutics. The problem with such an account of signification for him was less theoretical than practical, less a matter of linguistics than politics. The problem, for Sartre, was: “What is the structure of our society that provokes the appearance of this emphasis on hermeneutics?” (NE: 435) Sartre linked hermeneutics to the medieval clerk’s linguistic “techniques,” which “were not practiced for their own sake like spiritual exercises” (WL: 78). The writer remained fully accommodated to the ruling class and at the service of its ideology. Only when these techniques became capable

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of distinguishing themselves from the object could they become explicitly an object in themselves, ideological (WL: 77). This legacy lives on our own practices. The poet, on Sartre’s account, risks, in objectifying language, becoming simply ideological, while the existentialist, in contesting such alienated objectifications, resumes the medieval clerk’s nonspiritualized technique—albeit now fully rationalized in self-conscious responsibility. His existentialist criticism of Husserl notwithstanding, Sartre’s account of signification is staunchly transcendental, transparently devoid of the contingencies of convention, history, and stylistics. It is almost as if the radicality of modernist poetics had forced a certain transcendental regression. If the “speaker is in a situation”—indeed “within language like we are in our body”—this is not a limitation but a transcendental epistemic condition (WL: 7, 14). It is still true that “words are transparent and the gaze looks through them” (WL: 19). Although the poet “more often has the scheme of the sentence in his mind, and the word follows,” prose has been detached from the question of the schematism or the “verbal scheme” and linked directly to signification (WL: 10): “There is nothing to be said about form in advance, and we have said nothing. Everyone invents his own, and one judges it afterward” (WL: 20). Rather than “utilizing” words, the poetic attitude is an autonomous function; the poet’s words are magical, a self-constituted microcosm. “Thus in each word he realizes, solely by the effect of the poetic attitude, the metaphors which Picasso dreamed of when he wanted to do a matchbox which was completely a bat without ceasing to be a matchbox” (WL: 9). Now it is clearly the surrealists (whom Klee had already influenced) that were the focus of Sartre’s ire. He found the same “error” that he had found in Klee. Again the prose of the everyday becomes transformed into poetic object. This poetic transformation was generated, he claimed, in the wake of “Baudelairian dissatisfaction,” arising out of the “obscure spot of the most bourgeois soul where all dreams meet and melt in a desperate desire for the impossible” (WL: 154, 167). Thus the surrealist’s account of automatic writing was, for Sartre, to use Hegel’s terms, “the inverted world” to l’ homme engagé.6 Indeed, such automatic writing was above all “destruction of subjectivity”: When we try our hand at it, we are spasmodically cut through by clots that tear us apart; we are ignorant of their origin; we do not know them before they have taken their place in the world of objects and we must perceive them with foreign eyes. Thus, it is not a matter, as has too often been said, of substituting their unconscious

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subjectivity for consciousness, but rather of showing the object as a fitful glimmering at the heart of an objective universe. (WL: 170)

Like Klee’s écriture, the surrealists confused object and sign, inverted the voluntary for the involuntary in “the ruins of subjectivity.” They inverted the subjective and the objective, mixing virtue and vice, “greatness and error.” But this was not all surrealism did, for “the surrealists’ next step was to destroy objectivity in turn” (WL: 170). And it is just this that constitutes the ambivalence of their “greatness and error”: Whence, the ambivalence of the surrealist works: each of them can pass for the barbaric and magnificent invention of a form, of an unknown being, of an extraordinary phrase, and, as such can become a voluntary contribution to culture; and as each of them is a project for annihilating all the rest by annihilating itself along with it, Nothingness glitters on its surface, a Nothingness which is only the endless fluttering of contradictions. (WL: 172)

This Nothingness is obviously close to Sartre’s heart—or in any case the “heart of Being” on his account, wherein Sartre discovered the very essence of consciousness or the “for-itself.” Yet surrealistic nothingness, far from inhabiting the heart of being, occurs only “at its surface.” For Sartre, this is its failure; if the surrealists had caught the radical spontaneity of the creative act, or the upsurge and freedom of the for-itself, it was not connected to Being (or to its transformation) but rather to its impossibility. The esprit of surrealism, Sartre goes on to state, “is neither Hegelian negativity, nor hypothesized Negation, nor even Nothingness, though it bears a likeness to it; it would be more correct to call it the Impossible, or, if you like, the imaginary point where dream and waking, the real and the fictitious, the objective and the subjective, merge” (WL: 172). It may be suggested that such unification is what Idealism always sought, but again it is its “inverted world” that rules here: a flux of difference expelled from the world of eidetics. Rather than “dominating and governing its internal constructions” in synthesis, surrealism “wants to maintain itself in the enervating tension which is produced by an unrealizable intuition” (WL: 172–3). The stress on the unrealizable and impossible fulfillment of this experience was later made explicit by Georges Bataille, whom (like Breton) Sartre quotes at a number of crucial points in this text.7 Such “limit experiences” were invoked precisely as the alterity to the limitations of communicability or even community itself by which we are always insufficiently

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in the world. In searching for pure experience, we are inevitably led to give up the desire to be everything through knowledge, therefore to communicate. A “new knowledge” emerges in its transgression, and once again communication is then given to me (IE: 53–54). But such an excessive singularity encounters this new knowledge only in acknowledging its impossibility—that is, its failure as knowledge. If Bataille agrees that phenomenology is “the only philosophy that lives” (as did Sartre that surrealism is “the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century”), the problem is that experience is not limitable to such a goal: “The limit which is knowledge as a goal must be crossed” (IE: 8). For Sartre, however, the hopes of the poetic transgression itself remain too imaginary, too detached from the real. Sartre’s transcendental reduction takes hold here. At most, on Sartre’s reading, surrealism remains simply the enactment of the epoché. Instead of Husserl’s scientific epoché, however, the surrealists’ epoché is like the third-century skeptics Carneades and Philo, who, after enacting the epoché and “sure of not compromising themselves by an imprudent adherence, lived like everybody else.” Sartre directs this (still Hegelian) critique of skepticism at the surrealists themselves: “In the same way, the surrealist, once the world is destroyed and miraculously preserved by its destruction, can shamelessly give full play to their immense love of the world” (WL: 173).8 The tension that arises out of destruction never then gives way to positive revolution. Indeed, if Sartre does claim “surrealism is the only poetic movement of the first half of the twentieth century,” he adds that “what it liberates is neither desire nor the human totality, but pure imagination. Now, the fact is that the purely imaginary and praxis are not easily reconciled” (WL: 191). Bataille himself responded, “It is true that the operation is not without difficulties, which surrealism has revealed but not resolved” (AM: 66). His point remained that there is a (pseudo)logic of domination that forestalls Sartre’s own account. Here he was direct. In his 1943 article on Bataille, “Un Nouvelle Mystique,” Sartre already claimed that Bataille’s work violates the conditions of meaningful discourse. Sartre aligned the latter’s account of nothingness and the dark side of knowledge with Schelling— and again Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s indeterminacy, that at night all cows are black (NM: 184). It appears that to give oneself to the night is rapturous [ravissant]. I wouldn’t doubt it. It is a certain way of dissolving oneself into nothing. But Mr. Bataille . . . satisfies his

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wish “to be nothing” in a roundabout way. With the phrases “nothing,” “night” and “a non-knowing laid bare” he has simply presented us with a fine little pantheistic ecstasy. I call to mind what Poincaré said of Riemanian geometry; replace the definition of the Riemanian plane with that of the Euclidean sphere, and you have Euclidean geometry. Indeed. And in a similar fashion. Spinoza’s system is pantheist of the right-handed type, while that of Mr. Bataille is the left-handed variety. (NM: 185)

The problem (and the experience) of rapture will become increasingly evident. Here Bataille adamantly replied: “At this point, however, I am the one who should elucidate Sartre, instead of the other way around. He should have me say that it “would be a left handed pantheism,” if this infinite turbulence of mine had already ruled out even a possibility of stopping” (BatNiet: 182). Unlike either Schelling or Hegel, Bataille’s “experience” neither simply rises to the level of a proposition nor resides in a system, both of which are arguably still implicitly demanded in the existentialist phenomenological performative. Like the Hegelian account to which it appeals, Bataille claims, it “assumes a coincidence of subjective and objective aspects and at the same time a fusion of subject and object” (BatNiet: 186). If modern Phenomenology is “replying to changing thought,” it “is only one moment among others; a sandcastle, a mirage of sorts” (ibid.). Some would see in De Beauvoir’s critique of “masculine logic” in The Second Sex a similar account of logic of domination in Sartre—or what Merleau-Ponty referred to as Sartre’s “cursed lucidity.”9 Rightly or wrongly, however, Bataille had already made the critique in 1945: The profound difference between surrealism and the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre hangs on this character of the existence of liberty. If I do not seek to dominate it, liberty will exist: it is poetry; words no longer striving to serve some useful purpose, set themselves free and so unleash the image of free existence, which is never bestowed except in the instant. (AM: 66)

This logic of the instant is Kierkegaardian, a kairos appealed to not only by him but others in his wake, among them Heidegger, Benjamin, and Gadamer—and Sartre himself in the account of existential decision. As close as it may be to Sartre, here he could find in the poetic invocation of the instant only the game of loser wins. Acknowledging the failure of communication, “poetic language rises out of the ruins of prose.” The word, in ceasing to become an effective means, is metamorphosed and each word recovers its individuality and salvation (WL: 30). Bataille claimed—

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against Sartre—what is decisive is the spontaneity of automatic writing; surrealism “is founded on automatic writing. In so doing it extricates the human mind from any other end than poetry” (AM: 57–58). It opens up the domain of “inner experience” that Sartre’s logic of domination foreclosed—and precludes the disclosure of a realm that Sartre’s “responsible praxis” lost in being guided by the goal of knowledge. Bataille and Klee thus became similarly positioned in relation to the axioms of existential responsibility. A year later it became further evident that the argument that identified Bataille with Klee’s failure had found certain confirmation. Writing on Klee in Cahiers d’Art, a journal that had been instrumental to the dissemination of Klee’s work, Bataille openly identified himself with Klee’s work, stating they shared the “douceur d’un vice.”10 If so, both from Sartre’s standpoint would only be suffering from the same delusion. Thus we are beset with antinomies concerning the expressions of the imaginary. If not dominated or responsibly engaged, then art is not related to the “real”; but if so related to the real, Bataille rejoins, it is still dominated by utilitarian convention, pre-accommodated, “committed to useful activity” (AM: 46). Imagination and reason, praxis and the imaginary are all but irreconcilable. Sartre criticized these surrealists’ utopianism as “not easily reconciled” (WL: 191). If imagination and reason are “not easily reconciled,” however, does it follow that they are simply opposed, that there is no such thing as historical imagination, and hermeneutic invention? Does poetic engagement exist beyond the antinomies of meaning and use, signification and object, immanence and transcendence, responsibility and license? But what would it be like?11 Not without irony, this internal tension is never dissolved from Sartre’s early accounts. It is perhaps the problem of irony in the Sartrean text itself, even while he reinvokes the Hegelian critique of irony to overcome the destruction of tradition, the classical (WL: 85).12 Granted this logic of opposition between the silent and the said, the writerly and the painterly, there are perhaps few options. Merleau-Ponty’s account of the historical imaginary sought to overcome such distinctions, while, as Blanchot saw, still acknowledging a certain alterity in its midst.13 With Sartre we are confronted with a logic, if not of strict representation, then of strict phenomenological presentation, complete with its principle of presence and its logic of significative fulfillment; what is significative will be referentially significative when, and only when, it is adequate(d) to the real. It is in this

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sense that Sartre’s analysis remains consistent with Husserl’s famous tour of the Dresden Gallery in Ideas I, where “depictive objectification” and “sign objectification” distinctly interrefer without ambiguity: A name reminds us, namingly, of the Dresden Gallery, and our last visit there: we walk through the halls and stand before a picture by Teniers which represents a picture Gallery. If, let us say, we allow that pictures in the latter would represent again pictures which, for their part, represent legible inscriptions, and so forth, then we can estimate which inclusion of objectifications and which mediacies are actually produceable with respect to objectivities which can be seized upon.14

On this static model, all historicity and all convention have seemingly become superfluous, identically parsed in the sheer givenness in which pictorial and the significative have been distinctly isolated before the cognitive regard. But this is just what Sartre’s honest historical engagement and its concrete situation seemed to want to deny; for Sartre, the writer is both situated and historically engaged and responsible. Still, what becomes of the theoretical impact of surrealism and surrealist readings of Klee? And what options remain open, left standing for responding to Sartre? Klee’s links with surrealism were immediate and substantial. Breton, Aragon, and Artaud all affirmed, before Bataille, the importance of Klee for their works. Masson and Miró declared Klee decisive for their paintings. In turn, as a work like Park near Lu(cerne) also reveals, Klee was in turn influenced by it.15 Klee collaborated with Tristan Tzara, producing an engraving for his poem “L’Homme approximatif ”; its dreamlike image resonates with Tzara’s “I think of the warmth spun by the word / around this center of the dream we call ourselves”16 (see Figure 6). In the same issue of Cahiers d’ Art in which Bataille aligned himself with Klee’s work, Tzara spoke of Klee’s work “marvelously, openly, generously offering to the glory of man” the world as he viewed “it in its profound and living innocence.”17 Sartre surely would have similar misgivings over Tzara’s privileging of the unconscious and contingency in the poetic, to elucidate “the interpenetration of the rational and irrational worlds.”18 Tzara claimed that the two are never simply fused but exist as interdependent structures (indeed, structure and superstructure), Still, Tzara acknowledged that the lyrical or the poetic threatens to annihilate the essence of the rational (l’anéanter dans son essence).19 To this end the dream’s fertility is characterized as a psychic movement “capable of causing certain phenomena to pass from

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one state of being to another in the direction of a synthesis which is a quantitative act of knowledge and which we call poetry.”20 Sartre claimed of such surrealist poiesis that “instead of destroying in order to construct it constructs in order to destroy” (WL: 188). While applauding the poetic liberation of the imagination, he insisted that “a liberation which proposes to be total must start with a total knowledge of man by himself” (WL: 187). The question was, once having acknowledged or encountered such poetic fertility, whether it dictated (or could even allow) the reinstitution of the sovereignty of Sartrean prosaic consciousness. This became especially evident during the renaissance of surrealism that occurred in French letters in the 1950s and 1960s, reconnecting it to the issues accompanying the aleatory, chance, unconscious, phantasy and their limits. Merleau-Ponty’s 1960 “Eye and Mind” privileged Klee in his analysis of painting undertaken with the aim of rehabilitating Phenomenology. In Foucault’s interpretation of Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe (Ceci n’est pas une pipe), a different, more surrealist Klee came to the forefront. Indeed, instead of the neoromantic, phenomenological, or neo-Marxist readings of Klee, all of which were grounded in the naturalist symbolism of Goethe, Foucault insisted on the significance of surrealism. He even declared that “Breton is our Goethe” (AME: 172). Here he declared, rather than builders who place the first stone, “we are closer to those who excavate: to Nietzsche (instead of Husserl) to Klee (instead of Picasso)” (AME: 171). Still, like Breton before him, Foucault believed that Klee challenges but does not fully repudiate classical painting. Breton characterized Klee’s work as “partial automatism”; Foucault similarly claims of Klee that his emancipation from “external” representation is only partial.21 Klee steps beyond classical painting’s representationalism (and hence its “silent” constitution within a discursive space); he does so, for Foucault, through the invocation of a “new space,” one that is “simultaneously page and canvas, plane and volume, map and chronicle” (TNP: 41, 33). Foucault said elsewhere that the question of space is integral today “no doubt much more than time.” Unlike time, “which was ‘desacrilized’ in the nineteenth century,” it seemed to Foucault that “contemporary space is not yet entirely desacrilized” (AME: 177). Nonetheless he suggested that if this desacrilization is not complete, it is also true that “our life is still dominated by a certain number of oppositions that cannot be tampered with, that institutions have not ventured to change” (for example, the oppositions between public and private space, or the space of leisure and the space of

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work; AME: 177). This also remains true, for Foucault, of the opposition between discursivity and the silence or the beyond that escapes it. Our “uncertainty” here, consequently, brings us closer to those who excavate, to Klee, to Nietzsche and Breton—and yet in Klee’s case not without certain restrictions. If Klee emphasizes precisely the uncertainty of pictorial space, Foucault claims, this is not yet fully released from the space of representation and its sacred opposition. Somewhat in opposition to Klee, Foucault privileges Magritte, albeit by still acknowledging a certain complementarity (TNP: 35). Instead of Klee’s hieroglyphic “weaving of signs and images” resulting in a “new space”—still with Sartrean overtones—Magritte “allows the old space of representation to rule, but only at the surface, no more than a polished stone, bearing words and shapes: beneath, nothing. It is a gravestone” (TNP: 41). Indeed, this nothing itself seems almost as impossible as Sartre had claimed of the surrealists’ “surface” and space. Analyzing Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe, where text and image play off one another, Foucault claims that, in Magritte’s apparently representational and discursive space, “negations multiply themselves” and “the common space (lieu commun) has disappeared” (TNP: 30–31). Resemblance has not simply been rendered uncertain or hieroglyphic but has vanished. Similitude (the similitude between discourse and image) is rendered unstable in a series of multiplicities “referring” to nothing other than themselves. Foucault concluded: “A day will come, when, by means of a similitude relayed indefinitely along the length of a series, the image itself, along with the name it bears, will lose its identity. Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Campbell” (TNP: 54). Campbell would thus no longer, to speak Husserlian, infinitely iterate a timeless Sinn but would inexhaustibly differ from such identical “sameness.” Painterly modernism becomes a progressus ad Warhol and as such exhibits a step beyond Klee’s thickly textured space, ironically fulfilling the Sartrean account of the objectification of pure poetry, its opposition to discursivity complete. Moreover, what is true of painting is true of literature. Foucault’s own analysis of Bataille (or Hölderlin or Roussel) reveals a “language to infinity,” which, in opposition to “a purified metalanguage,” sought by the philosopher, writers find themselves “in the thickness of words enclosed by their darkness, by their blind truth” (LCP: 41). Here, too, Sartre’s oppositions between form and matter were not far removed. Ironically, in their opposition they divided up the grand

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synthesis of classical phenomenology between pure logical form and the immanent acts of consciousness. They concur in demoting the significative nexus of art from objective reference. If Duchamp, Sartre claimed, sculpts false pieces of sugar, actually cut in marble, he produces imaginary objects so constructed that their objectivity does away with itself. And so did literature: Literature also did its best to make language go through the same kind of thing and to destroy it by telescoping words. Thus, the sugar refers to the marble and the marble to the sugar; the limp watch contests itself by its limpness; the objective destroys itself and suddenly refers to the subjective, since one disqualifies reality and is pleased to “consider the very images of the external world as unstable and transitory” and to “put them into the service of the reality of our mind.” But the subjective then breaks down in turn and allows a mysterious objectivity to appear behind it. (WL: 171)

But all this, again, for Sartre, is futile or even puerile before the duty of existentialist prose: “All this without even starting a single real destruction” (WL: 171). We should read Foucault as trumping Sartre’s description on two grounds, however. First, provisionally accepting the strict Sartrean opposition between image and sign, Foucault invokes Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe to internally call into question the idea of a text simply regulated by discourse. Second, as Sartre sought to render the poetic into an autonomous (or analogous) fictional realm of objects, Foucault called into question the very idea of such autonomous prose as regulated and directed by an independent subjectivity. In both cases, Sartre’s thesis about art was denied. The work of art, Sartre declared, “has no other substance than the reader’s subjectivity” (WL: 39). Though realized in a medium, in painting or “through language [it] is never given in language” and has value only as an appeal to engaged responsibility (WL: 38). Foucault denied this reduction and the ahistorical purity of the gaze that would constitute it: “The breakdown of philosophical subjectivity and its dispersion in a language that dispossesses it while multiplying it within the space created by its absence is probably one of the fundamental structures of contemporary thought” (LCP: 42). Sartre acknowledged that language is a limit on our situation, but he continuously drew not upon the epistemic or semantic account but from his “ethical” conclusion: “Since he has once engaged himself in the universe of language, he can never pretend that he cannot speak. Once you

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enter the universe of significations, there is nothing you can do to get out of it” (WL: 18). What Sartre held was that this silence “is defined in relation to words” and that “words are transparent”; he hoped to acknowledge, thereby, both the historicity of language and the phenomenological purity of prosaic enunciation. As he replied to the Thomist in “Existentialism is a Humanism,” granted the signs are there, but they must be interpreted, and this implied a reduction of meaning to use, or in Sartre’s term “creation”: “In any case, I myself choose the meaning they have” (EH: 28). Foucault (and those more closely related to surrealism) rightly saw the untenability of this position and, in its decisionist formulations, the impossibility of its existential, transcendental foundation. The very idea of prose and analogical image (uniting discourse and image in resemblance and similitude) struck Foucault as no less magical itself, based historically on the magical or the analogical hermetics of resemblance that Foucault traced in the hermeneutics of the Renaissance—and arguably still dominated by medieval analogical accounts that would facilitate the representations of self and other. Sartre limited myth (and the classical) to a strictly regulated society, which “confounds the present with the eternal and historicity with traditionalism,” but the idea of a pure creative subjectivity devoid of myth surely itself risks turning mythic for the same reason (WL: 85). Indeed, as Bataille rightly saw, “the absence of myth is also a myth” (AM: 48). Sartre affirmed the opposition of text and image. Foucault’s response went further; he traced their dissolution through Magritte. Henceforth—and beginning with Flaubert and Manet—art and literature would, Foucault claimed, be erected “within the archive.” This would occur not out of classical lamentation for the origin but rather in order to explore the space opened up, “the aspect in painting or writing that remains essentially open” (LCP: 92). The result would, consequently, be less concerned with the figuration of another transcendent or external space than with “the square and massive surface of painting” and “the indefinite murmur of writing” (LCP: 93). Thus Foucault’s option in response to Sartre was to articulate the silence intrinsic to painting by distinguishing it from the space of representation. The history of painterly modernism, from Manet to Warhol, involves an emancipation from the expressive frame of “discursivity” in order to explore the dispersion of its inner possibilities. This was surely not the only surrealist option. As will become further evident in Chapter 5, Lyotard also attempted to articulate the silent

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significance that exceeds the said. More explicitly Freudian however, Lyotard articulated an account of the figure-matrix through which the silence of original phantasy is expressed outside and excessive to intentional discursivity. Even though he retained an account of painting as original expressivity, for Lyotard the artist does not simply communicate originary phantasies. Iteration here would demand precisely an identity of such phantasies in both painter and spectator. Rather, such phantasies are schematized in the figure-matrix that the work of art itself articulates. In a sense the figure-matrix articulated in the art work makes possible iterability between subjects, as does the Husserlian noema—but precisely as more originary than it. Incapable of reduction, the figure is not restricted (nor regulated) by discourse, image, or form (or conscious regard) since it expressively resides in the three spaces together and makes possible both identity and opposition among them.22 Accordingly, even though Foucault sees Klee to be constructing a new space, not yet wholly liberated from representation, Lyotard invokes Klee’s work as an example of a more primary expressive (figure-matrix) process antecedent to representation. Lyotard claims the transformation in Klee’s work occurs as he increasingly acquires a more critical relation to phantasy through the inventions of the figure-matrix. Early on, Klee attempted to more directly communicate phantasy, while the more experimental mature works—for example, the ambiguous works that Sartre finds problematic—more explicitly contest the dominion of cliché, representation, and discursivity. In these works discourse and figure are often explicitly, albeit indeterminately and expressively, together within the visual field. This interplay at stake in the figure-matrix also explains the complicated (and ironical) use of titles in Klee’s works. As art historians have noted, moreover, this heterogeneity further explains the appearance and transgressions of mythic themes in Klee’s work. This is especially true in the late works, where the figure-matrix allows expression of meaning to transcend both discursive and representational (including fascist) myth.23 This again raises the question of the importance of myth; throughout Klee’s career the latter surely accompanies the issues of “primitivism” in his art (the ethnographic, the art of the insane, or the art of children). Moreover it is among the issues that cluster around spontaneity (or automatism) that accompanied the problem of surrealism from the outset and has overdetermined discussions here. If Sartre condemned such views to the irrational, Foucault spent much of his career arguing against such

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condemnations. The charge of primitivism or irrationalism accompanied Klee’s work as well, as was seen earlier. Historians have noted that such charges miss his point, however, as evidenced from his 1912 review of the joint exhibition of the Neue Kunstlervereinigung and the Blaue Reiter in which Klee states: For there are still primal beginnings in art, which one is more likely to find in ethnographic museums or at home in the nursery (don’t laugh dear reader); children can do it too, and that is in no sense devastating for the latest efforts; on the contrary, there is positive wisdom in this state of affairs. The more helpless these children are, the more instructive is the art they offer us; for there is already a corruption here: when children begin to absorb developed works of art or even imitate them. Parallel phenomena are the drawings of the mentally ill, and so madness is not an apt word of abuse either. All that, in truth, must be taken far more seriously if present-day art is to be reformed. So far back will we have to go if we are not simply to imitate antiquity.24

As Franciscono argued, this step beyond antiquity involves neither primitivism nor regression, nor even the affirmation of insight into a spontaneous “unconscious enormous power.”25 Instead Klee saw such interest or investigations to be part of the exploration and reformation (and rational potential) of contemporary art. Blanchot makes defenses (on behalf of Webern and Klee) concerning similar charges by Adorno (IC: 345ff)—though he also distances himself from the “temptation to which surrealism risks succumbing when it lends itself to a search for the immediate” (IC: 410). How are we to escape the apparent antinomies regarding the imagination that result, however: that affirmation of such spontaneity is either beyond the reach of reason or wholly contained within it? As Sartre said, since the image is a function of spontaneity, there is nothing in the image that I did not put in it. Phenomenological imagination, for Sartre, is strictly contained by the reflective regard, and therefore “there is nothing new to be found in the imagination because I have made it.” That is, phenomenologically, subject and object are not only intentionally parallels but coefficients; as Fichte put it, Ich = Ich.26 Hence the result: “Nothing can be learned from an image that is not already known” (PI: 11). Arguably, even phenomenologically construed, this fails, however. If I am intentionally related to imaginative acts, “I” am not their simple epistemic coefficient. This is precisely how it can be that I might be taken by “surprise” in such imagining, as Schelling saw. Klee invokes the term

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too, for the account of figurative invention. The reference to Schelling further resonates with Klee’s cosmological mytheme, that nature as Will works itself through me. Such an account was also in the background of surrealism, as Bataille noted in his piece on Sartre. Aligning surrealism and Romanticism, he claimed, the former radicalized Romanticism by bringing everything into question (AM: 57). Still, for Klee (and this is why, perhaps, his is only a “partial automatism” for Breton), it is not the case that I am simply overtaken tout court by such imaginative events. In such rapture I am not simply delivered over, overtaken, surprised and forced to ascent in naïve immanence; this would involve the return of primitivism that he denied. As Husserl saw in replying to Hume, the explicative series in passive synthesis does not succumb to causal association but to the extensions and depths, the shadowing forth (Ab-Schattung) and the night of adumbrative explication. No more does the series of imaginings succumb to causal association; both are instances of transcendence— albeit still motivated, a step into the unknown.27 The “interruption” of reason’s immanence is not reason’s inversion— any more than it is its completion.28 It is instead, to speak Kantian, what provokes thought into reflection. This is why, from the outset, following Eugen Fink, Merleau-Ponty linked Phenomenology to Kant’s Critique of Judgment (PhP: xvii). Against the classical reduction of phenomenological immanence, such interruptions or transcendences trace irreducible excess. Accordingly, subjectivity here, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms, “is not motionless identity: as with time, it is of its essence, in order to be genuine subjectivity, to open itself to an Other and to go forth from itself” (PhP: 426). This opening arrests, to use Blanchot’s terms, the attempt to conceive intentionality immanently “in order to guarantee judgment” (IC: 251). Indeed, Merleau-Ponty, whose account of sense and significance provided a protocol for Sartre, found therein “typical relationships” transcending the distinctions between nature and convention, sense impression and categorical act, a body synthesis he identifies with Kant’s transcendental imagination (PhP: 168, 192). It involves an incarnate experience in which the question of transcendence is never exhausted; it is always an incarnate event irreducible to an act, a “gift” which the mind “makes use of beyond all hope” (PhP: 127). It may seem the case, then, as Sartre acknowledged in the Transcendence of the Ego, that the “I think” must accompany all our representations.

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The question is, Does it? (TE: 32f) Although Sartre distinguished these he retained the immanence of the I think for the contents of consciousness. Too often Sartre confused phenomenological immanence and transcendence, where transcendence is not the simple sign of inadequateness (or illusion) but an excess never finally reduced or cognitively adequated— and yet still relied on. Sartre’s subreptions regarding transcendence were certainly at work in his dealings with the imaginary, certainly present in his account of the imaginary, too often reduced by him simply to what I create and consequently to that for which I am reflectively responsible. The difference between image and reality, though real (that is, actual), is not absolute but equally genetic and historical, always a matter of “intentional implication”; perception is co-determined by the possibility of phantasial modification and vice versa. Without reducing the distinction between the real and irreal to “degrees of evidence,” it should be admitted that the centaur too has its transcendences, indeterminacies, problematic status, and horizonal (i.e. historical) coherence. Still, if the real and the imaginary remain phenomenologically distinct, where does the imaginary begin and where does it end if it is devoid of the ego’s domination? The result looks, beyond the attempt to guarantee judgment, like a very different domain, one perhaps Blanchot aptly caught in a lengthy passage with significant consequences for the issue that dogs Sartre: By showing there is a rigorous correlation between the determinations of the object and the steps of the “consciousness” that intends them or takes up their evidency, phenomenology made thought familiar with the idea of a relation that is empirical and transcendental. Or, to state this more clearly: it is intentionality that maintains the empirical and the transcendental within a structured relation—an alliance that is essentially modern, that is to say, explosive. As a result, the empirical is never in and of itself the empirical: no experience can claim of itself to be in itself knowledge or truth. And also as a result of this, the “transcendental” will find itself nowhere localized: neither in a consciousness that is always already outside itself, nor in the socalled natural reality of things (which must always be suspended or reduced). Rather, it will reside in the emergence of networks of relations that neither unite nor identify but maintain what is in relation at a distance, and make of this distance, recaptured as a form of alterity, a new power of determination. (IC: 251)

This network of relations, Blanchot claimed, has much then in common with his account of “the game, the aleatory, the encounter” and the new space of surrealism (IC: 421). In this guise, it has an impact on ­Blanchot’s

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own account of Klee, for whom, as for Foucault, Klee “dreams of a space where the omission of every center would at the same time do away with any trace of the vague or the indecisive”—albeit always as a dream (IC: 350). This reminds one of Tzara’s “L’Homme approximatif ” statements, “I think of the warmth spun by the word / around the dream we call ourselves.” To speak truly, it involved a dream and a concern that had been the fellow traveler of idealism since Fichte, the concern that “intuition is dream; thought . . . is the dream of that dream.”29 Thinkers from Fichte to Sartre had sought, through the sovereign acts of prosaic consciousness, to dominate the slippery slope of such dreams and illusion. Those closer to Sartre realized (as did the later Fichte, as will become evident) that this is not the only theoretical recourse. Moreover, far from being simply contradictory or nihilistic, or even simply impossible, there is a sense in which, freed from knowledge or the constraints of strenge Wissenschaft, all this remains phenomenologically a matter of the ordinary. It remains part of the task of saving the appearances. The surreal and real cannot be simply opposed. Even if it “is always already there,” Blanchot claims, the (aleatory) everyday “escapes” strict phenomenological adequation (IC: 241–244). Such a phenomenology, consequently, would require a step beyond its classical formulations. Writing in 1948, Emmanuel Levinas said of the captivation or incantation of poetry and music: It is a mode of being to which applies neither the form of consciousness, since the I is stripped of its prerogative to assume, its power, nor the form of unconsciousness, since the whole situation and all its articulation are in a dark light present. Such is a waking dream.30

Once again, the image is a shadow of reality, not its double or representation, literally beyond the world of judgment. And he adds: Here we have really an exteriority of the inward. It is surprising that phenomenological analysis never tried to apply this fundamental paradox of rhythm and dreams, which describes a sphere situated outside of the conscious and the unconscious, a sphere whose role in all ecstatic rites has been shown by ethnography; it is surprising that we have stayed with metaphors of “ideomotor” phenomena and with the study of the prolongation of sensing actions.31

Not far removed, Blanchot similarly challenged Sartre’s view of the image as a parasitic absence, claiming that the fictional, like a sleep from

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which it is impossible to awaken, is what gives reality its meaning (BR: 69). This opening beyond the “ideomotor” is precisely where Levinas himself would surpass classical phenomenology, transforming its other into the rituals or dramatics of the sacred understood as the ethical. He did so ultimately by articulating an event that opened beyond the image in announcing both the exteriority and the imperative of the ethical—the obligating appearance of the “face of the other.” Phenomenologists of religion such as van der Leeuw, Buber, and Rosenzweig prepared the protocols for this passage through (and beyond) ethnography.32 This relationality of the beyond (or to demystify it perhaps, according to Wittgenstein, this “family resemblance,” Blanchot’s “strange plurality”) is what connects the other, the primitive, and the sacred at the limit of phenomenology. This transformation turns its Husserlian theater of immanence into something more resembling the dramatics and reversals of the Hegelian series of figures (Gestalten). As such it would be the opening for a hermeneutics (or even an account of the sacred) that was beyond the discursive regulations to which both were previously bound.33 Its topos strangely would unite thinkers as diverse as Levinas, Bataille, Blanchot, Kristeva, Callois, and Breton. Emphatically, Foucault too made this point in his own evaluation of surrealism: There is no doubt that the whole network connecting the works of Breton, Georges Bataille, [Michel] Leiris, and Blanchot, and extending through the domains of ethnology, art history, the history of religions, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, [is] effacing the rubrics in which our culture classified itself, and revealing unforeseeable kinships, proximities, and relations. It is very probable that we owe this new scattering and this new unity of our culture to the person and the work of André Breton. He was both the spreader and the gatherer of all this agitation in modern experience. (AME: 174)

This is admittedly overstated; Foucault acknowledged that much of what we find in Breton is to be found in others, complicated in relation to the archive, “prefigured in Goethe, in Nietzsche, Mallarmé or others.” It is critical that Foucault also claims “what we really owe him is the discovery of a space that is not that of philosophy nor of literature, nor of art, but that of experience” (ibid.). This is precisely the realm that Sartre’s phenomenology sought to free in his attacks on surrealism. But for Foucault this space of new relations belies the distinctions between philosophy and poetry. To use a term of Derrida’s, who through the notion of arche-écriture, was still

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trying to “attain by deconstruction its ultimate foundation [dernier fond],” the concept of experience is “unwieldy,” indeed “embarrassing (embarrassant)” (G: 60). Experience remains divided between intuition and concept, event and history, “archesynthesis” and what inevitably escapes. Doubtless in all these cases (experience, history—and even perhaps phenomenology itself, unwittingly) both thinkers, unlike Sartre, were replanking the raft as they went. Both as experience and concept, however, this space of new relations is also the very space opened by imagination, as Blanchot saw. What Sartre may have forgotten in all this (and in his own attack on surrealism on the question of writing and the imagination) was the dependence of phenomenological reflection itself on fantasizing. The “free variation” that discloses (and conceals) pure possibility (and necessity) also explicates the phenomenological return to origins through the texts of time and image, reflection and dream, consciousness and its own fictions, as Husserl put it in Ideas I. He famously wrote: “Free phantasies acquire a position of primacy over perceptions and do so even in the phenomenology of perception itself.”34 In the extended passage quoted above, Klee articulates the differentiation of such possibilities in the attempt to escape the limitations of factical antiquity, articulating “the prehistory of the visible.” Here again we confront the question of rendering such origins visible. The question of the return to origins (Rücksfrage) cannot simply be reduced to the conscious gaze but is equally dependent on what escaped it in the inventions or the text of the imaginary and what, perhaps reflectively construed then, remains unconscious, conditional and excessive to the regard of significative intention. The space of transcendental reduction would not return to immanence but to time, to a sequence or dialectic of transformations and mediations. But both Husserl and Sartre problematically sought to contain such transcendence by reflective or transcendental immanence, conflicting the transcendence of dialectical possibility with analytic necessities. Having encountered this “strange plurality,” one can see the ease, the complicities, and the complications at stake when post-Sartrean phenomenologists such as Edward Casey would take up the matter. An author of a classical study on phenomenological imagining in English, Casey also found here a convergence between Husserlian phantasierien, which reveals essential possibility through imaginative variation, and something like the Jungian unconscious.35 In this convergence, Jung’s so-called archetypes would need to be understood more eidetically, or at least as eidetic varia-

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tions rather than as a set of primitive natural facts (as he too often interpreted then). As Jung himself likewise declared, in this regard they are an a priori condition of possibility.36 Here we are again proximate to Klee’s account of artistic creation: “I place myself at a remote starting point of creation, whence I state a priori formulas for men, beasts, plants, stones and the elements, and for all the whirling forces” (D: 345). Like the problem of the Kantian schematism, Jung thought, such archetypes revealed an “art hidden in the depths of the human soul,” a “treasure in the realm of shadowy thought” that is exhausted by none of its exemplifications.37 Similarly, Jung’s archetypes are transitional analogs always in need of interpretation or refiguration (“symbolic,” as he argued—and in their alterity, doubtless allegorical in Benjamin’s sense).38 It is not surprising that Adorno suggested to Benjamin that he would need to confront (and criticize) Jung’s account of the collective unconscious, especially singling out Jung’s reading of aesthetics.39 This task surely played a role in what Benjamin called “the epistemological foundations” of the Arcades Project.40 As Jung’s account blinkingly acknowledges, such possibilities require that we need to add the limitations (and excess) of the Kantian schematism to the phenomenologists’ reflective variability. Thereby we encounter again the problem of transcendence, the problem of finitude or historicity. Taken together they imply that phenomenology must be understood to involve less an a priori possibility or pure factum and instead, as Heidegger put it in a study of Kant’s schematism, an event that is always already “exploratory.”41 Hence emerges Heidegger’s penchant for translating the platonic eidos phenomenologically, always as its adumbrative Aspekt. Correlatively, at stake is not simply a description of self-contained mental facts (this is Husserl’s lingering Cartesianism). Rather, such a phenomenology involves the exploration of a transcendent or adumbrative event that exceeds us and in which, in provoking thought into reflection, it encounters its own limits—perhaps to use Benjamin’s term, even “the death of intention,” strictly or immanently construed. Klee’s exploratory defense of the primitive in his extension beyond the classical tradition perhaps should be understood in this light. The encounter with the primitive is by no means an encounter with an immanent essence truer than the classical but an alterity that articulates in the encounter itself more than the past might contain—and where, granted both the coherence (or textuality) of the past and the alterity of the present, image and text become interspersed as an adumbrative complex in the play of possibility, one always in need of interpretation.42

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This only emphasizes the ambiguity that theoretically underdetermines such adumbrations. This accounts for the fact that, although Husserl appeals to James’s stream of consciousness for the adumbrations of the perceived (real) world, Jung appeals to James for his account of the symbolic. This latter appears both in free association in the unconscious and the active imagination. As Jung quotes James: “Much of our thinking consists of trains of images suggested one by another.”43 Perhaps unsurprisingly, Gertrude Stein attested that James himself had interest in such matters as the unconscious and automatic writing.44 But Jung too denies rational access to the symbolic realm, almost on Sartrean grounds: “The rational functions are, by their very nature, incapable of creating symbols, since they produce only rationalities whose meaning is determined unilaterally and does not at the same time embrace its opposite”—tantamount, again, to declaring that reason only understands what it has itself put in it, which is to say univocally determined.45 As has become evident, the symbolic exceeds such parameters, and it exceeds the real only by being rediscovered (allegorically, historically) at its heart. Jung’s search for the archetypes of the unconscious perhaps should be understood less as a return to primitive facts (or as Blanchot puts it, an attempt to retrieve “a respectable spirituality”) than as a matter of the social or historicity (IC: 299). Indeed, Jung himself articulated the antinomies of such artistic possibility in the work of Picasso and Joyce.46 It remains similarly at stake in the Klee-Picasso double, a matter of systematic invention or excavation of expressive form. This is because this double of unity and fragmentation is at work in the symbolic function everywhere. But Sartre could view expressive images only in terms of consciousness and signification. Doubtless it was with this in mind that Blanchot argued that signification, so construed, in a sense detaches itself from iterative or significative mimesis: The image has nothing to do with signification, meaning as implied by the existence of the world, the effort of truth, the law and the brightness of the day. Not only is the image of an object not the meaning of that object and of no help in comprehending it, but it tends to withdraw from its meaning by maintaining it in the immobility of a resemblance that has nothing to resemble. (GO: 85)

Blanchot’s followers would not miss this. The network of intentionalities in which “the empirical is never in and of itself empirical” and “the transcendental that will find itself nowhere localized,” will always involve,

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as Foucault saw, a “transcendental-empirico doublet” (OT: 318). Derrida too saw that this intentional network would always emerge “as a warp of language, logic, evidence, fundamental security, upon a woof that is not its own” (G: 67). It is in just this crossing or doubling, complicating the simple distinction (indeed the Cartesian distinctness) between immanence and transcendence (or active and passive synthesis) that the image becomes, in terms Blanchot (and Benjamin) invoke, always potentially “explosive” or rapturous with respect to intention. What Levinas called the “ethnographic” decentering of the phenomenological image does not involve a naïve return to the primitive. Derrida, nonetheless, argued that Levinas’s own attempt to simply distinguish the (ethical) religion of the sacred law from sacred, but still pagan, naturalness was forced (FK: 150). As seen earlier, Eliade’s analysis of the concept of contemporaneity led to similar concerns about Gadamer’s attempted fusions with the past. Derrida argued in relation to Bataille that such claims to the archaic or the sacred could be accessed only through a double reading that would submit the known not simply to archaicism but to understanding the latter as equally a proposition, albeit one that opens itself up beyond the predetermined sovereignty of meanings. This looks like the very premises of what he called deconstruction, and it is. It also acknowledges, beyond Bataille’s empiricism, a double gesture in the refiguration, the twofold synthesis to the passage from the past to the future “beyond” or “outside,” the twofold synthesis of retention and protention.47 In this respect, beyond the limits of a Phenomenology predetermined in sense, another Phenomenology emerges, one no longer governed by the sovereignty of a meaning-bestowal and sense-correlate. “Phenomenology” thus, for Derrida, could not be understood as a meaningfully isolatable term. Nor could it be simply determined by a semantic context, but would be subject to its own internal (historical) “drift,” indeed, the very one we articulate here (cf. WD: 273). Here too, as Derrida argued concerning Bataille, “Tradition’s names are maintained, but they are struck with the differences between the major and the minor, the archaic and the classic. This is the only way, within discourse, to mark that which separates discourse from its excess” (WD: 272). Such a strategy is equally, in accord with what Heidegger saw as the exploratory (and hermeneutic) legacy of transcendental imagination, the “gathering together” of discourse and its excess, immanence and transcendence, analysis and synthesis, intelligible (that is, ontic) schema and ontological

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possibility. It is decisive that Heidegger, too, could still retain the term Phenomenology for all this. Such a Phenomenology would involve, as was the account of time internal to it, the constant reweaving of warp and woof, no longer governed by the sovereign gaze, and no longer governable by the external correlation of form and content. Reflection would emerge from the flux of appearance, which would in turn always shadow it. Phenomenology would no longer simply be strictly prefigured in advance; it would involve a transcendental logic that is neither simply conceptually regressive (or reductive) nor predetermined (by a pure form), a schematism whose adumbrative texture remains inevitably exploratory. So interpreted, Phenomenology would always be “multi-dimensional,” to use Klee’s term—indeed, even aleatory. When Derrida cites Klee it is precisely in this regard. For Derrida, Klee’s work articulates the aleatory distinction of form and content. In particular, he cites the 1927 Constructive-impressive, where nails (“the points that nail the canvas onto the painter)” appear in the painting (TIP: 304; see Figure 1). Here the image is neither dissolved nor simply opposed to discourse but remains lacking in immanence and completeness; its synthesis to speak Husserlian remains (not only uncertain or inadequate but) transcendent and indeterminately transitional, the presentation of a texture in “an object which has been transfigured” (TP: 304). This perhaps tells us something about Klee’s multidimensionality as well. Despite its acknowledgments of abstraction or constructivism (again unlike Foucault’s interpretation of him), Klee’s work is neither the construction of a new space nor the representation of a propositional space. It remains instead a fusion of the architectonic and the poetic, rendering the possibilities of the invisible visible, in the recognition that the apparent is not the only “world” possible (N: 92). In other words, “Everything we see is a proposal, a possibility, an expedient” (D: 374). Yet Klee is direct: “The world was my subject, even though it was not the visible world” (D: 374). The articulation of appearance cannot be restricted to the given, the optic, or the ontic. The appearances should not be underestimated, but they need to be amplified or extended. This task involves the ongoing figuration of the possible in which the phenomena and their possibilities, the prosaic and poetic become intertwined (N: 63). In the previously cited 1941 article on Klee, Greenberg credited Klee with “saving poetry” for easel painting. In accord with his purist narrative about modernist painting, he saw Klee’s work as transitional to pure abstraction. Poetry

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here remained linked to the literary and the ornamental.48 Ironically, Foucault and Greenberg concur. The narrative is different; Greenberg, horrified by the dispersion (or thanatos) that haunts its repetition, decried Warhol’s novelty.49 Still, both Greenberg and Foucault share the account of modern art as a drive toward purity. In Klee’s case, there is no such purity nor such a telos, nor hope that the prosaic and the poetic could be ultimately distinguished. Consequently, this is not the construction of a new space. Rather, it explicates the constant raveling and unraveling of the constructive-impressive conjunction that is involved, to use Derrida’s term, in the spacing (l’espacement) of actuality as a general phenomenon (or phenomenalization). As has become now apparent, something more is at hand in what we have been calling the indeterminacy, inadequation, or drift internal to Phenomenology. At stake is not simply a step beyond (or behind) reason, nor even simply a kind of trembulutum before what Blanchot called the unfigurable universe. Strictly construed, it involved all of these, confronted with an event in which the intentional adequatio has been abandoned— or an event in which adequatio abandons us. It was also the recognition of the problem of the dehiscent or textured plurality articulated adumbratively within the event of intentional implication itself; presentation is always linked to the not-yet-presented, the invisible—strictly taken, the unpresentable. The problem is that, far from there being simply too few figures for accounting for this event of inadequation, there were too many; the sacred, the other, could be neither simply allowed in nor simply ruled out—hence their hieroglyphic status. Moreover, devoid of such determinacy, there would be no one strictly scientific (or antiscientific), metaphysical (or nonmetaphysical) concept of the other or the sacred— and surely not “the” surreal.50 This would be the lot of more than one of our epistemic practices, shorn of scientific pretense. Derrida noted such an effect in arguing that “there is not one [psychoanalytic concept of] resistance, there is not la psychanalyse,” whether one understands it here as a system of theoretical norms or as a charter of institutional practices (R: 20). Perhaps more to the point, having denied the strictly scientific status of such terms, is his characterization of the result, too often construed as evidence of a theoretical failure or a pseudoscience: If this is indeed the way it is, this situation does not necessarily translate a failure. There is also a chance for success, with no need to dramatize things. I don’t believe one needs to turn this disjunction, in this case or any other, into bad drama. The inability

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to gather oneself, to identify with oneself, to unify oneself, all of this is perhaps tragedy itself, but it is also (the) chance and if there is no reason to dramatize, it is not only because that serves no purpose but also because it has not the least pertinence for this alliance of destiny, namely tragedy, and chance as the possible or the aleatory. (R: 21)

If this logic of strange plurality seems still an appeal to the theoretically surreal, it is what philosophers of science would call the “fertility of theory,” gauged by a theory’s ability to interact, contest, and advance the rational, even if fallibly or unknowingly. One might say, to invoke a term of Gaston Bachelard’s, who referred to Tzara in its explication, it is a matter of its “sur-rationality.” Hence “an experimental reason will be established, capable of organizing reality as the experimental dream of Tristan Tzara organizes poetic liberty surrealistically.”51 Bachelard’s article “Surrationalism” appeared, along with Tzara’s work, in a journal on the phenomenology of the human sciences. Both authors attempted, inter alia, to provide surrealism with a more sophisticated theoretical formulation. This might provide us with a clue. Understood in this light, we have been tracing the surrationality of “Phenomenology.” Even so, it might be replied, all this seems far from the sacred, in its purity and exteriority. Yet sounding very much like Sartre’s “we are condemned to be free,” Mircea Eliade once said: “Hermeneutics—the science of interpretation—is the Western man’s reply—the only intelligent reply—to the demands of contemporary history, to the fact that the West is committed (one might be tempted to say ‘condemned’) to a confrontation with the cultural values of the ‘others.’ ”52 Surely this occurs out of the chance of respecting what we don’t know, but also in acknowledging (the problem of Enlightenment itself ) that we might have something to learn from it (Kant’s sapere aude).53 That this condemnation and its chance has been reserved for our classical discourse for disambiguating theological texts (“Hermeneutics,” a term no more strictly determinate than “Phenomenology”) is perhaps not a matter of chance. To use Blanchot’s term, at stake is a discourse of interruptions. Such a hermeneutics openly acknowledges its own rational and semantic drift, combining, without resolving, the problem of transcendence and immanence, the same and the other.54 It might be said both conceptually and historically, this hermeneutics has something surreal about it. In its interplay of conceptual and experiential horizons, hermeneutics involves the encounter with the unknown, even against our wishes and the unconscious of knowledge and its sovereign gaze.

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For Blanchot this was precisely the site of écriture automatique, which formed the legacy of surrealism and “one of literature’s principle aspirations.” It provided, that is, both a “weapon against reflection” and a “belief in words” (WF: 86). Accordingly, the legacy of philosophy and écriture automatique then becomes somewhat unwieldy, almost inevitably understood in these authors as an encounter with philosophy’s beyond, the outside, its limit or its hieroglyphic remainder. As Derrida would inevitably put it, strictly construed this legacy involves the “becoming absent and the becoming unconscious of the subject”—but without, it should be insisted, succumbing simply to either absence or the unconscious (G: 69). Even if Phenomenology is to be understood only as a certain fictionalization that subtends the discourse of truth, this occurs without succumbing to irrationality. It is precisely this hieroglyphic structure that forms, Derrida claimed, the structure of interpretation— even Bataille’s: “Like every discourse, like Hegel’s, Bataille’s discourse has the form of a structure of interpretation” (WD: 274). Indeed, as has become apparent, this step beyond (a step beyond that in fact reinvokes both Hegel and Schelling and the question of the surprise) is equally “beyond the opposition of the mystic and the rational”—and yet obviously not as a beyond without risk. It is also not without relation to Sartre, who had found here only a contradictory combineatoire of scientism and mysticism (WD: 272, 269). No more than Bataille could remove such a writing from the task of interpretation could Sartre restrict it to the gaze of conscious regard—and neither, as a result, would grasp Heidegger, as Derrida notes (WD: 338). Writing is thus, in becoming other itself, the espacement of theory. We are reminded, as Louis Marin again emphasized, that Klee’s painting is similarly peinture-écriture.55 Indeed, this was Klee’s stated intention at points, the development of a “kind of picture writing”—one that in the end is neither sign nor object but the exploration of the hieroglyphic texture through which both are generated (N 2: 83).56 It is in this sense that we should oppose to Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe, which Foucault analyses to be pointing toward the murmur of Warhol’s Campbell, Campbell, Campbell, Klee’s Sichtbar machen (Make Visible; Figure 7). Before we see here the renewal of resemblance or representation, Grohmann, despite his own Goethean allegiances, speaks to the history we have traversed: “Klee tended toward neither the allegorical representation of the Renaissance nor the sentimental nature symbolism of the

Figure 7  Make Visible (Sichtbar machen), Paul Klee, 1926, 66. Pen on paper on cardboard, 11 x 30.3 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Schenkung Livia Klee. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

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Romantics, but toward a cipher which strengthens the polyphony of the picture like an enigmatic text.”57 As Klee insisted, the strange plurality in the appearance of this event remains always “multidimensional,” an infinite polyvalence of sens. Strictly taken, to invoke the title of a number of his script pictures, this “In-Schrift” is neither Sinn nor Bedeutung, it is indeterminately both at once—the opening, or to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, the écart or “inscription of Being” (VI: 197).58 It would be mistaken, however, to claim that, lacking strict Bedeut­ ung, this event remains nonphenomenological or prephenomenological.59 This would be simply to force the other side of an antinomy between the rational and the irrational that demanded strict reducibility and determination in all matters pertaining to the rational. Here, instead, beyond such antinomies, the phenomenological domain will be explored by an imaginative sketching out (Aufzeichnung), a trope that accompanied transcendental schematism from the outset. Merleau-Ponty recalled it, characterizing the Husserlian essence as a historically motivated interpretive outline or sketch (dessin) of the intended entity, undertaken to make sense of our finitude, a task “gradually effected and never completed” (S: 179). Granted its historical and rational development, the principles of this figured philosophy never find ultimate closure, depending on our expressive capacities (“ la ‘sur-signification’ ” ) to say and see the world anew (PW: 144). Klee’s work too, though by no means unprincipled, is also always interpretive. Its genesis beyond mysticism and scientism makes its “automatism” always fragmented and “partial,” to use Breton’s terms.60 In the same gesture Klee transcended the classical antinomies of prose and poetry, intuition and concept, Surrealism and Phenomenology—at least as Sartre initially construed them. Quick, as were others, to condemn the politics of surrealism, he could not endorse its poetics or its aesthetics, strictly distinguishing the prosaic and the poetic. But even Sartre knew better. The irony is that, having posited the adventure of the dialectic between the prosaic and the poetic as he had defined it, Sartre himself acknowledged a certain internal limitation, if not impossibility, to its expression. Perhaps he relied on the ironies of impossibility throughout. The distinction, in any case, he knew was only pragmatic and impure at best: It goes without saying that in all poetry a certain form of prose, that is, of success, is present; and, vice versa, the driest prose always contains a bit of poetry, that is a

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certain form of defeat; no prose-writer is quite capable of expressing what he wants to say; he says too much or not enough; each phrase is a wager, a risk assumed; the more cautious one is, the more attention the word attracts; as Valéry has shown, no one can understand a word to its very bottom. (WL: 31)

As Sartre’s scholars would later explain, the dialectic that appears in the footnotes of What Is Literature? would inevitably force him to “deossify” the polarities of prose and poetry.61 As a result, language itself would be recognized more and more as a concrete historical materiality with which the writer would grapple in order to say what remained unsayable (indisable) within it. This unsayable itself would require us to see the result in terms of a nonknowledge (le non savoir) yet to be revealed by means of imaginary transformation. In all this, it is clear that Sartre’s initial distinctions between prose and poetry, sense and signification—and also Phenomenology itself—would need to be transformed. Like the distinction between the imaginary and the real itself, the static relation between knowledge and nonknowledge, object and sign had been continuously and lucidly called into question. In retrospect, this was indeed the irony of Sartre’s condemnation of Klee’s “greatness and error”—which lies, he claimed in “Klee’s attempt to make a painting both a sign and an object.” Sartre had acknowledged the risk, the contingency, even blinkingly, to use Mallarmé’s terms, the coup de dés, at stake in the dialectics of signification. Notwithstanding his originality, for Sarte Mallarmé remained, like the surrealists after him, a poet of unhappy consciousness, nothingness, and skepticism (Mal: 116–131). The irony is that both Klee and Mallarmé might have become, as Flaubert later did concerning the materialities of literature for Sartre, something of mentors in grasping, beyond the mythic requisites of prosaic consciousness, the origins, the drift, and development of Phenomenology itself. Doubtless this accounts for Klee’s importance, say, to the later Heidegger, or for the importance of both Klee and Mallarmé to Merleau-Ponty or Lyotard in their attempts to traverse the ossifications of the classical stronghold (reduit) of Phenomenology. In all this we can still witness the proximity (and legacy) of Blanchot’s own earliest interpretation of surrealism. The latter, he declared, in emphasizing the “transcendence” of language, revealed a language that, in refusing to be relegated to strict rational construction or cognitive use, might instead be appropriated for the task of freedom itself—a task, the later Sartre would add, that is always a matter of concrete historical necessity (WF: 86–88).62 But perhaps it would be left to Merleau-Ponty, on

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whom Sartre often relied in aesthetic matters, to articulate their effect. Turning to Schelling in his final years to rearticulate this transcendence, Merleau-Ponty declared, “This excess of Being over the consciousness of Being is what Schelling wants to think in all its rigor. Schelling tries to describe this ‘over-Being’ (Übersein, in the sense of the word ‘surrealism’ [ce ‘Sur-être’ Übersein, au sens du mot ‘Surréalisme’])” (Nat: 38). Clearly the analogy, for reasons now evident, would not be merely an external one. But he also sees what was at stake in this attempt: “Schelling is trying for a non-prosaic conception of consciousness” (Nat: 50). The question, as will become further evident, is how all this avoids collapsing into poetry, that is, how it will maintain its links with the architectonic. Klee’s links with surrealism were (like his links with constructivism and the Bauhaus) immediate and far-reaching. In neither case could they be simple. From the start, he sought a fusion between the architectonic and the poetic. In both his art and his writings, Klee appealed to the inner world, to intuition, to a satire or ignorance (Unwissen) that would in many respects make him a model artist for the surrealists (or dadaists).63 His automatism, as Breton realized, was never more than partial. Yet this is what prevented Klee’s identification and collapse into the excesses of surrealism (or of constructivism). What would be problematic would be grasping the unwieldy synthesis that resulted.

Figure 8  Death and Fire (Tod und Feuer), Paul Klee, 1940, 332. Oil on canvas, 44 x 46 cm. Kunstmuseum, Bern, Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Art Resource, New York. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

4 Heidegger, Klee’s Turn, and the Origin of the Work of Art

In Klee something has happened that none of us yet grasps. Martin Heidegger (P: 150) If aesthetics is not to be trapped in tautologies it must gain access to what is not simply immanent in the concept of form. Theodor Adorno (AT: 141) The painter gifted with poetry can find in the driest geometry the ladders he needs for his deep diving. René Crevel (1930)1

Although he was said to have found Paul Klee’s writings too neo-Kantian, overly concerned with form, and too cosmological, Heideg­ ger spent hours looking at Klee’s late paintings and expressed a keen interest that was never fulfilled to write about them. Nonetheless, the writing on art that is his most well known, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” written in the mid-1930s, remained a somewhat conflicted work about the art of its time. It began as an exposition of the history of ontological concepts that issued in the distinctions between form and matter “usually employed” in aesthetics. He did so, as he put it, because we “mistrust this concept of the thing, which represents it as formed matter” (OWA: 27). Poised on what he termed elsewhere an “overcoming of aesthetics,” this account refused to view art as representations of subjective experience (B:  354). He held instead that works of art involved a more primordial struggling with the truth of their time; art is ultimately capable of opening up a domain of truth, and art is especially suited to opening up such truths. Heidegger held that the conceptual history through which this origin of the work of art could be made manifest needed to be understood within the context (and a certain leveling) of its Greek origins. As a 93

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r­ esult, he argued for an understanding of the thing as emerging from the earth (physis)—and the figuration (Gestaltung) of the work of art itself as a setting or bringing forth the being of such things (and their truth) into the open. Art thereby became linked with poiesis, and ultimately a kind of human dwelling (ethos) that appropriately articulated the art and the world of its time. Infamously, in the 1930s, the art of its time meant an art that would yet unite the German people—as much scholarship over the last decade or so has debated. Heidegger, not soon enough thereafter, seemed to demure about the connection, though he continued to think about art in connection with the truth of our time, its calculative and technological enframing (Gestell) and how we might confront the dangers of its leveling grip on us. Many believed this meant that Heidegger was not at all conflicted about contemporary art. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger wrote not about Picasso or Braque but more about Greek temples and vases. He did speak briefly about Van Gogh (as depicting the reliability of the earth on the mud of peasant shoes), ultimately telling us that art was about understanding the interrelations joining earth and sky, mortals and divinities, the event of the “fourfold” (Das Geviert). “Abstract art” he reputedly said, is a “tool that unfolds the being of technology,” as opposed to the Greek’s art, which “revealed the emergence of the world” (P: 66). Like many scholars in the lingering neoclassicism of the phenomenological movement (this “neo” beginning with Brentano’s own retrievals of the medieval intentio), the classical treatises of scholars working in phenomenological aesthetics seemed overwhelmed by the practices of the avant-garde that were going on around them. Indeed, Brentano himself still posited the Beautiful as a timeless intuition.2 When it came to art, it seemed to be a matter, as the title of a famous article put it, of “Heidegger et la penseé de decline,” a matter made all the more manifest by Heidegger’s claim that modern art itself had been largely a decline from the initial “realizations” of Cezanne’s heroic realism.3 In lectures dating from 1929–30, Heidegger, like Benjamin, thought in this regard that both philosophy and art begin in melancholy (Schwermut; FCM: 182). Unlike Benjamin, Heidegger seemed to have spent most of his time mournfully reading Hölderlin to understand the contemporary. In fact, both Heideg­ ger and Benjamin, who had written a thesis on romantic criticism, had roots in post-Kantian philosophy; its legacy seemed to many to lie contested between them, divided between neoclassical nostalgia and romantic

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revolution. For Benjamin, this connection formed the protocols for his affirmation of the artistic avant-garde; Heidegger seemingly remained more skeptical, or at least more ambivalent about the greatness of contemporary art in comparison to the Greeks. It seemed easy to criticize this. As a result, defenders of Heidegger often spent much of their time leading us between the lines to see a theoretical potential that, on the face of it, Heidegger’s apparently nostalgic text seemed patently to deny. The Epilogue of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which returned us to Hegel’s rationalist funeral oration on the work of art, seemed to confirm this. It surpassed the romantic theoretical potentials of those like Novalis or Schelling (let alone commitments such as Schlegel’s to the political potential of civic republicanism). The concern that art might be a thing of the past seemed to further confirm the worst: that Heidegger’s thought was not only a thought Unterweg but often of two minds about itself, one of which could occasionally be not only “untimely” but deplorable. Why would a thought committed to Hölderlin’s mourning (and hence continuing legacy) about the Greek past turn in the end almost defiantly to Hegel’s rationalist Aufheben? That is, was art not only dead and buried but surpassed by speculative Reason (Vernunft)? 4 Why would Heidegger be so silent about the revolutionary art that was being produced in his own back yard? At moments like this, condemnations of Heidegger, like Adorno’s concerning Heidegger’s “jargon” and anachronisms, seemed the only plausible alternative. In addition to many worthy laborers who steadfastly held to the contrary, we owe credit especially to his art historian student, Heinrich Petzet, to have confounded all this. In fact Heidegger’s most esteemed interpreter, Otto Pöggeler, recently wrote a book largely based on the information Petzet relates as well as certain manuscripts on Klee.5 In any case, and the purist in such scholarly matters would rightly demure here, Heidegger left little now published. For now, we must take such secondhand reports at their word, a particularly stretched and vicious version of editing in the last hand. Notwithstanding this careful scholarship, we know nothing of what Klee thought of Heidegger. Hence “Klee” and “Heidegger” here can be no more than formal indicators for certain paths or arguments that emerge in their respective works, artistic, poetic, or philosophical. With such provisos in mind, further discussion of Heidegger and Klee involves a risk worth taking, because of the picture that apparently emerges. Both Pöggeler and Petzet relate that Heidegger

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came to think that “The Origin of the Work of Art” now needed a second part focused on the work of Klee, that in Klee’s work there was a “turning” (P: 149, 146). Presumably, it was similar to the turning of his own work away from Being and Time and defiantly beyond the dangerous “entrapments” of technological enframing (QCT: 43–45). Indeed, if he was still willing to say that such a turning had been prepared for by Cézanne, and claimed that Cézanne’s path into the depths and his own were the same, it is Klee who seemed ultimately to be decisive. Even if he described Klee’s work as he did Greek temples—less as an object, a Gegenstand, than Being’s coming into presence out of unconcealment (or Zu-stand )—he still claimed that “in Klee something has happened that none of us yet grasps” (P: 142, 150). There were indications. As has been noted, the opening lines to the decisive 1962 lecture “Time and Being” cites Paul Klee along with Georg Trakl and Werner Heisenberg. Heisenberg was decisive in the theoretical formulations of Heidegger’s late account of the relation between science and technology. In a discussion with Shinichi Hisamatsu, dating from 1958, Heidegger declared, “I value Klee higher than Picasso. My opinion is that Paul Klee is a more significant painter than Picasso.”6 A 1960 seminar prospectus on the topic of Bild und Image conjoined Klee’s 1924 Jena manifesto “On Modern Art” with a quote from Heraclitus, a passage from Augustine’s Confessions, and Chuang-tzu’s simile of the carillon stand (P: 59). These texts, which were not in conflict with Klee’s own theoretical articulemes, were conjoined in a way that might have denied the inevitability of the peril Heidegger perceived in modern art. Moreover this could indicate that not simply Klee’s art but his writings as well were significant, leading us beyond the overdeterminations between abstraction and technology. Gunter Seubold’s publication of a summary of Heidegger’s enigmatic notes on Klee, dating from the late 1950s, confirms this (KN: 8–9). While these notes show him condemning surrealism, abstract art, and objectless art to the failures of metaphysics, they also reveal that Klee is something of an exception to this (KN: 10). A 1964 letter also denies that he is committed to thinking “abstract art is a branch of modern technology.”7 Yet it is the most technological aspects of modern art that seem omitted from his accounts, for instance, Van Gogh’s use of color, Cézanne’s geometrical elements that led toward cubism, Klee’s own constructivism—let alone all in Klee’s work that both the dadaists and the surrealists found remarkable. It is, one might think, these concrete and

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historical aspects that get mythologized in Heidegger’s attempts to grasp art as emerging from its world, its earth or physis. Not only in his art but in his writing, Klee finds here what Heidegger insists is the trace of Being, though not, it would seem, as a Being that exceeds all beings. Klee’s concern seemed more explicitly the being of nature, for example in his appeal to a natural functionalism that itself transcends formalism. Given Heidegger’s own sensitivities concerning nature, however, the matter must be difficult to adjudicate. For example, Heideg­ ger’s lectures on organicism, to which we shall return, reject mechanical accounts of nature: “Life is not simply organism, but is just as essentially process, thus formally speaking motion” (FCM: 265). His emphasis on the Greek’s physis in understanding Being only continued this. While he proposed to use Klee’s Jena lecture on art in seminar, Heidegger denied that what the artist thought was decisive. Petzet reports that Heidegger claimed that “it is not yet clear whether Klee’s own interpretations of his works (‘cosmic,’ etc.) actually represents the whole of what happens in his creation” (P: 148). Yet grasping the whole still seemed decisive; against the misinterpretation of Klee’s tachism, whose principle seemed to be “letting things run,” Petzet reports that Heidegger insisted that “there is inevitably a letting a ‘whole’ to be seen” (P: 149). Like Rilke’s poetry, Heidegger claimed, such painterly poiesis still celebrates “the wholeness of the sphere of Being” (PLT: 105). As Klee put it, “A sense of totality has entered into the artist’s conception of the material object,” a realm beyond appearance (N: 66). Heidegger claimed that “thinking solves no cosmic riddles” (WCT: 159). Yet his own work surely was not without cosmic overtones in its account of the emergence and “worlding of the world” (Das Welt weltet; OWA: 43). This theme accompanies his thought from the outset. As such, as “world-projection,” Klee’s thought thus maintained what Pöggeler describes as Heidegger’s theoretical site, the site of transcendental schematism, albeit rearticulated by the latter in the problem of Being itself. The result, however, remained unclear. Heidegger famously invoked Kant’s account of the transcendental illusion of ontotheology to criticize metaphysics, but Heidegger’s own stress on the worlding of the world, even its articulation through Dasein as a “Being-in-the-world,” was perhaps dangerously closer to the other form Kant criticized, cosmotheology.8 And what of Heidegger’s other cosmological figures (earth, sky, mortals, divinities); in what sense do they figure (or even mythologize) Being? ­A fter all, nowhere in all of this, to use Merleau-Ponty’s characterization of ­classical

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idealism, does Heidegger argue for an “acosmic subject” (PhP: 441). Rather, in the event of the fourfold interrelating mortals and divinities, world and earth, he is attempting to articulate its occurrence otherwise. Clearly the figures of the fourfold are not indexicals or “logically proper names,” but are to be understood equiprimordially, figures of a certain “equiprimordial venture,” to use the term for the components of In-der-weltsein (cf. BT: 170). Such equiprimordiality (Gleichursprünglichkeit) remains the “formal indicator” for what was once thought of in terms of analogy, which, for all Heidegger’s criticisms, remained throughout a fellow traveler of the Seinsfrage. It remains still evident in his articulation of the fourfold’s “primal oneness” (PLT: 147). Indeed, in this sense Husserl may not be simply wrong in claiming that “there is still a bit of Thomism embedded in Heideg­ger.”9 There is so, however, now, it might be replied, only as a matter of its ruins, difference, and dispersion—its ruinance. But does this remove it from the theological or mythological? If not, does the event of world appropriation (Ereignis) become theological or mythological? As became clear in the discussion of Gadamer and Benjamin, this is a not a new issue or readily resolved. Still, this much seems clear. Being is not identical with these mythemes; they are the dimensions (and figures) of its appropriation. The move from the hermeneutic or horizonal schematism of Being and Time to that of Ereignis continues the former’s inner circularity (BT: 416). Heidegger had, after all, already there invoked the myth of cura (equally with narratological links to Goethe) to confirm the Dasein metanarrative (BT: 492n). Still, all this doesn’t initially sound like Klee, it will again be replied. In the first place these metanarratives sound too monumental. As Adorno and others, like Clement Greenberg, emphasize, Klee’s work, often in miniature, does not sound this “big.”10 Both realized as well that Klee was already concerned with what Heidegger would call “gigantism,” or Adorno the violence of “growing structuration” (AT: 221). Moreover, although Klee, like Heidegger, held an interest in Greek tragedy, his understanding remains modern, equally committed to the transformations of experimentalism. As scholars of Klee have insisted, the function of myth in Klee’s late work is vitally important to its grasp, especially perhaps its critical and political implications. Heidegger (or Heidegger-Petzet) says little about this, either not noticing or not fully aware of it. It is true however that these works occur, like Heidegger’s, during a time of political mythologizing. Here Klee invoked fascist myth against itself.11

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As became evident, Klee’s work often takes place proximate to the figures of myth, but rarely in simple affirmation. Even in his theoretical writings, whose formalism was thought by writers such as Herbert Read to furnish the principia aesthetica of modern aesthetics, Klee invoked ancient mythemes, albeit often overdetermined in irony, contestation, and critique of time and tradition. If Heidegger missed these critical overtones, as has been seen, even he reportedly saw, especially in Klee’s paintings concerning the onslaught of death, something “profoundly ominous” (P: 150). Hidden throughout these experimental refigurations, however, there may be something that Heidegger sensed but perhaps missed and that binds together both its affirmation of myth and experimental refiguration. If we are to grasp this, to begin, we should examine Heidegger’s misgivings about Klee’s cosmic interpretations. In his early lectures on Aristotle, written about the same time as Klee’s own writings on art, Heidegger denies that “some incidentally chosen particular reality (e.g. the cosmos or nature)” can grasp the phenomenological relation between life and world. The world is what is lived, and life is articulated as a nexus through which “one goes out into the world” (PIA: 65). In comparison, Klee’s mathematical generativities would simply seem to be illicit abstractions of Heideg­ ger’s more fundamental ontology. Perhaps they require closer scrutiny. In the first place, like Heideg­ ger’s own later articulemes of the fourfold, they are less “incidentally chosen entities” (less ontic) than they are figures (or schemata) of world appropriation or projection of Being—and yet they are the figures of Klee’s formalism. It is here, Pöggeler also affirms, that Heidegger “was of the opinion that Klee’s theoretical analysis was too close to neo-Kantianism positions, which were one-sidedly bent on form.”12 The “Origin of the Work of Art” argued that “matter and form have a deeper origin” (OWA: 34). Klee’s account of pictorial composition assuredly begins most formally, based geometrically on the concepts of point, line, and plane. Still, the picture plane is not simply extensionally constituted, but a dynamic ontogenesis of forces. “Chaos,” as he puts it, is a concept that arises only antithetically, juxtaposed by binary opposition, only in relation to the figure of the cosmos. We should be wary of simple antithesis talk. Invoking an account of interdependent determinability that dates at least as far back as Fichte, Klee declared “there is no such thing as a concept in itself ” (N: 5). This would include the concept of antithesis itself, presumably: “Chaos as an antithesis is not complete and utter chaos, but a locally

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determined concept relating to the concept of chaos” (N: 2). Here too, Klee seems to have Romantic antecedents. As Benjamin quoted Schlegel in his own Habilitationschrift: “The highest beauty, indeed the highest order is still only that of chaos—namely a chaos that awaits but the touch of love to unfold into a harmonious world.”13 Schelling’s Philosophy of Art similarly depicted art as the manifestation of the Absolute out of chaos.14 Yet Klee insisted on articulating this event formally. Schematically, this is how Klee expressed it at one point (N: 3). Cosmos

Real Chaos

Antithetical Chaos

On Heideggerean grounds, this might seem simply to still move “within the prevailing attitude belonging to technological, calculating representation” (QCT: 48). What Klee adds, however, is equally decisive: “The pictorial symbol for this ‘non-concept’ is the point that is really not a point, the mathematical point” (N: 3). Now, we should be clear that it is not the idea that Being or time might be sketched or depicted that is problematic. Though he showed some hesitations in this regard, Heidegger himself had recourse to such sketches in his lectures, improving on his predecessors’ own sketches of time (for instance, Bergson or Husserl; MFL: 206).15 We shall return to the problem of such sketching out later. But it should also be added that if this sounds too formal or neo­K antian—“morphological”—it also sounds very much like the Goethean concept of symbol that so attracted others, such as Benjamin or Gadamer, and doubtless even Heidegger himself. Again, as Benjamin quoted Goethe, “Beauty in its relation to nature can only be defined as that which remains true to its essential nature only when veiled,” an event in which “the inadequate becomes an actuality” (in dem das Unzulangliche Ereignis wird ).16 As has been seen, this still echoes other Romantic innovations of the differential (for example, Maimon), and the difference that “disarticulates” the sensible and the intelligible or the visible and the invisible. Petzet notes that Heidegger would not have known but would have been interested in Klee’s Goethean world; we should perhaps wonder about this—its echoes are not that distant (P: 149). Klee’s account here is complex; it is less the posited thesis of a formal construct than the figuration of “onto” or cosmogenesis. Through it, Klee

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expresses (not without itself referencing the legacy of physis) the emergence of “the fateful point between coming-into-being and passing away” (N: 3). As Klee put it, “theory of form [Formlehre], as it is often called, does not stress the principles and paths.” Instead, he chooses Gestaltung precisely to emphasize such principles as paths that underlie form as living expression (N: 17). Such form, however, is subject to experiment and refiguration, composition and recomposition. In accord with his experimentalism, Klee refigures the concept of chaos and the cosmological figure of the picture plane by what he calls a “nonconcept,” both become schematized mathematically as a field of disequilibrium in terms of dynamics. Indeed, the whole field of the picture plane became conceived as an interplay of dynamic forces, generated in the dynamics of line. The generation of the world out of chaos is “depicted,” kinetically inscribed from point to line, line into plane, and the plane into a spatial dimension. Thus, even though Cézanne thought the essence of painting concerned the depiction of depth, for Klee it is all about dynamically (and hence temporally) articulated depth; that is, “all figuration is connected with movement” (N: 24). The issue, however, becomes once more complicated. We should not forget the many references in Being and Time to Dasein’s In-der-weltsein as a dynamic field. Such references in a sense make good on the caveat in his 1924–25 Sophist lectures that the understanding of the mathematical continuum in modern field dynamics makes possible a retrieval of Aristotle (Soph: 81). Still, Klee’s “Creative Credo,” which Heidegger knew—and whose first line he also emphasized, that “art does not reproduce the visible but renders it visible”—begins almost like the proof of a geometrical theorem: “Let us draw up a topographical plan.” The first act of movement (line) takes us far beyond the dead point. After a short while we stop to get our breadth (interrupted line or, if we stop several times, an articulated line). And now a glance back to see how far we have come (counter-movement). We consider the road in this direction and in that (bundle of lines). (N: 76)

For Klee, form and “exact experiment” become indispensable: “algebraic, geometrical, and mechanical problems are steps in our education toward the essential, towards the functional as opposed to the impressional” (N: 69).17 Yet this formalism surely takes us beyond mere formalism (“formalism is form without function”) and remains devoid of the relation between “essence and appearance” (N: 60). In this “first act,” originating

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through the path or Gestaltung of a certain deformation, these visual explorations or penetrations (Verinnerlichungen) are linked by Klee to the figurative articulations of “beginning, middle, and end” (N: 17)—and one might say, accordingly, as Aristotle defined it in the Poetics, again linked to narrative (mythos).18 As such, there remains once more a link to physis, that is, to the analogies of Being’s occurrence and its coming-into-being and passing away. Beyond the statics of forms, there is the task that explicates the inner articulation and development of the work, understood by Klee explicitly as a dialogue with the object. For this, “the imaginary is indispensable,” and it is here that its figural expositions became linked by Klee explicitly to myth (N: 59): “Cosmogenetically speaking, it [chaos] is a mythical primordial state of the world, from which the ordered cosmos develops, step by step, or suddenly, on its own at the hand of a creator” (N: 9). As the exposition of this first act obviates, following Rilke (and Schelling before him), Klee seemingly understands such creation as a venture of will, instead of Heidegger’s Being “as the venture pure and simple.” For Heidegger, this would place Klee metaphysically on the same plane as Leibniz, the great originator of modern metaphysics and logic and hence artistic constructivism (PLT: 99–100). The metaphysics of the self accordingly became modeled, beginning with Descartes, but most explicitly in Fichte, as the mathematical point. Again some of Klee’s interpreters likewise have seen Schelling’s transcendental idealism in Klee’s account.19 But then Klee’s writings, like the first act of Absolute Idealism itself, as Heidegger pointed out in his Schelling book, would amount to an absolute knowledge “placed at the beginning of system in the sense of the mathematical system of reason” (Schelling: 47). As is the case with Rilke for Heidegger, none of this is so simple, any more than is Klee’s mathematical grapheme. In one sense Klee’s mathematical figures are, if anything, deconstructive (Abbauende). Conceived mathematically or geometrically, by means of point, line, and plane, the mathematical figure is equally conceived as a nonconcept that emerges within a dynamic field that transcends and escapes it. While Klee argued for the importance of construction, he denied its completeness in aesthetic matters, a denial that precluded every bit as much a reading of simple irrationalism in Klee’s “sancta ratio chaotica” (N: 70). If it is deconstructive it is constructive nonetheless, a schematics of dynamis: “Everything (the world) is of a dynamic nature; static problems make their appearance only at certain parts of the universe, in ‘edifices’ on the crust of the

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various cosmic bodies” (N: 5). Stasis is always effect: dynamis pervasive, the horizontal, the earthly a yearning for the higher, a “yearning to free ourselves from earthly bonds” (N: 67). Tossed between birth and death, we are impelled in such figurations by “the static imperative of our earthly being,” albeit by “an imperative that crumbles in the direction of egg and death” (N: 5). Klee’s heights, too, never simply free themselves from, let alone disambiguate, their earthly depths, matter and form. As has been seen, this is precisely the feature that Derrida found remarkable in Klee’s art. He singled out the 1927 Constructive-impressive in which the nails that hold the canvas onto the stretcher are painted, as figure on a ground (TP: 304; see Figure 1). For Derrida the graphic line that was originally the basis of Klee’s art, far from being the site of a cosmological origin, was the inauguration of a transcendental withdrawal; it marked the trace of an invisible that will never become visible, the site of a certain “blindness” all drawing only ever repeats (MB: 45ff). What again about the figures of Heidegger’s fourfold? Or perhaps, even more directly, the inventive terms “Dasein” or its “cares” itself? The latter, as Heidegger explained, were generated out of an attempt “to interpret the Augustinian (i.e., Helleno-Christian) anthropology with regard to the foundational principles reached in the ontology of Aristotle” (BT: 492n). As Gadamer questioned, in initially hearing of these figures of the fourfold, “Metaphors? Concepts? Were these expressions of thought or announcements of a neo-heathen mythology?”20 Were they, as Clement Greenberg said of Klee’s work, products of the provinces, a vestige of the ornamental and decorative?21 Or here, too, has Greenberg missed the irony of their interior design?22 As has been seen, Heidegger’s mythemes seem themselves too big, too gigantic—let alone exclusive—to account for the experimental ironies of Klee’s work. Except that Klee himself insisted that, rather than in terms of a relation between subject and object, the artist too must be understood “as a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole.” As such, further surpassing the opposition of subject and object, art involves an event surpassing optical foundations. Perhaps most significantly, though Heidegger’s closest interpreters have insisted that Ereignis must be viewed as the renderings of such a similar schematism, Heidegger insisted they were to be grasped artistically through poiesis and apart from the calculative constructions of technology. Hence, as von Hermann has said, “The Origin of the Work of Art” must be understood through the Beitrage’s sophisticated critique

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of technology as calculative reduction. But Pöggeler has rightly questioned this in claiming that “technology and art belong together in our life, and art has to become the art of the age of technology. That such art could nevertheless remain ‘authentic’ was shown to Heidegger by a painting like Klee’s Death and Fire 23 (see Figure 8). Still, we must wonder about the extent to which Heidegger would have agreed. If he could agree, could his agreement occur without the substantial theoretical alteration that ultimately articulates the artistic and the technological beyond such oppositions? If in its dynamics Klee’s artistic (or written) work is deconstructive, in its formalism it remains constructive, a rendering of the invisible, always poised conceptually “towards a theory of form production” (N: 1). Heidegger would have demurred from such terms, but perhaps he needn’t have, as Klee’s refiguration of form as a path or Gestaltung indicates. What Klee gives us is something like the Heideggerean schematism in the age of technology. Hence we would perhaps need a part two of “The Question Concerning Technology” beyond the oppositions of technique and poiesis—in Klee’s terms, the architectonic and the poetic. Death and Fire surely would have appealed to Heidegger; he was equally taken with Klee’s works that articulated the fragile relation among humans, nature, animals, and machines (see Figure 9, in Chapter 5). Klee (unlike Cézanne, for example) was not obsessed with the opposition between nature and culture or the simple “realization”—perhaps recollection—of thing and image that might, as Heidegger put it, “overcome the ontological difference” of thing and image, surface and depth.24 Klee understood nature both with and beyond formalism, dynamically, as a conjunct of and not a disjunct between form and function, intuition and form, dynamis and stasis. Ironically, Klee found in the dynamic technically articulated in form what Heidegger found in physis, denying thereby the classical view of painting as a spatial and not a temporal art (N: 78). As many have noticed (especially Adorno, who interpreted it as a theoretical paradigm of the aesthetic), in all this the work of art takes on a transcendence whose character is hieroglyphic for Klee (AT: 124). Once more Klee retraces the path of post-Kantian philosophy. As has been seen, Novalis, following Fichte’s depiction of the self as the Archimedean point that infinitely, that is differentially, refracted the “circularity” of the Absolute, claimed that any characterization of the self, including ego itself, was a hieroglyphic matter. This is the point at which Klee’s work rejoins an ac-

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count of judgment as differentiation (Unterscheidung). On such accounts all terms are mutually interrelated and limited in the interplay (Wechsel) of the ontic and the ontological.25 Klee’s own mathematized hieroglyphics, however, have lost their neo-Platonist relation to the infinite circle of the Absolute. Now they articulate only “fragmented transcendence,” to use Adorno’s terms—or, following Heidegger, a (hermeneutic) circle in which the self is revealed as a (finite) aenigma. Continuing the Augustinian trope, here the self’s identity is less the articulation of an immanence than its “expulsion.” The result is then an experience and a figurative event (an Ereignis) that is less a unified world projection of being in its totality, the essence of perspectival construction, than, as Heidegger slowly came to more clearly see, a schema for the appropriation of what had always already withdrawn. But perhaps this insight was tacitly present throughout his work. The concluding chapter to his Habilitationschrift, on medieval semantics began by citing Novalis: “We seek everywhere the unconditioned [das Unbedingte] and only ever find conditioned things [Dinge]” (H: 62).26 As interpreters such as Manfred Frank have affirmed here, thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida form a direct link to Novalis’s (and subsequently, Schlegel’s) break with post-Kantian idealism.27 Some of Klee’s closest interpreters, accordingly, have described his “Heidegger-like” view of the artist as “thrown into the world.”28 It might be questioned whether Klee’s figures, for instance, that of the earth, and Heidegger’s are the same. A different history, different tasks, and different articulemes surely intervene; inter alia, Klee insisted on a different dialogue with modern science. Still, perhaps it is the very form of the earth that’s in question, and perhaps too the (theoretical) status of its invocations of “reliability.”29 Or, you might say “aletheia.” To many (again, Adorno included), all this sounds anachronistic. As in Klee’s case, primitivism was often enough the charge leveled against it. Yet, Heidegger declared, “poetic projection comes from nothing in this respect, that it never takes its gift from the ordinary and the traditional” (OWA 73). We should tread carefully. He denied primitivism from the outset (BT: 76). Like the term Cosmos itself, Heidegger claimed that his concept of aletheia emerged from reading the Greeks. Yet he also admitted that his own reading of the aletheia is not explicit in the Greek—that, as Maurice Blanchot reaffirmed, it “does not yet belong to the Greek language.”30 Like Heidegger’s account of the Ge-stell, which Heidegger claims forms “the essence of modern technology”—or the account of eidos as “outward aspect”

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(Ansicht), which, Heidegger argues, Plato transforms—such terms are not simple descriptors devoid of theoretical interpretation (QCT: 20). As Blanchot saw, like Hegel’s Aufheben, aletheia is argumentatively invented or created, a textual (inferential) construction, polysemically both constructive and ironical in its attempt to exhibit things otherwise.31 Such terms involve again something like the schematism of deconstructive differance, as much quantitative as qualitative—both formal or mathematical and dynamic, to speak Kantian.32 Or, more simply, in earlier Heideggerean terms, aletheia is a formal indicator (die formale Anzeige) whose implications are no less formal than they are indicative; both are at stake in the articulation or “in-forming (Ein-bildung) of the full phenomenon” of truth (PIA: 27). The resulting imaginative or inventive exhibitions would involve as much complicated (syntactic) construct as simple (semantic) interpretation. We might agree with Blanchot about the Romanticism of Heideg­ ger’s etymological returns (and transformations) but equally insist on how all this points beyond Romanticism—and, on ordinary readings, Romantic injunctions against the technological. All of this remains far removed from Heidegger’s occasional jibes against technology; it is perhaps to claim that Heidegger’s alethic poiesis is technological (and ironical) despite itself, almost as if, in the complexity of these transformations, Heidegger has a sense (or a glimpse) of what lies beyond the reductive occlusions of technological “enframing.” This is perhaps what he senses in Klee, a physis that comes to presence technologically, that is without occlusion, in a way that truly “restores it into its yet concealed truth” (QCT: 39). Here too, we would be beyond what Heidegger himself described as the simple oppositions that would view technology as all bad or a matter of fate (QCT: 48). Indeed, at one point he viewed his later account of releasement (Gelassenheit) and the letting be of things, renouncing the will and human machination, to be both a yes and a no to technology (DT: 54). It would both allow us to use technological devices and “keep ourselves free of them.” But it is not clear how such “patient noble mindedness” would indeed free us from the simple oppositions he eschewed—whether the yes by which we might instrumentally engage technology were not in the end simply subsumed beneath a more substantial no (DT: 85, 54). On the other hand, the latter might be taken to be something of a clue. We might still wonder whether, like Cézanne, Heidegger remained stuck in the opposition between nature and technology, whether Heideg­ ger and Cézanne did indeed share a common path. Heidegger could un-

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derstand himself in Cézanne; perhaps we should take him at his word. Something might be at hand in Klee that Heidegger could not fully grasp (or at least articulate), a construction that does not nostalgically hope to overcome technology. Instead such a construction would remain in touch with what Heidegger meant by the earth, the “saving power” that perdures through its dangers. This would involve not the overcoming of ontological difference in an aesthetic realization of surface and depth but in a nonrepresentational image modeled after a non- (that is, mathematical) concept that is the effective (chaotic) dispersal or figurative “penetration” and rendering visible of depth or transcendence (cf. QCT: 43). To reckon with it we must rely on the experimental, as Klee put it in relation to construction, where the imaginary becomes again essential. This becomes not simply a moment for giving thanks in the holy, even when thinking becomes a kind of recollection or “thanking” (Denken, Danken), but equally a matter of “venturing” in the loss or withdrawal of its immanence.33 If Heidegger could agree with Rilke that at stake is “an existence beyond number,” it doesn’t follow that existence could be found without number, or in any case only as simply opposed to it. Klee may well have said here just what he said of Rilke, that in continuing to cling to such oppositions Heidegger was simply “behind the time.” That is, if Heidegger is not an Impressionist, as Klee accused Rilke (D: 317) perhaps Heidegger may be still an Aristotelian or Brentanist (and metaphysical). Instead of articulating the differential event in which they emerge, Heidegger still retains a certain opposition between primary and secondary properties.34 Heidegger still claims that number is oppositional, or at least always incidental (accidental), to the essence of things. Rilke, Klee suggests, “paid less attention to the graphic work, where I advanced the furthest” (D: 317). He missed, that is, the dynamis of Klee’s graphic line. In that case, what Klee’s argument reveals is less that Heidegger’s overriding intuitions about things were wrong but that they were as abstract as the abstract art he condemned to simple techne. It is Heidegger, after all, who said, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” that the opposition between the structure of things and the structure of sentences is “undecidable” (OWA: 24). But at times Heidegger staunchly clung to it, and in any attempt saw in the formalisms of modern art (or any other formalisms for that matter) only metaphysics. In such metaphysical condemnations, Heidegger (like Carnap, to whom by a kind of antinomy he remains ironically very close) misunderstood the venture of experimentalism, both in science and art.

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Now what is being claimed is that Heidegger found in Klee what he had found in poiesis and physis. I have not claimed that one had to proceed mathematically to derive this (nor did Klee, granted the diversity of his work), but only that you could do so and that Heidegger missed it. If calculative reductionism is a danger that accompanies technological thinking, it is not simply entailed by technological thinking. In recognizing this, Klee was onto something that “none of us yet grasps,” precisely maintaining the tension that could speak of Heidegger’s figural Geviert technologically. 35 Again, the contrast with Romanticism is enlightening. Having explicitly abandoned a philosophy of first principles, Schlegel sought a relation to the Infinite that would proceed ironically through a series of alternating propositions, a Wechselkonstruktion. Klee’s formal constructions might reveal this infinite Wechsel (and its withdrawal) on their sleeve. By no means a deduction, or principia aesthetica to speak Wittgensteinian, they show what can’t be “said,” the extent to which the use of calculation involves not only a form but also an experiment regarding what exceeds us.36 Precisely in this regard, science and being, thinking and calculability cannot simply be opposed. Ironically, Heidegger himself did not always hold to these oppositions. Indeed, up until Being and Time, Heidegger viewed himself as more closely integrating philosophy and science, as Pöggeler noted.37 Heidegger in Being and Time thought he and Einstein were on the same turf. Equally, the 1925 lecture course The History of the Concept of Time aligned itself with the crisis in the foundations of mathematics in Weyl and Brouwer, who, he declared, “were influenced by phenomenology” (HCT: 3). The 1924–25 Sophist lectures praise Weyl’s use of mathematics in physics in overcoming the Newtonian account by claiming that “the notion of field is normative.” Indeed, he had hopes that such field theory would make possible a more “radical appreciation” of Aristotle’s account of motion (Soph: 81). Would it? Would it thereby suggest a new appreciation for Heidegger’s own radical interpretation of Aristotle? The answer must be that we do not have any final evidence of this, though the aforementioned use of Feld in Being and Time to characterize the dynamics of Dasein’s inner world or environmental involvements might be construed to indicate that such was the case early on.38 The explication in the Sophist lectures of Aristotle’s Physics, distinguishing it from the modern conception of number, claimed that the continuum is not “resolvable analytically.” It remains dependent, as ­Being

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and Time would also relate, on a synthesis “prior to the question of analytic penetration,” or more perhaps more fundamental than it (Soph: 81; cf. BT: 201–203). Once again, stasis is dependent on dynamis, or in phenomenological terms static analysis is dependent on genetic synthesis. As Merleau-Ponty later put it, it is not simply the point but “the point-horizon structure [that] is the foundation of space” (PhP: 102).39 With respect to Klee’s paradigm—and perhaps this is precisely what Klee meant by its “deformation”—Heidegger declared, “One cannot put a line together out of points.” Distinguishing the ontological continuum from the mathematical, Heidegger stated that in each case “there is something in between, something that cannot itself be constituted out of the preceding elements” (Soph: 76). The linear “manifold” is dependent on the synthesis, or “gathering,” of place. “Hence the ‘fold’ is the mode of connection of the manifold” (Soph: 76). This gathering, this synthesis, lies at the heart of the Dasein analytic and is what makes it possible for him to claim that the latter, as the “full existential conception of science,” would underlie the requisites of “the mathematical projection of nature” (BT: 414). Further implications of what Heidegger called his own radical appreciation of Aristotle for contemporary physics must remain oblique, but we can see him working through the other domain to which Klee appeals (organic function) in his analysis of contemporary biology in the 1929–30 lectures. He was aware of the technological complications of modern science, complications sufficient to prevent us from breaking “through, in the serious and above all enduring manner that is required,” what had come to be called a “crisis in the foundations of the sciences” (FCM: 191). This is a crisis even Being and Time still hoped to overcome (BT: 29). Yet in his 1929–30 lectures, Heidegger argued against any strict opposition between science and philosophy that would view science as simply delivering the facts and philosophy of their fundamental concepts. We cannot separate metaphysics and positive research, playing them off against one another in this manner. They are not two consecutive phases of a production process. The relation between them cannot be established in a rationalized, technical sort of way, as if science and metaphysics simply represented two branches of a single industrial concern, the former supplying the facts and the latter providing the fundamental concepts. (FCM: 189)

Aware that science is much too occupied with the realm of “practical or technical serviceability,” Heidegger nonetheless called for a more

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cooperative or “communal exchange” between philosophy and science that acknowledges their historicity. Significantly, Heidegger also rails against “the prevailing groundlessness of thought and understanding today when we are asked to regard the house as a machine for living and the chair as a machine for sitting” (FCM: 216). As close as such views were to Klee and his Bauhaus colleagues, however, we should perhaps not forget Klee’s similar call for a dialogue between subject and object, or “I and thou,” albeit again perhaps with different connotations. Arguably, the formalism of his Notebooks represents such a dialogue. Moreover, this dialogue with the sciences in general was widespread. Klee used ideas from modern biology, meteorology, astronomy, geology and physics, all engaged in the passage beyond the optical.40 In the present case, however, Heidegger states that such an exchange between philosophy and sciences entails that philosophy is not simply a “hyper sophistical, universal” founding discipline simply opposed to the “sciences of fact” (FCM: 189–191). Instead, thinking is historically generated in this exchange, the cooperation or co-responding itself, notwithstanding or perhaps overcoming the danger of technological reductionism. What becomes in such exchanges of the almost mythic status of all these terms, such as “the truth of the whole” of the earth and sky, mortals and divinities (to which Klee too appealed, if not in simple accord)? What are we to make of this lingering homoiosis or correspondence (analogia) at stake in such myth, which, as even his 1942–43 Parmenides lectures starkly stated, emerges in “the original relation between the word and the essence of being” (Par: 114)? It has also been suggested that Klee’s use of myth often remains more explicitly deconstructive. But in what sense? What does this have to do with the abstraction, or construction, of his graphic line? Return to Klee’s “Creative Credo” and its topographical landscape mentioned earlier, and its articulation of an “expression, dynamics, and psyché of the line.” He continues: We cross an unplowed field (area traversed by lines), then a dense wood. He gets lost, searches, and once even describes the classical movement of a running dog. I am no longer quite calm either: another river with fog (spatial element) over it. But soon the fog lifts. Some basket-weavers are returning home with their carts (the wheel). Accompanied by a child with the merriest curls (spiral movement). Later it grows dark and sultry (spatial element). A flash of lightning on the horizon (zigzag line). Over us there are still stars (fields of points). Soon we come to our original lodging. Before we

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fall asleep, a number of memories come back to us, for a short trip of this kind leaves us full of impressions. All sorts of lines. Spots. Dots. Smooth surfaces. Dotted surfaces, shaded surfaces. Wavy movement. Constricted, articulated movement. Counter-movement. Network and weaving. Brick work, fish-scales. Solo. Chorus. A line losing itself, a line growing stronger (dynamics). (N: 76–77)

Klee describes here the formal indication or figuration of pictorial space—or, more precisely, space / time. In so describing it, he exhibits or depicts the formal graphematics of the text, the very dynamics or texture out of which, as Blanchot put it, aletheia must emerge. Such figuration occurs less as a return to origins than as a field of fragmentation or ruinance born through a series of inventive, figurative transformations or recompositions.41 As such, it involves not simply a matter of remembrance of a being that escapes the ontic, but the inventive and experimental field of the imaginary. Indeed, Klee’s description has inescapable surrealist overtones. Heidegger himself realized that even memory properly understood could not be confined to “the power to recall the past” but also involved “what is present and what is to come.”42 What Klee’s geometrical figures remind us about is the inherent (syntactic) connectedness of this field dynamics with (conceptual and intuitional) “inferential penetration” (N: 66). In this there is much beyond mythic returns, beyond the simple critique of reason and technology. Form, even geometrical form, to use a phrase of Merleau-Ponty’s, can no longer simply be construed as the “freezing of being, which appeared to be the task of physics”; it is equally part of Being’s exploration and venture, never independent of productive imagination or poiesis (PhP: 54, 383f).43 We can still say that wherever the Beautiful occurs it does so as the Ekphanestaton of poiesis; thus “the poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of coming to presence into the Beautiful” (QCT: 34). Accordingly, keeping in mind “the Greek sense of thesis—to let lie forth in its radiance and presence—then the ‘fix in place’ can never have the sense of rigid, motionless, and secure” (OWA: 82). Klee was surely in accord. Such poiesis is not disconnected from the question of its rendering, the question of how we are to “make” it visible (sichtbar machen).44 As has become evident, this making visible, this rendering involves an event and a signification with multiple overtones—artistic, interpretative, even accountability (as in “to render an account”). Despite its polysemy, Heidegger himself had difficulties with the term rendering, connecting

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it most directly (a kind of pros hen) to accountability and (through his reading of Leibniz) to ratio, Reason, strict determinability, and ultimately objectivity (Gegenstandlichkeit; PR: 22, 118, 34). Hence emerges his claim that art in the age of reason, an age that is inherently the objectification of Being, must be objectless (Gegenstandlose; PR: 34). It is striking how much of this account of scientific objectivity is precisely what unites the positions of Heidegger and Carnap, described by the former as “the most extreme counter-positions” of the age, standing in the shadow of neo-Kantianism (PT: 24). They share in common, to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, the concept of science as the ontology of “the Great Object” (VI: 15). Like all such binary oppositions, their extremes share more in common than each would like to admit—and both were prone to misunderstand the venture, the experiri of experimentalism.45 Even though Heidegger would claim that such “objectless art” in the age of technology has both “an historical appropriateness” and a “legitimate function,” it was also true that in Klee he found a work, a rendering, and a truth that would not fit its constraints, an art in whose rendering “a different sort of standing (Standigkeit) emerges in what is objectless” (PR: 34, 20, 33). The result is precisely neither an object (Gegenstand ) nor even, as he once thought, a duplicated or projected image (eidos) but a coming into presence or “Zu-stand.”46 Indeed, the result was, like Heideg­ ger’s Greek temple, a producing and presenting (Her und Dar-stellung) which, in the sense of poiesis, “lets what presences come forth into uncealment.” This could all still be connected to more classical accounts of the Beautiful. Yet Klee ironically saw that the artistic event could (if perhaps not must) be both conceptually and pictorially rendered and explored with the assistance of technical means; at stake was an intuition that was both a matter of intuitive inference and also one “helped by finer instruments” (N: 66). Moreover, this irony could be reduced neither simply to a negative dialectic nor to the polysemic plurality of Being’s different manifestations. Equally ventured is the fragmentation they share, the venture of form or rendition. Against Heidegger’s attempts for a new beginning undertaken in relation to Greek origins or a Beauty that perdures prior to the levelings of (modern) objective reduction, Klee bore witness to a different kind of poiesis, a different relation to tradition, and a different kind of experiment. He was not alone. If the essence of technology ever were Enframing or Gestell, if being had been reduced to “standing-reserve” (QCT: 21), and

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manipulable objectivity, and if such characterizations might ring true for Hobbes or Newton, Hegel or Carnap, this was not simply true in itself, as Heidegger’s favorable lectures on the biology of Dreisch or Uexkull (who also influenced Klee) might again signal.47 The question concerning technology would now be more complicated, in both art and science. Heidegger’s returns would need to be read not only as responding to the limitations of a certain understanding of historical objectivity but also as experimenting with the concept of form in responding to neo-Kantianism. Indeed this becomes especially evident in his own turn back to Kant. It is worth recalling that at one point Heidegger understood the phenomenological method not simply as a matter of reduction, nor destruction (Abbau, undoing the conceptual failures of the past), but both as part of phenomenological construction (Konstruction; BP: 21–23).48 Husserl too had used the terms Aufbau and Abbau at the time—as had others, for instance Carnap in his Aufbau, who also understood the latter as a ­Konstitutionsystem.49 As important as Husserl’s account of categorical intuition remained for Heidegger, however, from now on Phenomenology for him would involve less pure description than an exhibition in the Kantian sense. It was precisely in this sense that he would interpret the Kantian account of categorization and schematism, the interpretive or “exploratory” event in which appearances became differentiated, a “sketching out” (Auf­ zeichnung) through which appearances became articulated as instances of pure possibility (KPM: 64–65).50 Moreover, as much as he demurred from the issue of objective validity in Kant, the quaestio juris, he could still claim that “through the analytical elucidation of the categories as the essentially more necessary building blocks, or rather hinges (Fugen) of transcendence, their ‘objective reality’ is demonstrated” (KPM: 58). In this regard we must challenge the standard interpretation that divides early and late Heidegger. This account was still in place in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and its account of the rift through which truth becomes established in the event of the fourfold, “the drawing together, into a unity, of sketch, and basic design, breach and outline” (OWA: 61). Heidegger’s own account of Gestalt­ung, in which the figure is the result of Being’s having been set up in the work, would occur here; such figuration articulates the truth of Being in joining together earth and world out of unconcealment (OWA: 62). This in turn is what becomes questionable when the work of art is conceived only “in terms of the power of the imagination”

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and its products as simply whimsically informed images (or matter) and ultimately understood as “unreal” (OWA: 70). We can also see in this sketching out of categorical or “hermeneutic intuition” (a term he used early on) the fugal structure that would compose pathways or joinings and outlines of the late 1930s Contributions to Philosophy, a work many would see as the Being and Time of the later works. Already in 1935 he saw in such inventions and calculation a glimpse (Blick) into Chaos, bringing him closer and closer to Nietzsche (and Klee), where such “schematization . . . not only fixes chaos in certain respects and thus secures the possible, it also lets chaos appear as chaos through its transparent stability” (N: III, 88). The result throughout involved an “objectivity” that acknowledged its “perspectival” or “aspectival” status—an objectivity, if you will, that was inevitably schema-specific. Heidegger realized that such schematization involved both invention and construction, but the exploratory virtue of such inventive construction became increasingly (if not simply) occluded in the massive critique of technological thinking and its totalizing En-framing (Ge-stell) of Being that would characterize his later writings.51 He forgot perhaps the extent to which “the question of Being must be constructed [gestellt].52 Still, when the summarized “Klee Notes” reelaborate the Beautiful in terms of Ereignis, they understand seeing (Sehen) as a catching sight or glimpse (Erblickung), the term he had invoked for the role of transcendental imagination with regard to pure intuition in the Kantbuch three decades earlier (KN: 11–12; KPM: 98). Indeed, if Klee’s writings were too neo-Kantian or overly committed to form, therefore requiring the supplement of the Seinsfrage or a Dasein­ analytik, we would be remiss to forget the extent to which both the articulation of the Seinsfrage and the Daseinanalytik involved a construction, one whose articulations remained themselves much indebted to the polemics of the neo-Kantianism of Lask or Natorp, or perhaps even his account of scientific experiment to positivisms such as Carnap’s. Still, if it were a construction, it proceeded always at the same time, as a preliminary sketching out (Aufzeichnung) of Being that perdures through his writings and reveals his complicated relation both to constructivism and the reductive excesses of technological paradigms. It appears that we are left with the final question: Would Heidegger see in Klee’s work (both artistic and theoretical) the means for a philosophy and an art that in the end provide only a clue by being overwhelmed by the dangers and oppositions of technology? “The Question Concern-

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ing Technology” asserted that we would surmount the technological, in the same way that, as he claimed (somewhat unconvincingly), one gets over the wounds of grief or pain (QCT: 39). Both claims (that technology involves a conflict that will simply be surmounted and that it must be undergone like pain to be surmounted) still seem overwhelmed by the mythemes of tragedy—and in this regard to have succumbed to their failures. In the end, Petzet reports, Heidegger thought Klee’s work too neo-Kantian, too committed to questions of form, and too cosmological. If he could sense in all this something he knew very well—as well perhaps as a path beyond it—it was because here too, in Klee’s “constructive— impressive” venture (and experiment), he continually saw (without fully seeing) something of himself. After all, it was Heidegger who saw that “modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the question of nature. Rather the reverse is true” (QCT: 21). Once we demure from the claim that pure theory only “sets nature up to exhibit itself as calculable in advance,” the experimental renderings of art and philosophy, science and mathematics can be grasped otherwise—doubtless in ways Heidegger’s own preliminary sketches exemplify. As will become further apparent, we then need to read Heidegger anew, perhaps in closer proximity to Klee’s chaos.

Twittering Machine (Zwitscher-Maschine), Paul Klee, 1922, 151. Watercolor, and pen and ink on oil transfer drawing on paper, mounted on cardboard, 41.3 x 30.5 cm. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©The Museum of Modern Art, Licensed by SCALA, Art Resource, New York. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Figure 9 

5 “Fiscourse / Digure” Of Nomadism, the Specter of Oedipus, and the Remnants of the Sublime Suddenly, everything moves in accord with a new law; not that older rhythms no longer prevail, but they are differently determined. The physiological grounding and explanation of rhythm (and its power). The ancient essence of music is to be reconstrued; the mime dance. Friedrich Nietzsche1 Now at last the real Otéro . . . Apart from what is after all of an orgiastic character, the artist can learn much here. Of course there would need to be still another dancer if one is not only to feel the law of movement, but also to understand it. The point at issue is perhaps only the complication of the linear relations that subsist between bodies at rest. This topic for the time being constitutes my real field of research. Paul Klee, writing of the dancer Otéro, 1902 (D: 85) Orgiastic representation can discover the infinite within itself only by allowing finite determination to subsist; better, by saying the infinite of that finite determination itself, by representing it not as having vanished and disappeared but as vanishing and on the point of disappearing, thus also being engendered in the infinite. Gilles Deleuze (DR: 43–44)

the interpretation of Paul Klee’s work between elements of neoclassicism and modernism is now evident. This in turn generated further antinomies as interpreters divided his work between formalist and poetic, mythological and political, oneiric and scientific elements. As his Diaries attest, granted Klee’s interest in traditional painting and literature as well as the emerging avant-garde, it is not surprising that such neoclassical or modernist interpretations emerge. As has The chiasm that divides

117

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also been become evident, the surrealists (as had expressionists and the dadaists before them) immediately identified with Klee’s work. This in turn became expressed in those writing in their wake. That Klee became paradigmatic for more radical forms of philosophy may be more surprising. This becomes especially true when one considers the forms of philosophy with which it became associated starting in the mid-1960s, in what came to be called postmodernism or poststructuralism and emerged in the work of such figures as Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard. Here too, however, the case becomes pointed, enlightening not only Klee’s work but the figures for whom his work became so important. Klee’s work assisted in the search for a philosophy that sought to escape the prosaic limits of reflection, albeit one, in Merleau-Ponty’s case, that could still be related to the classical archive of German thought through his work in Kant or Schelling. Now it would become a beacon for more radical forms of contesting reflective consciousness and subjective experience in general. Noting “Paul Klee’s work is probably the best evidence from the recent past,” Adorno claimed, “modern art breaks out of the sphere of the portrayal of human emotions and is transformed into the expression of what no significative language can achieve” (AT: 60). Even further removed from the language and the gaze of reflection, now poststructuralist thinkers would see in Klee a language beyond humanism and subjective or anthropological consciousness in general. To begin, it should be acknowledged that these thinkers too rely on the archive in German philosophy. This reliance is often immediately intelligible insofar as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are concerned, where numerous poststructuralist writings were devoted to the antihumanist elements of their works. But as scholars as diverse as Manfred Frank, JeanLuc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe have argued, this reliance is equally true of the post-Kantian or neoclassical archive out of which Klee’s own work emerged.2 This convergence becomes even further intelligible in what follows. To gain access to these thinkers, however, we can begin more proximate to its classical form of idealism in twentieth-century philosophy, Phenomenology, and more proximately again in French philosophy, to the cracks in the aesthetic idealism that already emerges in MerleauPonty’s own account, from whom many of these poststructuralist thinkers deliberately diverged. If Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics proved to be fertile for Sartre’s account, the tensions in Merleau-Ponty’s thought would turn out to prove equally fertile for those writing after him.

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At one point in Phenomenology of Perception, the topic of music intervenes, interrupting Merleau-Ponty’s defense of lived or embodied space: “Music is not in visible space, but it besieges, undermines, and displaces that space so that soon these overdressed listeners . . . are like a ship’s crew buffeted about on the surface of a tempestuous sea” (PhP: 225). He acknowledges this is not an isolated incident; in general, “sensory experience is unstable, and alien (étrangère) to natural perception” (PhP: 225). Merleau-Ponty initially seemed untroubled by the result. In natural perception, he claims, such displacement does not occur. Rather, like the constitutive acts of intellectualism he criticized in articulating the spontaneous order of perception, such interruptions arise only through an illicit abstraction; the focus on sensible quality accordingly is claimed to be “the outcome of a second order or critical vision” (PhP: 226). At the level of natural perception, in the experiential level of our “prehistory,” such interruption does not occur. Sensory experience, to speak Hegelian, returns to its ground (ist zugrundgehen) in the prelogical unity, the sensorium commune afforded by the body’s corporeal schema (PhP: 240, 235).3 But in such allusions, whether it be in Merleau-Ponty, who also appealed to the dialectic here, or others, we should also be forewarned by Hegel’s skepticism regarding sense certainty. Hegel’s skepticism was surely already organized dialectically; he had already conceived the negativity that accompanied the sensible by subsuming it or sublating it in the rhythmics of the speculative proposition.4 The word sublate (Aufheben), “a delight to speculative thought,” expressed the resulting unity of opposites in its twofold meaning: to preserve and to put to an end.5 Hegel similarly declared that sense was a “wondrous word” (wunderbare Wort): “Sense” [Sinn] is this wonderful word which is used in two opposite meanings. On the one hand, it means the organ of immediate apprehension, but on the other hand, we mean by it the sense, the significance, the thought, the universal underlying this thing. And so sense is connected on the one hand with the immediate external aspect of existence, and on the other hand with its inner essence. Now a sensuous consideration does not cut the two sides apart at all; in one direction it contains the opposite one too, and in sensuous immediate perception it at the same time apprehends the essence and the Concept.6

The oppositions at stake here had already been managed dialectically. Hegel reduced the Wechsel, the exchange or hovering between concept and sensuous “exteriority” to indifference. The sensuous always had a more

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problematic character for philosophy, and Hegel was not unaware of it. It was Hegel, after all, who maintained that those who assert the simple reality of sense objects “should go back to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus.”7 Perhaps all of Hegel’s treatment of the Bacchanalian (and the Dionysian) in art would depend on it, up to the point that the conceptual purity of philosophy would render art’s sensuous exhibition of the Absolute in the Beautiful obsolete. The apparent collusion between Merleau-Ponty and Hegel at this point is troubling. In both cases at hand is a certain exclusion of the difference and ekstasis of the sensuous for the sake of the realism of the perceptual or speculative event. In fact, Lyotard once noted, “There is very little on music in Phenomenology of Perception. Instead for Merleau-Ponty, music is in the method: abundance of metaphors on rhythm, consonance, being in tune, resonating force, synesthesia, constant assault on neo-Kantianism as music from the head” (Drift: 92–93). If there is very little on music in this work, it is even more striking that this work defending the significance of the body-subject has almost nothing to say about dance. Strikingly, when such aesthetic perception is applied to the body a similar displacement occurs: One might show . . . that the dance evolves in an aimless and unoriented space, that it is a suspension of our history, that in the dance the subject and his world are no longer in opposition, no longer stand out one against the background of the other, that in consequence the parts of the body are no longer thrown into relief as in natural experience; the trunk is no longer the ground from which the movements arise and to which they sink back once performed; it now governs the dance and the movement of the limbs are its auxiliaries. (PhP: 287)

Here too, as in the analogy of being, “there are several ways for the body to be a body, several ways for a consciousness to be a consciousness” (PhP: 124). In this description of the “disoriented” body of the dance, similarly claimed to be abstracted from natural perception, the body undergoes a displacement from the natural order and the natural or grounding governance of the body. It inverts one of the Phenomenology’s theoretical metaphors in which the body and music are conjoined paradigmatically. The natural order, the “landscape” articulated through the body schema, becomes especially exemplified in habit (and this as exemplified in the experienced musician). The expressive “attunement” it reveals, and even its

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descriptive philosophy, involves a certain celebratory singing of the world (chanter le monde). Later in his career, this invisibility or latent experience will no longer be understood as an abstraction or a second-order phenomenon but instead precisely as a mining of the invisible that accompanies or lines the visible. The reasons for this displacement have always been unclear. We might think that, like other issues in the Phenomenology, the transcendental silence of the tacit cogito and its theoretical or spoken expression, the levels of analysis of le sentir were in some sense in contradiction with their own premises. The model of second level abstraction seemed irreconcilable with Merleau-Ponty’s idea that “the claim to objectivity by each perceptual act” involves an “ever-recurrent failure of perceptual consciousness foreseeable from the start” (PhP: 240). This decidedly non-Husserlian thesis conflicts with the idea that the instability of le sentir disappears in the concrete of natural experience. One might wonder whether, once admitted, it can be simply undone. Le sentir refuses a simple “taking,” the results of an analytic grasp as the hyle or formless Stoffe by an intentional act, which the latter informs, a matter of “sense bestowal.”8 From Husserl’s classical perspective, Merleau-Ponty’s account remained ambiguous; sensation either dissolves into the concrete object or it does not. And why wouldn’t it? If anything were concrete, it was le sentir. Such a hyle, suitably transcendentally reduced, would not be anything other than the hyle of some bestowed (that is, some constituted) sense, some Sinn-gebung. Moreover, we should be (as Merleau-Ponty himself would perhaps later be) suspicious of all this prehistoric talk. MerleauPonty would ultimately replace constitution talk with institution talk in the Phenomenology, involving more an event than an act. But, in accord with Husserl’s anticonstructivism, he insisted on translating what he called “Husserl’s favorite term,” Stiftung, as fondation (PhP: 127n). It was such foundationalism that the instabilities of le sentir seemed to call into question. If anything, as even Husserl himself came to see, this experience was historical or genetic through and through.9 The instability of sensation specifically articulated what was true in general of the history of transitions (Übergangssynthese). Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the stone in the Tuileries wall, like his account of the dance, “entirely without history,” belonged to a statically mythic phenomenology (PhP: 293). Like much else in the Phenomenology, this realism was not unambiguous, was subject to refinement, and would not survive the test of

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time. Indeed, appropriately enough for a philosopher who invoked Kant’s productive imagination and bound it to the body-schema in time, perceptual objects would ultimately be bound to and emerge through a rhythm antecedent to the objects. Yet it was unclear how this rapprochement between Husserl and Kant would occur. Despite his eliminative realism, Merleau-Ponty came to see that objects emerge not by making the concept of sensation aufgehoben, but precisely through the rhythm of sensation itself, albeit one now articulated with the notion of passive intentional synthesis: Sensation is intentional because I find in the sensible a certain rhythm of existence is put forward—abduction or adduction—and that, following up this hint and stealing into the form of existence which is thus suggested to me, I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters in to a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law [loi momentanée]. (PhP: 213–214)

For Merleau-Ponty, this unfolding meaningfully occurred not only by preceding but exceeding (and soliciting) the reflective or constitutive capacities of the analytic subject, by and through the dispersion of le sentir itself. It did so not by the objects’ immediately distinct speaking to me (as Merleau-Ponty put it, early on) but more problematically by provoking “the reply to a question which is obscurely expressed” (PhP: 214).10 Perception must be able to penetrate and articulate the transcendence of the thing through the rhythm and vibration of sensation. The thing itself thus emerges not as a statically informed matter (or even simply the unity of a well-formed Gestalt), but through a general “symbolism in the thing” through which the object reveals itself naturally to me (PhP: 319). This is how the example of painting (especially the painting of Cézanne) became so paradigmatic for the Phenomenology. Cézanne’s notion of the motif involved a certain meditative intuition penetrating (pénétre) into the object, even “a subject-object dialogue.” It thus seemed better equipped than the in-forming Sinngebung of Husserl’s noema to grasp the rhythm of sensuous experience. What the Phenomenology had initially reduced to an abstractum now became, in acknowledging the independence of sensation and in appealing to Cézanne’s “distortions” for its model, the

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pivotal unfolding of nature, articulating the “physiognomy” of the concrete (PhP: 260, 322). Merleau-Ponty emphasized such distortion in both of his discussions of Cézanne, the Phenomenology (PhP: 260) and the earlier “Cézanne’s Doubt” (SNS: 13).11 He acknowledged it was just this chaos that Cézanne hoped to capture: “In giving up the outline [le dessin] Cézanne was abandoning himself to the chaos of sensations” (SNS: 13). This was an ironic gesture. His painting was “paradoxical”; in giving up form for the “modulation of color,” Cézanne was “pursuing reality without giving up the sensuous surface” (SNS: 12). The modulation of color articulates the surface in such a way that “it seems subtly illuminated from within” (ibid.). As in the Phenomenology, it is Cézanne’s naturalism that he most wants, his return “to the source of silence and solitary experience on which culture and the exchange of ideas has been built” (PhP: 19). This was an early writing, but he already knew that we would need to overcome readymade alternatives for its grasp: sensation versus judgment, the painter who sees against the painter who thinks, “nature versus composition, primitivism as opposed to tradition” (SNS: 13). The complications attending the “intertwining” between intuition and concept would continue to overdetermine Merleau-Ponty’s account. But he already knew that a certain rationalist philosophy “is collapsing before our eyes.” That is, “the experience of chaos both on the speculative and the other level, prompts us to see rationalism in a historical perspective” (PhP: 56). Again emphasizing Cézanne’s naturalism, Deleuze noted that Cézanne is the painter par excellence for the phenomenologists (FB: 156n). Indeed, this is because, for Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne is the phenomenologist par excellence. Acknowledging that Cézanne’s distortions are irreducible painterly expressions of the “symbolism of the thing that links each sensible quality to the rest,” he claims that the painter “in the face of the ‘motif’ is about to join the aimless hands of nature” (PhP: 319, 262). This is why the artist does not engage in the psychoanalyst’s “hermeneutic musing” (rêverie; SNS: 25). Instead, Merleau-Ponty approvingly cites Cézanne’s rejection of imagination and abstraction for the sake of “remembering” nature (SNS: 12). In attending to the rhythmics of the sensible, such remembrance institutes the return enquiry of Phenomenology (Rücksfrage). In the end, the Preface of Phenomenology concluded that neither reason nor the world was problematic. If they are mysterious, “their mystery defines them” (PhP: xx). Moreover, he admitted that a certain retrieval is at

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work here; this “rich notion of sense experience” (sentir) was “still to be found in Romantic usage, for example, in Herder” (PhP: 52). Deleuze clearly had reservations on this, both with Phenomenology and its Cézannian hopes concerning the “realization” and remembrance of thing and sensible phenomena. He did so precisely in focusing on the Hegelian ambiguity of sensation itself, “the relation between sense itself and the object in its reality” (LS: 97). In the first place, he wondered whether the identification of sensation and object wasn’t precisely the place where the Husserlian reduction turned precritical, in identifying sensation with the grasp of the thing. Here “the nucleus has indeed been determined as attribute; but the attribute is understood as predicate and not as verb, that is, as concept and not as event” (LS: 156n). There was a transcendental illusion in this identification. In appealing to the event of an embodied schematism, Merleau-Ponty, as had Kant’s original invocation of the schematism before the noumenon, acknowledged that the attribute emerges from an event that exceeded it. Both were involved in a certain “ontological rehabilitation of the sensible.”12 More radically, Deleuze questioned whether, belying all his appeals to transcendence and reality, what Husserl “calls ‘appearance’ (is) anything more than a surface effect?” (LS: 21). He questioned, in accord with its problematic character, whether the denial of the latter by transcendentalists such as Kant, Husserl, and even MerleauPonty depended on an illicit appeal to a certain good but transcendentally illusory “common sense.” These terms were indeed invoked by MerleauPonty, citing Herder and Erwin Strauss (LS: 97; PhP: 235). Deleuze held that Cézanne’s modulation of color could not be assimilated to the transcendental unity of the lived body. Rather, Cézanne articulated a field of forces that chaotically disrupts such unity (FB: 39, 97). Strikingly, Deleuze invokes (not Nietzsche or Lucretius but) Hegel’s skepticism regarding the identity and unity of sense certainty against MerleauPonty’s perceptual faith. He claims of Hegel that “he short circuits this aspect of sensation, which nonetheless forms the basis for every possible aesthetic” (FB: 156n). But for Deleuze, the inadequacies that result from the oscillation between universal and particular at this level articulate not an implicit sublation and ultimate emergence of speculative identity but its difference, discontinuity, and alterity.13 As oblique as this reference is, we can infer the discontinuity that undermines the aesthetic Deleuze intends by it. Merleau-Ponty tried to regulate the discontinuity of aesthesis by a certain “momentary” but still “natural law” that emerged through the

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rhythm of experience. We have already begun to sense this discontinuity or oscillation in its attending concepts. To use Hegel’s terms again, there results a certain Hexenkreis of ground and grounded that afflicts not only sensation but its articulemes: thing and attribute, matter and form, appearance and content.14 The ultimate result of such essential differences, Hegel charged, is the “dissolution [Auflösung] of appearance.”15 Hegel linked this dissolution to “Bacchanalian revel” on the condition that it be understood in terms of the unity and truth of the whole—a totalizing or “orgiastic representation,” to use Deleuze’s term.16 Even Merleau-Ponty claimed such dissolution of the evidence of finite appearance could be avoided only if experience or appearance “is not being but the phenomenon,” an experience always under way (PhP: 296). Merleau-Ponty claimed a number of times that Husserl rediscovered the “harmony between sensation and concept” of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (PhP: xvii). Still, we might wonder whether the indeterminacies of reflective judgment could be used to found the apodictic determinacies of Husserl’s realism. Following Deleuze, we might wonder whether Merleau-Ponty had confronted the third Critique’s concomitant claims concerning chaos “in its wildest most ruleless disarray and devastation,” the event in which the unity of a manifold turns not simply into a mere “rhapsody of perception” but the experience of the sublime.17 The difference in these accounts becomes starker in examining Deleuze’s own treatment of painting. First, this distance from Merleau­Ponty appears in Deleuze’s own analysis of Cézanne, whom he contrasts with Francis Bacon. Second, it appears in Deleuze’s extensive treatment of Klee, who became as much a paradigmatic figure in the later works of Merleau-Ponty as Cézanne had been for the early Merleau-Ponty. ­Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” placed Klee in the forefront of discussions of aesthetics thereafter. Merleau-Ponty still thought that Klee confirmed the phenomenological project, at least as he was rethinking it. Like the earlier account of Cézanne’s color modulation and its “inner illumination” of reality, Klee would contribute to our understanding of the “inner radiance” of the visible (EM: 182). Deleuze held that sensation manifests a rhythm that is crucial to painting as it articulates the interconnection of the field of senses. But it contests, he claimed, the well-formed (and hierarchical) unity (and transcendence) that informs the phenomenological body-synthesis, the phenomenological or transcendental organism. The unity of bodily sensation

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escapes such good form or Idea. This is possible because of a “rhythm” that exceeds every level and traverses all the arts and facilitates the operation through which they render visible: This operation is possible only if the sensation of a particular domain (here the visual sensation) is in direct contact with a vital power that exceeds every domain and traverses them all. This power is Rhythm, which is more profound than vision, hearing etc. Rhythm appears as music when it invests the auditory level, and as painting when it invests the visual level. This is a “logic of the sense,” as Cézanne said, which is neither rational nor cerebral. What is ultimate is thus the relation between sensation and rhythm, which places in each sensation the levels and domains through which it passes. This rhythm runs through a painting just as it runs through a piece of music. It is diastole-systole: the world that seizes me by closing in around me, the self that opens to the world and opens the world in itself. Cézanne, it is said, is the painter who put a vital rhythm into the visual sensation. (FB: 37)

The question of the rhythm of sensation appears to return us to Merleau-Ponty’s prereflective intentionality. The body is “not a collection of adjacent organs, but a synergic system, all the functions of which are exercised and linked together in the general action of being in the world, insofar as it is the congealed figure of existence” (la figure figée de l’existence; PhP: 234). The similarity is only apparent; for Deleuze the synergic rhythm of existence remains not only prereflective (as it had in Merleau-Ponty) but also preintentional. It arises from the specific and contingent interconnection: the chaotic unity of the senses themselves, “a nomadic distribution, radically distinct from fixed and sedentary distributions as conditions of the synthesis of consciousness” (LS: 102). Rather than accounts of transcendental reflection, the precursors of such a view are held by Deleuze to be found in Boehme, Schelling, Schopenhauer—but most significantly Nietzsche (LS: 106). Such a nomadic distribution would escape a synthesis that might simply be subsumed or harmonized with a (reflective) concept. It would also escape the purposiveness of nature, the organismic or teleological unity of the lived body. Having invoked Hegel against the phenomenology of perception, Deleuze thus now himself verges toward Schelling and Novalis’s night: “We can seek the unity of rhythm only at the point where rhythm itself plunges into chaos, into the night, at the point where differences of level are perpetually and violently mixed” (FB: 39). Because of his own stress on the prereflective, Merleau-Ponty found increasing affinity with Schelling against Hegel. He stressed Schelling’s

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barbarous principle, out of which all life and all knowledge emerged, over against Hegel’s Absolute idealism that subsumed Nature under Reason’s self-realization or objectification (N: 47). He also used Schelling’s principle to similarly reinterpret Husserl’s own idealism of the lifeworld (S:  178). Merleau-Ponty as well affirmed Schelling’s account of the imagination and the ekstasis or opening of the work of art to articulate, against Sartre, a nonprosaic account of consciousness (N: 46). Its proximity to Klee’s account of the emergence of art out of chaos has similarly been noted. Schelling, like Klee, further stressed the synthesis of rhythm as underlying art, articulating “the infinite within the finite,” the “music within music.”18 Moreover, for Schelling the connection between music and painting is noted in privileging drawing as the first articulation of identity within the particular: “Drawing is the rhythm of painting.”19 Like Klee, Schelling emphasized the corporeal connection between the rhythm of music or sonority and those of the body; insofar as this is true, art “comprehends forms still within chaos and without differentiation.”20 But as close as Deleuze (like Merleau-Ponty) may have been to Schelling, it is not Schelling but Artaud that Deleuze invokes for the rhythmics of what he calls, against the transcendentally unified organism, “the body without organs.” Such a body, belying the body of idealism, “is less opposed to organs than to that organization of organs we call an organism” (FB: 39). It no longer “determines within itself representative elements, but allotropic variation” (ibid.). Its expression opposes the organic representation of classical art. Following Worringer, Deleuze stresses the gothic line here. This line is no longer linked to form but to surface: “It is thus a line that never ceases to change direction, that is broken, split, diverted, turned in on itself, coiled up, or even extended beyond its natural limits, dying away in a ‘disordered convulsion’ ” (FB: 40–41). Such convulsions, like the performative theatrics of Artaud, belie the natural body (as do “alcohol, drugs, schizophrenia, sadomasochism, and so on”). Hence the importance of Bacon’s scream: “the mouth is no longer a fixed organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes and from which the flesh descends” (FB: 24). The body without organs is structured by a systole-diastole that traverses and transgresses all organs, opening the self and the world itself— as “being-in-the-world, as the phenomenologists say” (FB: 31). However, Deleuze contends that, unlike the phenomenologically lived body, the body without organs liberates line and color from their representative function,

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freeing the eye from its adherence to the organism. Rhythm would thus “cease to be attached to and dependent upon a Figure: it is rhythm itself that would become the Figure, that would constitute the Figure” (FB: 60). How does this relate to Cézanne? In one sense Deleuze wants to maintain continuity; Bacon is a Cézannean (FB: 37–38). For Deleuze, however, Cézanne’s distortions were the first to articulate the destruction of form: “The whole material environment, the structure begins to stir . . . everything is now related to forces, everything is force” (FB: 50). The distortion occurs through the modulation of color, which is for Deleuze too Cézanne’s “principle operation” (FB: 97). Through the motif, Cézanne’s operation becomes an operation of analogy, the articulation not of things but forces. It occurs then not by means of resemblance or similitude (FB: 93). In the interrelation of forces, the motif provides a screen or filter for the expression of chaos, beyond the limited representational realm of the figure and its received or everyday clichés (FB: 72ff; F: 131). The percept is articulated in terms of our ability “to render perceptible [sensible] the imperceptible [insensible] forces that populate the world and that affect us, make us become” (WP: 182). It is in this sense, in rendering force visible, Deleuze holds, that Klee’s famous dictum is to be taken: “ ‘Not to render the visible, but to render visible’—means nothing else” (FB: 48–49). Thus “in art, and in painting as in music it is not a matter of reproducing or inventing forms, but of capturing forces” (FB: 48). Cézanne rendered visible the force of mountains; Van Gogh, the unheard-of forces of a sunflower seed. All art involves this capturing of forces; this has been true throughout its history, whether it be the decomposition and recomposition of depth in the Renaissance or color in Impressionism or movement in Cubism (FB: 49). In all these cases, it was a question of reckoning with chaos. Hence Klee’s importance for Deleuze: Klee’s account of the cosmological genesis of the picture plane from point to line to plane articulated a rhythmical response or refrain to chaos (TP: 313). In so doing, Klee articulated the forces of an inner world beyond appearances, always “deterritorializing” with regard to the earth (to Naturalism and Romanticism, even its oppositions to technology) in an attempt to capture new forces, always in this respect a breaking away, a defying of gravity (TP: 313). For Deleuze, Klee’s ironic machines are no longer symptoms of alienation but are themselves liberating, deterritorializing and reterritorializing, belying the simple distinctions between nature and culture, human and mechanical, animal and rational.

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Previously, Deleuze invoked Klee’s Twittering Machine, where the distinctions between animal and machine become equivocal (see Figure 9 at the opening of this chapter). In a remarkable analysis, Deleuze claimed that “all of music is pervaded by bird songs, in a thousand different ways, from Jannequin to Messiaen” (TP: 300). Further: It is not certain whether we can draw a dividing line between animals and human beings: Are there not, as Messiaen believes, musician birds and nonmusician birds? Is the bird’s refrain necessarily territorial, or is it not already used for very subtle deterritorializations, for selective lines of flight? The difference between noise and sound is definitely not a basis for a definition of music, or even the distinction between musician birds and nonmusician birds. Rather, it is the labor of the refrain. (TP: 301–302)

The close connection between music and painting in Klee is well known, and Deleuze does not fail to note it, stating that Klee is “the most musicianly of painters” (TP: 303). Again referring to Klee, he states: “Suppose a painter ‘represents’ a bird; this is in fact a becoming-bird that can occur only to the extent that the bird itself is in the process of becoming something else, a pure line and pure color. Thus imitation self-destructs, since the imitator unknowingly enters into a becoming that conjugates with the unknowing becoming of that which he or she imitates” (TP: 304– 305). What is in question is not the expression of some form but again “capturing forces,” a “Cosmos philosophy, after the manner of Nietzsche” (TP: 342–343). It is not a question of Spirit but of technique, of entering into the machine age. Such processes or forces could no longer be conceptually captured by means of form or content, philosophically by the identities of no formal synthetic activity (TP: 342). In this respect, Deleuze approvingly cites Klee’s “intermundia that is perhaps only visible to children, madmen and primitives” (AO: 243). Indeed, here too it is the remainder of thanatos: in Bacon’s scream, “life screams at death, but death is no longer this all-toovisible thing that makes us faint; it is this invisible force that life detects, flushes out, and makes visible through the scream” (FB: 52). Like Beckett or Kafka, Bacon’s work is a figurative miserabilism, but one that serves an increasingly powerful figure of life (“They have given life a new and extremely direct power of laughter”; FB: 53). This new laughter is often to be found in Klee’s work. As playful as the birds of the Twittering Machine might appear, they are equally monstrous. If they sing, they do not fly;

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they do not escape the forces of gravity. Their legs remain bound to the machine; their song may capture forces, but not without their own ominousness, forces no longer bound by the purposiveness of the organic. Throughout his account, Deleuze insisted on the “insufficiency” of the phenomenological lived body: “The lived body is still a paltry thing in comparison with a more profound and almost unlivable Power [Puissance]” (FB: 39). In particular, the body synthesis is insufficient to grasp “the synthesis of sensation.” Beyond qualitative difference the synthesis of sensation involves “only an intensive reality which no longer determines within itself representative elements, but allotropic variations. Sensation is vibration” (FB: 39). What vibrates within it is as a heterogeneous synthesis that involves “several levels, several orders of domains,” orders of both sensible appearance and force (ibid.). As Deleuze put it in his commentary on Leibniz, here it is a question less of teleologically unifying and more “owning,” having, in place of being a body: “In fact, it is very difficult for everyone of us to make a list of our own belongings. It is not easy to know what we own, and for what length of time. Phenomenology does not suffice” (F: 108). In articulating an already reduced transcendental field, Edmund Husserl (and Husserlians) did not face this issue. Because of his intentional correlation of sense and reference, “The great difference with Husserl is that the latter does not face any special problem in organic composition: my body does not pose any problems in my sphere of appurtenance” (F: 109). Lacking such a correlation, the problem becomes how to divert or dominate multiplicity (“a monad has as its property not an abstract attribute—movement, elasticity, plasticity—but other monads, such as a cell, other cells, or an atom, and other atoms”) (F: 110). This theme of domination is again what brings Leibniz close to Nietzsche—and perhaps equally to Adorno, who also linked the problem of art to expressive emancipation (F:  110). The result involves a series of transformations, within “an extremely sinuous fold, a zigzag, a primal tie that cannot be located,” where fixity in general is overcome through actualization. This generalization is wide-ranging indeed. Civilization itself can be discerned as the deterritorialization of clichéd or fixed forms—again, nomadism (F: 120). Here too, Deleuze found Klee. Klee’s artistic concern that “the people are not with us; we seek a people” to understand his art becomes articulated politically by Deleuze through his account of “dividuals” (N: 95, 239).21 Through the rhythm of formal particularity or dividuals, culture emerges as a multi-

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plicity out of which wholes might be generated (TP: 341). Moreover, here too we see what Deleuze termed his own “constructivism” (Neg: 147). But how are we to adjudicate the differences at stake here, not only the differences between these thinkers’ works but the difference concerning the artists on whom their analysis seemed to depend? We are confronted not only with competing conceptual claims but competing interpretations of art and artists. An analysis of internal coherence would not be sufficient. Nor would simple appeal to the facts of art history, the significance of which ultimately will likewise be theory-dependent. To begin this task, I return at length, as we briefly did in the case of Foucault, to a third thinker, Jean-François Lyotard, whose work, both conceptually and historically, stands between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty at several points. Lyotard’s early work began in close proximity to Phenomenology (and influenced Deleuze) but then moved away from both. Throughout these transitions, he too appealed to the work of Klee. In following this itinerary and the conceptual transformations that occur, it becomes further apparent what is at stake between these thinkers. Beginning with a 1969 article on Mikel Dufrenne, “In Place of Man, Expression,” we can see this differentiation occur. The article cites Klee’s epitaph, taken from his Diary: “I cannot be grasped in immanence” (PE: 14). Merleau-Ponty cited this in explicating the incarnate transcendence of the lived world; Lyotard claimed he missed it (EM: 188). Lyotard credits Merleau-Ponty with discovering that “the body is essentially an expressive space” (PhP: 146). Once more, sensibility is affirmed to involve a prelogical field that escapes reflective grasp. Nonetheless, like Deleuze’s charge against Husserl, Lyotard criticizes Merleau-Ponty for a certain monism of expression. In particular, Lyotard charges Merleau-Ponty with insufficiently distinguishing discourse (language) from the expressivity of the body, simply understanding each as the other’s correlate. The two expressivities are not the same. Language is an institution (the institution of Bedeutung) that always depends on a convention and a prior history, while the body’s expressivity does not: “The transcendental of language is not able to be thematized on the same model as perception” (PE: 175). Merleau-Ponty hoped that in painting we could discover a figured philosophy. Now he was clear in his lectures on Schelling that this did not mean painting would complete philosophy or “sublimate itself in art.” Instead, in encountering a similar opening in art, philosophy as a discourse realizes

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that it does not have “to expect everything from itself and not rely on any other experience, religious or artistic” (N: 46). For Lyotard this position still relies on the precritical harmony of philosophy and art. The sensible image is not a word; nor can its rhythmic intensity be grasped as a perceptual correlate. Even the sensible world of the dream is not a discourse; “It is a rebus, that is to say a figure combined with a text, a sensible space inundating the graphic or linguistic space” (PE: 168). The discourse of the other must be not simply its other side, but the other-than-discourse. Hence, granted this aesthesis the question of epistemology cannot be an epistemological question; the “speaking” of the sensible world would not simply be the expression of constituting consciousness (PE: 170). In terms revealing Lyotard’s commitments to psychoanalysis, the sensible contains an irretrievably Oedipal problem of separation before discourse. Two years later, Lyotard more harshly criticizes Merleau-Ponty in these terms: “There is no Father in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty” (DF: 59). In his Temps Modernes obituary on Merleau-Ponty, Sartre emphasized the role of Merleau-Ponty’s own mother in his philosophy, one that continuously stressed our naissance and primordial historicity.22 Here Lyotard proceeded similarly. In modeling speech on the corporeal gesture, he claimed, Merleau-Ponty was incapable of recognizing the problem of their difference, separation, and conflict—everything in the sensible that discourse can’t say, refuses to say, or cannot allow itself to say. Instead, Merleau-Ponty dwells on an incarnate unity whose possibility transcends such distinctions, and we are “thrown into discourse in an insatiable demand for the Mother” (DF: 59). Invoking Husserl’s metaphor for intentionality, we do not confront two coordinated or parallel expressive “strata”; nor is sense the implicit speculative metaphor that unites concept and event, to use Hegel’s terms. For Lyotard, both accounts miss the differences involved. These expressivities involve two orders always other than each other. Sensible movement and gesture always present themselves as a “gesticulation, a dance.” Deleuze would attempt to go beyond phenomenological consciousness of sensation through reference to Heidegger’s account of Being-in-the-world. So similarly did Lyotard: “The result of sensible activity is a Dasein and not a Sinn” (DF: 41). Laterality here is not the “good unity” of existence; rather, it is always the encounter with the unconscious. Eros-logos is always bound up with the death instinct (DF: 19). Lyotard suggests that this duality (understood not as two separate drives but two moments) of the event

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again echoes Klee’s own interworld. For Lyotard, Klee recognizes the complications attending the sensible in understanding it in terms of energetics; far from being a reflective or theoretical recuperation, the eye too becomes a dance (DF: 14–15). Hence the importance of art: “What is sauvage in art is like silence. The position of art is demented in relation to the position of discourse. The position of art indicates a function of the figure, which is not signified and this functions around and even in discourse” (DF: 13). “Fiscours, Digure,” as he puts it at one point, surely not without resonance with Klee’s hieroglyphics, divided between sign and object (DF: 327). Lyotard’s book Discours, Figure devoted considerable space to the analysis of Klee. What is significant about Lyotard’s analysis is that it traces Klee’s own development from the more directly fantasized works of his youth (notably The Virgin in the Tree, 1903, 2) to his more formal or graphic work (in which Klee perceived that he advanced beyond Cézanne), to his more mature work. Lyotard’s analysis proceeds not only by the analysis of Klee’s painting but also by copiously citing both the Diaries and the theoretical works. Klee’s development, Lyotard argues, takes him beyond the realm of fantasy, where it remains bound to prohibition and cliché, to use Deleuze’s term. Klee himself wrote of this work that it involved “a critique of bourgeois society” (D: 144). Pierre Klossowski noted of Klee’s The Virgin in the Tree that “through fin de siècle nostalgia” it still remained a “Nude tormented by its sexual indetermination.”23 Here we see the inner connection, perhaps even blindness and necessity, which is to say external compulsion, that binds phantasm and cliché. As Alain Bonfand notes, even if he intended it as a critique of bourgeois society, Klee’s view of women is one that he shares with others of the time, with Strindberg, Ibsen, Munch.24 For Klossow­ski, Klee’s theory of abstraction would not assist him here. Instead, Klee’s formal theory of abstraction (if not his paintings) led to “an arbitrary production of phantasms devoid of inner compulsion and therefore no longer capable of exercising anything morally.”25 Abstraction, Klossowski argued, abandons the inner tension or emotion that animates the painting through the play of phantasms. Despite his misgivings about Klee’s formal theoretics, Klossowski himself noted that Klee’s works, bound as they might be by inner torment, still “simulate phantasms at the highest level,” parodying “obsessional stereotyping with celestial irony.”26 Lyotard agrees that Klee’s constructivism is not simply the abandonment of the phantasm. But for him, it more emphatically articulated the

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movement beyond stereotypical phantasy, and it does so by means of what he calls the “figure matrix.” Lyotard focuses on Klee’s following instruction for its elaboration: “First draw from nature, second turn the page around and stress the important plastic elements, third, put the page back into the first position and attempt to reconcile the results of the first two operations” (Drift: 74). Here Lyotard comments: What is altogether remarkable is that Klee is thus perfectly describing the real relation of the artist with his phantasies, i.e. the double reversal. What he is attempting to do when things are upside down, is to free himself from the object, to keep desire’s mise-en-scène from seducing him, to see the form itself, the stroke, the value, etc. . . . When this is resorted to, you have a work that is no longer jammed by phantasy, but on the contrary one that opens up other possibilities, that plays, that sets itself up in the ‘inner-world’: this is not the world of personal phantasy (and neither, obviously, is it that of reality) this is an oscillating work [un œuvre oscillante], in which there is room for the play of forms, a field liberated by the reversal of phantasy, but which still rests upon it. (Drift: 74–75)

The inner world sets up a possible realm (Klee’s “a priori formulas”) in which “despite reality creativity exceeds the creator” (DF: 233; cf. D: 345). Such “transcendence” (a word Lyotard still invokes here) is “the condition of all possibilities of the communication of plastic levels however they be enumerated and exploited” (DF: 233). Strictly taken, phantasies are idiosyncratic, their communicability dependent on the transcendence of the figural. The figure liberates simple phantasy, precisely in rendering the inner world “the exhibition gallery of the primary process” rather than a purely imaginary world (DF: 238). Thus we are led beyond Freud’s largely pessimistic account of art (LR: 161). One can no longer say, for example, that the deformation or distortions of Cézanne’s pictorial space were negative metaphors of a primary space or simply a symptomatic deformation; rather, “the former are positive versions of the latter; or the latter are the same as the former” (LR: 161). Such appeals to “transcendence” (or “derealization,” to use another of his terms) should not be interpreted classically (DP: 75). If, to use Freud’s term, there is a certain laxity (Locherheit) or holding in abeyance (in Schwebe) in repression and sublimation, the subject does not dominate the creative process.27 If artistic sublimation occurs as an “oscillation” (classically understood, as Lyotard realized, a Wechsel), this does not im-

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ply that it occurs out of the telos of representation.28 It cannot involve the attempt to exhibit the repressed content and to reconcile it in the category of the Beautiful; inter alia this would be to tolerate only art that is reassuring, simply an art of Eros (or Kapital) and not Thanatos, its dissolution (DP: 311). Nor can it be seen as a wish fulfillment that might become reality (Marcuse). This is what distinguishes art from symptom (ASA: 138). Beyond the concept of “ego gratification” or “the equilibrium of objectrelations” the purpose of such exhibition is neither knowledge nor beauty, but truth. Knowledge and Beauty are charms, temptations that attract the poet and the painter, that incite them to soften, to make intelligible and loveable, to render logical and attractive the rough sketch extracted from the night. They urge him to create a work. But truth appears where it is least expected. Its emergence is sufficient to make a work of art, but a work of art will not make it appear. The power of a literary or pictorial expression does not lie in its harmony (nor in the “victory” of the ego), it is that which holds and maintains open and “free” the field of words, lines, colors, and values so that truth can “figure” itself therein. (ASA: 143)

Such a figure then emerges not as an event of reconciliation between phantasy and reality; “rather it proceeds from the realization of their dissociation, while affirming the rights of the former in the enclaves that it creates in the latter” (ASA: 139). Lyotard too could claim, in relation to Klee’s work, that beyond its “cosmological ideology” it involved “capturing and retaining chromatic and linear energy” (DP: 273–274). But such capturing was precisely an exhibition, the play of the unconscious as a mise-en-scène. Recalling Lyotard’s claim that the figure emerges not for an act or a reference but for a Dasein, here we can see that its truth emerges, to use Heideggerean terms, in the figural interplay between concealment and unconcealment, between presentation and depresentation, intensification and dissolution (HJ: 4). This again is why Eros and Thanatos cannot be simply distinguished for Lyotard; expression cannot be grasped as presence, representation, reconciliation, or dialogue. All of these remain overly tainted Hegelian resolutions of the sensible: “For the truth is that for the artist his relation to the work is not dialogue but an encounter, in the sense of tuché, not capitalization but indifference to the object” (LR: 163). Here we return to the rhythm of the dance and with this tuché to the aleatory and the experimental. Tuché is Lacan’s trope on Aristotle’s

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tuchi (fortune versus chance), where tuché is understood by Lacan as an “encounter with the real insofar as it is missed.”29 Dance is articulated in Libidinal Economy precisely as “this encounter, this tuché where something is set alight on what is called the body” (LE: 51). What is true of the dance is true of the arts as a whole, namely that the laxity of the artist begins by lowering the barriers that in theory separate exterior from interior reality. This gives prominence to the notion of a single libidinal surface without thickness or limits, which does not exist prior to what might be inscribed there by pen, brush, noise or voice, but is produced by the operations that transform affective intensities into colors, sounds, sentences. (LR: 164)

Again we encounter a libidinal or intensive band or state that approximates Deleuze’s body without organs. Against it Merleau-Ponty’s description of the body in dance, over against the body in “natural space,” seems to fade away: the “new spatiality” of the dance would instead be articulated through rhythms antecedent to the regulated or directional space of the organized body. Against it, Merleau-Ponty’s dancer seems phenomenologically still, static; to use a characterization of Lacan’s, too “Apollonian.”30 Accordingly, like Deleuze, Lyotard states that such intensities escape the phenomenological body. It belies the teleology of organic purposiveness, a “global body,” unified and “totalized in itself ” (DP: 112). Its synthesis is more disjunctive: “The body is not unitary. Intensities are capable of being invested here and there” (DP: 188). Writing of music and invoking his criticism of art as unification, Lyotard states, now criticizing Adorno: Composition is a desensitization of material (it reaches its limit with Schönberg, says Adorno). Desensitization, this introduces a reference to the body. But which one? What is hearing? A phenomenological schema of the body functions implicitly in Adorno, but also in Cage: uncompleted unity of sense, always in the process of constituting itself along with and at the same time as the world; but unity just the same, and of sense. . . . The phenomenological body is a body that composes, a body possessed with Eros. But to compose is always to filter out and to bind, to exclude entire regions of the sound world as noise and to produce “music” (that is “audible”) with the input. . . . The phenomenological body is a filter and requires, then, that whole sound regions be desensitized. (Drift: 92–93)

Inverting this, and in accord with his account of the Eros-Thanatos duality, Lyotard argues that sensitization of the material must be extreme.

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It requires not simply construction or composition but the transformation and virtual destruction of the filtering device. What should be said is that no unity, no comprehensive unity, no composition is made with this noise, this sound, this singular intensity, but rather in spite of them. To hear this event is to transform it: into tears, gesture, laughter, dance, words, sounds, theorems, repainting your room, helping a friend move. (Drift: 93)

The inclusion of theorems and laughter at one point in his career was to be taken seriously. The “nice tautological body of the theoretical text” with its “stable disjunctions” was to be grasped as a sequence of intensities. Aesthetics would no longer be granted an ideological alibi, the lure of the Beautiful, but rather would itself provide “access to the subsoil of the political scene” (Drift: 16). The point is then no longer one of critique. Critique remains bound to the limits of the criticized, profoundly skeptical, profoundly Hegelian in this regard; instead the point is the metamorphosis of intensities beyond the loss of totality, of the modern, Marxism of the tragic subject (Adorno; ADev: 132). A concern that arose earlier is here openly affirmed: Adorno’s negative dialectic everywhere encourages cynicism and disbelief.31 For Lyotard himself, however, “What brings us out of capital and ‘art’ . . . is not criticism, which is language bound [langagière] nihilistic, but a deployment of libidinal investment” (ADev: 136). Theoretically, propositions are to be judged by their effects (LE: 255). Their readings, transformed and ­Nietzschean in character, are identified as “the production of new different intensities” (Notes: 46). Still, Lyotard came to question whether the aesthetic politics he initially outlined was flawed, its emphasis on intensification resulting in political intensities incapable of acknowledging injustice. The strict distinction between discourse and intensity could not readily account for a linguistic performative that bore witness and testified to an injustice that has taken place, the “differend.” The question, he acknowledged, is where such a theoretical metamorphosis would reveal itself within the metaphysics of desire.32 This question arose out of the acknowledgment of the logic of the other as articulated by Emmanuel Levinas. This otherness, grasped as that which summons or obligates in the face of the other, is “the presence of transcendence” (LR: 292). It is further linked by Lyotard to the Kant­ ian factum of moral imperatives. Accordingly, it is also conceptualized

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through the feeling of the sublime, albeit understood since Burke as “no longer a matter of elevation (the category by which Aristotle defined tragedy), but a matter of intensification before an ‘It is happening’ ”—and in the case of a moral failure, its omission (LR: 205). One might think all this would lead him away from Klee’s chaotic or cosmological energetics, yet Klee remains one of its models: “The sublime,” writes Boilieu, “is not strictly speaking something which is proven or demonstrated, but a marvel, which seizes one, strikes one, and makes one feel.” The very imperfections, the distortions of taste, even ugliness, have their share in the shock-effect. Art does not imitate nature, it creates a world apart, eine Zwischenwelt, as Paul Klee will say, eine Nebenwelt, one might say in which the monstrous and the formless have their rights because they can be sublime. (LR: 202)

While the sublime was formerly understood as what disrupts representation, it will be increasingly understood (as it was in Kant), now following Levinas, as having ethical import. Still, how does this intensification become transformed into an acknowledgment of the other that emerges in the event, the Ereignis, the “Is it happening now?” Lyotard’s citation of Klee here provides a clue: it was present in his use of Klee’s account of the artist’s “oscillation,” the “laxity” of the sublimation that made possible the figuration of the beyond. Consciousness does not dominate the effect in either case. But how does such intensification occur as the acknowledgment of transcendence and not simply the intensification of will? Recalling Lyotard’s previous reference to Dasein to distinguish the expressions of painting from intentional Sinn, or the account of its exhibition as a matter of unconcealment, we might turn, as Lyotard did not at this point, to Heidegger. Heidegger understood Nietzsche’s rapture as the highest intensification or resoluteness that unveils what exceeds us. He did so precisely in understanding life as “bodying forth as a wave in the stream of chaos.”33 In his early Freiburg lectures Heidegger already claimed that, belying objectification, “the environing world does not stand there with a fixed index of existence, but floats away in the experiencing, bearing within it the rhythm of experience, and can only be experienced in this rhythmic way.”34 Such bodying forth, Lyotard recounts, was found in Klee’s parable of the tree depicting how “from the roots the sap rises up into the artist, flows through him and his eyes” (N: 82). In the transformative “laxity of the figure,” the apparently contradictory character of techne and physis is

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overcome. The work of art arises out of the interplay of concealment and unconcealment, both unveiling an event, a happening, or an occurrence, and deriving it from beyond oneself (DF: 238). This emphasis on embodiment might seem to return us to Merleau-Ponty. The early Merleau-Ponty, as Deleuze pointed out, privileged Cézanne in his analyses. So did Heidegger, who claimed that Cézanne’s motif in which “what is present and presence becomes realized [realisiert]” reveals a path for the “belonging together of poetry and thought.”35 We will wait to sort this out later. Here it can be noted that, against MerleauPonty’s early account, Lyotard makes two significant charges, one that Lyotard thinks affects both Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts. The first is that Merleau-Ponty privileges Cézanne (or that he privileges any one at all). This claim is skeptical: “But being didn’t choose Cézanne to express itself, now did it? Nor Merleau-Ponty, nor anyone?” (LR: 188). Indeed, “no one knows what ‘language’ Being understands, which it speaks or to which it can be referred” (LR: 190). Lyotard’s early emphasis on sensuous intensity had already led him to question Merleau-Ponty’s reduction of the libidinal economy of Cézanne’s derepresentation into perceptual faith (DP: 82ff).36 Now Lyotard questions Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on Cézanne at the expense of experimentalists such as Duchamp. The second claim, not unrelated, is that this indeterminacy leads to a satirical and postmodern experimentation. Again, this occurs without Romantic nostalgia. It is equally devoid of the unity of meaning, transcendence, or seriousness that accompanied the Hegelian pathos of objectivity, which, Lyotard holds, is still operative in Adorno or Benjamin. Crucially with respect to Merleau-Ponty’s account, however, Lyotard thinks he misses something about Cézanne’s doubt. Cézanne himself often complained of the “little sensations” (intended to capture perception at its birth) that they were inadequate, that they were “abstractions” that “did not suffice for covering the canvas” (LR: 207). Lyotard’s question here is simple: “But why should it be necessary to cover the canvas? Is it forbidden to be abstract?” (LR: 207). Lyotard points here to the experimental (and satirical) ventures and abstractions of the avant-garde, not without their own link to Cézanne but also not limited to his Naturalism.37 They take place, as Klee’s cool Romanticism announced, through the necessity of experimenting precisely within the failure of traditional contents. Lyotard too links constructivism to voluntarism, as is often the case. Here he finds a kind of collusion

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between capital and the avant-garde: “The force of skepticism and even of destruction that capitalism has brought into play . . . in some way encourages among artists a mistrust of established rules and willingness to experiment with means of expression, with styles, with ever-new materials. There is something of the sublime in capitalist economy” (LR: 209). One might be tempted to conclude that this is what is capitalist in the work of Lyotard (and Deleuze). But here Lyotard saw confusion. Even though he has argued against “Heideggerean preaching” about Being (LR: 189), this is a confusion that mistakes the will to innovation with the experiment that concerns Ereignis: “The occurrence, the Ereignis, has nothing to do with the petit frisson, the cheap thrill, the profitable pathos, that accompanies an innovation” (LR: 210). Instead, “With the occurrence, the will is defeated” (LR: 210). Heidegger insisted on just this in his reading of Nietzsche; the highest form of willing or resoluteness involves passivity, a letting be seen that emerges only through a certain caesura.38 Lyotard, however, was adamant that Heidegger’s account lacked the recognition that such “seeing” would not fully take place, that it would give birth to a quest, a Durcharbeitung, and a debt and obligation that is ineradicable or irresolvable (HJ: 85).39 Deleuze would not have followed him here—any more than he would have followed Lyotard’s psychoanalytic analysis; he had concerns about the conservativeness of Lyotard’s figure-matrix from the beginning, worrying that it involved a recoding of desire.40 Heidegger remained resolute against the experiments it would involve, linking them to the oblivion of Being manifested within technology. For Lyotard the Ereignis remained experimental, its occurrence consistent with the same event he had articulated in Discours, Figure’s analysis of the constructivist moment in Klee’s works. Such works emerged not in order to let Being be seen (nor to simply liberate the phantasm) but to let it be articulated and figured. Klee’s constructivism, even his invocation of mathematical models, never amounted to a reduction of being to quanta or the imposition of form. It involved instead an experiment or path (Gestaltung) undertaken to articulate what exceeded the optical. This sheds further light on Lyotard’s own concerns with MerleauPonty. Lyotard remained close to Merleau-Ponty in demanding that such experience cannot be reduced, neither cognitively represented nor linguistically assigned. If Lyotard denied that perception can be linked in any simple sense to the birth of sense, it was Merleau-Ponty, after all, who first declared that “there is no pure perception”; experience always opens out

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onto an absolute Other (PhP: 326). Merleau-Ponty too came to link his critique of analytic or reflective phenomenology to psychoanalysis. What Lyotard denied was Merleau-Ponty’s lingering monotheism, the claim that perception and discourse somehow spoke the same language. MerleauPonty’s expressivism is devoid of the agony of separation inherent to the Oedipal event, as Lyotard put it in one of his final writings (MP: 112). In one sense, what Merleau-Ponty lacked was an account of discourse as construction, an experiment concerning what exceeds us. Arguably, his use of Saussure briefly glimpsed it as “a logic in contingency,” an “architecture of signs” that is “never independent of historical discourse” (IPP: 57). The irony here is that Merleau-Ponty often invoked Klee in his final works and lectures and increasingly abandoned the monotheistic account of language (based on habit or gesture) that had structured the early account. Indeed, he used Saussure’s diacritics to understand Klee’s line. But to Lyotard (and we should affirm the claim) all of this remained subservient (and monologically) to Merleau-Ponty’s realism concerning perceptual faith (le foi perceptif ). Instead, we may need to read MerleauPonty through Lyotardian or Deleuzeian lenses, where, abandoning his Cézannian realism, in the rehabilitation of sensible he came to something like a construction in Klee’s sense before an event and a difference (écart) that exceeds us and remains irreducible to a sign or to the immediate “speaking” of things.41 No longer could the task be satisfied, as he once described Cézanne’s work, by simply or directly “remembering nature” (SNS: 12). It would involve no simple remembrance, in any case, an anamnesis capturable in Errinerung. Such remembrance, as Klee put it, would involve a Verinnerlichung, aware that “the visible is only an isolated case taken from the universe and that there are more truths unseen than seen” (N: 78–79). It would truly be a task undertaken to render the invisible visible and would not escape the trace of its experimental exhibition, and thus its link with imagination. Here sensation is not an abstractum. Rather, abstraction figures sensation and, as Merleau-Ponty ultimately acknowledged, leaves its trace there: “Sensible being is not only things but also everything sketched out there, even virtually, everything which leaves its trace there, everything which figures there, even as divergence and a certain absence” (S: 172). As Merleau-Ponty came to see, “there is no vision without the screen” or without its shadow (VI: 150). Its difference notwithstanding,

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language too is such a screen. Lyotard had at one time hoped to do away with the screen of the composing body in the same moment that he hoped to do away with the subject, in order to arrive at the intensities that underlie representation. In this he sought an immediacy he curiously shared with classical phenomenologies that dominated sensibility, constituting the image (as hyle of the intentional object) through reflective regard. If Merleau-Ponty thought similarly at first, he came to realize that both vision and language would ultimately need to be experimentally figured and refigured anew, as part of “an operative imaginary, which is part of our institution, and which is indispensable for the definition of Being itself” (VI: 85). This is inevitably a backward-and-forward enterprise, as many of these thinkers, including Klee, knew. It is by no means simply the naturalism of remembrance or return; such renderings occur beyond simple phenomenological description. The incarnate subject that had been constructed to underlie the previous account now participates in the ecstasies or the rhythms (both syntactic and semantic, linguistic and nonlinguistic) of the Ereignis that exceeded it. To invoke Husserl’s terms, the “symbolic rhythmic” (symbolische Rhythmik) that resulted could no longer answer to the recuperative (or oppositional) rhythms of the speculative proposition.42 This returns us to Deleuze, who in the end refused the Heideggerean Ereignis much more strongly, identifying it with the traditional radiance or “splendor of Being” (DR: 66). Lyotard had his own objection here; no one knows what language Being speaks. But we can no more grasp Being as force simpliciter; our theoretical models inevitably share this much in common with metaphor. Taken literally, the reduction of the concept to force would simply commit the psychologistic fallacy. Lyotard’s account of the figure matrix that makes possible the communicability of primary expression tacitly acknowledged this. Even Merleau-Ponty could himself claim (along with Klee) that the experience of Gestaltung leads us to understand that “a line is a vector, that a point is center of forces,” always a matter of “transcendence” (VI: 195). But in all these cases our terms are inevitably analogous, articulemes or screens; this is what theoretical construction and abstract expressionism share: both are always deferred beyond themselves by history as much as instinct. For Deleuze, abstract expressionism was the analogical as such, the expression of a life reducible neither to being nor to subject; for Lyotard, its oscillation was still the condition for the possibility or transformation of instinct into the exhibition

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of a truth that always eludes us. But what should we conclude regarding these differences? In the postmodern era, Lyotard claimed, deprived of master­narratives (metarécits), narrative has become less impossible than plural or multiple (ADev: 137). We are left with at least two narratives. Curiously, granted our postmodern mise-en-scène, it might be two Fichtean narratives that we have been tracing. On the one hand, as will be seen, Deleuze will invoke here the later Fichte’s account of life and blessedness irreducible to either an act or a Being. On the other hand, what seemed everywhere contested (both in the later Fichte and elsewhere, as has been discovered) was the early Fichtean account positing the lived body as the tool or organ of will, determinacy, and rationality.43 As close as his early account of the body subject was to this, even Merleau-Ponty contested it. Rational reflection was always parasitic on hyperreflection, our relation to the lived, dialectic on an incarnate hyperdialectic, the concept of being on “sur-being” (sur-l’ être). He found here what Lyotard would call oscillation, a Vielseidigkeit, a reversibility between the visible and the invisible essential to reason and an imaginary at the heart of being. Even in this oscillation, however, we remain proximate to Fichte, who made the Wechsel of imagination crucial to his reflective science. To use Merleau-Ponty’s term, the “momentaneous law” of Fichte’s symbolic rhythmics was precisely that of interdetermination, and this in turn was based on the mathematical infinite: “Whether I choose to count backward or forward steps as positive quantities is in itself a matter of complete indifference. . . . So too in the Science of Knowledge. Whatever is negation in the self is reality in the not-self, and vice versa.”44 Again, this is where Deleuze found “orgiastic representation,” an (illicit) deduction proceeding either from above or below, episyllogism or prosyllogism, either the infinitely small in which all analytic parts are already ordered (Leibniz) or the infinitely great that contains all such oppositions (Hegel; DR: 45ff). Against such ekstasis or elevations, Deleuze invoked Nietzsche, Lucretius, and Artaud. He understood sensation as a fall (clinamen) or Lyotard’s “lapsus” (and not reflective transcendence), the affirmation of the unregulated and the sublime in the Kantian sense, the body without organs (cf. DF: 135). Yet even he knew its limits: You have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn: and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against

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their own systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to; and you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality. (TP: 160)

Despite Deleuze’s attraction to Klee’s interest in the children’s art or the art of the insane, he was well aware that Klee “was infuriated when people would talk about the childishness of his drawings” (TP: 344). It would be a matter of experimental, even postmodern, intensities. How “nonmodern” all this is is contestable. Even the Critique of Pure Reason begins as an experiment—albeit in both Lyotard’s and Deleuze’s refigurations the experiment would involve less the Beautiful than the sublime, and a rationality that acknowledged the multiple. We should note that such experiments remain reflective, not in the sense that they are under the sovereign control of subjectivity but in the Kantian sense that they seek a schema or a screen or filter for what is initially problematic. It is thus already linked with chaos.45 Derrida claimed that the experience or experimenting of drawing, and experimenting in general, “as its name indicates, always consists in journeying beyond limits” (MB: 54). Adorno similarly noted that experiments in art have increasingly involved “methods whose objective results cannot be foreseen,” a matter still Schellingian (AT: 24).46 It was Schelling who stressed the surprise in the experience of the work of art before the concept. Yet the Critique of Pure Reason arguably is no less such a screen or venture. Lyotard’s own criticisms of the body as screen or composition can be viewed in a similar stylistics. The body schema is not fixed but mobile, yet it is always a specific attunement. The idea of a body without a screen is as lifeless as the automaton that is fixed; what the experience of chaos raises is the question of composition (or decomposition) of the screen itself. Even the phenomenological realist had to relent that there is no vision without the screen, just as no object escapes the rhythmics of le sentir. Badiou suggests that when Deleuze “continues to place art on the side of sensation as such (percept and affect)” he remained “in paradoxical continuity with the Hegelian motif of art as the ‘sensible form of the Idea.’ ”47 Although this resonates too with Lyotard’s critique of Adorno, as Lyotard himself came to see, the forgetting that would enable new libidinal investment to “bring us out of capital and out of ‘art’ ” remained perilously close by (Adev: 136). Close enough that we should hear it in Badiou’s reminding us that Nietzsche’s invocation of the dance was by no means simply “liberated intensity,” “primitive ekstacy,” or “forgetful pulsation”; this would coincide with Nietzsche’s account of vulgarity.48 Here,

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as well, there will be a fusion between the poetic and the architectonic; as Klee saw the body too, it is a building (ein Gebäude).49 As Nietzsche put it, in the dance the older rhythms are being affirmed or “differently determined.” If it will be everywhere a matter of “differentiation,” it was judgment or perception as differentiation that was at stake. Lyotard would remind us, however, that the “differentiations” of the dance always occur as an encounter with what withdraws, tuché, less an immanent affirmation than the encounter with the real insofar as it is missed, or later an encounter with a debt ever unfulfilled. Though both Deleuze and Lyotard often invoked Klee as a model, Klee himself often complicates their accounts; as we have seen, he often refuses to choose between the alternatives. Klee understands concepts such as the Beautiful and the Ugly (or good and evil) less as oppositions within simple unity than as a matter of tension (Spannung) without simple resolution—oscillations, to use Lyotard’s again Fichtean term (N: 15–16). This is true of the dance as well: “Particularly outstanding is Nijinski, who dances in the air and on the ground simultaneously” (D: 337). On the poststructuralist reading of Klee, such a venture belies the totalizations of orgiastic representation. Deleuze himself sees in this a non-Romantic attempt “to escape” from the earth, “elaborating a material charged with harnessing forces of a different order” (TP: 337, 342). Once again forces are at stake, a cosmophilosophy “after the manner of Nietzsche” (TP: 342). But he also knew, as did Klee, that “we still lack the ultimate force” (TP: 337). What has been suggested is that Klee’s refusal to choose itself attested to post-Fichtean ironists and the venture of their experiments. It belies the unity and harmony of what Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe call “the ordinary interpretation of romanticism.”50 Such experiments were now devoid not only of complete determinability, but of the imposition of form, including the primacy of practical reason. At stake here, as Fichte put it, was not simply a choosing between two directions or objects: We should reflect neither on one aspect alone, nor the other alone, but on both together, oscillating inwardly [mitten inne Schwebe] between the two opposing determinations of the Idea. And this is the business of the creative imagination, a faculty that all men are quite certainly endowed with, since without it they would have no presentations at all.51

Lyotard insisted on this inner oscillation or hovering (Schweben) and suspense in Freud’s account of the potential truth revealed in sublimation,

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distinguishing the work of art from a symptom. This is where he cites Freud: “All depends on the quantity of unemployed libido that a person is able to maintain in abeyance” (im Schwebe; ASA: 142n). Klee treated the topos and the tension of this Schweben in a number of works and writings. As with other Bauhaus artists (among them Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy), such hovering involves, as Geelhaar put it, utopian attempts to escape the bond of gravity; all of these remain “limited in some way by ineluctable, compulsive motive forms that must overcome the force of gravity.”52 Such ultimate overcoming, Klee realized, would require weightlessness. In “Hovering” (Before the Ascent) Klee hinted at such weightlessness through a certain linear inconsistency and irrationality53 (see Figure 10). Only a slight heaviness at the bottom seems to impart the lingering impression of earthly constraint, and hence the lingering tension (Spannung). This is hardly the speculative unity of contraries we noted at the outset, rendering the difference between concept and weightlessness that was the utopian goal of the Bauhaus pure constructs. This would involve a hubris, for Klee, that escapes our finitude. Nor are we simply earthbound; we are “half a prisoner, half born of wings” (N: 407). Accordingly, the construction of “Hovering” (Before the Ascent) becomes semiotically complicated by Klee’s use of an arrow that indicates the looming ascent, a mixture of the architectonic and the poetic. Once again, in the hovering between reason and imagination, poetics and intuition intercede on exact theorem and construction. As Fichtean as these resonances may be, none of this involves the simple return of the Fichtean self-positing Ich—and certainly not Fichte’s account of the body subject (Lieb) as the “tool of reason.” Even MerleauPonty’s account of the systole-diastole rhythm of le sentir, exceeding the perceiving subject, abandoned the logocentric organicism of idealism. This systole-diastole, understood as a rhythm of existence, already articulates the ascent and descent, presence and absence, appearance and dissolution of the event Lyotard would call “eros-thanatos” (PhP: 213). If, as Lyotard suggested, there is very little on music in Phenomenology of Perception, its trace is everywhere. If Merleau-Ponty continues to call sensation intentional, what Lyotard calls the “dialectic between intense and the intentional” that “splits” the simplicity or the unity of the ego had already been encountered (LE: 48). But it is evident that even Fichte’s own logocentric account is by no

“Hovering” (Before the Ascent) “Schwebendes” (vor dem Anstieg), Paul Klee, 1930, 220. Oil on canvas; original frame 84 x 84 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Figure 10 

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means simple here. If Fichte models the account of his Wissenschaftslehre mathematically, in accord with his account of creative imagination, he himself provides its metamorphosis, through rhythms that exceed it. Just as in Klee, the creative imagination transcends the literal opposition at stake, a matter of the spirit and not the letter of the mathematical model.54 As Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe stated, the play of this difference (écart), this nomadic Schweben, will be particularly significant to Romanticism everywhere, which in its difference from Idealism “involves a certain impossibility of accommodating the vision of the Idea.”55 Instead it is the venture, the experiment of the truth, that exceeds everywhere it emerges—including the experiments of the later Fichte, as Deleuze points out. Indeed, precisely here is where Deleuze appeals to the later Fichte for a model for his own account of the immanences of the transcendental field: “To the degree that he goes beyond the aporias of the subject and object” and “presents the transcendental field as a life no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act” (PI: 27). All this is to occur without nostalgia or hope of returning to the past (HJ: 34; TP: 338ff). But we should note the later Fichte’s proximity to Heidegger as well: Being [Seyn] must be distinguished from, and opposed to, Existence [Daseyn]; and indeed—since besides the absolute Being [absolut Seyn] itself is nothing else whatever but its Existence—this differentiation and opposition must be manifest in Existence itself; and this, more clearly expressed, is equivalent to the following: Existence must apprehend, recognize and image forth [bilden] itself as mere Existence: and, opposed to itself, it must assume and image forth an absolute Being, whose mere Existence it is.56

Texts in which Klee affirms the divine within himself or understands artistic creation as cosmogenesis have often led Klee’s commentators to link him to Schelling. Klee’s ironies perhaps place him closer to Schelling’s predecessors, to Schlegel and Novalis’s transformations of Fichte. At stake throughout, to cite one of Klee’s appropriate titles, is an experiment in hovering (“Schwebeversuch,” 1925, 161).57 The same may be true of Heidegger’s stress on finitude and the ontological difference, as commentators such as Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Frank have emphasized. It is in this sense that we have understood the event in question as Heideggerean, as the interplay (Spielraum) of concealment and unconcealment.58 Such an event (Ereignis) would combine the Beautiful and the sublime, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and in the way, Heidegger argued, that Nietzsche had,

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combining these in terms of rapture (Rausch). But this too could be done only problematically and not without contention. Such contention would be particularly apparent in the case of Deleuze, the only thinker here who would not relate his work to Heidegger at this point—especially, as will become apparent, in his own reading of Heidegger’s Nietzsche. The resulting readings of Klee would be equally and provocatively contentious.

Rapture (Rausch), Paul Klee, 1939, 341. Panel, oil and watercolor, 65 x 80 cm. Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, München. ©Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Figure 11 

6 The Rapture of Sensuousness “Color Possesses Me . . . I Am a Painter” We can still speak rationally about the salutary effects of art. We can say that imagination, borne on the wings of instinctual stimuli, conjures up states of being that are somehow more encouraging and more inspiring than those we know on earth or in our conscious dreams. That symbols console the mind, by showing it that there is something more than the earthly and its possible intensifications. That ethical gravity coexists with impish tittering at doctors and priests. For, in the long run, even intensified reality is of no avail. Art plays in the dark with ultimate things and yet it reaches them. (Die Kunst spiel mit den letzten Dingen ein unwissend Spiel und erreicht sie doch!) Paul Klee (N: 80) Many paradoxes: Nietzsche is in the air. Klee (D: 26)

Within a few years of Klee’s death , Will Grohmann, a leading scholar of his work, connected Klee’s thought and art to the work of Martin Heidegger. Several decades later, leading Heidegger scholars such as Pöggeler or von Hermann began to explore the connection between Klee and Heidegger. In the meantime, thinkers influenced by both would not miss the connection. In his late lectures on contemporary philosophy, Merleau-Ponty used Heidegger to understand Klee and Klee to understand Heidegger (NC: 124). There was not, however, strong consensus concerning such views. Many believed Heidegger’s thought was disconnected not only from the artists of his time (his brief references to Klee’s being an exception) but from the reality of his time. Many thought that both the art and the reality would be better grasped otherwise. Instead, as Benjamin 151

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said in comparing Klee’s Angelus Novus to the angel of history, history has become “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (IL: 257). As close as they were at points, Adorno insisted that Klee’s work contradicted Heidegger’s idealizing tendencies. Grohmann, on the ­other hand, as well as other scholars of his work such as Jürgen Glaesemer, found Klee’s work closer to the Romantics and not Heidegger’s search for a new beginning in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”1 If, as has been argued, Heidegger’s work is not nearly as removed from the Romantics’ as is usually thought, even here Heidegger might have learned from Klee’s modernism. This was true even of Klee’s experiments in formalism, which Heidegger (and Adorno, not incidentally) apparently eschewed (AT: 290). Interpreters insisted on comparing Heidegger and Klee’s similar account of anxious Being-in-the-world, but what seemed missing was the irony and ekstasis—to use Lyotard’s term, the oscillation—by which such anxieties might not be simply consoled or accommodated but transformed.2 Groh­ mann favored Klee’s kinship with Novalis instead, “the correspondence of nature and art, evolution and image formation, biology and ontology.”3 This was true even if, like all of these writers, Grohmann paired Klee with the Goethean notion of the Beautiful that allows it to be revealed only under a veil. Like Gadamer, Grohmann tied all this together in Klee’s paintings on Harmony.4 Still, those like Werckmeister saw Klee’s attention to “time honored German idealism,” to reconciliation and the unity of contraries, corresponding to his tendencies toward “the antirevolutionary ideal of order.”5 Werckmeister also realized that “Klee remained intent on defusing his negative conclusions by romantic irony.”6 Again, “We have the parts but not the whole” (N: 95). He already grasped the effects of Adorno’s claim; once works of art are simply conceptualized as tensions within totality, they have been destroyed (AT: 53). What Heidegger appealed to in both Klee’s and Novalis’s case was an encounter with Being that withdraws from us, that lacks the harmony, the homoiosis, and even the “why” of Being in the traditional accounts of metaphysics. If he still invoked the Greek account of physis or aletheia it seemed divorced from the nature, the unity of contraries, and the Naturphilosophie to which those such as Grohmann appealed. Indeed it seemed to many precisely thereby a diversion, an abstraction from the realities of history. This was true even when he turned not simply to art but to nature. It was true perhaps even when, in the same years that he was writing his

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“Origin of the Work of Art,” to which Grohmann alludes, he was writing about Nietzsche. Yet if Heidegger’s ontology of the work of art seemed to many to avoid the link between art and nature, or art and reality, or art and desire, in confronting Nietzsche none of this could be avoided. To use Nietzsche’s terms, which Heidegger himself emphasizes, he could not avoid the question of “the rapture [der Rausch] of the Beautiful.” As will be seen, while Klee’s own discussion of Nietzsche (or his discussion of Novalis for that matter) is scanty, it takes place at times in precisely these terms, and he produced a number of works on this topic, albeit ones not readily interpreted (D: 26).7 When Grohmann contemplated a late (1939) work under this title, he said “it was difficult to say what this work means, and for Klee the word ‘Rausch’ . . . probably had a meaning different from the usual one”8 (Figure 11). This may be true of the standard English translation of this work’s title, Intoxication. Indeed, confronting the fragmentation at stake in the series to which this work belongs, Grohmann characterized them as “ecstatic visions” and “demonic [dämonischeren] utterances.”9 Perhaps here too, as Klee put it, “the daemonical shall be melted into simultaneity with the celestial” (D: 372). This issue, in any case, appeared to escape Grohmann’s more classical or naturalizing reading of Klee (though he further compared these works to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake). Still it did not escape Nietzsche’s or Heidegger’s (or Deleuze’s) confrontation with this topic, all of whom realized that the demonic was never far from the excess, the fragmentation, and the transcendence of imagination; nor would it escape the problem of our relation to nature itself, even the problem of our own physiology.10 To consider this issue, it is necessary to affirm the ambiguities involved. Throughout his writings, Heidegger insisted that Nietzsche’s “physiology of art” had “an essentially covert meaning” (N: 102). At one point, Heidegger stated that it seemed “strange and almost incomprehensible . . . that he tries to make his conception of the aesthetic state accessible to his contemporaries, and tries to convince them of it, by speaking the language of physiology and biology” (N: 113). As strange and incomprehensible as it might seem, this much is clear: here too, Heidegger has taken his leave from neo-Kantianism. Just five years earlier, he sought a dialogue between philosophy and science and a few years before that he saw himself providing the foundations for the philosophy of biology (FCM: 190ff; BT: 30). It was a matter of the body, but not simply a restricted physiology of the body, which involves an illicit reduction (N: 51). Such a reduction would

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lose the experience of the Beautiful, that is, the rapture of the Beautiful, the “explosive” feeling that lies at its origin. As Nietzschean as it sounds, here Heidegger likewise followed classical phenomenological accounts of emotion; emotion is (intentionally) directed or related outward beyond the physiological or psychological content through which the object becomes constituted. Being and Time had already stressed that mood (Stimm­ung) is a constitutive and disclosive feature of our being-in-the-world, in particular of our having been “delivered over” to the world (BT: 173). In his analysis of Nietzsche, Heidegger similarly states that, unlike mere affects, in feeling “a state opens up and stays open.” But, Heidegger adds, it does so as a bodily event. The resulting account yields some of the most explicit pages Heidegger devoted to the lived body, though he is often criticized for its seeming omission. Confronting the physiology of feeling, he is forced to make it explicit at the cost of losing all that was at stake. Rapture is always rapturous feeling. Where is the physiological, or what pertains to bodily states, in this? Ultimately we dare not split up the matter in such a way, as though there were a bodily state housed in the basement with feelings dwelling upstairs. Feeling, as feeling oneself to be, is precisely the way we are corporeally. Bodily being does not mean that the soul is burdened by the hulk we call the body. In feeling oneself to be, the body is already contained in advance in that self, in such a way that body in its bodily states permeates the self. We do not “have” a body in the way we carry a knife in a sheath. . . . We do not “have” a body; rather we “are” bodily. . . . Feeling achieves from the outset the inherent internalizing tendency of the body in our Dasein. But because feeling, as feeling oneself to be, always just as essentially has a feeling for beings as a whole, every bodily state involves some way in which the things around us and the people with us lay claim on us or do not do so. (N: I 98–99)

This seems like the classical phenomenological position, but it is so with explicitly ontological concerns. The Kantbuch marked this overcoming of the physiological: “Kant for the first time attains a concept of sensibility which is ontological rather than sensualist” (KPM: 18). A later gloss articulates it thusly: it’s not that pure reason becomes sensible because it is tied to a body. “Rather, the reverse is true: the human being, as finite, rational creature, can thus only ‘have’ its body in a transcendental (i.e. metaphysical) sense because transcendence as such is sensible a priori” (KPM: 118). Moreover, Heidegger’s admittedly “violent reading” is maintained here (KPM: xviii). Nietzsche (as well as Schopenhauer) is criticized for missing Kant’s point about the Beautiful’s break with interest. Far from

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lacking in interest, Heidegger argued, comportment toward the Beautiful is “unconstrained favoring of the object,” passing beyond the mere aesthetic state (N: 109). In this, Heidegger claimed, “Kant alone grasped the essence of what Nietzsche in his own way wanted to comprehend concerning the decisive aspects of the Beautiful” (N: 111). Kant alone recognized the “ascent beyond ourselves” that “occurs according to Nietzsche in rapture.” Moreover, rapture is not indeterminate: “The mood [Stimmung] of rapture is rather an attunement [Gestimmtheit] in the sense of the supreme and most assured determinateness [Bestimmtheit]” (N: 113).11 Such heightened attunement will be identified in “The Origin of the Work of Art” as the intensity and the resoluteness that permits the repose of truth, “the letting things be as things” in the work of art (OWA: 47). Here Nietzsche’s effect and this emphasis on the physiological also seem to take us beyond Kant. While Hegel defiantly closed the door on Kant (and Schiller) in proclaiming art a thing of the past, for Nietzsche art, in being delivered over to physiology, is pursued as “the countermovement” to speculation, a countermovement into chaos (N: 90–91). If Nietzsche does not go far enough for Heidegger, he is still to be credited with a vitality that, as he puts it in the Beitrage, “wills its intensification and heightening” (B: 254). In this way Nietzsche has drawn out what is ownmost to truth; “he understands these projecting openings of beings as an experiment that we do with ‘truth’ ” (B: 254). Here too, however, we have taken Kant only slightly beyond himself. Heidegger credits Kant with discovering Nietzsche’s “chaos.” As has been noted, Schelling gave chaos a major role in understanding the origin of art. Still, Heidegger returns to Kant. He does not turn initially to the third Critique’s connection between the sublime and chaos (as opposed to the harmony experienced in natural beauty).12 Rather, he returns to the first Critique’s axioms and their ontologizing of the sensuous. Kant spoke of receptivity as a manifold or mass of sensations, “meaning by that the chaos, the jumble that crowds us, keeps us occupied, concerns us, washes over and tunnels through us—one says, with apparently great precision, through ‘our bodies’ ”(N III: 78). Still (with Husserl’s categorical intuition in mind), Heidegger’s Kantbuch already claimed that Kant glimpsed but insufficiently grasped “the exploratory” character of the schematizing, the experiment that we do with truth (KPM: 127).13 For Heidegger, Nietzsche understood life itself in this regard as “a bodying forth as a wave in the stream of chaos” (N III: 82). Heidegger

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struggles here. On the one hand, he hopes to avoid “an uninhibited ‘biological’ thinking” that might construe the world as a “gigantic body” (N III: 80). In a few years, such giganticism would become a significant topic in his thought, articulated in terms of the technological account of machination that turns all qualities into quantity and makes them calculable in advance (B: 94). This is of a piece with his concern about formalism in general. Not incidentally, in his mind it is what makes the work of art into a commodity for the culture industry, even making it conceptually possible for a painting to travel from one exhibition to another, acquiring the general character of “installation” (OWA: 19; M: 25). It is hard to avoid thinking that the attempt in The Origin of the Work of Art, if not to identify politics as an artwork then to compare it with the work of art, was not untouched by such failures. On the other hand, equally significant in Heidegger’s attempt to grapple with Nietzsche’s idea of life as a bodying forth into chaos is that it be removed from irrationalist approaches. Such chaos is not simply the unordered, “arising from the removal of all order” (N III: 80). Rather, the concept of the chaos of life Heidegger is articulating through Nietzsche involves “what urges, flows, and is animated, whose order is concealed,” and as such, “beings as a whole projected relative to the body and its bodying” (N III: 81). Such chaos is the name for that “representation of being as a whole which posits being as a manifold of necessitous Becoming and in such a way that unity and form are excluded” (N II: 91). Again, the problem of their schematism arises, “the need for a schema and forming a horizon” (N III: 87). Here too, the claim is that the object is not closed off. The horizon “is not a wall that cuts man off, rather the horizon is translucent”; indeed, “looking thorough and looking ahead, together with the formation of a horizon belongs to the essence of life” (N III: 87). Heidegger views such formation to belong to the very notion of idea as immediate and “undistorted outward appearance” that lies at the heart of mimesis, rightly understood (N: 185–186). This points to his own (phenomenological) rendering of Plato’s eidos) as the look or aspect (Aspekt) articulated in encountering the things themselves (cf. B: 145ff). Nietzsche’s commentators have had trouble with this view. For example, once again we can see that Deleuze is openly in conflict: “Heideg­ ger gives an interpretation of Nietzschean philosophy closer to his own thought than to Nietzsche’s,” which opposed “every conception of affirmation which would find its foundation in Being” (NP: 220n). As has become

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clear, Deleuze accused Heidegger of a return to Scotus and giving “renewed splendor to the Univocity of Being” (nouvelle splendeur á l’univocité de l’ être; DR: 66). To concretely grasp their differences, however, one must first acknowledge their agreement. For Deleuze too, Nietzsche cannot be understood without Kantianism and the “concept of synthesis which it discovered” (NP: 51). Like Heidegger, he follows post-Kantian claims that such a synthesis “was also truly genetic and productive (a principle of eternal difference or determination)” (NP: 51–52). Deleuze interprets Nietzsche’s synthesis as a synthesis of forces: “He understood the synthesis of forces as the eternal return and thus found the reproduction of diversity at the heart of synthesis” (NP: 52). Still, for Deleuze ­Nietzsche’s account cannot be understood as implicitly linked (or attuned) to the splendor of beings as a whole. The point, for Deleuze, is precisely to confront the chaos that Hei­ degger eschews in making Nietzsche’s horizonal schema “translucent” (III: 87). Post-Kantian thought articulated the image of thought restricted to a synthetically schematized perspective. It maintained the illusion of totality and did not confront the dispersion internal to perspectivism. For Deleuze, such a confrontation occurs paradigmatically in the modern work of art, which “develops its permutating series and its circular structure” strictly beyond any figure of representational univocity: “It is not enough to multiply perspectives in order to establish perspectivism. To every perspective or point of view there must correspond an autonomous work with its own self sufficient ‘monstrosity’ ” (DR: 69). Once again, Heidegger and Deleuze could not seem to be farther apart, now providing incommensurable readings of Nietzsche. For Hei­ deg­ger, Nietzsche did not go far enough and remained caught within metaphysics. For Deleuze, Heidegger did not go far enough and remained entrapped within the illusions of post-Kantianism, attempting to translate Nietzschean Rausch into the illumined ekstasis or radiance of Being. Heidegger’s understanding of such chaos remains, for Deleuze, still regulated, its Dasein only a body ‘with organs,’ its “preontological understanding of Being” intact (DR: 129). Its rhythmics remains devoid of chaos, still the rhythmics of analogic resemblance. As has been seen, Deleuze himself invokes analogy. Sensation is analogical through and through, the presentation of another order, the order of forces. Painting is understood analogically, albeit devoid of resemblance. It becomes so precisely because sensation, to cite his gloss on Klee, renders

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force visible (FB: 49). In the very concept of rhythm (diastole-systole), relaxing or contracting sensation “gives something different from itself” and makes visible (FB: 37). Painting is said to be the analogical art form par excellence. Indeed, in abstract painting analogy is taken as an object; it is the expression of the analogical as such (FB: 95–96). What is the difference between Heidegger and Deleuze on the analogical? It cannot be Scotus. Although Deleuze criticized Heidegger’s lingering Scotist position for its commitments to resemblance, he himself invokes the Scotist notion of haecceity for the individuation or expression of events. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relation of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. (TP: 261)

Deleuze denies that difference could be recollected in Being; hence his critique of “the splendor of Being.” Difference is not the ontological difference, the difference of (univocal) Being, but difference articulated in the affirmation and collection of forces.14 Deleuze’s difference with phenomenological accounts of intentionality is also telling. Deleuze himself claims that “the diastole-systole of sensation,” related as rhythms to the withdrawal of chaos, is both preindividual (as it is in fact in Merleau-Ponty or Sartre) and preintentional (FB: 37). He would replace the apodicticities or moralisms of the phenomenological Ich kann with the analysis of the problem and the question, delineating the repetition of possibility and multiplicity, identity and difference. In departing from the classical account of intentionality, Merleau-Ponty already understood sensation in an interrogative sense. For Merleau-­Ponty, “Sensation is intentional because I find that in the sensible a certain rhythm of existence is put forward—abduction or adduction” (PhP: 213). The sensible emerges as “a vague beckoning [sollicitation vague] before which I must find the reply to a question which is obscurely expressed” (PhP: 214). To understand the rhythm of repetition, however, Deleuze does not appeal to such existentialist accounts but cites Heidegger’s self-description in the Kantbuch: “By a repetition of a fundamental problem we understand the disclosure of primordial possibilities concealed in it. The development of these possibilities has the effect of transforming the problem and thus preserving it in its import as a

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problem” (DR: 201). We thus need to wonder, as have others, how much Deleuze’s account of difference is really at odds with Heidegger.15 Does Heidegger’s account of ontological difference reduce or regulate difference or univocity? The interrogation of the Seinsfrage remains always problematically related to ontological difference. It may not be true for Heidegger, as it is for Deleuze, that “ontology is the dice throw, the chaosmos from which the cosmos emerges” (DR: 199). Still, for Heidegger Being is surely irreducible to regulated necessity. Regarding the affirmation of force, Heidegger claimed of Nietzsche’s rapture that “what lives is exposed to other forces, but in such a way that, striving against them, it deals with them according to their form and rhythm, in order to estimate them in relation to possible incorporation or elimination” (N III: 212). Heidegger understands such estimation or incorporation in the problematic relation between rapture and Beauty (N III: 212). Heidegger insisted that such heightened affirmation occurs precisely in the “explosive” event of rapture, openness to the thing itself. In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger noted the failure of our aesthetic concepts regarding imposed or created form, or purposive or preregulated matter, both matters of instrumental rationality. Instead, he asked, “What seems easier than to let a being be just the being that it is?” (OWA: 31). The answer, though he never quite says it, is that nothing could be harder. It requires the greatest strength to exceed oneself not only in the affirmation of one’s own difference (Deleuze’s take on self-affirmation), but in the affirmation of the otherness of the thing, this “letting the Beautiful be what it is” (N: 109). It is in this sense that “rapture is the Basic mood,” attunement or determination (Stimmung and Bestimmung), “but Beauty does the attuning” (N: 123). Rhythm is expressed then linguistically not in the N. N. fecit but in the factum est (OWA: 63). Beauty is precisely this: the illumination of “self-concealing being” (OWA: 54). The event of its being created does not simply reverberate through the work [zittert in Werk]; rather, the work casts before itself the eventful fact that the work is as this work, and it has constantly this fact about itself. The more essentially the work opens itself, the more luminous becomes the uniqueness of the fact that it is rather than is not. (OWA: 63)

What reverberates or is “rendered visible,” to use Klee’s terms? For both Deleuze and Heidegger (as for Klee) it can be articulated in relation to force. But force for Heidegger remains ontological, the explication of

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the difference that sensuousness possesses in itself. Deleuze’s empiricism defines force in terms of the Platonism Nietzsche sought to invert, inter alia, because of its hidden connection to bad theology. Heidegger’s explication of difference remains motivated. Its experience, “explosive” to use Nietzsche’s term, is now, in the phenomenological sense, explicated adumbratively as a shadowing forth, an Ab-schattung. This interpretation, not incidentally, violently articulates the Platonic essence or Eidos back through the visible. Deleuze also appealed to the concept of perspectival explication, albeit refusing all attempts to understand it in terms of a founding univocity.16 The whole difference between them might seem (as Deleuze seems to suggest) to revolve around this issue of bad theology. According to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s “God is dead” conjures a post-Kantian notion of “God” as a synthesis of forces. For Heidegger “God is dead,” as he later put it, means anything but “there is no god” (QCT: 105). A number of Klee’s commentators insisted that his work is about the recovery of the sacred.17 There is room for disagreement all around. Heidegger finds such questions intelligible only within the semantic (analogical) complexity, the repetition that opens through the Seinsfrage itself. Deleuze appealed to this complexity for understanding the repetition at stake in problematic, versus apodictic, imperatives. This includes the question of the being of force itself, in particular the synthesis or gathering of forces. Deleuze smells a deeper appeal to resemblance in Heidegger’s renewed “splendor” concerning the univocity of Being, secretly still revealing in Platonic ­ekstasis something deeper (or higher) than itself. We might deny this, noting Heidegger’s denial of the work as symbolon as the joining together of symbol or allegory (OWA: 19). Such an allegory involves a synthesis or joining together that founds or makes the work of art intelligible in another order. But Heidegger dismisses this: “color shines and wants only to shine” (OWA: 45). Here the shining of color is akin to Cézanne’s articulation of thing as force; it is not the invocation of another order, its zugrundgehen, but the appearance of the thing itself through the beyond that sensuousness “possesses in itself.”18 But perhaps this does not respond to Deleuze’s criticism sufficiently. In Van Gogh’s “shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth” (OWA: 33). This misses Van Gogh’s experiments with color, undertaken, Deleuze claims, to unlock “the unheard of force of a sunflower seed” (FB: 49). Deleuze may have Heidegger in mind when he asserts, concerning Klee’s

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account of chaos, that “the forces to be captured are no longer those of the earth, which still constitutes a great expressive Form, but the forces of an immaterial, nonformal, and energetic Cosmos” (TP: 342–343). Accordingly, Heidegger’s fourfold (the interrelation of earth and sky, divinities and mortals that articulates the event of the worlding of the world, the Ereignis) would still risk sublimating the chaos of forces to a code of resemblance. The work gathers together (and distinguishes) Heidegger’s cosmological fragments. The interrelationships constituting the fourfold are surely analogical. Yet granted the field of differences to which both thinkers appeal—and whether or not there is a God, and whether or not Being can be stripped of its theological overtones—in both cases there is no primum analogatum.19 One might be inclined to provisionally agree with Deleuze. Adorno has suggested that, granted its role as secularized illumination or revelation, art now inevitably contains theological overtones (AT: 106: 271). Indeed, Jean-Luc Marion has suggested that, granted the aporias that emerge between appearance and thing, “theology becomes, in this situation, an indisputable authority (instance) concerning any theory of painting.20 Jacques Derrida agreed but (like Deleuze) equally insisted, citing both Van Gogh and Artaud, that a “rejection of a certain theological order of the visible” was also involved (MB: 45n). Derrida too stressed, with ­A rtaud, Van Gogh’s accomplishment in painting as the articulation of forces. In this accomplishment, Artaud wrote, “These sunflowers of bronzed gold are painted; they are painted as sunflowers and nothing more.”21 But here, Derrida claimed, “Heidegger is not far off” (US: 90). For his own part, Heidegger in the 1930s, and still proximate to Nietzsche, understood the work of art in terms of the incorporation of forces (as had Klee). Yet in the projected seminar of 1959 and the summarized “Klee Notes,” he connected Klee’s work (as had Klee also) to the religions of Asian thought (P: 59; KN: 11). What sense can be made of these differences? As theological as Klee’s work gets, interpreting Klee in ways that takes Heidegger’s fourfold literally would turn it into simple allegory. If not everywhere, here, to use Adorno’s terms, “the literal is barbaric” (AT: 61). As has been seen, Ereignis is analogical (and rhythmical) through and through; Heidegger’s articulemes are not descriptors or logically proper names. Still, on a number of fronts, one might wonder whether Deleuze is overinterpreting. Klee is not interested in “earthly” matters because he is not interested in truths

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of “this” world but the possibilities (or the Zwischenwelt) of another (possible) invisible world or worlds (N: 92). Klee is not Cézanne; the goal was not naturalistic in the simple sense of merging with nature, its “realization.” This is true even if Heidegger affirmed that in this regard his “way” and Cézanne’s were the same. Like the early Merleau-Ponty, who similarly relied heavily on Cézanne, Cézanne’s naturalism may well be akin to Heidegger’s physis. Against this, Deleuze’s chaotic or Lucretian physis may seem more appropriate. From the beginning, Klee affirmed not only the poetic but also the architectonic. Such architectonics affects not only the architectonics of rhythm (in ways, I have argued, that are syntactic, both in the formal sense and the argumentative) but equally, as Deleuze points out, the rhythmics, “the retrogradable rhythm” of color (FB: 159n). The “shining” of color is neither simple illumination nor simple immanence but emerges or “reverberates” through the rhythms of chaotic genesis—still resplendent with cosmological significance.22 But again, in what way does this event emerge? Granted the difference between concepts and sensibility, there is theoretical complexity (even instability) in grasping this. Klee once claimed in passing beyond the Old Masters’ stereotype of the nude “that sensibility (Empfindung) comes first.” It thus seemed (to many in fact, Deleuze included) to be a matter of breaking down stereotypes, the painterly version of negative dialectic. As Pierre Klossowski, the French translator of Klee’s Tagebuch, commented, “The painting now ceases to be a simulacrum in order to become an object in itself.”23 Still, Klossowski thought such abstraction risks falling into decadence: “an arbitrary production of phantasm devoid of inner compulsion and therefore no longer capable of exercising anything morally.”24 Deleuze thought that abstraction reduces “the abyss of chaos . . . to a minimum: it offers us an asceticism, a spiritual salvation” (LS: 84). Still, it remains to be seen how, and in what sense, it might be an ethical matter. If Klossowski aptly caught Klee’s “celestial irony,” one might in any case wonder whether he caught Klee’s account of abstraction. Such abstraction was not simply opposed to the genesis of sensibility. As Klee elaborated in the passage quoted earlier, sensibility already became articulated through the formal “lineaments” of the graphic line, a line that was not without its formal, even Euclidean, overtones while also containing its own surrealist resonance. Here we are in close proximity to Deleuze’s claim that abstract art was the articulation of the “analogical as such.” In-

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deed, in the immediately preceding Diary entry Klee sounds like Deleuze’s account of the body without organs in stating that “with his calligraphic line, Dürer circumscribes the whole realistic aspect of the ear” (D: 184).25 An earlier entry notes of such transfiguration in dance that “sensuality is the malleability of the flesh [Sinnlichkeit ist die Biegsamkeit des Fleisches] when it is submitted to higher pressure. Eyes dazzled by colors. Ears drenched in sound. Noses in odors. The same is true for the organs of love” (D: 86).26 Thinkers like Lyotard or Klossowski would not be wrong in seeing in this (libidinal) energetics a “fundamental proposition” of Klee’s work (DF: 229). Our passion here, Lyotard claimed, is not even to understand. Like Klee’s line, he stated in Libidinal Economy, “We hope rather to be in motion. Consequently our passion would sooner be the dance, as Nietzsche wanted, and as Cage and Cunningham wanted” (LE: 51). In such moments we seem to reach the limit of the law of the concept, the limit of philosophy itself. In separating philosophy from the “religious” thought of the “oriental consciousness,” too immersed in the infinite to achieve spiritualization, Hegel remarked, “In Religion we find self-immersion in the deepest sensuality (in die tiefste Sinnlichkeit) represented as the service of God.”27 In 1916 Klee wrote, “I . . . am growing more and more Chinese” (D: 365). Even in describing the “orgiastic character” of the dance in these entries, however, Klee focused on “the complication of linear relations that subsist between bodies at rest” (D: 85). As has been seen, Klee’s line abandons naturalism “the instant the line enters into an independent pictorial element” (D: 232). Here Lyotard found the expression of the figure matrix that transcended the immanent determination of instinctual energy. In the same way that we have questioned Klossowski, one might wonder whether, if Deleuze understood Klee’s construction (or architectonic), he missed its ironic invocation of transcendence. This would return us to Heidegger, for whom Klee took on increasing importance in the last part of his career. If Heidegger seemingly understood Klee’s poetic invocation of transcendence, his emphasis on a genesis, which precedes form and comes to stand (Zu-stand ) in the object (Gegenstand ), did he sufficiently grasp the irony of Klee’s chaotic construction? He might have been too quick to consign its architectonics to the decadence of technology (and, once again, bad neo-Kantianism). We should note, further, that the theoretical complexity does not end here. Notwithstanding his stress on energetics, none of this readily

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reduces to force in any simple sense. Certainly not for Klee, who openly denied that the simple intensification of life gets to ultimate things (N: 80).28 Like Nietzsche, Klee articulated a physiological correlate to the rhythms he emphasized; the systole-diastole became explicitly connected with the circulation of blood or the inhalation and exhalation of breath (N: 80). Still, readings of Klee that reduce it by the concepts of immediacy, a simple erotics of the will, or the metaphysics of natural immanence will equally risk being bound by overinterpretation. In denying such immediacy, we meet up with Adorno. Adorno similarly lamented the repression of sensuousness in the instrumental rationality of modernity. He privileged the work of art in its denial and privileged Klee’s hieroglyphic drawings as its model (AT: 124). He acknowledged that “aesthetically only what is realized in sensual material counts,” even if it is superficial on its own terms (AT: 277). Instead, “in important artworks,” Adorno declared, “the sensuous illuminated by its art shines forth as spiritual” (AT: 15). Yet even though the truth of art is inseparable from the sensuous, sensuous embodiment, and doubtless embodiment itself, transcendence remains irreducible to force or sensibility: “The promise that the content is real—which makes its truth content—is bound up with the sensuous. . . . Without recollection of this element, however, there would no longer be art, any more than if art abandoned itself entirely to the sensual” (AT: 277). In such immediacy, the sensuous risks falling into kitsch (AT: 276). Even the black and grays of modern art are not the simple denial of color, but its negative apotheosis (AT: 135). Now precisely here is where Adorno might seem to have differed with Heidegger. He agrees that the shock or shudder (Schauer) one experiences before the work of art has become threatened: “For the culture industry the idea of the shudder is idle nonsense” (AT: 245). But he distinguishes this shudder before the loss of the I that he claims characterizes rapture: “The disappearance of the I in the moment of the shudder [im Augenblick von Erschütterung] is not real; rapture [der Rausch], which has a similar aspect, is nevertheless incompatible with artistic experience” (AT:  245). The difference, Adorno asserts, is that in the experience of the work of art the I does not disappear; rather, its illusion disappears, its “attitude to objectivity” (AT: 245). This seems similar to Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s rapture, which, on his terms, passes beyond a mere subjective state, beyond immediate lived experience (Erlebnis) in being attuned, its Gestimmtsein, by the thing—and in this case, the Beautiful or the

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Ugly. Heidegger and Adorno concurred on the importance of Kant by emphasizing that “aesthetic comportment is free from immediate desire” (AT: 10). Such “attunement” permitted the resoluteness to “allow things to be” apart from their technical or instrumental grasp. It led Heidegger to attempt to think about art, and in particular Klee’s art, apart from calculative or objective modes of the rational. One of the things that make Klee (like other “exemplary artists of the epoch” such as Schönberg or Picasso) significant for Adorno is that Klee accords equal intensity to the expressive mimetic and the constructive elements (AT: 257). Adorno nonetheless thinks a complete fusion illusory; instead, both coexist as moments without achieving a final synthesis or “happy mean” (AT: 257). Works that strove after both expression and construction were rewarded with a “dubious consensus” (AT: 44). This in turn derives from Adorno’s own misgivings not only with regard to construction but with his commitments concerning the truth of art. What the experience of shudder reveals is its own repression: The I is seized by the unmetaphorical, semblance-shattering consciousness: that it itself is not ultimate but semblance. For the subject, this transforms art into what it is in-itself, the historical voice of repressed nature, ultimately critical of the principle of the I, that internal agent of repression. (AT: 246)

But we should wonder—as Lyotard did—whether Adorno remained too Hegelian in his understanding of the sensuous, ultimately seeing it as an object from which the artist seeks emancipation. Composition is about the will to power, at least this much, in that it is about the neverending, and never fully successful, search for domination of the material and “the overarching process of spiritualization: that of the progress of consciousness” (AT: 93–94). Here, in any case, he remains more Hegelian than Heidegger. Adorno declared that Schelling provided the connection between idealism and aesthetics in asserting that art is a kind of existent that becomes spiritual as a result of its configuration in nature (AT: 91). Heidegger claims that Schelling is important because he begins with nature. Indeed, Heidegger sees himself closer to Schelling than to Hegel, at odds with Adorno’s Schelling. For Adorno, what Schelling’s philosophy of art portends for idealist philosophy is the extension of human domination over nature to the extreme, albeit only in failure (AT: 77). It does so only in failure (as it did for Deleuze) because in idealism art becomes the petrification of the mimetic impulse in totality (AT: 91). For Heidegger,

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however, Schelling has “the profoundest grasp of the spirit.” When one begins with nature one recognizes nature as “the other” of the Absolute in a way denied to Hegel. As a result, “Schelling does not want to ‘spiritualize’ nature” (M: 233). Rather, Schelling prepared the way for the disclosure of Being through ontological difference in a way denied to negative dialectics. Being will be “other” than the simple distinctions of metaphysics, even distinctions such as those of force or power. Almost in the same irony with which Adorno sees art as helpless before the forces of history, revealing repressed or unreal reconciliation at the expense of real reconciliation, Heidegger will claim that Being emerges as “the powerless” (AT: 77–78; M: 166ff). If Adorno agreed with Heidegger that the work of art is a thing, that is, has ontological significance, he denied that Heidegger had grasped the history and the dialectic of their emergence (AT: 99). Klee wrote that “art plays in the dark with ultimate things and yet it reaches them”; this is true even if “we have found parts but not the whole” (N: 80, 95). After all, everywhere it has been the possible that is at stake. If, as Adorno too suggested, “art’s truth transcends the knowledge of reality as what exists,” it does so not only as “anamnesis of the vanquished” but also “perhaps of what is possible” (AT: 258–259). Adorno distinguishes this possibility from the timeless abstractness of phenomenological intuition and its pure essentiality: “It is not what it was fated to have been from time immemorial but rather what it has become” (AT: 352). At the same time, the possible is not simply invented, even if its exploration is, as Heidegger said of Nietzsche’s grasp of our relation to truth (B: 254). The possible is never simply possible per se but articulated between the contingent and the necessary: “necessitous Becoming” (N II: 91). This is the effect of Heidegger’s and Deleuze’s (and Klee’s) refusal to think of chaos as simple disorder. It is the origin of Heidegger’s claim that the more the work opens out the more it reveals “the uniqueness of the fact that it is rather than is not.” Adorno almost agreed, if he did so from within his more Hegelian account, that in its relation to chaos, to the unmastered, “spiritualization is antinomial” (AT: 94). Theories arguing that “art has the responsibility of bringing order—and, indeed, not a classificatory order but one that is sensuously concrete—to the chaotic multiplicity of the appearing or of nature itself, suppress in idealistic fashion the telos of aesthetic spiritualization: to give the historical figures of the natural and repression of the natural their due” (AT: 93). We are not far from Worringer’s theory of abstraction, endorsed by Klee. Adorno stresses that the

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chaos revealed in abstraction is the chaos of economic history, and this is specific chaos revealed in modern works of art. What gets repressed or forgotten in modern works of art for Heideg­ ger is the necessitous Becoming and differentiation of Being itself. It is precisely the oblivion and withdrawal of Being’s transcendence that is characteristic of modern works of art. The technological character of modernity determines the work of art in terms of installation and exhibition; it allows art to be understood only in terms of what can be made accessible, regulated, and planned (M: 25). Kitsch thus becomes autonomous, no longer recognizable as kitsch. Again the thesis is that modernity is not simply the application or invention of technology but technological out of its understanding of Being as calculable. In his 1938–39 lectures, Mindfulness, Heidegger singles out the cinema and photography over against historically known works of art, claiming that both have new norms corresponding to the present and the circulation of behaviors, fashions, and the current leveling of experience. Heidegger claims the cinema in itself is not “trashy,” but what it offers derives from the “machination” of lived experience. This becomes crucial to understanding the lack of discussion of modern works in Heidegger’s published writings. Modern art had been precluded from revealing Being, precluded from reaching beyond the calculable, the obvious, the pointillist present of lived experience. Like the instrumental construals that threaten the concepts of form and matter, this is all traceable to the concept of producibility that lies at the origin of modern art (M: 25). Now the Mindfulness lectures indicate that another understanding of the relation of the work of art and Being is possible, namely the one articulated, in “The Origin of the Work of Art” lectures, as “setting of the truth of being into work” (M: 27). The artists of such an understanding, he claims, are still to come. This is what makes Heidegger’s turn to Klee so significant and his apparent intention to write a second part of “The Origin of the Work of Art” so intriguing—and equally complicated. Heidegger condemned most of the art of his time to the evils of technology and bad metaphysics; the “Klee Notes” summary singles out surrealism, abstract art, objectless art (KN: 10). He ranked Klee high—higher than Picasso. But Klee too had apparently been too technological for Heidegger. He questioned whether Klee’s interest in formalism (equally eschewed by Adorno) might have been understood differently than as a matter of machination or the

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calculated control of instrumental rationality. Equally questionable is whether it can be interpreted in terms of the antinomy of attempted selfcontrol and its loss, or whether, to use Adorno’s terms, construction is “a process through which the subject ratifies its self abdication” (AT: 24). Adorno claimed (as did Heidegger more disparagingly) that the question of construction was unavoidable; “Construction is currently the only possible form that the rational element in the artwork can take” (AT: 57). Both perhaps thereby limited their understanding of the rational. Earlier, Heidegger’s limited understanding of formalism as calculative reductionism and its corresponding claims of inner objectivism and will to power were found lacking. A similar objection must be made here against Adorno’s claim that construction is “the extension of subjective domination, which conceals itself all the more profoundly the further it is driven” (AT: 57). For Adorno, such domination of the material is at stake in all creative expression, but modern art’s emphasis on construction occurs at the expense of the subjective, mimetic, and the expressive, substituting quantity for quality. In it Adorno found the fruition of Kant’s schematism once more: “The abstract transcendental and hidden subject of Kant’s theory of schematism becomes the aesthetic subject” (AT: 57). Following the romantics, Heidegger stressed the schematism as opening the hidden art or Spielraum of imagination. Adorno focuses on both its disjunction and alienation from reflective consciousness and its almost mechanistic rationalization of the (chaotic) manifold of experience through mathematical principles. Against Adorno, one can stress (as we did previously against Heidegger’s neo-Kantianism) the experimental character of such an exploration. Again, the Critique of Pure Reason envisioned itself less as an attempt to control nature in advance than a Copernican turn undertaken as an epistemic experiment to advance beyond Hume’s skepticism about nature. When it came to experiment, Adorno chose Shakespeare over ­Bacon, the victims of progress over progress itself (AT: 254–255). But, as Kant often exemplifies (and especially when not seen through neo-­K antian lenses), it is not clear that these are the only alternatives, nor that they are simple alternatives, either in science or in art. Klee’s experimentalism similarly belies such reductions. Christian Geelhaar has catalogued Klee’s differences with the more rigid formalism and functionalism of the Bauhaus, his figurative or expressive extension beyond the formal, and his insistence on the expressive and intuitive elements in the synthesis between architectonic and the poetic that he sought.29 This insistence contributed to his ul-

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timate departure from the Bauhaus. It involved precisely a heterogeneous synthesis that characterized his art as a whole—if anything did. Indeed, Klee’s work presents us with a multiplicity of styles, languages, and themes. Some stress what Adorno called the constructive, while others stress the more mimetic or the expressive. Each in turn expresses the claim that “in its present form” this “is not the only world possible” (N: 92). Klee knew too that the fusion between the architectonic and the poetic is never complete; it could never simply result in Adorno’s “happy mean” or grand synthesis. The dialectic between parts and wholes never attains closure. Like its theoretical interpretation, the formal always requires the augmentation of imagination. Even at his most scientific or formal, we can say of Klee’s gesture what Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy said about Schlegel’s attempts to “alternate between chaos and system”: without simply abandoning system or form, it internally acknowledges something that cannot be accommodated by either.30 But this does not imply that the formal and the expressive are simply distinct. Klee’s tendencies toward formalism, by which he theorized, for example, his graphic line, also sheds light on his work even when it is not formal, where it is still involved in its step beyond optics and surface, the interplay of deconstruction or dispersion (Zerstörung) and construction.31 The same was true of his more formal works, which are not intelligible without Klee’s understanding of construction as path, genesis, and motion—poiesis. He implicitly realized too, perhaps, that the rational suffered from incompleteness in art as much as it would in logic. Like theory in general, this means that the idea of a single theoretical solution would be illusory. For the same reason, it would be wrong to think that Klee becomes a certain test case for interpretations everywhere. No concept can be invoked here without acknowledging the underdeterminability that intervenes—neither the concept of force, the materialist concept of history, the call of Being, that of the immanent flesh of the world; nor the ascent (or decline) of sensation, etc. Moreover, this is not because there is no simple objective meaning to be had in interpretive matters, as is sometimes claimed; instead, as has become evident, objectivity in these matters is itself always scheme-specific. These concepts belong to developing theories and interpretations and transform an emergent theoretical history as these thinkers interpret their predecessors’ accounts and rearticulate them within their own projects. Deleuze’s Nietzsche may remain insufficiently attached to voluntarism, the body without organs simply committed to

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substituting “forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation” (TP: 151).32 But among other things, Deleuze’s Nietzsche interpretation is also responding to Heidegger’s phenomenological account. This was also true of Adorno’s aesthetic theory at points, though it is worth noting that his own critique of representationalism or duplication is at one point linked (not only, say, to Heidegger’s or Lukács’s accounts but) to Husserl’s (AT: 285–286). Never far from Husserl himself, Heidegger’s own Nietzsche interpretation, on the way to Gelassenheit, was transforming his own flirtation with voluntarism in his early works.33 What is to be affirmed now, Heidegger claims, is the “letting be” of the beyond contained in the sensuous oscillation, systole-diastole, out of which the truth of Being “vibrates.”34 We have followed this systole-diastole since encountering the ambiguity of sensation in Merleau-Ponty, but we have also found it in Klee and Heidegger, Lyotard and Deleuze. If interpretations are never completely determined, they are also not isolated. Just as it is barbaric to speak of an isolated literal meaning here, as Adorno saw, Merleau-Ponty claimed it would be equally barbaric to speak of “refutation” or “verification” (S: 10). Such verificationism has been long gone, not only in matters of aesthetics but even in the philosophy of science. It is true, as Heidegger once put it, that the “multiplicity of possible interpretations does not discredit the strictness of the thought content” (WCT: 71). What we can do is trace the dispersion of such interpretations’ historical and conceptual interaction, another instance of the oscillation between the factual and the possible. Especially concerning the concept of sensuousness itself, Adorno is right to insist that the difference between art and theory, precisely a difference between the sensuous and the conceptual, should not be forgotten. This is true even when the philosopher and the painter coincide in one body, as they did in Klee’s case. Heidegger would remind us that painting is not a simple act; the gathering of synthesis is not simply an event of will. If it is about resoluteness, it is about the resoluteness to overcome oneself in letting the Beautiful, the thing itself, be. It is a matter of acknowledging the truth, the beyond (or withdrawal) that such sensuousness possesses in itself. It is also true, at least since Kant, that divided between concept and intuition no theoretical articuleme exhausts the sensuousness of the work of art. If, as Adorno claimed, there is a nonsensuous element in art, even in concept-alien art (begriffsfernen Kunst), for example music, no conceptual work of art is ever simply devoid of sensuousness, never fully de-aestheticized (AT: 98).35

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Conceptually, the intelligibility of the work of art emerges only in plurality and multiplicity, part of a constellation without ultimate determination. Painters and interpreters articulate in their midst such a constellation of historical and theoretical possibilities, a constellation of concepts, works, perspectives, insight, and arguments. The rationality of interpretation emerges only in the inner oscillations this plurality articulates, divided between history and concept, experience and judgment. Like the others, Heidegger’s “Klee Notes” summary cites Klee’s famous dictum that art renders the invisible visible (KN: 8). Almost acknowledging this underdeterminability, even he asks precisely what is rendered visible: “What? Being?” (KN: 12). Yet, where is Klee in all this, who, as Heidegger also did not fail to note, said that art plays in the dark and reaches ultimate things (KN: 9)? As theoretically adroit as Klee may have been, it is perhaps precisely at this juncture that we meet his 1914 Tunisian annunciation: “Color possesses me [Die Farbe hat mich]” (D: 297).36 This too must be detached from primitivism or immanentism. It took him years to achieve the insight that was part of his final departure from representation, from the optical, first achieved with his graphic line. The difficulty is manifest: What could be more restrictedly a matter of the visible, or the optical, than color? What can be more obvious than that color is a presentation of the given? And what could be more obvious than that its concept is a pure taking, a pure grasp, a Be-griff, as Hegel insisted?37 What can it mean to say that color possesses me? Here again, Kant’s ontology of the sensible may assist us in grasping such possession. Kant saw with respect to moral conscience that at stake once more was a caesura, a reversal of representation and desire. As Kant put it concerning the moral law, “Virtue in its whole perfection is to be represented not as if man possessed virtue but as if virtue possessed man (sondern als ob die Tugend den Menschen besitz).”38 This marked precisely the sublimity of the moral conscience. Both Kant and Klee knew that it was the sublime that was stake. But Kant also claimed, in what Adorno calls a “dubious theorem,” that nothing sensuous can be sublime (AT: 90).39 Even Kant admitted that morality arises out of sensations in which we exceed ourselves and our egoistic desires. Were we lacking in the sensations morality required, as its “sensitive (ästhetisch)” and “natural predispositions,” we would be “morally dead.”40 For example, “Love is a matter of sensation, not of willing.”41

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In the third Critique Kant did in fact question, against Burke, whether sensations were beautiful in themselves. He wondered whether they depend on form, or at the very least the intuition of a time interval that is seemingly unperceived. Thus there would be a tacit judgment or differentiation involving the ratio in the vibrations in music, and by analogy colors.42 Both are connected not only to the consciousness of life but as connected to the feeling of pleasure and pain to the body; their synthesis is incarnate.43 In accord with reflective judgment, where the experience of the particular is given but the universal is only problematic, it involves an event that transcends us, precisely in transcending the chaos of brute particularity. But, as Merleau-Ponty, who relied throughout on Kant’s reflective judgment, put it, none of this can be simply reduced to a constitutive act overseen by a reflectively dominating Ich: “I am not the creator of time any more than of my heartbeats” (PhP: 427).44 As Merleau-Ponty came to emphasize, Schelling, no longer bound by Kant’s narrow (Humean or optical) account of intuition (or the later works’ tentative steps to supercede it), would not miss the implications of this event. Sounding almost like Klee’s cosmological terms, Schelling would speak of the connection between sound and time, sonority and rhythm in general, where rhythm is the music within music; similarly, drawing becomes the rhythm of painting. With color would emerge the fulfilled expression of the verity of things.45 Klee articulated such rhythms not only organically in the beating of the human heart but also not simply in the physiological sense: “Our pounding heart drives us deep down to the underground” (N: 93). It could be further associated with the cosmic rhythms of nature, of day and night, or the phases of the moon, or the seasons, and cultural rhythms. These rhythms all had formal overtones: the articulation of wholes and parts, individual and dividual (N: 268ff). Notwithstanding his constructivism, Klee sought hardest to articulate the rhythmics of color, “the place where the world and our brain meet.” Indeed, “Color and I are one” (D: 297). He refers at such moments to the complex figure “Art-Nature-Self” (D: 287). These are hieroglyphs, to use Novalis’s terms.46 He even refers, as did Novalis, to the Absolute or “Divine Ego” (D: 318). Klee’s ongoing quest for color attests both to this juncture between sensation and the invisible world and our need to abandon unnecessary reliance on the optic model to grasp its occurrence. This is what makes grasping color beyond impressionism both so difficult and so crucial. When Klee’s graphic line abandoned the optic,

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he also articulated it geometrically, a dynamic movement from point to line to plane. He equally construed color mathematically. Just as he could draw using the straight edge in a work such as Crescent Moon over the Rational (the front cover of this book), so in a work such as Ancient Harmony (Figure 4) Klee could assign chromatic variances “a reversible series of numbers in order to calculate the static and dynamic relations.”47 These squares retain links to cubism’s geometrical dissection of the surface of objects.48 But they are not simply about the surface, nor simply about the optical. Produced during the height of the Bauhaus years (1925), neither work could simply grasp formally what withdrew in their midst: the dissonance or wane of the crescent moon, or the black background of Ancient Harmony, of which Klee claimed, “we do not have to understand the black, it is the primeval ground.”49 Both indicate the rhythms and the withdrawal of an invisible world that vibrates through the visible and remains optically unpresentable. Indeed, in this unrepresentability Lyotard again found in Klee’s “magic squares” the “end of narrative” (ADev: 137).50 The world vibrates in and through color; color emerges through “the worlding of the world,” to use Heidegger’s terms, where sensuality has truly gained ontological status. Bonefand wrote that, in abandoning scenographic space, the flesh of Klee’s canvas steadily become part of the “flesh of the world” itself, rendering its invisible visible.51 Bonefand is using Merleau-Ponty’s terms without citing them. Following Klee, MerleauPonty claimed that color is a dimension that generates the rhythms in question of itself, the event in which “the caesura” of the visible and the invisible originates (EM: 166). It is not a question of color as a simulacrum of the colors of nature; “The question, rather concerns the dimension of color, that dimension which creates identities, differences, a texture, a materiality, a something—creates them from itself, for itself” (EM: 181). Yet even he acknowledges that in thus rendering the invisible visible, it is not a question of granting primacy to the visual. Adorno claimed that granting prominence to the visual, “the sensuously unmediated,” confuses reality and appearance and thus accedes to the illusory obviousness of “bourgeois consciousness” (AT: 94f). It remains, in Klee terms, like impressionism, linked to “everyday appearances,” thus a matter of optics (N: 93). Notwithstanding his initial commitments concerning the primacy of perception, Merleau-Ponty came to realize that there was no choice to be made between color and space; there is “no one master key of the visible” (EM: 181). He denied the hierarchy of artistic potencies for which

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Schelling had argued, articulating the intertwining of the visible and the visible at stake in art through what he, too, called the “rhythm of the event of the world” (VI: 196)—or as Heidegger’s “Klee Notes” summary put it, the Beautiful must be understood through the event, the Ereignis itself and its corresponding seeing that it makes visible (Er-blicken; KN: 11).52 How, for Merleau-Ponty, does color articulate the texture of the visible? His answer too is that “it surpasses itself of itself”; it is inherently ontological in disclosing a wealth beyond itself. Without speaking of the particularity and universality, for example, of the yellow of this colored thing, say, the golden yellow of Van Gogh’s sunflowers, both are now rendered problematic. If Merleau-Ponty acknowledges, with Deleuze, a haecceitas that can be reduced neither to subject nor to substance, he still affirms that “sensoriality = transcendence, or a mirror of transcendence” (VI: 217). Or, to cite Nancy’s Heideggerean version, color is “a coming into presence” that “has a meaning” but this beyond is not, strictly taken, a meaning anymore, nor “in reality is it beyond.”53 Merleau-Ponty famously criticized Heidegger’s strict distinction between appearance and being, the ontic and the ontological. Heidegger, he claimed, refused “all the mirrors of Being” (Themes: 112). Notwithstanding their differences here on the issue of the sensuousness, on the event of seeing, to use Sartre’s terms for their relation, “their paths crossed.”54 This may be because to use Lyotard’s terms color is not simply a quality, surely not a “secondary quality” but an event whose peculiar virtue is to “irradiate” a “chromatic world” (MP: 110). It dissipates mere appearance as much as it presents the thing; this is both the “ascent” and the “fall” (Deleuze’s Lucretian clinamen) of sensation, systole and diastole. In truth, as Cézanne’s distortions already made clear, it does neither simpliciter. It may still be a Darstellung, but if so it is one that cannot represent or be represented (MP: 110). The contradiction that Hegel attributed to sense certainty—that it would need to be both a universal and a singular—had gone too far on both counts. It involved neither mere certainty attained in a universal nor the mere particularity of sensation or impression, strictly taken neither Sinn nor Bedeutung. When Deleuze criticized aesthetics and Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to a good or common sense, he reinvoked Hegel’s argument concerning the dissonance and incoherence that attaches itself to the harmonies of perception. Here, perhaps, it comes back to haunt him. Merleau-Ponty’s realism (like his naturalism) became transformed. It did so, breaking with

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Husserl, beginning already with the account in Phenomenology of Perception of the problematic character of the sensible (le sentir), understood as a vague solicitation. Deleuze’s argument still follows the Hegelian account. He agrees that the sensible is not simply a quality but this is because, for Deleuze, it is implicitly a sign: “It is not a quality but a sign. It is not a sensible being but the being of the sensible. It is not the given but that by which the given is given” (DR: 140). It is in this respect that “Hegel’s phenomenology short circuits this aspect of sensation, which nonetheless forms the basis for every possible aesthetic” (FB: 156n). But, as has become clear, the sensuous will not answer to Hegel’s gloss on sense certainty. The paradoxical existence of sense certainty presupposes the very logic of representation that sensibility disavows; Deleuze’s “logic of sensation,” a term that he takes from Cézanne, still belongs to Hegel. In turning to the logic of the sign, Deleuze’s account of sensation remains representational despite itself. It by no means authorizes the inversion of (Hegelian) representation in the encounter of the “monstrosity” of its “limits”—the reappearance of the surrealist’s limit experience—that Deleuze outlines either for thought (Artaud) or image (Rivière; DR: 146). We are reminded that the logic of the sign is always unstable, always deterritorializing (TP: 112).55 Deleuze’s argument bars unmediated or dogmatic realism by acknowledging a transcendental illusion within it. Still, schizophrenia is a limit possibility of human experience, but it is only that (AO: 245). Again Deleuze cites Heidegger for all this: “Man can think in the sense that he possesses the possibility to do so. This possibility alone, however, is no guarantee to us that we are capable of thinking” (DR: 144). But this absence of a guarantee is what authorizes the “problematic” explorations of the Seinsfrage Deleuze endorsed. It is this problematic character that renders its account of the schematism, for Heidegger, experimental, detaching it from any presupposed logic of identity and representation. The explorations of the Seinsfrage, beginning with the sensible encounter, never lose their interrogative status. In Heidegger’s term, they originate in a rapture that explores the possibility that sensuousness is ontological in itself—or in Merleau-Ponty’s terms, that sensoriality “mirrors” transcendence. Still, what becomes of history under such conditions, the fragmented radiance that has turned black? Adorno himself has said that as the notion of representation became jettisoned from art, it was inevitable that the elements thus set free (colors, sounds, configuration of words) began

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to express something in themselves. But, like the polylogue of interpretation itself, these elements become meaningful “only through the context in which they occur” (AT: 90). Hence, the notion that “red itself possesses an expressive value was an illusion” (AT: 90–91). So is the idea that multitonal sounds are expressive values in themselves; such sounds were in fact predicated on the insistent negation of traditional sounds (AT: 91). ­Merleau-Ponty claimed in Phenomenology of Perception that “it would probably be impossible to graduate to atonal music without passing through classical music” (PhP: 190). When in the preceding passage he speaks to the transcendence of sensuousness, he would repeat the analogy between color and tone in his final writings in discussing the rhythm or transposition of the sensuous. Here too we will find echoes of Klee’s “primordial underground” and the sensible understood as the opening of a world or cosmos, stressed by Grohmann in his analysis of “Alter Klang” (Ancient Harmony or Sound). Like Grohmann, who compared Klee and Schönberg at this point, Merleau-Ponty too stresses atonal music.56 And if Adorno insisted on the historical mediation at stake in the sensible, and the risk of overparticularization in its analysis, he too denied the Hegelian idea’s ultimate resolution of the difference between the sensible and the intelligible. As much as Merleau-Ponty, who found in Proust a model for the sensible idea, Adorno emphasized Proust’s analysis of Vermeer’s patch of yellow wall or Schönberg’s attention to “the instinctual life of sounds”57 (Meta: 135–136). But how does one avoid the contradiction between the universal and the particular, between the particular and its world? Again invoking Bachelard’s account of the elements with its claim that “each sense has its own imaginary” (VI: 245), here is how Merleau-Ponty began his response: The alleged “contradiction” between the yellow as some thing and the yellow as the title of a world: this is not a contradiction, for it is precisely within its particularity as yellow and through it that the yellow becomes a universe or an element—That a color can become a level, a fact become a category (exactly as in music: describe a note as particular, i.e. in the field of another tone—and “the same” note that has become that within whose key a music is written) = the veritable movement [marche] toward the universal. The universal is not above, it is beneath (Claudel), it is not before, but behind us—atonal music = the equivalent of the philosophy of Being in indivision. Like paintings without identifiable things, without the skin of things, but giving their flesh—The Transponierbarkeit is a particular case of a more general transposition of which atonal music is the thematization. (VI: 218)

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The relation between music and painting was ever present in Klee’s work, as Ancient Harmony (Alter Klang) again attests. It is essential to his denial that drawing or painting are simply spatial arts: “More and more parallels between music and graphic art force themselves upon my consciousness. Yet no analysis is successful. Certainly both arts are temporal” (D: 177). Adorno thought that Beethoven’s late quartets had fought the reification in Hegel’s concept of the Idea, casting off the conventions of harmonious modernity. Klee prized them also; with his concept of creative chaos in mind, he spoke again of our disruption and dispossession: “In Beethoven’s music, especially in the late works, there are themes that do not allow the inner life to pour itself out freely but shape it into a selfcontained song” (D: 176). We are perhaps again proximate to Schelling’s account of rhythm as “the music in music.” As Schelling reminded us, both music and painting emerge through rhythm, through differentiation. Again, Merleau-Ponty was not far removed in asserting that they emerge through the event of the rhythm of the world. The cosmological rhythm of Klee’s graphic line would reemerge in the rhythm and movement of color itself. Klee notes that yellow is prejudiced toward brightness. As it darkens, its color characteristic is lost in favor of green, articulating and disarticulating the surface.58 Pure color thus can be “true only for an instant. . . . The characteristic sign for an instant is the point” (N: 496). In such transcendence we are beyond pointalism, beyond the instant and beyond the sign. Instead, this means again that a certain primordial historicity (and in the account of abstraction, the ruins of history itself) is always at work; “Time is an essential factor in the pictorial field” (N: 503). Sounding more like Klee, Merleau-Ponty states of this complicated intuition, “the sensible itself is invisible . . . yellow is capable of setting itself up as a level or horizon” (VI: 237). In stressing the interrelation or movement (and not the speculative identity) between fact and essence here, Merleau-Ponty is attending to the expressive character of color and tone and as interrelated constellations of expression; they are color and tones of a world and a world historical. In the same text he connects the sensible and language, again denying the Hegelian account: What is proper to the sensible (as to language) is to be representative of the whole, not by a sign-signification relation, or the immanence of the parts in one another and in the whole, but because each part is torn up from the whole, comes with its roots, encroaches upon the whole, transgresses the frontiers of the others. (VI: 218)

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We are reminded again of Klee’s tree parable, where from the “primordial underground” the artist is the trunk or the conduit for the sap from the roots “that flows through him and his eyes” (N: 82). In saying that such expressivity functions “not by a sign-­signification relation,” Merleau-Ponty is denying that such expressivity is simply overseen by a reductive act or a speculative subject, or regulated by a propositional or representational grid. Elsewhere he will deny that the unmotivated upsurge of brute being (and even its “hidden god”) can be sacrificed to the Ens realissimum of Leibniz’s theodicy, repeating Kantian and Heideggerean charges against ontotheology (VI: 211). This was true even if the Phenomenology’s foundationalism still alluded to the world of lived experience in precisely these terms (PhP: 398n). Now he insisted that such être sauvage emerges only through écart, differentiation, or by “oscillation,” to use Lyotard’s term. From the beginning, Merleau-Ponty realized that I don’t possess ­color: “The sensible takes possession of my ear or my gaze, and I surrender a part of my body, even my whole body, to this particular manner of vibrating and filling space known as blue or red” (PhP: 212). It escapes the constitutions and subsumptions of reflection. I subsume it less than I exhibit, differentiate, vary, and transform its possibilities. Following Mallarmé, Merleau-Ponty said just this about expressive possibilities, or silence, in conventional language (S: 44). Again, neither is devoid of the dialectic that Adorno was insisting on between expression and history. Merleau-Ponty ultimately concurred that his analysis of the visible was “already an exercise in history” (VI: 186).59 But, as has been seen, a lacuna occurs in his work insofar as Merleau-Ponty does not connect these considerations to specific analysis of the historical (and what elsewhere he called the historical imagination and the symbolic interworld; IPP: 56). Lyotard, however, points out that, unlike even the fort / da between concept and intuition, discourse / figure of the Freudian economics, which presupposes definite reference, color never fully becomes a cultural object; this subtracts it from theory as well as from contextual explication (MP: 110). In all these senses, it never fully becomes our possession. Still, how does one “play in the dark and yet reach ultimate things”? Since Schiller, the concept of play has stood at the center of aesthetics. It was, moreover, never far from the Wechselspiel of dialectics. For reasons similar to his concerns about overemphasizing the visual or the immediately sensuous, Adorno had problems with the concept of play. Over­

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emphasis on the sensuous restricts art to appearance, thus reinforcing current realities, but the concept of play involves childlike regression into unfreedom: “Only when play exposes its own terror, as in Beckett, does it in any way share in art’s power of reconciliation” (AT: 317). Klee was not unaware of this, as Benjamin’s use of his angels evidences. What is omitted in play is history, anamnesis, memory. Memory too is overdetermined and must be won back from the darkness. As Hegel realized, memory is a nightlike pit; image and enlightenment themselves must be born out of Novalis’s night.60 As Derrida put it with respect to drawing, anamnesis always emerges out of a certain amnesia (MB: 208). The past always emerges from fragments. For Hegel, out of the darkness of image, creative imagination (Phantasie) allows the linking together of images, symbolization, and once again signs.61 Devoid of such speculative identity, however, in becoming experimental the play of imagination becomes as unavoidable as it may be dangerous. Indeed, just as he acknowledges art’s enigmatic sensuousness (as a hieroglyph in need of interpretation), Adorno similarly acknowledged that art without the contingencies of play is no more thinkable than if it were totally without repetition (AT: 316). In the shadow of such contingency we realize that there is, from the beginning, a crescent moon over the rational, but not one ineffably beyond the experiment of reason’s venture. If the crescent moon articulates a withdrawal into the night, for Klee the crescent moon is also a dividual, again understood by a logic of parts and wholes that ultimately escapes it.62 Our memory is not all behind us, however. Memory is not, as Heidegger put it, simply a power to retain, but also the exploration of what withdraws: “Retention by memoria refers as much to what is past as to what is present and to come” (WCT: 18, 140). Deleuze stressed the paradoxical relation between empirical memory and transcendental or representational memory, the one contingent and the other a reminiscence of the immemorial past. He sought to substitute forgetting for anamnesis, experimentation for interpretation (DR: 140; TP: 151). We will not have to choose. Indeed, we will need them all to grapple with the event at stake, as Deleuze’s own work with Proust’s mémoire testifies. Arguing that painting is just such a form of anamnesis, Lyotard claimed that anamnesis is “interminable” (MP: 102). It involves a question, a task, and a debt never fulfilled. And, as close as Heidegger’s account of Gelassenheit was to Klee at points, even Gelassenheit, as has been seen, was insufficient to grasp Klee’s experiment at this point. If Merleau-Ponty claimed that the transcendence of the sensible

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emerges not from above but from beneath us, he too would ultimately relent. He also realized that “the originary is not of one sole type, it is not all behind us,” but must be ceaselessly confronted and articulated anew (VI: 124). If not everywhere, perhaps, here “the very idea of a complete statement [énoncé complet] is inconsistent” (S: 17). From early on, and arguably much earlier than Merleau-Ponty’s formulation of it, the sensible was experienced as “a vague beckoning before which I must find the reply to a question that is obscurely expressed.” In the question of the beyond that “sensuousness possesses in itself,” we confront the issue of our narratives, our selves, and others, our “other selves.” As Heidegger put it, “Every bodily state involves some way in which the things around us and the people with us lay claim on us or do not do so” (N: 99). His final publication on art, “Art and Space” (1969), ends however by denying that truth is dependent on such embodiment (AS: 8). Instead, he cites Goethe and once more the romantic’s hovering: “It is not always necessary that what is true embody itself; it is already enough if spiritually it hovers [Schweben] about and evokes harmony, if it floats through the air like the solemn and friendly sound of a bell” (AS: 8). Luce ­Irigaray criticized this view of Heidegger’s, wondering whether it abandons the only origin granted to mortals. In particular, she suggests, Heidegger has forgotten the difference between gendered bodies that generates this rhythm, hovering not above but between and through bodies—and where specifically she (elle) generates this air.63 Whether or not one privileges sexual difference in this regard, this much is true. If truth does not depend on embodiment, it does not follow that it is independent from embodiment, that it doesn’t participate in the question of sensuousness, or that the hovering of truth is not already at stake within it. All these cases involve narratives of affirmation and rapture, immanence and withdrawal, flesh and transcendence, voluptuousness (and in Klee’s case, vulnerability) and mystery.64 Even Lyotard affirmed in his reading of Klee’s magic squares that the end of narrative is not its simple demise: “A narrative will still be possible, but only as one realization among others” or “the emergence of structure” (ADev: 137). Again, as Levinas knew, it would be a mistake to think we have departed thereby from matters of the flesh. As Levinas put it, sensuousness in its exposure or palpation “binds the node of incarnation into a plot larger than the apperception of the self.”65 It is at this point that we encounter Klee’s “ethical gravity,” which coexists with “impish tittering,” the work of art, both as

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play and as problem. There arises in the very factum est of the sensible, the problematic of distance, its encounter, the work, and the sketching out (Aufzeichnung) or schematism of truth (OWA: 61; cf. KPM: 65). Hence there emerges Heidegger’s worry that Nietzsche “does not inquire into the work as such, at least not in the first place” (N: 114). In the end, Heidegger claimed that Nietzsche had already succumbed to the leveling of modernity, “lived experience,” and the occlusion of art within it. However much he depended on both Hegel and Nietzsche, Heideg­ger ultimately divided the failed metaphysics of the “rational animal” between them: Hegel, in “absolute reason,” Nietzsche, in the “earthly virtues” of the body (M: 21). Adorno thought that even Hegel’s definition of Beauty as “the sensuous semblance of idea presupposes the concept of the idea as the concept of absolute spirit” (AT: 352). Badiou thought similarly of Hegel’s proximity to Deleuze’s emphasis on sensuousness. Adorno hoped nonetheless that the idea of spirit in works of art could survive its collapse. He insisted no less that Heidegger’s account of art as a thing merely dignified its historical reification. But even he acknowledged that lived experience is “indispensable to aesthetic knowledge,” precisely in order to encounter the “tremor” that art provoked (AT: 353). What is remarkable is how these thinkers were dividing up the ruins of the system between them— and how persistently Klee seemed to offer them a way out. One means by which Klee did so, as Clement Greenberg realized as early as 1950, was by articulating a way beyond the nostalgic (and reified) idealism of Winckelmann and German classicism. If he too thought “one has to bring in the history of German idealist philosophy with its penchant for explaining the world by dialectics in order to account for him,” Greenberg thought Klee’s transformation of that past became critical for those in his wake.66 It has been suggested that Klee did not ultimately discover the flesh and fragility of history until his final decade. Perhaps only then, through the force of circumstance, of history and mortality, would his work finally confront a realm beyond phantasy and utopia. The idea of “utopia of a purely dynamic work of art” or “a kind of Aristophanic castle for flyers and balloons” would further encounter Sophocles.67 Only then, to use another of his formulations, did his work fully reveal that “the formal must fuse,” not only with the poetic but “with the Weltanschauung” (D: 374).68 Only then perhaps do we discover not simply the possibility but again “the debt of painting.” The Durcharbeitung of the artistic process, from the start associated with the artists’ need for dignity, would further acquire

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ethical connotations: not simply a matter of wit or irony but also one of “ethical gravity,” and responsibility. The sensuousness at stake was never simply a matter of gratification, but both a matter of the sublime and of vulnerability. The Beautiful, in any case, cannot simply be opposed to the ugly or to evil. It is not simply the promesse de bonheur; it broaches the question of the Good. The Good and the Beautiful are not the same; to think so threatens to turn art into a message. Still, all this was not far from Adorno’s claim that, for us, radiance has turned black, Heidegger’s mourning, and all that both found ominous in Klee. Both insisted that “for the sake of the Beautiful there is no longer beauty: because it is no longer Beautiful” (AT: 53). The Beautiful had withdrawn. But, not far from Heidegger, even Adorno insisted that the Beautiful (like the Good) perdures here as question. It does so, Klee realized, out of the possibility that, even in darkness or ignorance (Unwissen), art may reveal ultimate things (N: 80).

Notes

Introduction 1.  Martin Heidegger, Toward the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 99. 2.  These terms, which were revived by Michel Foucault in a famous article on Deleuze with the same title, derive from Francis Bacon’s New Organon. It alerts us to the complicated relation to science (and technology) that both philosophy and aesthetics will have in modern philosophy. Klee’s work would provide further evidence of this complicated relationship. Foucault sought to find in Deleuze a new philosophy of the event that had eluded neopositivism, Phenomenology, and the philosophy of history alike. We are reminded that Bacon’s own concerns with philosophy as theatrum or spectacle emerged concomitantly with his experimentalism and his critique of the syllogism as the standard of the rational. This, in turn, generated what he called the problem of the “interpretation of nature,” one arguably still contested in the wake of neopositivisms and Phenomenology. Such concerns about experimentalism, as Foucault or Deleuze would attest (both of whom appealed to Klee in this regard; Klee himself spent considerable time worrying about artistic experiment) would thus accompany the history of modernity both at its inception and in its aftermath. See Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum” in Language, Counter Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1977). See Francis Bacon, The New Organon, para. 6–15. 3.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1955), p. 183. 4.  O.K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History,” Oppositions, No. 25 (Fall 1982), p. 104. Without denying their metaphysical differences, Werckmeister concludes concerning their theoretical projects: “Both men relied on the validity of a subjective stance for the simultaneous work of total critical destruction and total synthesis” (122). 5.  As will become further evident here, I agree with the attempts of recent thinkers to stress the links (albeit not ones of simple continuity) among classical German thought, German Romanticism, and more recent thought. See Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millan-Zaibert (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004). Also see Philippe Lacoue-Labarth and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988). 6.  Compare in this respect Klee’s 1927 Limits of Reason (1927: 293), where the same iconography is at play, with the exception of an abstract face that appears at the bottom 183

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and ladders that lead toward a heavenly body. The celestial moon, in various phases, plays a role in a number of Klee’s works. 7.  One thinks here, for example, of the ongoing debates among Hayden White, Stanley Fish, and Richard Rorty. A recent discussion can be found in Hayden White and the History / Literature Debate, ed. Kuisma Korhonen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006). 8.  The neo-Kantian background of the distinction between form and content, universal and particularism has been established by a number of scholars, among them Michael Friedman. See his A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). Within these protocols, following Husserl and Heidegger’s rejection of Natorp, I argue for a genetic, problematical, and developmental account of the concrete—and, in particular, the understanding of Klee’s work. 9.  Herbert Read, A Concise History of Modern Painting (New York: Praeger, 1959), p. 186. 10.  Clement Greenberg, “Essay Two,” in Five Essays on Paul Klee, ed. Merle Armitage (New York: Duell Sloano & Pearce, 1950), p. 60. 11.  As has been well known since Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the task of interpreting an event that “provokes thought into reflection,” one for which we have no determinate concepts in advance, is a matter especially exemplified by aesthetic rationality. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 182. Still, the interpretive claim here is that the opposition with other forms of rationality should not be taken as absolute. In any case, Klee himself was clearly committed to such particularism. Notwithstanding his careful theoretical works, this is how his “distaste for theorizing” vis-à-vis Franz Marc should be understood: “Healthy ideas arise from concrete cases” (D: 324). Similarly, notwithstanding his copious study of the history of art and historians, such as Burckhardt, none of this could be reduced to art history. Though a careful reader of art historians, Klee stated, “I don’t want to examine the common feature of a series of works or the differences between two series of works—no such pursuit of history for me—but to consider the individual act in itself, and were it only a single work that accidentally had the luck to become good, as recently happened with two or three of my ‘paintings’ ” (D: 238–239). 12.  See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1953), p. 80. 13.  Moreover, such “inter-ludes” can be taken literally, a rationality constituted through these interpretations’ inter-play, their inter-luder and the tacit dialectic or Wechsel­spiel they outline. 14.  As Claude Imbert has suggested, early Wittgenstein and early Merleau-Ponty in their respective appeals to formalism and expressivism represent in this regard two antinomies in modern philosophy of language. See Claude Imbert, Phénoménologie et langues formulaires (Paris: PUF, 1992). Such antinomies ultimately impact Husserl’s account. Prior to Badiou, Jean Cavaillès and Jean-Toussaint Desanti contested the determinacy Husserl’s transcendental logic had sought. See the latter’s Les idéalités mathématiques (Paris: Seuil, 1968), pp. 94–104. 15.  On Klee’s architectonic concept of dividual, see, for example, Rainer Crone, “Cosmic Fragments of Meaning: On the Syllables of Paul Klee,” in Rainer Crone and Joseph

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Leo Loerner, Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 18ff. 16.  To recall the structural and logical implications of such a Wechsel returns us to its Fichtean origins, modeled on the structure of “interdetermination” transferred from mathematics, albeit one that immediately acknowledges, precisely in accord with the underdeterminability previously outlined, “an ambiguity in the concept of reality itself.” See J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath, John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982) p. 129. As with Klee, Fichte’s appeal to the mathematical model must be understood in terms of his distinction between the letter and its spirit, that is, its transformation by “creative imagination” (250). The empirical difference outlined in their history is what in principle distinguishes these “interpretive renderings” from false or illusory totalization—or to use a term of Deleuze’s, “orgiastic representation.” 17.  See Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 182ff, 214ff.

Chapter 1 1.  See P: 146ff. Also see Otto Pöggeler, Bild und Technik: Heidegger, Klee, und die moderne Kunst (München: Wilhelm Fink, 2002). 2.  See Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 3.  See Friedrich Schlegel, On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnett (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), p. 35; Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), p. 25 (the latter is Athenaeum Fragment 58, attributed to August W. Schlegel). I have further discussed these issues in Tradition(s): Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), chap. 4. 4.  For the sake of consistency throughout this book, I will capitalize “Beautiful” as a noun but not as an adjective. This will require altering some of the standard translations (but not others, hence the consistency issue). 5.  See my “Beyond the Speaking of Things: Merleau-Ponty’s Reconstruction of Phenomenology and the Models of Kant’s Third Critique,” Philosophy Today, 2008 Supplement. 6.  As will become further evident, Klee denies that there is a beautiful “in itself,” or that the Beautiful and the ugly can be simply separated, or that the Beautiful attaches to substantial content. 7.  See Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power / Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980). 8.  See PI. Throughout his work, Merleau-Ponty carried on an extensive dialogue with Sartre’s account of imagination, continuously questioning the Cartesian and dualist framework of Sartre’s account. Although this dialogue is evident from early on, MerleauPonty’s differences become ultimately explicit in the later work. See VI: 39ff; 266. The first work of art reproduced in “Eye and Mind,” a drawing of a man by Giacometti, reiterates this dialogue. Sartre’s 1954 “The Paintings of Giacometti” had similarly focused, as would Merleau-Ponty, on the line as an “interrogative apparition” that conveys “arrested flight,” but it is the question of the “vacuum” that drives it; Sartre maintained that “the real is absolute positivity” and that “there is no transition from being to nothingness.” Yet

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“emptiness seeps in everywhere.” See “The Paintings of Giacometti,” in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (Greenwich Conn.: Fawcett, 1969), pp. 128–129, 131. For Merleau-Ponty, painting is less about the vacuum, which derives from the technical metaphysics of modern science Merleau-Ponty will criticize, than the density of being where “depth, color, form, line, movement, contour physiology” are all dimensions and hence “interstices” of being and transcendence (EM: 188). This further explains his choice of Klee as model. 9.  See G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf, H. S. Harris (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), p. 187. 10.  Throughout, the influence of Eugen Fink remained significant in these transformations. See my In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I (London: Continuum, 2009), Introduction. 11.  Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: the Colored Works in the Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern: Kornfeld, 1979), p. 32. 12.  See Wassily Kandinsky, “Concerning the Spiritual in Art,” in Complete Writings on Art, Eds. K. Lindsayk, P. Vergo (London, 1982). 13.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 183. 14.  Ibid, p. 214. 15.  See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1973), p. 111 (A76 / B102). Here I follow (as does Merleau-Ponty) Heideg­ ger’s Kant interpretation, and in particular his gloss on this passage. See KPM: 41. 16.  See Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), p. 44. 17.  Kant, p. 167 (B154). 18.  J. G. Fichte, The Science of Rights, trans. A. E. Kroeger (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), pp. 89–90. 19.  This new account of intentionality is not without Schellingian overtones. See Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism?, trans. Sabine Wilke, Richard Gray (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 276ff. 20.  See Martin Heidegger, “A Dialogue on Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 18. 21.  Clement Greenberg, “2,” in Five Essays on Klee, p. 56. 22.  See F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), pp. 221–222. 23.  Clement Greenberg, “A Critical Exchange with Herbert Read on ‘How Art Writing Earns Its Bad Name,’ ” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), p. 149. 24.  These neo-Kantian commitments are evident in Greenberg’s, 1960 “Modernist Painting,” ibid., pp. 85–93. For further discussion of this issue, see my “Criticism and the Closure of Modernism,” SubStance, no. 42, pp. 15–30. 25.  See O. K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History,” p. 122. 26.  See, for example, Jürgen Glaesemer, “Klee and German Romanticism,” in Paul Klee: His Life and Work, ed. Carolyn Lanchner (New York: Hatje Cantz, 2001).

Notes to Pages 22–28  187

27.  See G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 40. 28.  Jean Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” trans. Theodore Kisiel, in Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences, ed. Joseph J. Kocklemans, Theodore Kisiel (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 409. The preface to Merleau-­Ponty’s Sense and Non-Sense probably reflects Cavaillès influence. See SNS: 3–4. Both were involved in the task of undertaking what Fink called Phenomenology’s “archaeology.” On Merleau-Ponty’s and Cavaillès relationship in the early forties, see H. L. Van Breda, “Merleau-Ponty and the Husserl Archives at Louvain,” in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Texts and Dialogues, ed. High J. Silverman, James Barry Jr. (Atlantic Highlands, N.J: Humanities Press, 1992), pp. 150–161. 29.  Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978), p. 179. 30.  See Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee, His Work and Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 289. 31.  See Jenny Anger, Paul Klee and the Decorative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). As Anger notes, this conflict concerning the decorative was internal to modernism since Kant and played an important role in Klee’s background and in his development. Klee’s own synthesis of the poetic and the architectonic in turn, knowingly or not, played a significant role in its transformation. One might consider similarly, as did Sartre, the conflict between the lyricism and childlike innocence of our incarnation and the realities of history and dialectic that coincide in Merleau-Ponty’s thought. See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty,” in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (New York: Fawcett, 1965). 32.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 36. 33.  See Galen Johnson, “Thinking in Color: Merleau-Ponty and Paul Klee,” in Merleau-Ponty: Difference, Materiality, Painting, ed. Veronique M. Fóti (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996), p. 173. 34.  Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant Garde 1912–1940,” Paul Klee His Life and Work, ed. Carolyn Lancher (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2001), p. 71. 35.  Recent secondary literature on Klee has focused on this interaction. See, for example, Marianne Vogel, Zwischen Wort und Bild: Das Schriftliche Werk Paul Klees und die Rolle der Sprache in seinem Denken und seiner Kunst (München: Scaneg, 1992); Jean Laude, “Paul Klee: lettres, ‘écriture,’ signes,” in Anne Marie Christin (ed.), Ecritures: Systèmes idéographiques et practiques expressives (Paris, 1982). Also see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, Leon S. Roudiz (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 36.  Klee does not name Schelling, but leading Klee scholars have not missed the link. See, for example, Glaesemer, “Klee and German, Romanticism,” p. 22. 37.  G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. II, trans. T. M. Know (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 721. Like Merleau-Ponty, Adorno stressed the notion of determinate negation and denied the idea of a complete surpassing or totalization. 38.  See Novalis, Fichte Studies, ed. Jane Kneller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 6–7. 39.  See James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Random House, 1961), p. 34.

188  Notes to Pages 28–31

40.  In this respect the Freudian thesis remains, to use a term of Nancy and LacoueLabarthe’s, “homoiotical,” regulating the economics of Being’s plurality through reference beyond it, a pros hen. Interpretation is reserved to the critic and to judgment; it belongs to the economy of representation. To put it simply, the artist does not epistemically interpret. See Jean Luc-Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, trans. Francois Rafould, David Pettigrew (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 133ff. 41.  Such a conception brings Merleau-Ponty close to Gaston Bachelard, who influenced his later accounts of the flesh and the rapprochement it entailed between phenomenology and psychoanalysis. Against the classical account of sublimation, Bachelard argued for a dialectical conception. This in turn may bring him close to Adorno’s negative dialectic (and it does), but it also distances him from it; instead of Adorno’s stress on a skeptical notion of critique with its agonized account of imagination, Bachelard argued for a more felicitous (even joyful) account of imagination, part of his experimental account of reason. The latter substitutes “for the unconscious repression a conscious repression, a constant will to self-correction.” See Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan M. Ross (Beacon Press, 1984), p. 100. We shall return to this account in Chapter 3, tracing its lineaments in Bachelard’s (and Merleau-Ponty’s) emergence from surrealism. Here, to use terms on which both Merleau-Ponty and Adorno concur, tradition is a kind of forgetting. 42.  For further discussion of Merleau-Ponty’s conceptual transformation of the classical phenomenological research program, see my In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I (London: Continuum, 2009), and, in particular, regarding Saussure, chap. 2. 43.  Like others, Merleau-Ponty interpreted the Saussurian diacritics through the dialectic or Wechsel between the synchronic and the diachronic. What authorizes such an interpretation is the temporal synthesis usage (and its analysis) presupposes, without being reducible to a constituting consciousness or the contents of a discrete idiolect. Moreover this is not to deny the mathematical model or the functional or syntactic determination of meaning. In this regard, as shall become further evident, it incorporates the classical account of Wechselspiel that underlies dialectic, whose “interdetermination,” as Lukács notes, emerges from the mathematical model (“whether I choose to count backward or forward is a matter of complete indifference”). See Fichte, Science of Knowledge, p. 129. See the analysis of Lukács in History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingston (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 116–119. Still, this dialectical transformation, based as it is upon reflective and differential judgment, also acknowledges that such interdetermination is always opened, underdetermined, and subject to transformation. Hence, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, still with the phenomenological imaginative variation in hand, “Language is history i.e. variation of a convention always vorgegeben” (NC: 127). 44.  Eye and Mind opens by characterizing science as an “admirably active, ingenious and bold way of thinking” (EM: 159). His point is that “for all its fluency, science must still understand itself ” and “must return to the ‘there is’ which underlies it” (EM: 160).

Notes to Pages 31–37  189

While Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty seem very close on this point, Merleau-Ponty’s (partial) affirmation of formalism is perhaps missing in Heidegger’s account, threatening to turn it “premodern.” It is a search for “a direct expression” of Being, “the result of his refusal of all the mirrors of Being” (Themes: 111–112). 45.  Kathryn Kramer, “Myth Invisibility, and Politics in the Late Work of Paul Klee,” in Language of Visuality: Crossings Between Science, Art, Politics, and Literature, ed. Beate Allert (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 182. 46.  The complexity of Merleau-Ponty’s account of language becomes evident again in his appeals to classical expressivist accounts (von Humboldt) and even the surrealists in interpreting the algorithmic account of Saussure. See S: 88, 233ff. The resulting account of the phenomenology of speech is not without history, convention, institution, or norm. 47.  See Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Citadel Press, 1946), p. 230. Each being is claimed to have “its own way of undulating,” and the secret of the art of drawing, as he quotes Leonardo, “is to discover in each object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line which is, so to speak, its generating axis, is directed through its whole extent, like one wave which spreads out in little surface waves” (229). Looking at Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” Bergson states, “does it not seem to us that the visible lines of the figure rise toward a virtual center, located behind the canvas, where would be revealed all at once, gathered into a single word, the secret we shall never have finished reading [lire], phrase by phrase, in the enigmatic physiognomy?” (229–230). Merleau-Ponty returns to this text a number of times, including “Eye and Mind,” where he compares it with Klee’s account of abstraction and its “contestation of the prosaic line” (EM: 183). His use of Bergson’s model emerges in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, where he cites it as a model for reading the history of philosophy, divided between the conventional or “tractable” past and the more original hidden meaning texts derived by reading between the lines (IPP: 19). 48.  See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Allan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1981), p. 71. Also see “Merleau-Ponty in Memoriam,” trans. Wilfred Ver Ecke, Dirk de Schutter, Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry, vol. XVIII, 1982–83, p. 79. 49.  Compare in this regard the semiotic analysis of Felix Thurlemann, denying that the opposition between figurative and nonfigurative art can be absolute. See Thurlemann, Paul Klee: analyse sémiotique de trois peintures (Lausanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme, 1982), p. 98. 50.  See TM: 79.

Chapter 2 1.  Friedrich Schlegel, Philosophical Fragments, p. 25 (“Athenaeum Fragment” 58, attributed to A. W. Schlegel). 2.  Letter to Franz Marc, June 8, 1915, cited in O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) p. 269, n. 86. For Werckmeister’s analysis, see pp. 56ff. 3.  For further discussion of this issue, see Rainer Crone, “Cosmic Fragments of

190  Notes to Pages 37–48

Meaning: On the Syllables of Paul Klee,” in Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). 4.  The link between Phenomenology and optics (perspectivism, theoretical or experiential) was explicit through its history, beginning with Lambert. See my Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992) chap. VIII. 5.  See Roland Barthes, S / Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 61. 6.  See Marc Richir, Phénomènes, temps, et l’etres: ontologie et phénoménologie (Grenoble: Jerome Millon, 1987), pp. 78–79. 7.  G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 40. 8.  Klee’s Bauhaus theory course was modeled after Fux’s fundamental musical counterpoint manual Gradus ad Parnassum (1720). The stated goal was “to work out a method similar to that by which children learn, first letters, then syllables, and finally how to read and write.” See A. Kagen, “Paul Klee’s ‘Ad Parnassum’: The Theory and Practice of Eighteenth Century Polyphony as Models for Paul Klee’s Art,” Arts Magazine 52, no. 1 (1977), p. 92. 9.  For example, in a 1987 interview with Klaus Davi, Gadamer claimed that “American art has been very ably puffed up by the media, but it has never produced anything of real significance, nothing that a hermeneutic analysis can’t classify as pure imitation.” See Flash Art, no. 136 (1987), p. 79. 10.  See Regine Prange, Das Kristalline als Kunstsymbol: Bruno Taut und Paul Klee (Hildescheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1991), chap. 1. 11.  Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, p. 418. 12.  Certainly Klee was arguing for art as an alternative to catastrophic reality and death, which had long been its spur. The late images would finally and heroically articulate the failure of art before death. See O. K. Werckmeister, Paul Klee in Exile, 1933–1940 (Himeji, Japan: Himeji Museum of Art, 1985), pp. 172–174. Still, even the abstraction of the early period arises not only out of our yearning for a higher realm but also out of repugnance for the war and this world. Perhaps the most explicit work of this account is Crystalline Memory of Destruction by the Navy (1915, 11). 13.  See Leo Strauss and Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Correspondence Concerning Wahrheit und Methode,” Independent Journal of Philosophy 2 (1978), p. 10. 14.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, pp. 213–214. 15.  O. K. Werckmeister, “Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee, and the Angel of History,” p. 104. He also acknowledged the metaphysical differences between Klee and Benjamin’s views of the “ruins,” but Werckmeister’s (Benjaminian) view is not uncontroversial. See, for example, Donat de Chapeaurouge, Paul Klee und der christliche Himmel (Stuttgart Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), p. 53. 16.  On the notion of reciprocal rejoinder, see my Tradition(s) I Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought, Introduction. 17.  See G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Nature (Encyclopedia, part II), trans. A. V. Miller (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 293. The full force of this connection be-

Notes to Pages 50–55  191

comes even more explicit in Hegel’s own use of the artistic model in the preceding Zusatz for the understanding of crystallization, where once again the metonymy between life and death is not far away. Unlike more primitive geological formations: The calcareous formation thus represents the transition to organic being: on the one side, arresting the leap into dead neutrality, and on the other side, into lifeless and unitary abstraction. These organic forms (not all of course, but those others are not in question) are not to be thought as having once actually lived and then died: on the contrary, they are stillborn. To suppose otherwise is like supposing that bone-fibers were once veins or nerves, and subsequently hardened. It is organoplastic Nature which generates the organic in the element of the immediate being and therefore as a dead shape, crystallized through and through, like the artist who represents human and other forms in stone or on a flat canvas. He does not kill people, dry them out and pour stony material into them, or press them into stone (he can do this too for he pours models into moulds); what he does is to produce in accordance with his idea and by means of tools, forms which represent life but are not themselves living; Nature, however, does this directly, without needing such mediation. (ibid.)

One might then, following Benjamin, question what the affirmation of organics excluded in such a “sublimation”—not only with respect to Gadamer’s attempt at reinstituting an organic aesthetics but equally on the particulars of Hegel’s own aesthetic. One might question the role of this metaphysics in Hegel’s account of sculpture as the culmination of artistic media and the classical idea in the external presentation of the human form, the “organoplastic” interpenetration of Spirit and Nature. 18.  As the correspondence reveals, Adorno urged Benjamin to undertake a critical analysis of Jung. Benjamin regarded such a study as assisting in providing the “epistemological foundations” of the Arcades Project. See Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 61ff; 201. 19.  See C. J. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (1912), trans. R.F.C. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956). Klee’s mystical views are perhaps as easily accessed here (as interpreters have suggested), rather than Benjamin’s angelology of historical materialism. 20.  E. Husserl, The Crisis of the Europeans Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 387. 21.  See my “The Rationality of the Fragment,” Extensions, chap. 10. 22.  This “exhibitive disparting” is Heidegger’s characterization of the complex “synthesis” of judgment. See BP: 209. 23.  “The Beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. This way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it” (D: 192). 24.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 655 (A835 / B863). 25.  This is not so much a “religious” claim as a conceptual claim, one that follows Gadamer’s invocation of the analogia entis in the third Critique; but this retrieval and “dispersion of the sacred” is even more explicit in the Dialectic of Kant’s Second Critique. See Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), Book II.

192  Notes to Pages 56–61

26.  Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 54. 27.  Cf. TM: 122 and Gadamer, “Concerning Empty and Full-Filled Time,” trans. R. P. O’Hara, in Martin Heidegger in Europe and America, ed. E. G. Ballard and C. E. Scott (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). 28.  See Mircea Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 393–394: “This contemporaneity with the great moments of myth is an indispensible condition for any form of magico-religious efficaciousness. Seen in this light, Søren Kierkegaard’s effort to express the Christian status as ‘being contemporary with Jesus’ is less revolutionary than it at first sounds; all Kierkegaard has done is to formulate in new words an attitude common and normal to primitive man.” Eliade himself argued in favor of such “primitive sacrality” over against Heideggerean historicism. The agonistic lies at the heart of hermeneutics, however. Paul Ricoeur links hermeneutics to a “transcendental deduction” of the symbol explicitly understood in terms of Eliade’s notion of hierophany in the conclusion of his The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 347ff. Yet it is precisely at this point that Adorno invokes Benjamin’s concept of allegory to criticize Kierkegaard’s account of contemporaneity and the doctrine of the instant. See his Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hallot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 54. In either case, the conceptual adumbrations involve—and without dissolving their evidence—a certain “wager,” to use a term Ricoeur invokes (355). 29.  It is precisely in this sense, as Benjamin puts it in a passage in the Arcades Project, immediately following a characterization of Heidegger (as “the secularization of history in Heidegger”), that “Goethe saw it coming: the crisis in bourgeois education (Bildung)” (AP: 472). Klee’s late work, as is often recognized (inter alia, it was what fascinated Hei­ degger), was often preoccupied with the figures and fate of death. Yet like Goethe, Klee continually articulates nature as Urphänomen in another sense, one Gadamer’s account of him fully affirmed. Indeed, a 1929 work titled Crystalline Landscape (1929, 75) seems to exhibits precisely the Darstellung that Gadamer claimed restrictedly as Klee’s point. In any case, we should be leery of Benjamin’s characterization of “secularization” here for reasons we have already encountered. “Theology”—at least in Benjamin’s sense—seems no more absent in Heidegger than in Gadamer; that was the point of understanding interpretation as an event, an Ereignis, to use Heidegger’s term. This Ereignis is clearly there in Goethe’s own characterization, cited in Benjamin’s reading: beauty “remains true to its essential nature only when veiled” (in dem das Unzulängliche Ereignis wird; IL: 199). 30.  See Alain Bonfand, Paul Klee, L’oeil en trop, vol. 1 (Paris: Editions de la Difference, 1988), pp. 78ff. 31.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 35.

Chapter 3 1.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 56. 2.  F.W.J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, pp. 221ff. 3.  See my In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I, chap. 3.

Notes to Pages 62–69  193

4.  See Clement Greenberg, “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–1940),” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, p. 72. 5.  Clement Greenberg, “L’Art americain au XXe siecle,” Les Temps Modernes, vol. 2, 1946, pp. 340–352. Greenberg and Sartre met in 1939. He added Dubuffet to the list of those influenced by Klee (90) and condemned them all to the impurity of admitting literary influences into their painting. In Dubuffet’s case, Greenberg claimed incorrectly that the influence was Sartre (91–92). See the analysis of Kent Minturn, “Greenberg Misreading Dubuffet,” in Abstract Expressionism: The International Context, ed. Joan Marter (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007), pp. 125–138. For further discussion of Klee’s influence on American art, including Pollock, see Carolyn Lancher, “Klee in America,” in Paul Klee Art and Life, ed. Lancher, pp. 83–111. 6.  See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 90ff. 7.  Though he criticizes Bataille’s reflection on the impossible as “feeble” in comparison to his predecessors’ theories, Sartre’s previous discussion of the limitations of surrealist negativity still suggested that “it would be more correct to call it the Impossible” (WL: 172). 8.  On Hegel’s Critique of Skepticism, as “a consciousness which is empirical, which takes its guidance from what has no reality for it,” see Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 124. 9.  See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 612. Also see Merleau-Ponty, S: 24. 10.  Georges Bataille, Cahiers d’Art, 20e–21e années (1945–46), p 52. 11.  Again, this is not to deny that such oppositions can be justified but to claim that such articulemes are schema-specific. That is, they are always articulated against a background that, in turn, delineates possibility and impossibility and remains (indeterminately) open to transformation. As “antinomies,” to speak Kantian, they are less mathematical than dynamic. We may say of Sartre’s hope to strictly distinguish signification and object (for example, between experience and proposition, signification and object, the lived and its systematic “correlate”), maintaining its inner historicity, what Merleau-Ponty said of Kant, that what he had learned in the Transcendental Dialectic he seems to have forgotten in the Analytic (PhP: 304). 12.  On Hegel’s criticism of the beautiful soul, see Phenomenology of the Spirit, pp. 406ff. On the critique of irony as a “longing which will not let itself go in actual action and production,” see Lectures on Aesthetics, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 160. Sartre’s account of irony remains underdeveloped, though always presupposed. It plays an explicit part in his classical account of bad faith (BN: 87) but arguably underlies the dynamics of the “for-itself ” generally, as “being what it is not and not being what it is.” 13.  Maurice Blanchot, “Le ‘Discours philosophique,’ ” L’arc 1980, pp. 1–3. 14.  Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, pp. 246–247. See the analysis of Jacques Derrida (SP: 104). 15.  Franciscono especially singles out Miró and Picasso in discussing this influence. See Paul Klee, His Work and Thought, p. 289.

194  Notes to Pages 69–81

16.  See Ann Temkin, “Klee and the Avant-Garde 1912–1940,” in Paul Klee His Life and Work, ed. Carolyn Lancher, 64–72. Her analysis of Klee and Tzara and “L’Homme approximatif,” which I follow here, can be found at p. 72. 17.  Tristan Tzara, “Paul Klee ou l’apprenti du soleil,” Cahiers d’Art, 20–21 années (1945–46), p. 37. 18.  Tristan Tzara, Grains et issues (Paris: Editions Denoel et Steele, 1935), p. 213. 19.  Ibid., p. 211. 20.  Ibid. 21.  André Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row, 1972), p. 64. 22.  See DF: 278. 23.  See O. K. Werckmeister, Paul Klee in Exile, 1933–1940, Introduction. 24.  Cited in Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, p. 167. 25.  Ibid. 26.  See Edward S. Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 93n. For the Fichtean protocol, see the 1794 Wissenschafts­ lehre (that is, “the first absolutely unconditioned principle”), Science of Knowledge, pp. 93ff. 27.  See Edmund Husserl, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S. Churchill, Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), appendix II. 28.  See my Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism, chap. II. 29.  Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Vocation of Man, trans. Roderick M. Chisholm (New York: McMillan, 1985), p. 80. 30.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in Collected Philosophical Papers, trans. Alphonso Lingus (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), p. 4. 31.  Ibid. 32.  Of these thinkers, perhaps van der Leeuw remains the least known in this context. His work in the phenomenology of religion (especially in what Levinas calls its ethnographic or comparative dimensions) surely makes it critical at this point. See G. Van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation, trans. J. E. Turner (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1986). For further discussion of these issues, and in particular the question of surrealism, see Celia Rabinovitch, Surrealism and the Sacred (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2002). 33.  See my “Hermeneutics and the Retrieval of the Sacred,” Extensions, chap. III. 34.  See Husserl, Ideas, pp. 158–159. 35.  See Casey, Imagining: A Phenomenological Study, pp. 212ff. 36.  See C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R.F.C. Hull, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vol. 9 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). p. 66. 37.  Ibid, p. 84. 38.  Jung, Psychological Types, trans. H. G. Baynes, Collected Works, vol. 6, p. 111. 39.  See Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1928–

Notes to Pages 81–85  195

1949, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 61. Adorno notes the “not insignificant essay on Joyce” that appears, along with Jung’s writings on Picasso, in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, the Collected Works, vol. 15, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), pp. 109–133. 40.  Ibid, pp. 61, 201. Jung’s work also influenced other surrealists, for example, Tristan Tzara and Gaston Bachelard, who will be further discussed in what follows. 41.  See KPM: 127. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s similar invocation of “an operative imaginary” in his later critique of Sartre, which is “part of our institution, and which is indispensable for the definition of Being itself ” (VI: 85). 42.  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 463. 43.  Jung, Symbols of Transformation, R.F.C. Hull, Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 17. 44.  See Gertrude Stein’s account of experimenting with automatic writing while she worked under James in “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 74. 45.  Jung, Psychological Types, p. 111. 46.  See C. J. Jung, The Spiritual in Man, Art, and Literature, vol. 15, pp. 109–143. For Jung, both artists articulated the possibilities of a “new cosmic consciousness,” albeit under the fragmented conditions of the present and its resulting drame intérieur. 47.  Hence although this “double reading” looks like an extreme or an exceptional account of interpretation, elsewhere I have argued that it underlies the rationality of traditionality more generally. See my “Our Reciprocal Rejoinder with the Past: On Hei­ degger’s Erwiderung,” Introduction to Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought. 48.  Clement Greenberg, “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–1940),” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, p. 71. Klee’s refusal to fully “accept the flatness of post-cubist painting” (69) was clearly a vice for Greenberg. He remained an “interior designer rather than an architect,” as he put it elsewhere. Unlike “the still unexploited potentialities of the cubist heritage,” he does not have “enough carrying power to support a school of major importance.” See “Review of an Exhibition of Victor Brauner,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 149–150. 49.  Lyotard argues that grasping the principle of repetition as linked to Thanatos “is absolutely essential for Warhol” (DP: 276). Here “the death instinct is but repetition, just like Eros, but it touches upon effects which, from the point of view of Eros, of Kapital, can only be grasped in death, dissolution. It is in connivance with multiplicity. It isn’t another instinct, another energy. It is the same energy as unsettling-unsettlement” (Notes: 48). 50.  I take this to be similar to claims that Janicaud made regarding phenomenological possibility in his objections to “the theological turn” in recent French philosophy. See Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). This is not to say that one cannot undertake a phenomenology of the sacred (or the surreal), but that such a phenomenology does not turn into theology, precisely because such a phenomenology is no less underdetermined, interpretive, than any other phenomenology. Or to put it otherwise, it is only faith that encounters the given as saturated.

196  Notes to Pages 86–89

51.  See Gaston Bachelard, “Surrationalism,” trans. Julien Levy, Arsenal / Surrealist Subversion 4, ed. Franklin Rosemont (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989), p. 112. This work originally appeared in Inquisitions in 1936. Both Tzara and Bachelard in 1936 participated in Inquisitions, purported to be the “Organ du Groupe d’études pour la Phénoménologie Humaine.” See Elmer Peterson, Tristan Tzara: Dada and Surrational Theorist (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1971), pp. 133ff. For further discussion of Bachelard and Phenomenology, see my “Notes on Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Poetics,” in Phenomenology, Institution, and History: Writings After MerleauPonty II (London: Continuum, 2009), chap. 4. 52.  Mircea Eliade, “Foreword” to The Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 11. 53.  Immanuel Kant, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in On History, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), p. 3. 54.  See James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: 20th Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 146: “The surrealist moment in ethnography is that moment in which the possibility of comparison exists in unmediated tension or with sheer incongruity.” 55.  Louis Marin “Klee ou Le Retour à L’Origine,” Revue d’Esthétique, vol. 23 (1970), pp. 74–75. 56.  See the analysis of K. Porter Aichele, Paul Klee’s Pictorial Writing (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Aichele rightly sees that Klee’s hieroglyphics breaks down Enlightenment accounts (for example, La Fontaine, Lessing) that divide poetry and painting and traces its antithesis tradition, the ut pictura poiesis, to Horace’s Ars Poetica. Before that tradition, it should be added, Plutarch quoted Simonides as calling “painting silent poetry, and poetry articulated painting.” 57.  Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 150. 58.  E.g. “Inschrift xxxß” (1938, 97). 59.  See, for example, the discussion of this issue in Emanuel Martineau, Malévitch et la philosophie (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1980). Martineau aptly argues against the “vulgar,” naturalized sense of abstraction, construed in terms of genus and species, and questions whether, insofar as it remains more radical than phenomenological Bedeutung (still confined by Husserl to an objective residuum), constructive abstraction in modern art remains “monstrously nonphenomenological” (68). Affirming the antecedent claim, I have argued that abstraction in modern art assists in understanding the radicalization or development of Phenomenology: to use Fink’s terms, an “extension” that emerges through the phenomenological reduction, and not at odds with it. Michel Henry, on the other hand, argued with regard to Kandinsky that, although Kandinsky remains consistent with Husserl’s eidetics, his work returns from the noematic (and hence objectifying) intentional correlate to the noetic, to sensibility in its primary elements, where affectivity and interior sensibility is in question. See Michel Henry, Voir l’ invisible: sur Kandinsky (Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 2005, pp. 73, 125). Finally, a third figure worth mentioning on this issue is Henri Maldiney, who invokes Klee’s sense of form as pathway (Gestaltung) to distinguish it from objective or formal accounts. Like Merleau-Ponty’s account of depth

Notes to Pages 89–96  197

and sensing, Maldiney appeals to Erwin Strauss’s le sentir for the development of a phenomenological aesthetic, albeit by basing it on an account of affective hyle claimed to be nonintentional. See “Le Dévoilement de la dimension esthétique dans la phénoménologie d’Erwin Strauss,” in Regard, parole, espace (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1974), pp. 133–135. 60.  Similarly, we should add, Derrida’s own écriture remains “partial,” a refusal to substitute the “mechanism” of automatic writing for the writing of reflection. If he insisted (still ironically) on the “act” of writing as the “becoming unconscious of the subject” or “the decisive progress of formalism,” he likewise demanded that both “must discover a field of transcendental experience” (G: 61). 61.  See, for example, Christina Howells, “Sartre and the Language of Poetry,” in Philosopher’s Poets, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 140–152. 62.  No more than did Klee should we see such affirmations to involve the affirmation of the irrational. Instead, we shall need—as did the later Merleau-Ponty—to understand consciousness as a matter of transcendence, its history as a matter of structured multiplicity, and thereby that there is transcendence between theories, historical motivations, and intentional encroachment (emptièment) and transformation—and precisely in these exchanges, development, justification, and right (droit; VI: 185–187). Such I have been arguing is the lot of Surrealism and Phenomenology itself. Or as Merleau-Ponty put it in relation to Schelling, “He is seeking a Reason that is not prosaic, a poetry that is not irrational” (Nat: 50). The point was not only poetic. Jean Cavaillès first claimed that Phenomenology involved an “adventure” involving an “intelligible system of contents which are impossible to dominate” in advance. See Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” pp. 406–409. 63.  See in this regard, Oskar Batschmann, Joseph Helfenstein, “Das utopishe Kalligram: Klee’s ‘Zeichnen’ und Surrealism,” in Paul Klee, Kunst und Karriere: Beitrate des I­nternationalien Symposiums in Bern (Bern: Stämplfli, 2000), pp. 204–225. On Klee’s links with Dadaism, see Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, pp. 219ff.

Chapter 4 1.  René Crevel, Paul Klee (Paris: Gallimard, 1930), translated by Gert Schiff under the title “René Crevel as a Critic of Paul Klee,” Arts Magazine, vol. 52, no. 1 (September 1977), p. 136. 2.  See Franz Brentano, Grundzüge der Asthetik (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1988). Even Adorno did not deny such “invariants” (e.g., music is a “temporal art”), claiming only that “surgically extracted and displayed, however, they are insignificant” (AT: 23). 3.  See Francois Fédier, “Heidegger et la pensée du déclin,” in Jean Beaufret, Dialoque avec Heidegger 3: Approche de Heidegger (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974), pp. 155–182. 4.  See Jacques Taminiaux, “The Hegelian Legacy in Heidegger’s Overcoming of Aesthetics,” in Poetics, Speculation, and Judgment, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). 5.  See Otto Pöggeler, Bild und Technik: Heidegger, Klee und die Moderne Kunst, op. cit. 6.  Shinichi Hisamatsu, Martin Heidegger, “Wechselseitige Spielegung,” in Japan und Heidegger, Gedenkschrift der Stadt Messkirk zum hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers, ed. Hartmut Buchner (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1989), p. 190. By itself

198  Notes to Pages 96–101

this statement is enigmatic. Some clarification might be found in Petzet’s account that pairs Picasso with Heidegger’s notion of Destruktion, although this would seem overly to understand Picasso through his cubism (P: 145). In any case, Picasso’s influence on Klee is well documented. See, for example, Marcel Franciscono, Paul Klee: His Work and Thought, pp. 290ff. 7.  Letter to R. Kramer-Badoni, cited in R. Kramer-Badoni, Zwischen Allen Stuhlen (Munich: Herbig, 1985), p. 166. 8.  See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 525 (A632 / B660). Although ontotheology “believes it can know the existence of [the original being] through mere concepts, without the help of any experience whatsoever,” cosmotheology “proposes to deduce the existence of the original being from an experience in general.” 9.  See Edmund Husserl, “Marginal Notes on Being and Time,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, 1927–1931, ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), p. 285. 10.  See Clement Greenberg, “2,” in Five Essays on Paul Klee, pp. 29ff. 11.  See Kathryn E. Kramer, “Myth, Invisibility, and Politics in the Late Work of Paul Klee,” op. cit. Also see Otto Werckmeister, Paul Klee in Exile, 1933–1940. Heidegger too used classical myths “deconstructively,” as was the case with his reading of Hölderlin. Werckmeister suggests that early on Klee was “indecisive” (110), but Heidegger’s earlier complicities with Nazism surely make his later criticisms much more ambiguous than Klee’s. See Fred Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993). Finally it should be noted that this account of myth (mythos) should by no means simply be tied to language or the discursive as, for example, analyses of Klee’s semiotics of the arrow have shown. Nor should it be restricted to the symbolic, as is true of analysis of the language—like (langagiére) or the figural in his work. The latter will be further discussed in relation to Lyotard’s treatments below. 12.  Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger on Art,” in Martin Heidegger, Politics, Art, and Technology, ed. Karsten Harries, Christoph Jamme (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1994), p. 122. 13.  F. Schlegel, Jugenschriften, cited by Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. I, p. 168. 14.  See F.W.J. Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, trans. David W. Stott (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 34ff. 15.  Notably, such an objection to time’s depiction occurs in Merleau-Ponty’s Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible, explicitly aimed again at Bergson and ­Husserl. ­Husserl’s diagram based on the time of the present as a point is labeled “positivist projection of the vortex of temporal differentiation” (VI: 231). Sounding much like Klee, he states, we must “understand that the Gestalt is already transcendence; it makes me understand that a line is a vector, that a point is a center of forces” (VI: 195). 16.  Conclusion to Faust, part II, cited in Il: 198. See David R. Burnett, “Paul Klee, from Symbolism to Symbol,” in The Turn of the Century, German Literature and Art 1890– 1915, ed. Gerald Chapple, Hans H. Schulte (Bonn: Bouvier-Verlag, 1981), pp. 237–248. 17.  See Werner Schmalenbach, “Paul Klee und Geometrie,” in exhibition catalogue, Paul Klee (1879–1940), Dusseldorf, 1993.

Notes to Pages 102–107  199

18.  See Aristotle, Poetics, where mythos involves the organization of events and poetics the art of composing plots (47a2)—or, as Ricoeur puts it, a propos transcendental imagination, it “extracts a configuration from a succession.” See Time and Narrative, vol. I, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), p. 66. 19.  See Dirk Teuber, “Intuition und Genie: Aspekte des Transzendenten bei Paul Klee,” in Paul Klee: Konstruktion-Intuition (Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1990), p. 39. 20.  Hans-Georg Gadamer, Philosophical Apprenticeships, trans. Robert R. Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 51. 21.  See Clement Greenberg, “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–1940),” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, pp. 66–69. 22.  As has been noted, despite his emphasis on the architectonic, Greenberg thought Klee was “an interior decorator rather than an architect.” See The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 2, p. 149. 23.  See, for example, Otto Pöggeler, “Heidegger on Art,” p. 122. 24.  See Martin Heidegger “Cézanne,” “Thoughts,” trans. Keith Hoeller, Philosophy Today, vol. 20, No. 4 / 4, p. 289: “In the later work of the painter, the duality of what is present and presence become one, ‘realized’ [realisiert] and overcome at the same time, transformed into mysterious identity.” 25.  This again is the account of judgment as differentiation, as Manfred Frank has remarked. See The Philosophical Foundations of Early German Romanticism, pp. 85f. Yet even though Frank rightly sees this as a move beyond Fichte, German Idealism, and foundationalism, he likewise analyzes it as a coherence (versus a correspondence) theory. We should perhaps, as does Heidegger, deny the opposition in order to understand historical coherence as a Vorurteil that does not simply determine the “ekstatic” Wechsel and hence the potential (correction or extension of) correspondence internal to judgment itself. 26.  See Novalis, Schriften I, p. 412, No. 1. 27.  See Manfred Frank, The Philosophical Foundations of German Romanticism, p. 53. 28.  Carolyn Lanchner, “Klee in America,” in Paul Klee: His Life and Work, p.84. 29.  See Heidegger’s discussion of reliability in OWA: 34f. 30.  See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 94. 31.  Ibid., pp. 94–95. “For both Hegel and Heidegger, the one with the help of a hypothetical (a probable) etymology, the other by a verbal analysis, created these words, philosophically or poetically.” 32.  I will not try to justify this claim fully here. To start, one could point to Derrida and Deleuze’s early treatment of these issues in Nietzsche. The interplay between quality and quantity, the boundaries of the immanent and the transcendent (the ontic and the ontological) was at stake from the outset in post-Kantian thought concerning the dialectic, perhaps especially in the writings of Fichte and Schlegel. On Kant’s own use of the mathematical / dynamic distinction in the antimony of pure reason, see Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 462ff (A529 / B 557). 33.  See WCT: 138. 34.  If this were true, Heidegger’s lingering Aristotelianism would have broad-ranging

200  Notes to Pages 108–112

implications. See, for example, Luce Irigaray’s similar concerns regarding Heidegger’s Aristotelianism in The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, trans. Mary Beth Mader (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 20. 35.  For a similar view, see Wolfgang Kersten, Paul Klee: Zerstörung, Der Konstruktion Zuliebe (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1987). 36.  Compare Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 4.1212: “What can be shown cannot be said”; and 6.2331 “Calculation is not an experiment.” Calculation is not an experiment (calculation has a different outcome, as he puts it elsewhere), but “calculating,” that is, its “use,” can be. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp. 79, 171. 37.  See Pöggeler, “Heidegger on Art,” p. 113. 38.  Being and Time itself uses Feld in a number of senses. For example, describing his own project, the Daseinanalytik begins by saying that we can claim to provide answers to the question What is Being? “only if the question of Being has been reawakened and we have arrived at a field where we can come to terms within a way that can be controlled” (BT: 49). At the same time, however, the Umwelt’s existentialia of ready-to-hand and present-to-hand is characterized as a “field” that we encounter (BT: 305). 39.  For Merleau-Ponty, this entailed that the non-Eucledian synthesis involved must be corporeal: “But the point-horizon structure can teach us what a point is only in virtue of the maintenance of a hither zone of corporeality from which to be seen, and round about it indeterminate horizons which are the counter part of this spectacle” (PhP: 102). As will become further evident below, Heidegger, following Nietzsche, would agree in understanding life as the “bodying forth” and “schematizing” of chaos. See N III: 78–83. 40.  See Sara Lynn Henry, Paul Klee, Nature, and Modern Science, the 1920s, Ph.D. dissertation in history of art, University of California, Berkeley, 1976, p. xi. Lest interpretation here fall back into positivism, however, it is important to recall Klee’s statement: “Does the artist concern himself with microscopy? History? Paleontology? Only for purposes of comparison, only with a view to mobility. He is not interested in a scientific check on fidelity to nature” (N: 93). 41.  On the notion of ruinance, see PIA: chap. II. 42.  See Heidegger’s’ description of thinking as “thane” in What Is Called Thinking?, p. 140. 43.  Without denying the truth of formalism, it would not constitute the whole (or the essence) of mathematics any more than it would poiesis. 44.  Indeed Merleau-Ponty invokes this term in “rendering” Klee’s “Creative Credo” into French in his L’oeil et l’esprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p. 74. 45.  See B 111ff. Although Heidegger’s history of the concept of experiment is always richly layered, it is, as is too often the case, a matter of decline, without sufficiently identifying either the shortcomings inherent in previous theoretical history that provoked conceptual transformations or the venture that took place by their means. In any case, the rise of experimentalism was surely such a fragmented venture, undertaken, as Bacon put it, out of “argument of hope.” For further discussion of this issue, see my “On the

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Rationality of the Fragment,” Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality, and the Closure of Modernism, chap. x. 46.  KN: 11. See Pöggeler, Bild und Technik, p. 156. 47.  More generally, such claims were probably not true for the likes of humanists and experimentalists such as Montaigne or Erasmus, Bacon or Boyle, Shaftesbury or Schlegel. For further discussion of this issue, see my Tradition(s) II Hermeneutics, Ethics, and the Dispensation of the Good, pp. 234ff. 48.  Both Fink and Merleau-Ponty would continue to use this term, as Phenomenology of Perception’s Preface testifies in citing Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation (PhP: vii). 49.  See R. Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World (a translation of Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Berlin: Weltkries-Verlag, 1928), in The Logical Structure of the World and Pseudoproblems in Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969). Heidegger’s famous description of “Carnap-Heidegger” as the “most extreme counter positions” in contemporary thought is thus overdetermined; more than either was prone to admit, they shared a theoretical context in common. See PT: 24. In addition to characterizing Phenomenology as Konstruktion (necessarily related to the Destruktion or Abbau of the history of philosophy), as late as the Nietzsche lectures Heidegger could still understand thought as constructive in the sense of bauende in thinking that “fashions what does not yet stand,” understood as “the poetizing nature of positing a horizon within a perspective” (N III: 143–144). We may find the same complexity in the Heidegger-Adorno aesthetic counter positions. Adorno’s emphasis on the artist’s need for domination and emancipation from the material was perhaps the last vestige of instrumental rationality in his work. Nonetheless, while declaring experiment to be essential to modern works of art, he likewise held it had become something “qualitative different” than the Enlightenment’s account of experiment based upon the domination of the will, a testing of hypotheses whose “results were a match for what had already been established” (AT: 23). Instead, artistic experimentation employs methods, including construction, “whose objective results cannot be foreseen” (AT: 24). Again, the issue was not simply aesthetic. To use Cavaillès’ similar terms, terms Cavaillès generalized to Husserl’s genetic account (ultimately impacting his account of theory as determinate nomology), here ‘prediction’ or articulation “risks departing from itself in an adventure toward the other.” See Cavaillès, “On Logic and the Theory of Science,” p. 402. If Heidegger could claim that analysis presupposes synthesis, its Vorhabe, such a complex synthesis was at work in the sketching-out of the Daseinanalytik’s possibilities. See, for example, BT: 242–349, 428. 50.  On Heidegger’s characterization of Kant’s pure synthesis as “exploratory,” see KPM: 127. As has been noted, the model of drawing or sketching (zeichnen) for the schematism has a certain Kantian precedent. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 171 (B162). 51.  Here, too, Heidegger followed in the wake of German Idealism and its elevation of transcendental imagination. As has been seen, Fichte articulated the intentionality of the transcendental ego itself through the figure of a line drawing. The difference, as Heidegger put it at one point, is that his own “interpretation of the power of imagination . . . moves, so to speak, in the opposite direction from that of German Idealism” (KPM: 95n). Rather than beginning with a primal act and an objective correlate, it begins from the articulation of Being’s transcendence.

202  Notes to Pages 114–125

52.  See HCT: 143, translation modified. See the analysis of Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), p. 71.

Chapter 5 1.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, zweite Abteilung, Bd. 3, ed. F. Bornmann, M. Capitella (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), p. 322. 2.  I have further developed this thesis in my Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought. 3.  Merleau-Ponty would thus deny the opposition between perception and sensation that is advocated by Erwin Strauss, for whom perception is an objectifying act. At the same time, he will invoke Strauss’s account of depth in his account of a lived space in which the depth of things is related to me and the distance between two objects (PhP: 255n) as well as his distinction between the space of perception and sensation, respectively the space of geography and the space of the lived landscape (PhP: 287). For Strauss the perceptual world is a “world of things with fixed and unalterable properties in objective space and universal objective time.” Geographical space is perceptual. The landscape is sensory, the horizonal landscape in which we move, prior to the subject-object distinction. See Erwin Strauss, The Primary World of the Senses, trans. Jacob Needleman (New York: Free Press, 1963), p. 317. 4.  See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 38. 5.  G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, p. 107. 6.  G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics, vol. I, pp. 128–129. 7.  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 65. 8.  See Edmund Husserl, Ideas, pp. 203–205. 9.  See, for example, Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001) p. 627. 10.  Cf. PhP: 131. Here again we are returned to the transcendentalist archive. In the third Critique, Kant too talked of the charms of sensation in which “nature speaks to us.” See Critique of Judgment, p. 169. But consistent with Kant’s contrast between form and matter, this concerns, he claims, a reflection on the form, not the matter, and strictly taken the speaking image is not an “analogy” but “a play of fancy” (193). 11.  Claude Lefort has pointed out that, although “Cezanne’s Doubt” was published in 1945, it was “written several years before.” See Editor’s Preface (PW: xvi). 12.  These terms are applied by Merleau-Ponty to Husserl’s Ideen II analysis (S: 166– 167), but it should be recalled that this was the thesis of Heidegger’s Kantbuch, that “Kant for the first time attains a concept of sensibility which is ontological rather than sensualist.” See KPM: 18. 13.  See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 64. 14.  Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 461. 15.  Ibid., p. 509. 16.  See Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 27. Also see Deleuze (DR: 43ff). 17.  See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 120.

Notes to Pages 125–137  203

18.  Schelling, The Philosophy of Art, pp. 115, 111. 19.  Ibid., p. 128. 20.  Ibid., pp. 108, 118. Cf. N: 268. 21.  On Klee’s use of the concept of dividual or “the dividual-individual antithesis,” see N: 253ff. As Frank notes, in tracing it to Novalis, it too has a Romantic conceptual history that Deleuze challenges. See Manfred Frank, What Is Neostructuralism? pp. 382ff. 22.  See Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty,” in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett, 1965). 23.  Pierre Klossowski, “Description, Argumentation, Narrative,” trans. Paul Buck, Catherine Petit, in The Decadence of the Nude (London: Black Dog, 2002), p. 133. 24.  Alain Bonfand, Paul Klee, L’oeil en trop, vol. 1, p. 16. 25.  Klossowski, “Description, Argumentation, Narrative,” p. 134 (translation altered). 26.  Ibid. 27.  The critical text in question for Lyotard is Freud’s New Introductory Lectures in Psychoanalysis, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1951), p. xvii. Lyotard follows Ehrenzweig here (LR: 162). 28.  I have argued that the laxity and holding in abeyance or “hovering” (Schweben) in question has a genealogy in post-Kantian thought. In his later work, Lyotard explicitly traces this Wechsel in Kant himself, in the question of the sublime and the differential account of judgment and wit. See, for example, LR: 326ff. This in turn will authorize a retrieval of phronesis in Aristotle. In all of these cases, what bars a return to humanism remains the initial link between Schweben and desire, Eros and Thanatos, its “connivance with multiplicity,” as he put it elsewhere (Notes: 48). 29.  The term tuché is taken from Aristotle, tuchi (fortune, chance, luck). See Physics 11, 198b, 17. Compare the reading of Jacques Lacan’s account of tuché as “encounter with the real insofar as it is missed,” in “Tuché and Automaton,” seminar of 12 February 1964, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, pp. 53–64. This text undertakes an extensive “dialogue” in which Lacan characterizes Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible as a “happy encounter (eutuchia).” 30.  Lacan interprets the later Merleau-Ponty’s account of painting as challenging “the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting.” Ibid., p. 101. We can only wonder whether Merleau-Ponty’s later encounter with Schelling’s barbarous source might have changed his ahistorical and nonnatural account of dance. Schelling himself in any case immediately connects rhythm to dance. See Philosophy of Art, p. 110. 31.  Despite his own cynicism (for instance, about theory), Lyotard thought that Adorno’s account of music remained cynical when he claims that perfect harmonies are to be compared with money in the economy: “The tonal, the dominant, and the seventh dominant chords are not money, on the contrary they are the analogs, in classical and baroque music, of the minutely observed rules weighing on artisan fabrication and its product, they are the ‘chefs-d’oeuvre,’ they incarnate the supposedly perfect reconciliation of material and form. They are the cult” (ADev: 134). Without making further claims about their positive role, Lyotard’s Nietzschean account, beyond negative dialectic, still insisted on their role in artistic affirmation.

204  Notes to Pages 137–144

32.  For further discussion of this issue, see my “Lyotard and the Adventure of the Narrative,” Continental Philosophy, vol. 1, 1988. 33.  See Martin Heidegger, (N I: 113; III: 82). 34.  Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2000), p. 83. This rhythm of experience will later be described as the backward and forward movement of the hermeneutic circle. 35.  Martin Heidegger, “Cézanne” in “Thoughts,” p. 289. 36.  Lyotard’s early account viewed the late works of Cézanne (and Klee after him) to be abandoning representation (or castration) to expose the painting as an object in itself, in order for it to become a site of polymorphic libidinal operations (DP: 90–91). This “important mutation” again takes it beyond the negative limitations of Freud’s representational analyses of art works, which remain “insensitive to the Cézannian and post Cézannian revolution” (88). 37.  Claiming that Merleau-Ponty was “one of the least arrogant of philosophers,” Lyotard finds such satire in some of Merleau-Ponty’s “ekstatic” formulations of the flesh as chiasmatic reversibility (LR: 188–189). Merleau-Ponty himself understood it as irony, continuing a tradition he linked to Montaigne and Schlegel. 38.  Without endorsing its more speculative overtones, or its equation with Ereignis, on the relation between caesura and Heidegger’s work of the thirties, see the analysis of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), chap. 5. Compare Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the caesura of “sensorial messages” that “opens upon a texture of Being” (EM: 166). 39.  Such a debt could still be understood in terms of tuché, now glossed as an obligation that precedes the possibility and pertinence of the beautiful: “And even the pertinence of the world: of any world, for that which is in quest of the unpresentable. Of a world that touches, of an aesthetic world. For the unpresentable is the in-tact, that which will have preceded all touch, and will not have been of the world nor in the world” (HJ: 34). 40.  This difference is apparent as early as Anti-Oedipus. See AO: 243. On Lyotard’s response to this work, see “Capitalism Énergumène” (DP: 7–51). 41.  See my In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I, chap. 5. 42.  See Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, p. 265. Husserl himself, still implicitly appealing to parallel expressive strata, thought such “symbolic rhythmics” were ultimately fulfilled (and founded) in the intentional significative and eidetic strata that exceeded them. 43.  On the body as the sensible articulation of reason, see J. G. Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, trans. Michael Bauer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 53ff. On the body and ultimately the “whole sensuous world” as the tool of reason, see The Science of Ethics, trans. A. E. Kroeger (New York: Appleton and Company, 1897), pp. 293–296. 44.  J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, p. 129. 45.  Deleuze thus construes reflective judgment as “deterritorializing”: “The art— which remained hidden, and as it were subordinate, in determining judgment—becomes manifest and exercises itself freely in reflective judgment” (KCP: 60).

Notes to Pages 144–152  205

46.  See my “Aesthetics and the Foundation of Interpretation: Schelling and the Ueberraschung of the Work of Art,” Extensions, chap. II. 47.  Alain Badiou, “Art and Philosophy,” in Handbook of Inaesthetics, trans. Alberto Toscano (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 10. 48.  See Alain Badiou, “Dance as Metaphor for Thought” in Handbook of Inaesthetics, p. 60; “Accordingly, dance is defined as the movement of a body subtracted from all vulgarity” (ibid.). 49.  “We ourselves are after all buildings which have to stand on little feet and must not fall. What do we do, if we do not succeed in reestablishing calm (in a very small way) through a balancing shift of the weighty parts in ourselves? We move first one leg (enlargement of the base) and perhaps soon after the other. And finally we walk, which facilitates the balance. We have become a form in movement and we sense an alleviation.” Paul Klee, Beiträge zur bildernischen Formlehre, p. 63, cited in O. K. Werckmeister, “From Revolution to Exile,” in Paul Klee: His Life and Work, ed. Carolyn Lancher, p. 49. 50.  Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 96. 51.  Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, p. 250. 52.  Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1973), pp. 155–156 (quoting Moholy-Nagy). 53.  See Sara Lynn Henry, “Paul Klee’s Pictorial Mechanics from Physics to the Picture Plane,” Bruckmanns Pantheon, Internationale Jahreszeitschrifts für Kunst, 1989, p. 160. 54.  Ibid. As has been seen, Klee views construction (and mathematics) as a necessary but ultimately insufficient artistic model without invention, intuition, and imagination, a step in our education beyond impressionism toward the essential (N: 69). 55.  See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, p. 122. 56.  See Fichte, “The Way towards the Blessed Life (Religionslehre),” Fichtes Werke, Bd. 5 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), p. 441. Clearly Heidegger would be opposed to the monism of Fichte’s account, which would only implicitly express the problem of the ontological difference. Still, when, as has been seen, Heidegger distinguished his (and Klee’s) work from “a way toward the blessed life,” here it is evident how complicated his relation with Fichte remained (TB: 1). 57.  This work depicts a hovering (flying) human. Klee realized that such a realm too was ironic, or “Aristophanic.” As Sara Lynn Henry concludes: “It seems that in all of Klee’s pictorial mechanics, it was only angels that could truly fly freely.” See “Paul Klee’s Pictorial Mechanics,” p. 163. 58.  As has been noted, Lyotard too has made this link, though his understanding of it is perhaps equally Lacanian. See Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan, pp. 133ff. Also see Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, pp. 123ff.

Chapter 6 1.  See Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 214. 2.  See Carole Lancher, “Klee in America,” in Paul Klee: His Life and Work, ed. Carole Lancher, p. 84. Also see Alain Bonfand, L’oeil en trop, p. 27.

206  Notes to Pages 152-160

3.  Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 214. 4.  Ibid. 5.  O. K. Werckmeister, The Making of Paul Klee’s Career, 1914–1916, p. 135. 6.  Ibid., pp. 135–136. 7.  1923, 51; 1939, 1. These works are more readily identifiable with their translated titles, albeit still ambiguously related to other connotations; but one also would need to consider associated themes, for example, “Rapture of the Dance” (1912, 126). 8.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, pp. 344–345. Often Klee’s appeals to the unity of contraries derive from Naturphilosophie and the natural sciences. But we will need to say the same of such appeals as was noted of his appeals to mathematics; less an artistic positivism, they were spurs for the imagination. He often advised his students against relying too heavily on them. 9.  Ibid., p. 344. 10.  This complicity between transcendence and the demonic is ancient. It is worth recalling that Glaucon refers to Socrates’ presentation of the divided line in the Republic as “a demonic excess” (509c). Hence perhaps the proximity of the problem of Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism. 11.  For Kant the experience of the Beautiful involves a pure or disinterested contemplation (Kontemplation). Judgment occurs without a prior concept, “does not count on other people to agree,” and “speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.” See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 51, 56. I note in addition that, for Heidegger, rapture in Nietzsche’s later work supervenes on the earlier works’ dichotomy between the Apollonian and Dionysian states (N I: 96ff). They now will be combined “reciprocally” in the systolediastole of the sensuousness, the Beautiful and the sublime in the Kantian sense, resulting in the “felicitous discord” between art and truth (N I: 198–199). As will become evident, all of these terms are at stake in the discussions and challenges to follow. 12.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 99. 13.  In Heidegger’s Marburg lectures from a few years previous to the Kantbuch, we can see a similar gloss on Husserl’s account of categorial intuition: “Sensuousness is a formal phenomenological concept and refers to all material content as it is already given by the subject matters themselves. This is to be contrasted with the proper concept of the categorial, that is, of the formal and objectively empty. Sensuousness is therefore the title for the total constellation of entities which are given beforehand in their material content” (HCT: 70). 14.  Hence emerges Deleuze’s “empiricism,” purportedly an affirmation of Hume and Nietzsche against Heidegger’s Plato and Kant interpretation, violent or otherwise. 15.  Compare, for example, Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 21: “This is an extremely complex question: for my part, I would maintain that Deleuze is, on a number of critical points (difference, the open, time . . . ), less distant from Heidegger than is usually believed and than he no doubt believed himself to be.” Deleuze himself considers Heidegger to be close to Nietzsche’s account of the eternal return at this point (DR: 201). 16.  Deleuze’s treatment of the (neo-Platonist) explication-implication expressivist doublet occurs in a number of contexts in his philosophy, beginning with his early analy-

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sis of Proust. Perhaps its most direct treatment occurs in the introduction to his book on Spinoza. See ES: 13–22. 17.  See, for example, Alain Bonfand, Paul Klee: L’oeil en trop, pp. 32, 117. Also see Mark Luprecht, Of Angels, Things and Death: Paul Klee’s Last Painting in Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). 18.  Both Heidegger and Deleuze would concur in the wake of Hegel’s critique of the doctrine of essence. See Hegel’s Science of Logic, pp. 444ff. 19.  Compare Heidegger’s discussion of the primum analogatum, Suarez’s terms (BP: 81). 20.  Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K. A. Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. ix. 21.  Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976), p. 502. Cited in US: 90. 22.  Indeed, even in color Klee discovered the Zwischenreich of our interworldly tragedy. If we discover the purity (and transcendence) of color in the rainbow, it remains only “half transcendent” (N: 467). The chief flaw of the rainbow is that it interrupts the color series at red instead of continuing into violet. For further discussion of rhythm in Paul Klee’s work, see Christiane Dessauer-Reiners, Das Rhythmische bei Paul Klee: eine Studie zum genetischen Bildfahren (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1996). 23.  Pierre Klossowski, Decadence of the Nude, p. 132. I invoke the translation of Klossowski’s French translation of Klee’s Tagebuch (D: 184), which may deviate from the original by losing Klee’s account of the generative graphic line. 24.  Klossowski, Decadence of the Nude, p. 134. 25.  Doubtless this resonance between Deleuze and Klee occurs because of their mutual reliance on Worringer’s account of the gothic line. See Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy, trans. Michael Bullock (Chicago: Elephant Books, 1997), pp. 110ff. 26.  This 1902 entry occurs a few days after Klee attended the dance of “la belle Otèro” (Caroline Otèro) noted in this chapter’s opening. Klee was equally taken with this famous courtesan of the époque, claiming that she was “unsurpassable” (D: 85). A year later, close to the production of The Virgin in the Tree, he alludes to her again (D: 146). 27.  G.W.F Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 1, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 97. 28.  Compare in this regard Klee’s own contrast of Franz Marc’s “noble sensibility” (Sinnlichkeit) with his own more distant love that dissolves into the whole of creation, even beyond the Beautiful (D: 344–345). Similarly, compare his contrast with Rilke, who remains in this regard an impressionist: “His sensibility [Sensibilität] is very close to mine except I press on more toward the center, whereas his preparation tends to be skin deep” (317). Finally, contrast this with the “sensuality [Sinnlichkeit] ran amuck” of Klee’s youth (D: 46). These are indications that Klee tacitly acknowledges with respect to Sinnlichkeit questions not simply concerning what was classically referred to as the Beautiful but the Good, issues to which we shall return. 29.  Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus, pp. 18–21. 30.  See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, pp. 121–122.

208  Notes to Pages 169–171

31.  This interplay is documented in Wolfgang Kerston, “Zerstörung, and Der Konstruktion Zulieb?” See, in particular, chap. 3. Despite the limitations of Greenberg’s reading of Klee he also sees this synthesis at work. Claiming that Klee was not ready to let go of representation, he recognized too that “Klee also painted perfectly abstract pictures, many of them almost as non-objective as Kandinsky in spite of their literary titles. And it is significant that as one becomes more and more familiar with Klee’s work little of the important qualities present in his more representational painting is found missing in his abstractions.” See “Art Chronicle: On Paul Klee (1870–1940),” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, p. 71. Nonetheless, granted the heterogeneous synthesis at stake, the relationship between the constructive or architectonic and the poetic will be less strictly methodological than one of family resemblance between parts and wholes. As Jordan has argued, one can see the impact of the constructivism in such works as “Hovering” (Before the Ascent) or The Tightrope Walker (Seiltänzer) (1923, 138). See Jim M. Jordan, “The Structure of Paul Klee’s Art in the Twenties: From Cubism to Constructivism,” Arts Magazine, vol. 52, no. 1 (September, 1977), pp. 152–157. 32.  As has been seen, even Deleuze admits “you have to keep enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn; and you have to keep small supplies of significance and subjectification, if only to turn them against their own systems when the circumstances demand it” (TP: 160). 33.  The argument remains coherent with the Nietzschebuch’s account of the will’s overcoming in resoluteness: “Perhaps a higher acting is concealed in releasement [Gelassenheit] than is found in all the actions within the world and in the machinations of all mankind.” But Gelassenheit, “renouncing the will,” would lie “beyond the distinction between activity and passivity.” See “Conversations on a Country Path” (DT: 61). 34.  One might deny that such an oscillation or Spielraum is still at stake in Gelassenheit, claiming instead that Gelassenheit resolves such oscillation. But “this restless to and fro between yes and no” is also a moment of its experience (DT: 75). 35.  See my In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I, chap. 3. 36.  “Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour. Color and I are one. I am a painter” (D: 297, 4–16–14). 37.  This is not to deny the Hegelian point concerning conceptual coherence. Nor will it involve a return to immanence, primitivism, or simple object description. But as has been seen, it denies Hegel’s metaphysical identity of sense and sensibilia, acknowledges other nonprosaic (inventive) uses of language, and allows the Wechsel (Fichte) or “zig zag” (Husserl) between concepts and intuition, history and experience, that has accompanied both dialectic and Phenomenology from the outset. Nor does it deny the experimental venture of such a practice. 38.  See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans. James Ellington (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), p. 65. 39.  Kant, Critique of Judgment, p. 99. 40.  Ibid., pp. 58–59. For further discussion of Kant’s metaphysics, or what I have called his hermeneutics of virtue, see my “Kant, the Architectonics of Reason, and the

Notes to Pages 171–176  209

Ruins of the Ancient Systems: On the Symbolics of Law,” in Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought, chap. 2. 41.  Ibid., p. 60. In addition to love (amor benevolentiae), the other predispositions to morality are moral feeling, conscience, respect (reverentia). 42.  Kant, Critique of Judgment, pp. 139, 193. 43.  Ibid., p. 139. 44.  Even Merleau-Ponty knew, however, that “I function by construction. I am installed on a pyramid of time which has been me. I take up a field and invent myself ” (S: 14). 45.  Schelling, Philosophy of Art, p. 128. 46.  Here again we meet Heidegger’s fourfold, or at least the gods. Both Heidegger and Klee invoked Asian thought for its grasp. Classically we confront the problem of the divine names—or at least its placeholder, Deleuze would insist. 47.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 216. 48.  Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus, p. 46. 49.  Cited in Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 215. 50.  Recall that Grohmann had claimed that “the last trace of narrative disappears and, as Goethe said, ‘the world contemplates itself in us.’” Ibid., p. 214. Once again, Lyotard’s stress upon the multiple is far from romantic intuitionism. The argument here concerning the denial of metanarratives relies less on Lyotard’s Freudianism, where Thanatos provides a similar problem of the multiple, than on his linguistic structuralism: “A narrative will still be possible but only as one realization among others of a structure, the performance of a competence” (ADev: 137). 51.  See Alain Bonfand, L’oeil en trop, pp. 28, 79. 52.  In a recent article, it is argued that this entails that a change has taken place since “The Origin of the Work of Art”: “It is no longer the difference between earth and world that works in the work, but the deployment of world (Welter) in advance (starting from the setting into work as bauen) of the fourfold (Ereignis des Gevierts).” See Pierre Pochon, “Le quadriparti dans le meditation Heideggerienne de l’art, de L’Origin de l’OEuvre d’Art aux Notes sur Klee,” Heidegger Studies, vol. 22 2006), p. 167. Granted that the account of Being as Ereignis was just emerging in the earlier work, something of this sort may be true, but not crucial to the exposition here. I have resisted, in any case, strict periodization of Heidegger’s project. The term Erblicken was already used to articulate the role of transcendental imagination with regard to pure intuition in the Kantbuch (KPM: 98). 53.  See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes and others (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 352–353. 54.  Jean-Paul Sartre, “Merleau-Ponty,” Situations, p. 217. 55.  I thank Leonard Lawlor for his comments at this point. 56.  See Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, p. 216. Grohmann again stresses the role that mathematics plays in both Klee and Schönberg. This discussion is absent in MerleauPonty’s account. It could be generated by relating Kant’s account of sensible appearance, disarticulated between intensive and extensive magnitude, to Merleau-Ponty’s account of

210  Notes to Pages 176–180

écart between the visible and the invisible in the sensuous. The latter explicitly reaffirms Kant’s doctrine of real opposition. See VI: 261. 57.  Theodor Adorno, Notes to Literature, vol. 2, p. 102. Indeed, Adorno argues that it is precisely this attention to sensuousness, the instinctual life of sounds, that “protected the compromises art made later, when the catchword ‘automatic’ became popular” (ibid). Elsewhere Adorno specifically singles out Boulez and Messiaen (whom, as has been seen, Deleuze had favored in analyzing Klee’s Twittering Machine): “These composers have above all attempted to bring rhythm under the strict domination of twelve-tone procedure and ultimately to replace composition altogether with an objective-calculatory ordering of intervals, pitches, long and short durations, degrees of loudness: an integral rationalization such as has never been envisioned in music.” See “The Aging of the New Music,” trans. Robert Hullor-Kentor, Frederic Will, in Theodor W. Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. Richard Leppert (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 187. Clearly, many of the issues that have been traced here concerning Klee and painterly modernism would also surface in philosophical interpretations of music. 58.  See the analysis of Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus, pp. 44ff. Though once again Klee sought mathematical models and formal laws for color, he warns his students “against the schematism which tries to put the naked law into the actual work” and “against the impoverishment that comes of taking the law too literally” (N: 499). 59.  As Klee’s commentators have noted, this omission of explicit historical reference involves a certain repetition of Klee’s own omission of history. If so, we must leave to thinkers like Adorno or Sartre the correction for this “optics” in both thinkers, noting all the while that there will always be more than (factual) history at stake. Still, it must also be noted that Klee himself criticized “bourgeois” consciousness from early in his career— albeit precisely in relation to “The Virgin in the Tree,” which was discussed earlier (D: 144). Every bit as much as Sartre (whom Adorno praises for his political engagement), Merleau-Ponty was a fellow traveler of leftist politics throughout his life (AT: 256). As much as Adorno, he adopted Lukács’ critique of a direct thought, unmediated by the realities of history, and it too was operative in his late thought (NC: 351). If the sensible is precisely “that medium in which there can be being without it having to be posited,” it is not without history (VI: 214). It is always figured by “the invisible community, the invisible other, the invisible culture” (VI: 229). This critique of direct thought may well partially motivate the need to find, beyond “the philosophy of consciousness,” a “figured philosophy” in painting. 60.  See G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace, A. V. Miller (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 206–211; Novalis, Hymns to the Night, trans. Charles E. Passage (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1960), pp. 3–4. 61.  Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, p. 208. 62.  The crescent moon is part of a series, a sequence, a structure, and a concept. Here too, nonetheless, we lack an ultimately determinate whole; even the “full” moon remains one-sided, schema-specific: an Abschattungen. For Klee, its phases moreover “make visible” a rhythmics, a time (or season), and a space (or Cosmos) that exceeds us.

Notes to Pages 180–182  211

63.  See Luce Irigaray, The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), pp. 28ff. 64.  In invoking Klee’s vulnerability, I have in mind especially the late works that reveal his own relation to illness and death, works that were especially significant to Heidegger’s similar meditations. See P: 148. 65.  See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), p. 76. Hence, to the analogy of being or the illuminations of the Beautiful, in the experience of exposure as sensibility we must add the question of the “anarchy” of the Good (ibid., 75). The difference between Heidegger and ­L evinas will doubtless be as complicated as that between Heidegger and Deleuze. Hei­ degger’s understanding of rapture or ekstasis was never very far from, if never identical to, the Platonic notion of the Good. As the difference between Deleuze and Heidegger already reveals, the remnants of the logic of analogy are not far away. Suffice it to say here that both Heidegger and Klee stoically discovered what Levinas describes in saying, “Stoic nobility of resignation to the logos already owes its energy to the beyond essence (178).” For further discussion of this issue, see my Tradition(s) II: Hermeneutics, Ethics and the Dispensation of the Good, pp. 239ff. 66.  Clement Greenberg, “2,” in 5 Essays on Paul Klee, pp. 35, 60. 67.  Paul Klee, “Pictorial Mechanics,” Lecture of July 2, 1924, cited in Christian Geelhaar, Paul Klee and the Bauhaus, p. 31. 68.  Nonetheless, these terms, as well his the problem of the synthesis of “ethical gravity” and “impish tittering” by which art “plays in the dark with ultimate things and yet it reaches them,” are longstanding in Klee’s work. Their earliest formulations date from decades earlier (N: 80). For the details of Klee’s last decade, the transformation of his work, and his confrontation with death, see O. K. Werckmeister, Paul Klee in Exile, 1933–1940.

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. abstract expressionism, 142–43 abstraction: and analogy, 158, 162–63; Deleuze on, 158, 162–63; Gadamer on, 42; Heidegger on, 94, 96, 167; Klee and, 3, 5, 17, 21, 22, 26, 29, 31, 37, 40–41, 44, 56, 84, 133, 162, 166, 189n47; Klossowski on, 162; MerleauPonty on, 29–31; in radicalization of Phenomenology, 196n59; Worringer on, 28 Adorno, Theodor: on aesthetics and form, 93; on art after representation, 175–76; on art’s theological overtones, 161; and Bachelard, 188n41; on Beauty, 13, 14, 16, 25–26, 27, 28, 33; on Beethoven’s late quartets, 177; on Benjamin, 25, 50, 56, 81, 192n28; on chaos, 166–67; confluence of Merleau-Ponty and, 12–13; on construction, 165, 168; on experience of work of art, 164; on experiment, 144; on formalism, 167; Gadamer on, 52; on granting prominence to the visual, 173; on Hegel’s definition of Beauty, 181; versus Heidegger on art, 164–65, 166; on

Heidegger’s jargon and anachronisms, 95; on hieroglyphic character of Klee’s work, 7, 11, 104, 164; on Husserl, 12; on imagination, 16; on Jung’s essay on Joyce, 194n39; on Klee and gigantism, 98; on Klee and neo-Marxism, 4; Klee as interpreted by, 24–29, 75, 118, 165; on the literal as barbaric, 161; and Lyotard, 136–37, 144; and Merleau-Ponty, 8; on metaphysics after Auschwitz, 15; on modern art, 26–27, 118; negative dialectic of, 12, 137; and phenomenology, 24, 166; on play, 178–79; on rapture, 164; and Schelling, 25, 26, 165–66; and the sensuous, 7, 15, 164, 165, 170, 176, 178–79, 210n57; on spiritualization and art, 24–25; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2; on tradition, 13, 16; on truth of art, 165, 166 Aichele, K. Porter, 196n56 aletheia, 42, 105–6, 111, 152 allegory: as always already interrupting Kalonic present, 53; Benjamin on, 44, 46, 49, 54, 81, 192n28; as falsely 213

214  Index

devalued for Gadamer, 46; Gadamer on fixed tradition and, 33; Gadamer on rehabilitation of, 35, 39–40, 46, 48, 55; Kant on, 54–55; in Klee’s work, 56, 87; symbolics distinguished from, 42, 46–48 anamnesis, 179 Ancient Harmony (Klee), 34, 144, 176, 177 Angelus Novus (Klee), 3, 26, 44–46, 45, 57, 152, 179 antiart, 42 appearances: articulation of, 84; Hegel on dissolution of, 125; Heidegger’s distinction between being and, 174; multidimensionality of, 21; overemphasis on the sensuous restricts art to, 179; saving, 78 Approximative Man (Klee), 58 Aragon, Louis, 69 Arcades Project (Benjamin), 43, 50, 81, 191n18, 192n28 archetypes, 80–81, 82 Aristotle: doctrine of the mean, 35, 41; on founding the rational beyond the formal, 38; and Gadamer on work of art, 48; Heidegger and, 99, 103, 107, 108, 109, 199n34; on mythos, 102, 199n18; on tragedy, 138; on tuché, 135–36, 203n29 art: Adorno on, 24–25, 164, 165, 166; as beginning with chaos for Klee, 20, 99–102, 127, 128, 160–61, 177; as expressing truth of the tragic, 27; Gadamer on, 53; Hegel on, 27, 95, 120, 144, 155; Heidegger on, 93–94, 112; intelligibility emerges in plurality and multiplicity, 171; Klee on artistic creation, 81; Klee on art “playing in the dark,” 166, 171; Klee on return to the works themselves, 35, 36, 40; Klee seeks cosmological significance for, 54, 76; Lyotard on importance of, 133; Merleau-Ponty on interpretation of, 7;

Nietzsche on physiology and, 155; and order, 166–67; philosophical analog of, 21, 22; and play, 178–79; and politics, 156; as rendering visible for Klee, 17, 37, 40, 101, 128, 159, 171, 173; after representation, 175–76; Schelling on, 20, 61, 75–76, 87, 144, 155; theological overtones of, 161. See also dance; modern art; music; painting “Art and Space” (Heidegger), 180 Artaud, Antonin, 69, 127, 143, 161, 175 automatic writing (écriture automatique), 20, 64–65, 68, 82, 87, 197n60 Bacchanalian, the, 120, 125 Bachelard, Gaston, 30, 86, 176, 188n41, 195n40 Bacon, Francis, 125, 127, 128, 129, 183n2 Badiou, Alain, 6, 144, 181, 206n15 Barthes, Roland, 37–38 Bataille, Georges: and Derrida, 83, 87; on experience, 66, 67; Foucault on, 71; and Klee, 68, 69; on myth, 73; on Phenomenology, 59, 66, 67; and Sartre, 8, 65–68, 193n7; and space of new relations, 79; on surrealism and Romanticism, 76 Baudelaire, Charles, 50, 64 Bauhaus: complexity of Klee’s links to, 91; and “Crescent Moon over the Rational” and “Ancient Harmony,” 44, 173; Heidegger criticizes views similar to those of, 110; Klee’s differences with, 168, 169; and Klee’s evolution from representation to abstraction, 57; Klee’s theory course at, 190n8; and Klee’s Wege des Naturstudiums, 2, 17; utopian goals of, 146 Beauty: Adorno on, 13, 14, 16, 25–26, 27, 28, 33; allegory as always already interrupting Kalonic present, 53; Benjamin on, 47, 49, 54, 100; Brentano on, 94; as

Index  215

ekphanestaton of poiesis, 111; Gadamer on, 42–43, 49, 53–54, 55; Goethe on, 152; and the Good, 182; Hegel on, 181; Heidegger on, 14–15, 112, 114, 154–55, 159, 182; Kant on, 206n11; Klee on, 14, 54, 145, 185n6; Lyotard on, 135, 137; Merleau-Ponty on, 13–14, 27, 33; modern art’s refiguring of, 35; Nietzsche on, 155; rapture of the Beautiful, 154; Romanticism on, 13; and the sublime, 148–49; understanding through the event, 174; and withdrawal, 24, 52, 44, 103, 107–8, 167, 182 Beauvoir, Simone de, 67 Being: Deleuze on splendor of, 142, 157, 158, 160; Gadamer on interruption and, 53; and Goethe’s understanding of symbol, 39; Heidegger on Enframing (Ge-stell) of, 114; Heidegger on Gestaltung and, 113; Heidegger on modern art and withdrawing of transcendence of, 167; Heidegger on Schelling preparing way for disclosure of, 166; Klee on creation contrasted with Heidegger’s, 102; Lyotard and, 140, 142; Merleau-Ponty on geometrical form and, 111; Merleau-Ponty on “inscription of Being,” 89; MerleauPonty on Schelling on “over-Being,” 90–91; Merleau-Ponty reads Klee through question of, 21–22; no one knows what language it speaks, 142; theological overtones of, 161 Being and Time (Heidegger), 96, 98, 101, 108, 114, 154, 200n38, 201n49 Benjamin, Walter: Adorno on, 25, 50, 81; and agonistic of understanding, 56; on allegory, 44, 46, 49, 54, 81, 192n28; Arcades Project, 43, 50, 81, 191n18, 192n28; on aura of work of art, 42; on avant-garde, 95; and Baudelaire, 50; on Beauty, 47, 49, 54, 100; and classical German thought, 43; on “constella-

tions,” 13; on death of intention, 81; on explosive image, 50, 82; on formal standards for knowledge, 4; and Gadamer, 8, 43–50, 55–56, 57; and Heidegger, 43–44; on history as recurrence of catastrophe, 44, 151–52; and Jung, 191n18; Klee as interpreted by, 3, 44–46; and Klee’s Angelus Novus, 3, 44, 57, 152, 179; and logic of the instant, 67; messianic view of history of, 55, 56; on modern techniques of reproduction, 49; on order and chaos, 100; The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 44; and phenomenology 43–44; on philosophy and art beginning in melancholy, 94; post-Kantian legacy in, 94–95; on self-understanding, 50; on the symbolic, 47–48, 49, 50; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2 Bergson, Henri, 32, 59, 63, 100, 189n47 Blanchot, Maurice: on aletheia, 105, 106, 111; on automatic writing, 87; on conceiving intentionality immanently, 76; on the empirical and the transcendental, 77, 82; on expressive capacities of language, 61; on the fictional, 78–79; and Jung’s archetypes, 82; Klee as interpreted by, 75, 77–78; on MerleauPonty, 68; on signification and images, 82–83; and space of new relations, 79, 80; on surrealism, 59, 90; on unfigurable universe, 85 body: as a building for Klee, 145, 205n49; without organs, 127–28, 136, 143–44, 169–70. See also lived body Bonfand, Alain, 56, 133, 173 Braque, Georges, 42, 94 Brecht, Bertolt, 15, 42 Brentano, Franz, 94, 107 Breton, André: Foucault on, 59, 70, 71; on Klee’s importance, 69; on Klee’s partial automatism, 70, 76, 89, 91; and Sartre, 65; and space of new relations, 79

216  Index

Buber, Martin, 43, 79 Burckhardt, Jacob, 184n11 Burke, Edmund, 138, 172 Callois, Roger, 79 Carnap, Rudolf, 3, 107, 112, 113, 114, 201n49 Carneades, 66 Casey, Edward, 80 Cavaillès, Jean, 22, 184n14, 187n28, 197n62, 201n49 Cézanne, Paul: articulation of thing as force, 160; Deleuze on, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128; distortions of, 122–23, 128, 134, 174; on essence of painting as depth, 101; Heidegger on, 94, 96, 139, 199n24; Klee and Romanticism of, 17; Klee compared with, 162; Klee perceives that he has advanced beyond, 133; on logic of sensation, 175; Lyotard on, 139, 204n36; Merleau-Ponty on, 14, 16, 122–23, 125, 139, 141, 162; on motif, 122, 128; naturalism of, 123, 139, 162; on opposition of nature and culture, 104, 106–7 “Cézanne’s Doubt” (Merleau-Ponty), 123, 202n11 chaos: Adorno on, 166–67; Deleuze on, 162, 166; Heidegger on, 156, 157, 166; Kant on, 155; Klee on art beginning with, 20, 99–102, 127, 128, 177; Nietzsche on, 138, 155–56, 157; order and, 100; Schelling on art and, 155; Schlegel attempts to alternate between system and, 169 cinema, 167 classical German thought: Benjamin and, 43; Klee and, 3, 152; Merleau-Ponty and, 14, 118; in Phenomenology’s origins, 12; postmodernism and poststructuralism and, 118 Clifford, James, 196n54 color: Deleuze on, 162; Heidegger on,

160; Kant on, 172; Klee on, 171, 172–73, 177, 207n22, 210n58; Lyotard on, 178; Merleau-Ponty on, 173–74, 176, 177, 178; after representation, 175–76; in Van Gogh, 160, 174 concrete: appeals to the, 5–6; MerleauPonty’s Phenomenology of Perception on, 16 consciousness: James’s stream of, 82; as matter of transcendence, 197n62; Merleau-Ponty on several ways of, 120; nonprosaic conception of, 91, 127; prosaic, 70, 78, 902, 127; Sartre on essence of, 65. See also unconscious, the constellation, 13; and illumination (Benjamin), 44; and multiplicity, 171, 177. See also interpretation; multiplicity; phenomenology constructivism: Adorno on, 165, 168; of Deleuze, 131; Heidegger and, 114; Husserl’s anticonstructivism, 121; in Klee’s “Crescent Moon over the Rational,” 4; Klee’s links with, 37, 84, 91, 102, 104, 133–34, 140, 165, 169; Lyotard on, 139–40 contemporaneity, 39, 43, 46, 47, 52–53, 56, 83, 192n28 Contributions to Philosophy (Heidegger), 114 Contructive-Impressive (Klee), xxii, 84, 103, 115 “Creative Credo” (Klee), 19, 38, 54, 101, 110–11, 200n44 Crescent Moon over the Rational (Klee), 4, 44, 173, 179 Crevel, René, 93 Critique of Judgment (third Critique) (Kant), 14, 54–55, 76, 125, 155, 172, 184n11, 202n10 Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique) (Kant), 18, 144, 155, 168 crystalline, the, 40–41, 46, 48, 52, 54, 190n17

Index  217

Crystalline Landscape (Klee), 192n28 Crystalline Memory of the Destruction of the Navy (Klee), 190n12 Cubism, 42, 128, 173 dadaists, 20, 91, 96, 118 dance, 120, 121, 135, 136, 144–45, 163, 203n30 Dasein: Heidegger on, 39, 97, 98, 101, 103, 109, 114, 132, 135, 157; Lyotard on, 132, 135, 138 Death and Fire (Klee), 11, 92, 104 deconstruction, 83, 102, 104, 106, 110, 169 Deleuze, Gilles: on abstract expressionism, 142; on abstraction, 158, 162–63; on body without organs, 127–28, 136, 143–44, 169–70; on Cézanne, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128; on color, 162; constructivism of, 131; on diastole-systole, 126, 127, 158, 174; empiricism of, 206n14; on explication-implication expressivist doublet, 206n16; and Fichte, 143, 148; on gothic line, 127, 207n25; and Heidegger, 8, 149, 156–61, 211n65; on Husserl, 124, 130; on Klee, 4, 125, 160–61; and Lyotard, 131, 132, 136, 140, 143; on memory, 179; on MerleauPonty, 139, 174; on music, 129; and Nietzsche, 126, 129, 130, 143, 157, 160, 169–70; on ontology as dice throw, 159; on orgiastic representation, 117, 125, 143; on painting, 125; on perspectivism, 157, 160; on Phenomenology, 130; and postmodernism and poststructuralism, 118; on reflective judgment, 204n45; on rendering force visible, 128, 158; on sensation, 124–25, 130, 157–58, 175; on sensuousness, 181; on splendor of Being, 142, 157, 158, 160; on the sublime, 144; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2 Derrida, Jacques: on act of writing, 197n60; on anamnesis, 179; on arche-

écriture, 79–80; on Bataille’s discourse, 87; on claims to the archaic or sacred, 83; on deconstruction, 83; on experience, 80; on experiment, 144; on Heidegger as not far off from Artaud’s characterization of Van Gogh, 161; on immanence and transcendence, 83; on indeterminacy of psychoanalysis, 85–86; Klee as interpreted by, 84, 103; and Novalis’s break with post-Kantian idealism, 105; on Phenomenology, 83–84; and postmodernism and poststructuralism, 118; and Searle, 3; on spacing of actuality, 85; on theological order of the visible, 161; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2 Descartes, René, 102 Diaries (Klee), 27, 35, 36, 40, 56, 117, 131, 133, 163 Discours, Figure (Lyotard), 133, 140 dividual, 7, 28, 37, 130, 172, 179, 184n15, 203n21 drawing: Klee on writing and, 22–24; Klee’s graphic line, 17–23, 103, 107, 162, 163, 169, 172–73, 177; as symbol for Klee, 33 Dreisch, Hans, 113 Dubuffet, Jean, 193n5 Duchamp, Marcel, 42, 72, 139 Dufrenne, Mikel, 131 Duns Scotus, John, 157, 158 Dürer, Albrecht, 163 Eliade, Mircea, 56, 83, 86, 192n28 emotion, phenomenological account of, 154 epoché, 66 Ereignis: and Goethe on Beauty, 47, 100; Heidegger on, 98, 103, 105, 114, 147, 161; Lyotard on, 138, 140, 142; understanding the Beautiful through, 174 essences, 12–13, 43–44, 89 Existentialism Is a Humanism (Sartre), 73

218  Index

experimentalism: Adorno on, 144; Cavaillès on, 201n49; Critique of Pure Reason begins as experiment, 144; Derrida on, 144; of Duchamp, 139; Heidegger on, 112, 115, 140, 200n45; in Klee, 20, 99, 101, 103, 107, 168, 183n2; in play of the imagination, 179 “Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty), 7, 15, 22, 33, 70, 125, 185n8, 188n44, 189n47 Fédier, François, 94, 197n3 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb: and Adorno and Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Husserl, 12; and Deleuze, 143, 148; on ego’s action as linedrawing, 18–19, 201n51; and Heidegger, 148, 205n56; on imagination, 143; on interdependent determinability, 99; Jung’s views on the symbolic influenced by, 50; on lived body, 143; logocentricity of, 146, 148; on mathematical analogue for understanding the self, 37, 185n16; on mathematical/dynamic distinction, 199n32; on self as mathematical point, 102, 104; on self-understanding, 51; on thought and dream, 78; traditionality and legacy of, 52; transcendental Ich of, 52, 146 finitude, 46, 49, 81, 89, 146, 148 Fink, Eugen, 51, 76, 186n10, 196n59, 201n48 Fish, Stanley, 184n7 Flaubert, Gustave, 73, 90 formalism: Adorno on, 167; Heidegger on, 4, 107, 156, 168; of Klee, 5, 29, 37, 54, 97, 99, 101, 104, 117, 152, 167, 169, 181; of Saussure’s linguistics, 21, 29 Foucault, Michel: on Bataille, 71; on Breton, 59, 79; on hermeneutics of resemblance, 63; on Klee, 4, 70–71, 74, 84; on Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe, 70, 71, 72, 87; on matters of local intervention, 15; on modern art, 85;

and postmodernism and poststructuralism, 118; on primitivism, 74–75; on Sartre, 71–74; on surrealism, 79; Theatrum philosophicum, 2, 183n2; as theoretical interpreter of Klee, 2; on transcendental-empirico doublet, 83 foundationalism, 121, 178 Franciscono, Marcel, 22, 75, 193n15 Frank, Manfred, 105, 118, 148, 199n25, 203n21 Frankfurt school, 52 free association, 82 Frege, Gottlob, 22 Freud, Sigmund, 50, 118, 134, 145–46, 178 Friedrich, Kaspar David, 40 Gadamer, Hans-Georg: on aesthetic experience as exemplary for hermeneutic experience, 38–40; and agonistic of understanding, 56; on allegory and fixed tradition, 33; on American art, 190n9; on analogia entis, 55, 191n25; on art as unfinished event, 53; on Beauty, 42–43, 49, 53–54, 55; and Benjamin, 8, 43–50, 55–56, 57; on classical aesthetic tradition in Klee’s work, 4; and critique of metaphysics, 54; on Frankfurt school, 52; on Goethe, 39; on Heidegger’s fourfold, 103; on hermeneutics, 38–39, 40, 41, 43, 48, 50, 52, 53–54, 55–56, 57; on Kant on the symbolic, 55; Klee as interpreted by, 40–46, 57; and logic of the instant, 67; on mimesis, 35, 39, 47, 48; on modern art, 40, 42, 47, 54; on modern techniques of reproduction, 49; the negative emphasized by, 48; on our distance from the past, 52; on rehabilitation of allegory, 35, 39–40, 46, 48, 55; “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” 42, 46, 52; on selfreflexivity, 52; on self-understanding, 50, 51; “The Speechless Image,” 35; on the symbolic, 46–50; as theoretical

Index  219

interlocutor of Klee, 2; on tradition, 33, 39–40, 49–50, 52, 53; Truth and Method, 35, 39, 42, 48, 52; on the unconscious, 51; on understanding as an event, 55 Geelhaar, Christian, 146, 168 Gelassenheit, 106, 170, 179, 200n40, 208n33, 208n34 gender, 180 German philosophy, see classical German thought Gestaltung, 94, 101, 102, 104, 113, 142 Glaesemer, Jürgen, 152 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von: on Beauty, 152; Benjamin on crisis in bourgeois education seen by, 192n28; Foucault on Breton and, 79; Heidegger’s myth of cura and, 98; Klee associated with legacy of, 36; on symbol, 39, 40, 42, 43, 44, 47, 50, 54, 57, 70, 100 Greenberg, Clement: on artists influenced by Klee, 62, 193n5; on Dubuffet, 193n5; on Klee and German philosophy, 5; on Klee and gigantism, 98; on Klee articulating way between nostalgic idealism and German classicism, 181; on Klee saving poetry for painting, 84–85, 195n48; on Klee’s graphic line, 19, 20; on Klee’s work as ornamental and decorative, 103, 199n22; on modern art, 85; on sign and object in Klee’s work, 62; on synthesis in Klee’s work, 208n31 Grohmann, Will, 2, 17, 22, 44, 57, 62, 87, 151, 152, 153, 176, 209n56 Guernica (Picasso), 60 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: on art as at first hieroglyphic, 27; on art as sensible form of the Idea, 144; on art as thing of the past, 95, 155; Aufheben of, 95, 106, 119; and Bataille on

experience, 67; on Beauty, 181; on the crystalline, 52, 190n17; on dissolution of appearance, 125; and Gadamer on contemporaneity, 39; Geist of, 52; on Gestalten, 79; Heidegger sees himself closer to Schelling than, 165, 166; on imagination, 16, 179; on irony, 68, 193n12; on mistaking sensuous appearance for Absolute Idea, 42; on Naturphilosophie, 48, 190n17; on “night-like pit” of memory, 29, 179; on painting as spatial, 18; on plastic discourse, 22, 38; on religion, 163; on sensory experience, 119–20, 124, 125, 174, 175, 176; and skepticism, 66, 119; surrealist readings of, 59 Heidegger, Martin: on abstraction, 94, 96, 167; and Adorno, 95, 164–65, 166; on aletheia, 42, 105–6, 152; as Aristotelian, 107, 199n34; on Aristotle, 99, 103, 108, 109; “Art and Space,” 180; on art and the truth of its time, 93–94; on art as objectless in age of technology, 112; and Beauty, 14–15, 112, 114, 154–55, 159, 182; Being and Time, 96, 98, 101, 108, 114, 154, 200n38, 201n49; Benjamin on, 43–44, 192n28; and Carnap, 3, 107, 112, 201n49; on Cézanne, 94, 96, 139, 199n24; on chaos, 156, 157, 166; on cinema, 167; classical myth used by, 198n11; on color, 160; on the continuum, 108–9; Contributions to Philosophy, 114; cosmic undertones in work of, 97– 98; Dasein analysis of, 39, 97, 98, 101, 103, 109, 114, 132, 135, 157; and Deleuze, 8, 149, 156–61, 211n65; Derrida on, 161; on embodiment and truth, 180; on enframing (Gestell), 94, 96, 105, 106, 114; etymological returns and transformations of, 106; on exhibitive disparting, 53; on experimentalism, 112, 115, 140, 200n45; and Fichte, 148, 205n56; finitude and ontological difference

220  Index

stressed by, 148; on formalism, 4, 107, 156, 168; on the fourfold, 17, 94, 98, 99, 103, 161, 209n52; on “gathering of the gesture,” 19; on Gestaltung, 94, 101; on gigantism, 98, 156; “God is Dead,” 160; on hermeneutical intuition, 1, 114; on hermeneutic circle, 48, 105, 204n34; The History of the Concept of Time, 108; and Husserl, 12, 50, 98; on idealistic conception of sense, 42; on imagination, 16, 31, 83–84, 114, 201n51; interest in Klee, 93, 163; Kantbuch, 154, 155, 158, 209n52; on Kant on imagination, 18; on Kant on sensibility, 154–55; on Klee and his Denkweg, 2–3; on Klee and modern science, 11–12; on Klee and neo-Kantianism, 5, 93, 99, 114, 115; Klee as interpreted by, 95–115, 167–68; “Klee Notes”, 114, 161, 167, 171, 174; on Klee’s experimentalism, 20; on Klee’s importance, 3; Klee’s importance for later, 90; “In Klee something has happened that none of us yet grasp,” 93, 96, 108; and Klee’s search for transcendence, 24; on life as historical, 1; and logic of the instant, 67; Lyotard on Heideggerean preaching about Being, 140; on memory, 111, 179; MerleauPonty on, 12; Mindfulness, 167; on modern art, 94–95, 96, 107, 167; on multiplicity of interpretations, 170; and Natorp, 184n8; on nature, 97; and neo-Kantianism, 153; Nietzsche, 148, 170, 208n33; and Nietzsche, 114, 140, 148–49, 153–57, 159, 161, 170, 181; and Novalis’s break with post-Kantian idealism, 105; on ontic versus ontological, 174; on ontological difference, 104, 107, 148, 159; on organicism, 97; “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 11, 17, 93–96, 99, 103–4, 107, 113–14, 152–53, 155, 156, 159, 167, 209n52; on overcoming of aesthetics, 93; Parmenides

lectures of, 110; on phenomenological construction, 113, 201n49; post-Kantian legacy in, 94–95; “The Question Concerning Technology,” 11, 104, 114–15; on rapture, 153–55, 164, 206n11, 211n65; on rendering, 111–12; retains term Phenomenology, 84; on rhythm of experience, 138, 204n34; and Romanticism, 106, 152; on Schelling, 165–66; on schematism, 81, 97, 103, 104, 106, 156, 168, 175, 202n11; scholars associate Klee and, 151–52; on science and philosophy, 108–10, 153; on sensuousness, 7, 206n13; sketches of time of, 100; Sophist lectures of, 101, 108; on surrealism, 96, 167; on technology, 106–7; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2; “Time and Being,” 96; on what is “profoundly ominous” in Klee, 28, 99 “Heidegger et la pensée du déclin” (Fédier), 94 Heisenberg, Werner, 11, 96 Henry, Michel, 196n59 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 124 Hermann, Friedrich-Wilhelm von, 103–4, 151 hermeneutics: Adorno on art works and, 25; beyond discursive regulations, 79; Eliade on, 86; Foucault on Renaissance, 73; Gadamer on, 38–39, 40, 41, 43, 48, 50, 52, 53–54, 55–56, 57; Heidegger on hermeneutical intuition, 1, 114; hermeneutic circle, 48, 105, 204n34; rational and semantic drift in, 86; and rehabilitation of allegory, 46; Ricoeur on, 192n28; Sartre on, 63–64; surreal quality of, 86 Hisamatsu, Shinichi, 96 history: Beauty as historical product, 26; Benjamin on Heidegger’s attempt to rescue, 43–44; Benjamin on Heidegger’s secularization of, 192n28;

Index  221

Benjamin’s messianic view of, 55, 56; in Benjamin’s view of artistic form, 49; Gadamer on our distance from the past, 52; Klee interpretations and, 3; Klee’s omission of, 210n59; MerleauPonty’s omission of, 178, 210n59; play omits, 179; as recurrence of catastrophe for Benjamin, 44, 151–52 History of the Concept of Time, The (Heidegger), 108 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 94, 95, 198n11 Homme approximatif, L’ (Tzara), 58, 69, 78; on Klee’s etching for this work, Approximative Man (1931), 58, 69 Horkheimer, Max, 16, 52 “Hovering” (Before the Ascent) (Klee), 146, 147 Hume, David, 76, 172 Husserl, Edmund: Adorno on, 12; anticonstructivism of, 121; on categorical intuition, 113, 206n13; critique of account of determinate multiplicity—in Cavaillès, 201n49, in Desanti, 184n14; Deleuze on, 124, 130; on Dresden Gallery, 69; and Heidegger, 12, 50, 98; and James’s stream of consciousness, 82; lingering Cartesianism of, 81; and Merleau-Ponty, 12, 14, 29, 89, 121, 125, 202n11; on multiplicity of interpretation, 6; and Natorp, 3; on paintings as prelinguistic phenomenological Sinn, 61–62; on passive synthesis and adumbrative explication, 76; on ray of the world, 27; Sartre’s criticism of, 64; scientific epoché of, 66; sketches of time of, 100, 198n15; and space of new relations, 80; and speculative discourse, 22; on symbolic rhythmic, 142, 204n42 idealism: Absolute, 38, 42, 102, 127; Gadamer contrasted with transcendental, 51; Klee’s graphic line and,

19; logocentric organicism of, 146; as mistaking symbolics for metaphysics, 42; Novalis’s break with post-Kantian, 105; objective, 24; and surrealism, 65; on thought and dream, 78; on transcendental imagination, 201n51 imagination: Adorno on, 16; antinomies regarding, 75; Cézanne’s rejection of, 123; the demonic and transcendence of, 153; as essential in construction, 107; Fichte on, 143; Hegel on, 16, 179; Heidegger on, 16, 31, 83–84, 114, 201n51; imaginary versus real, 77, 90; Kant on, 18, 31, 61, 76, 122; Klee on, 148; Merleau-Ponty on, 15, 18, 29, 31–32, 68, 122, 127, 185n8; phenomenological, 75–76; play of, 179; and reason, 68; Sartre on the imaginary, 61–62, 75, 77; Schelling on, 127 Imagination (Sartre), 15, 62, 185n8 Imbert, Claude, 184n14 Impressionism, 17, 37, 38, 107, 128, 173 “In Place of Man, Expression” (Lyotard), 131 interpretation: in Adorno, 24–26; and allegory, 46, 48–49, 56; and antinomies of form and content, universal and particular, 5; arises out of tension among differences, 57; and constellation, 171; as creative use (Sartre), 73; does not determine meaning (Wittgenstein), 6; as double reading and deconstruction (Derrrida), 82, 195n47; as event (Gadamer), 48, 55–57, 192n29; as fragmentation of tradition, 54–57; Heidegger and adumbrative exploration of, 81; Heidegger and fourfold (earth, sky, divinities, mortals), 97; Heidegger on multiplicity of, 170; and illumination (Benjamin), 44; as interrupted, 53; Klee’s work as interpretive, 89; and mourning, 49, 54; and perspective

222  Index

multiplicity, 3; plurality of Klee, 1–8, 117–18; as polylogue (Kristeva), 2, 176; rationality of, 171; and symbol, 46–48; and theatrum philosophicum, 2; and Vorhabe, 7; and Wechsel, 7. See also constellation; hermeneutics; multiplicity; phenomenology Irigaray, Luce, 180 irony, 68, 162, 181, 193n12, 204n37 Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 37 James, William, 82 Janicaud, Dominique, 195n50 Johnson, Galen, 22 Joyce, James, 82, 153 Jugendstil, 50 Jung, Carl, 50, 80–81, 82, 191n18, 195n40, 195n46 Kandinsky, Wassily, 13, 17, 25, 41, 146, 196n59, 208n31 Kant, Immanuel: and Adorno on metaphysics after Auschwitz, 15; on aesthetic rationality, 7, 184n11; on allegory, 54–55; on ascribing reality to aesthetic predicates, 60–61; on Beauty, 206n11; as captivated by notion of pure form, 31; on chaos, 155; Critique of Judgment, 14, 54–55, 76, 125, 155, 172, 184n11, 202n10; Critique of Pure Reason, 18, 144, 155, 168; on drawing a line in thought, 18, 19; Heidegger on concept of sensibility of, 154–55; and Heidegger’s phenomenological construction, 113, 201n50; on imagination, 18, 31, 61, 76, 122; on mathematical/dynamic distinction, 106, 199n32; and Merleau-Ponty, 14, 193n11; on morality, 137, 171; on ontotheology, 97, 178, 198n8; on sapere aude, 86; on schematism, 61, 64, 81, 89, 124, 144, 168, 201n50, 202n11; on sensation, 171–72; and simultaneity, 40; on the sublime, 13, 25, 138, 171; on

the symbolic, 55; and tradition, 13, 16. See also neo-Kantianism Kantbuch (Heidegger), 154, 155, 158, 209n52 Kierkegaard, Soren, 56, 67, 192n28 kitsch, 167 Klee, Paul artistic and intellectual context of: at Bauhaus, 2, 17, 44, 57, 91, 168, 169, 173, 190n8; Cézanne compared with, 162; classical German thought and, 3, 152; dialectic between Picasso and, 60; links with surrealism, 4, 5, 69–70, 89, 91, 111, 118; Novalis associated with, 17, 148, 152, 153; Schelling associated with, 148; scholars associate Heideg­ger and, 151–52 characteristics of work of: as about recovery of the sacred, 160; the allegorical in, 56, 87; Asian religions associated with, 161; celestial irony of, 133, 162; constructivism of, 37, 84, 91, 102, 104, 133–34, 140, 165, 169; cool Romanticism of, 2, 21, 22, 29, 31, 33, 41, 139; as critique of bourgeois society, 133, 210n59; as deconstructive, 102, 104, 110, 169; energetics of, 37, 133, 138, 163; the experimental in, 20, 99, 101, 103, 107, 168, 183n2; figure-matrix in, 4, 74, 134, 135, 163; figures of fate and death in late works, 192n28; formalism of, 5, 29, 37, 54, 97, 99, 101, 104, 117, 152, 167, 169, 181; fragmentation of tradition in, 56–57; and gigantism, 98; graphic line of, 17–23, 103, 107, 162, 163, 169, 172–73, 177; as having advanced beyond Cézanne, 133; hieroglyphic character of, 7, 11, 22, 104, 164; homoiosis and harmony in, 42; as

Index  223

interpretive, 89; mathematical figures in, 102, 140; multidimensionality of, 84, 89, 169; music related to, 18, 129, 177; mythic themes in, 74, 98–99, 110; partial automatism of, 70, 76, 89, 91; primitivism in, 74–75, 81, 105, 129, 171; representation in, 87, 89; Romanticism associated with, 21, 36, 37, 152; the symbolic in, 56, 57; systole-diastole in, 164; tachism of, 97; tension of the Schweben in, 146; titles in, 74; turning in, 96; unites collisions and transitions between modernity and the past, 16; vulnerability in, 180, 211n64 epitaph of, 131 interpreting, 1–8, 117–18; by Adorno, 6, 24–29, 75, 104, 118, 165; by Bataille, 68, 69; becomes paradigmatic for radical forms of philosophy, 118; by Benjamin, 3, 44–46; by Blanchot, 75, 77–78; critical disagreement about, 36; by Deleuze, 4, 125, 160–61; by Derrida, 84, 103; by Foucault, 70–71, 74, 84; by Gadamer, 40–46, 57; by Greenberg, 5, 19, 20, 62, 84–85, 195n48; by Heidegger, 93, 95–115, 163, 167–68; by Lyotard, 133–35, 138, 163; by Merleau-Ponty, 16–24, 29–33, 125, 141; by Sartre, 4, 37, 59, 62, 65, 74, 90; self-interpretation of, 3, 36; theoretical interlocutors of, 2 theoretical views and concepts of: and abstraction, 3, 5, 17, 21, 22, 26, 29, 31, 37, 40–41, 44, 56, 84, 133, 162, 166, 189n47; on art beginning with chaos, 20, 99–102, 127, 128, 160–61, 177; as articulating way between nostalgic idealism and German classicism, 181; on artistic creation, 81, 148; on artist’s

connection with nature, 17; on art “playing in the dark,” 166, 171; on art rendering visible, 17, 37, 40, 101, 128, 159, 171, 173; on Beauty, 14, 54, 145, 185n6; on Beethoven, 177; on the body as a building, 145, 205n49; on childishness of his art, 28–29, 144; on color, 171, 172–73, 177, 207n22, 210n58; on composition, 38, 190n8; cosmological significance sought for art by, 54, 76; on the crystalline, 40–41; on dance, 117, 145, 163; on defining today, 1; on deformation, 102, 109; on “dividuals,” 6–7, 37, 130–31, 203n21; on drawing as symbol, 33; on ethical gravity coexisting with twittering, 151, 180, 181, 211n68; on figuration of dynamic forces, 57; on form, 101; on fusing the architectonic and the poetic, 1–2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 21, 23, 37, 57, 84, 91, 104, 162, 168, 169, 187n31; on Gestaltung, 101, 102, 104, 142; on good and evil, 25; on Greek tragedy, 98; history omitted by, 210n59; on imagination, 148; on Impressionism, 38; as making painting both sign and object to Sartre, 37, 59, 62, 65, 90; on mathematics, 36–37, 54, 205n54, 209n56; on modernism and the spiritual, 17; on nature, 97, 104; on Nietzsche, 151, 153; on painting and writing, 22–24; on painting as not spatial art, 6, 18, 104, 177; parable of the tree, 138, 178; on particularism, 5–6, 184n11; on philosophy and art, 1; on prehistory of the visible, 36, 37, 80; on primordial underground, 24, 176; refuses to choose between alternatives, 145; on return to the works themselves, 35, 36, 40; on

224  Index

Rilke, 107; on science, 105, 110, 200n40, 206n8; on theorizing, 35, 36, 184n11; as too neo-Kantian for Heidegger, 5, 93, 99, 114, 115, 163; transcendence sought by, 24; on the unconscious, 50; on utopia, 181; early views on women, 133; on yesterday’s tradition, 13, 35 works of art of: Ancient Harmony, 34, 144, 176, 177; Angelus Novus, 3, 26, 44–46, 45, 57, 152, 179; Approximative Man, 58; Contructive-Impressive, xxii, 84, 103, 115; Crescent Moon over the Rational, 4, 44, 173, 179; Crystalline Landscape, 192n28; Crystalline Memory of the Destruction of the Navy, 190n12; Death and Fire, 11, 92, 104; “Hovering” (Before the Ascent), 146, 147; Limits of Reason, 183n6; Make Visible, 87, 88; Park near Lu(cerne), 10, 22, 69; Rapture, 150, 153; Saint, from a Window, 11; script pictures, 23–24, 26, 65, 87, 89; Signs Clustering, 23; Twittering Machine, 116, 129–30, 210n57; The Virgin in the Tree, 133, 207n26, 210n59 writings of: “Creative Credo,” 19, 38, 54, 101, 110–11, 200n44; Diaries, 27, 35, 36, 40, 56, 117, 131, 133, 163; Notebooks, 17, 20, 110; “On Modern Art,” 96, 97; Wege des Naturstudiums, 2, 17 “Klee Notes” (Heidegger), 114, 161, 167, 171, 174 Klossowski, Pierre, 2, 133, 162, 163 Kristeva, Julia, 7, 23, 79 Lacan, Jacques, 32, 135–36, 203n29 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 118, 145, 148, 169 Lask, Emil, 114 Lefort, Claude, 202n11

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 102, 112, 130, 178 Leiris, Michel, 79 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 18 Levinas, Emmanuel, 78, 79, 83, 137, 138, 180, 211n65 Libidinal Economy (Lyotard), 163 “Limits of Reason” (Klee), 183n6 lived body: Deleuze on, 127, 130; Fichte on, 143; Heidegger on, 154; MerleauPonty on, 29, 126 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 44 Lucretius, 143, 162, 174 Lyotard, Jean-François, 131–42; on abstract expressionism, 142–43; and Adorno, 136–37, 144; on anamnesis, 179; on Beauty, 135, 137; on Cézanne, 139, 204n36; on color, 178; on constructivism, 139–40; on dance, 145, 163; on Dasein, 132, 135, 138; and Deleuze, 131, 132, 136, 140, 143; Discours, Figure, 133, 140; on Eros and Thanatos, 135, 136; on figurematrix in Klee’s work, 4, 74, 134, 135, 163; on “Fiscours, Digure,” 133; on Heideggerean preaching about Being, 140; on importance of art, 133; “In Place of Man, Expression,” 131; Klee as interpreted by, 133–35, 138, 163; Klee’s importance for, 90; on Klee’s “magic squares,” 173, 180; Libidinal Economy, 163; on Merleau-Ponty, 27, 120, 131–32, 140–42, 204n37; on narratives as plural in postmodern era, 143; on no one knowing what language Being speaks, 142; on oscillation, 7, 134, 142–43, 145–46, 152, 178; and Phenomenology, 131; and postmodernism and poststructuralism, 118; on principle of repetition and Warhol, 195n49; and psychoanalysis, 132, 140; on silent significance, 73–74; on the sublime, 138, 144; Thanatos, as repeti-

Index  225

tion and connivance with multiplicity, 195n49; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2; tuché—as dance, 136, 145, as debt, 204n39 Magritte, René, 70, 71, 72, 73, 87 Make Visible (Klee), 87, 88 Maldiney, Henri, 196n59 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 32, 61, 79, 90 Malraux, André, 14 Manet, Édouard, 73 Marc, Franz, 35, 36, 41, 184n11, 207n28 Marin, Louis, 87 Marion, Jean-Luc, 161 Martineau, Emanuel, 196n59 Marx, Karl, 52, 118 Masson, André, 69 mathematics, 36–37, 54, 108 memory, 29, 111, 179 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice: on abstraction, 29–31; and Adorno, 8; on atonal music, 176; on Beauty, 13–14, 27, 33; and Cavaillès, 22, 187n28; on Cézanne, 14, 16, 122–23, 125, 139, 141, 162; “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 123, 202n11; and classical German thought, 14, 118; on color, 173–74, 176, 177, 178; confluence of Adorno and, 12–13; on dance, 120, 121, 136; on deformation, 25; Deleuze on, 139, 174; on diastole-systole rhythm, 146; on effort of modern painting, 24; on essences, 12–13, 89; “Eye and Mind,” 7, 15, 22, 33, 70, 125, 185n8, 188n44, 189n47; formalism and expressivism appealed to, 184n14; on geometrical form and Being, 111; on Gestaltung, 142; and Heidegger, 112, 151, 174; history omitted by, 178, 210n59; and Husserl, 12, 14, 29, 89, 121, 1252, 127, 202n11; on imagination, 15, 18, 29, 31–32, 68, 122, 185n8; on “inscription of Being,” 89; on interpretation of art works,

7; and Kant, 14, 193n11; on Klee and Heidegger, 151; Klee as interpreted by, 16–24, 29–33, 125; Klee invoked in his final works by, 141; on Klee’s epitaph, 131; Klee’s importance for, 90; leftist politics of, 210n59; Lyotard on, 27, 131–32, 140–42, 204n37; on music, 119, 120, 146, 176; on the originary, 29; on painting as figured philosophy, 11, 15, 21, 29, 32, 131; on painting as seeking radiation of the visible, 27–28; on percept-image opposition, 17; on phenomenological construction, 201n48; on Phenomenology and Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 76; Phenomenology of Perception, 12, 14, 15, 16, 119, 120–24, 146, 175, 176; on philosophy returning to the flesh, 15, 30, 32; on plurality of interpretation, 1; on poetic and architectonic in Klee’s work, 4; on point-horizon structure as foundation of space, 109, 200n39; and poststructuralism, 118; on real and imaginary reference, 62; and Sartre, 60, 61, 67, 118, 132, 195n41; and Saussure, 21, 29, 31, 141, 188n43, 189n46; and Schelling, 14, 91, 126–27, 131, 172, 203n30; Sense and Non-Sense, 187n28; on the sensible and language, 177–78; on sensory experience, 119–25, 158, 174–75, 179–80, 202n3; on significative difference, 61; Signs, 24, 27; on stone in Tuileries wall, 121; on subjectivity, 76; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2; on time’s depiction, 198n15; on tradition, 13; transcendental aesthetic of, 14; on truth shown by modern painting, 24; on verification, 170; The Visible and the Invisible, 198n15, 203n29 mimesis: Adorno on Klee and, 165, 169; Adorno on modern art and, 168; Blanchot on signification and, 82;

226  Index

Gadamer on, 35, 39, 47, 48; in modern art, 35, 36, 39; and the sensuous, 5 Mindfulness (Heidegger), 167 Miró, Joan, 69 modern art: Adorno on, 26–27, 118, 168; Foucault on, 85; Gadamer on, 40, 42, 46, 54; Greenberg on, 85; Heidegger on, 94–95, 96, 107, 167; Klee as paradigmatic artist of modernity for Adorno, 26; Klee’s work unites collisions and transitions between modernity and the past, 16; MerleauPonty on effort of modern painting, 24; mimesis in, 35, 36, 39; progresses beyond Klee, 71; as spiritual for Klee, 17. See also abstraction Moholy-Nagy, László, 146 multiplicity/the multiple: and Adorno, 166; Badiou and Husserl, and formal implications of, 6; critique of multiplicity as determinate multiplicity (Husserl)—in Cavaillès, 201n49, in Desanti, 184n14; and constellation, 171, 177; as evidenced in Klee’s work, 6–7, 169; in Heidegger, 111, 150, 170, 178; Lyotard on Thanatos and connivance with multiplicity, 195n49; and meaning and interpretation, 2–3, 6, 7, 145, 166; as structural multiplicity (Merleau-Ponty), 197n62; and repetition—in Deleuze, 130, 158, in Heidegger, 111, 170, 178, and Seinsfrage, 160. See also constellation; interpretation; phenomenology music: atonal, 176, 210n57; Deleuze on, 129; Gadamer on modern, 42; Kant on, 172; Klee’s art related to, 18, 129, 177; Levinas on, 78; Lyotard on Adorno’s account of, 136–37; MerleauPonty on, 119, 120, 146, 176; Nietzsche on reconstrual of ancient essence of, 117; Schelling on, 127, 172, 177; sensuousness in, 170

myth: in Klee’s works, 74, 98–99, 110; Sartre on, 73 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 118, 145, 148, 169, 174 Natorp, Paul, 3, 114, 184n8 naturalism, 29, 123, 139, 162 Naturphilosophie, 48 neoclassicism: and the Beautiful, 27; and Gadamer’s invocation of the crystal, 41; Gadamer’s notion of tradition seen as, 49; of Gadamer’s Truth and Method, 39; in Klee interpretation, 117; in phenomenological aesthetics, 94; Winckelmann on symbol and allegory, 46 neo-Kantianism: and form, 4, 113, 184n8; Heidegger and Carnap and, 112; Heidegger on Klee and, 5, 93, 99, 114, 115, 163; and Heidegger’s use of sketches, 100; Heidegger takes his leave from, 153; and Lyotard on Merleau-Ponty on music, 120 neo-Marxism, 25 neo-Platonism, 53, 105 Nietzsche (Heidegger), 148, 170, 208n33 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on all good things as once terrible, 28; on art and physiology, 155; on the beautiful and the ugly coexisting, 54; on Beauty, 155; and bodying forth, 138, 155, 156, 200n39; and chaos, 138, 155–56, 157; on dance, 144–45, 163; Deleuze and, 126, 129, 130, 143, 157, 160, 169–70; Foucault on Breton and, 59, 70, 71, 79; “God is Dead,” 160; Heidegger and, 114, 140, 148–49, 153–57, 159, 161, 170, 181; Klee on, 151, 153; on new rhythms, 117; physiological conception of rhythm of, 117, 154, 155, 164; postmodernism and poststructuralism and, 118; on rapture, 138, 148–49, 153, 157, 159, 164, 206n11; on truth and the beautiful, 14 Notebooks (Klee), 17, 20, 110

Index  227

“Nouvelle Mystique, Un” (Sartre), 66 Novalis: Deleuze and, 126; Fichte Studies, 37; Heidegger’s “The Origins of the Work of Art” and, 95; Klee associated with, 17, 148, 152, 153; and Klee’s concept of the dividual, 203n21; and night, 126, 179; on representations of the self as hieroglyphic, 27, 104, 172; on the unconditioned, 105 “On Modern Art” (Klee), 96, 97 ontological difference: Deleuze on, 158; Heidegger on, 104, 107, 148, 159; Heidegger on Schelling and, 166; mathematics and, 37 Origin of German Tragic Drama, The (Benjamin), 44 “Origin of the Work of Art, The” (Heidegger), 11, 17, 93–96, 99, 103–4, 107, 113–14, 152–53, 155, 156, 159, 167, 209n52 Otéro, Caroline, 117, 207n26 painting: Adorno on relationship of philosophy to, 25; as analogical, 158; as anamnesis, 179; Deleuze on, 125; depth in, 101; as figured philosophy for Merleau-Ponty, 11, 15, 21, 29, 32, 131; Foucault on Klee and classical, 70; Husserl on, 61–62; Klee and philosophy and, 3–4; Klee on graphic line and, 17–23; Klee on writing and, 22–24; in Merleau-Ponty’s transcendental aesthetic, 14, 122; as not spatial art for Klee, 6, 18, 104; Schelling on music and, 127, 177; as seeking the radiation of the visible to MerleauPonty, 27–28; and theology, 161 Park near Lu(cerne) (Klee), 10, 22, 69 Parmenides (Plato), 110 particularism, 5–6, 184n11 perspectivism, 157, 160 Petzet, Heinrich, 95, 97, 100, 115, 198n6

phantasies, 70, 74, 134, 179, 181 Phenomenology: abstraction in radicalization of, 196n59; Adorno criticizes classical, 12; Bataille on, 59, 66, 67; Benjamin on, 43–44; on the concrete, 6, 16; Deleuze on, 130; Derrida on, 83–84; on emotion, 154; as exploration of originary domain that is figured throughout, 29; foundationalism of, 121, 178; Heidegger on phenomenological construction, 113, 201n49; inadequation of, 85; on inseparability of conceptual and aconceptual, 12; Kantian schematism and, 81; Klee’s importance for transformation of, 90; Levinas surpasses classical, 79, 83; lingering neoclassism of, 94; Lyotard and, 131; Merleau-Ponty criticizes classical, 12; Merleau-Ponty links Kant’s Critique of Judgment to, 76; Merleau-Ponty on Klee and, 125; as modeled on description of experience that founded concept of number, 38; as multidimensional, 84; and optics, 37, 190n4; on percept-image opposition, 17; phenomenological imagination, 75–76; and postmodernism and poststructuralism, 118; of religion, 79; return to things themselves in, 32, 36, 37–38; of the sacred, 195n50; surrationality in, 86 Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 12, 14, 15, 16, 119, 120–24, 146, 175, 176 Philo, 66 philosophy: Adorno on relationship of painting to, 25; as analog of art, 21, 22; Gadamer on continuity of Western tradition, 52; Heidegger on science and, 108–10, 153; Klee and painting and, 3–4; Klee becomes paradigmatic for radical forms of, 118; Klee on art and, 1; Merleau-Ponty on painting as

228  Index

figured philosophy, 11, 15, 21, 29, 32, 131; and poetry, 60; returning to the flesh for Merleau-Ponty, 15, 30, 32; and surrealism, 59–60. See also classical German thought; idealism; neo-Kantianism; Phenomenology Philosophy of Art (Schelling), 100 physis: Deleuze’s Lucretian, 162; Heidegger on emergence of art and, 94, 97, 104, 106, 108, 152, 162; in Klee’s cosmogenesis, 101, 102, 139 Picasso, Pablo: Adorno and, 165; Foucault on Klee and, 59, 70; Gadamer and, 42; Guernica, 60; Heidegger ranks Klee higher than, 167, 96, 197n6; Jung on, 82; Sartre on, 60, 64 Plato: eidos of, 81, 156, 160; Parmenides, 110; Republic, 206n10; Sophist, 101, 108 play, 178–79 Poetics (Aristotle), 102, 199n18 Pöggeler, Otto, 95, 97, 99, 104, 108, 151 poiesis: alethic, 106; Being as never independent of, 111; Heidegger on art and, 94; Heidegger on Ereignis and, 103; Heidegger on Klee and, 108; Klee bears witness to different kind of, 112; opposition of technology and, 104; painterly, 97; Sartre on surrealist, 70; in understanding Klee’s work, 169 Pollock, Jackson, 20, 62 postmodernism: Klee associated with, 118; Lyotard on narratives as plural in era of, 143 poststructuralism, 118 primitivism, 74–75, 76, 81, 105, 129, 171 Proust, Marcel, 176, 179 psychoanalysis, 51, 53, 59, 85, 132, 140, 141 Pythagoreanism, 31, 41, 46 “Question Concerning Technology, The” (Heidegger), 11, 104, 114–15 rapture: Adorno on, 164; Blanchot on,

83; Heidegger on, 153–55, 164, 206n11, 211n65; Nietzsche on, 138, 148–49, 153, 157, 159, 164, 206n11; and Sartre on Bataille, 66 Rapture (Klee), 150, 153 Read, Herbert, 5, 99 “Relevance of the Beautiful, The” (Gadamer), 42, 46, 52 repetition: and Seinsfrage (Heidegger), 160; and problematization (Deleuze), 159 representation: art after, 175–76; Foucault on language and, 63; Heidegger on, 93; Klee on art as not, 37; in Klee’s work, 56, 70, 71, 84, 87; Lyotard on Cézanne and, 204n36. See also mimesis repression, 50, 52 Republic (Plato), 206n10 Richir, Marc, 38 Ricoeur, Paul, 192n28, 199n18 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 97, 102, 107, 207n28 Romanticism: Bataille on surrealism and, 76; on Beauty, 13; Heidegger and, 106, 152; innovations of the differential, 100; Klee and Cézanne’s, 17; Klee and nature symbolism of, 89; Klee associated with, 21, 36, 37, 152; and Klee on chaos, 100; Klee’s cool, 2, 21, 22, 29, 31, 33, 41, 139; play of difference and, 148; ruinance as legacy of, 21; Schlegel’s Wechselkonstruktion, 108; unity and harmony of ordinary interpretation of, 145 Rorty, Richard, 184n7 Rosenzweig, Franz, 79 Saint, from a Window (Klee), 11 Sartre, Jean-Paul: on automatic writing, 64–65, 87; Barthes’s criticism of, 37–38; and Bataille, 8, 65–68, 193n7; Existentialism Is a Humanism, 73; on existentialist’s speech act, 63; on

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form and matter, 71–72; Foucault on, 71–74; on hermeneutics, 63–64; on Husserl, 64; on image and sign, 72, 82; on the imaginary, 61–62, 75, 77; Imagination, 15, 62, 185n8; on immanence and transcendence, 76–77; on irony, 68, 193n12; on Klee and surrealism, 4; on Klee making painting both sign and object, 37, 59, 62, 65, 90; on Klee’s mature experimental works, 74; and Merleau-Ponty, 60, 61, 67, 118, 132, 195n41; on myth, 73; “Un Nouvelle Mystique,” 66; on our being “condemned to be free,” 86; on percept-image opposition, 17; on Picasso’s Guernica, 60; on prosaic and poetic, 62–63, 67, 89–90; and prosaic consciousness, 70, 78, 90, 127; on rapture and Bataille, 66; reduction of meaning to use, 77; on signification, 63–64; and space of new relations, 80; on surrealism, 59, 64–70, 71, 80; as theoretical interlocutor of Klee, 2; on thought and dream, 78; What Is Literature?, 60, 62, 90 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 21, 29, 31, 141, 188n43, 189n46 Schelling, Friedrich: and Adorno, 25, 26, 165–66; on artwork surprising the artist, 20, 61, 75–76, 87, 144; on chaos and art, 155; on creation as venture of will, 102; on dance, 203n30; and Deleuze on rhythm of sensation, 126; Heidegger and, 95, 165–66; on hierarchy of artistic potencies, 174; on imagination, 127; Klee compared with, 148; Merleau-Ponty and, 14, 90–91, 126–27, 131, 172, 203n30; on music, 127, 172, 177; on “over-Being,” 91; Philosophy of Art, 100; Sartre associates Bataille’s account of nothingness with, 66; on significative difference, 61; on the symbolic, 50; on synthesis

of rhythm underlying art, 127; on the unconscious, 50 schematism: Heidegger on, 81, 97, 103, 104, 106, 156, 168, 175, 202n11; and imaginative sketching out, 89; Kantian, 61, 81, 113, 124, 144, 168, 201n50; Merleau-Ponty on, 124; Sartre on prose and, 64 Schiller, Friedrich, 50, 178 Schlegel, August W., 35, 40 Schlegel, Friedrich, 95, 100, 105, 108, 148, 169, 199n32 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 39 Schönberg, Arnold, 165, 176 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 54, 126, 154 Schweben, 145–46, 147, 148, 180, 203n28 science: Heidegger on philosophy and, 108–10, 153; Klee on, 105, 110, 200n40, 205n56; Merleau-Ponty on, 188n44 script pictures, 23–24, 26, 65, 87, 89 Searle, John, 3 sensation: Deleuze on, 124–25, 130, 157–58, 175; Hegel on, 119–20, 124, 125, 174, 175, 176; Kant on, 171–72; Merleau-Ponty on, 119–25, 158, 174–75, 179–80; morality arises out of, 171 Sense and Non-Sense (Merleau-Ponty), 187n28 sensuousness: Adorno and, 7, 15, 164, 165, 170, 176, 178–79, 210n57; Deleuze on, 181; Hegel on concept and, 119; in Hegel’s definition of Beauty, 181; Heidegger on, 206n13; Levinas on, 180; as matter of the sublime and vulnerability, 181–182; Merleau-Ponty on Cézanne and, 123; Merleau-Ponty on transcendence of, 176; and mimesis, 5 Seubold, Gunter, 96 Signs (Merleau-Ponty), 24, 27 Signs Clustering (Klee), 23 simultaneity, 40, 48, 50, 53, 56 skepticism, 66 Sophist (Plato), 101, 108

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“Speechless Image, The” (Gadamer), 35 Stein, Gertrude, 82 Strauss, Erwin, 124, 202n3 sublime, the: Adorno on, 13, 25; and Beauty, 148–49; Kant on, 13, 25, 138, 171; Lyotard on, 138, 144; MerleauPonty on, 14; moral conscience as, 171 “Surrationalism” (Bachelard), 86, 196n51 surrealism: Bataille on existentialism and, 67–68; Bataille on Romanticism and, 76; Blanchot on, 59, 90; cosmological mytheme in, 76; Foucault on, 79; Heidegger on, 96, 167; on Klee’s graphic line, 20; Klee’s links with, 4, 5, 69–70, 89, 91, 111, 118; on limit experiences, 175; and philosophy, 59–60; versus the real, 78; renaissance in 1950s and 1960s, 70; Sartre on, 59, 64–70, 71, 80; search for the immediate in, 75; “sur-rationality,” 86; as theoretical source for accounts of other matters, 59–60 symbol: allegory distinguished from, 42, 46–48; Benjamin on, 47–48, 49, 50; Gadamer on, 46–50; Goethe on, 39, 42, 43, 44, 47, 50, 54, 57, 70, 100; Jung and, 50, 81, 82; Kant on, 55; Klee on drawing as, 33; in Klee’s work, 56 Theatrum philosophicum (Foucault), 2, 183n2 theology, 55, 161 This Is Not a Pipe (Magritte), 70, 71, 72, 87 Thurlemann, Felix, 189n49 “Time and Being” (Heidegger), 96 Tobey, Mark, 62 tradition: Adorno on, 13, 16; Derrida on, 83; Gadamer on, 33, 39–40, 49–50, 52, 53; Kant and, 13, 16; Klee on yesterday’s, 13, 35; Klee’s work instantiates fragmentation of, 56–57; MerleauPonty on, 13

Trakl, Georg, 96 transcendence: acknowledgment of, 138; Adorno and art as fractured, 16; of the Beautiful, 25–26; Blanchot on, 90; Deleuze on, 125, 143; Derrida and, 83; figuration and refiguration of, 30; fragmented, 105; Gadamer and, 49, 55; Hegel and, 14–15; Heidegger on, 83, 113, 154; hermeneutics and, 86; Husserl and, 124; of imagination, 153; and Klee’s construal of “higher realm,” 21, 24; Klee’s ironic invocation of, 163; Lyotard on, 134, 137, 139; Merleau-Ponty on, 14, 90, 131, 142, 176, 179; modern art and withdrawing of Being’s, 167; as never exhausted, 76; perception and, 122; phenomenology and, 81; poetic engagement and, 68; Sartre and, 76–77, 80; in works of art, 28–29, 104 Truth and Method (Gadamer), 35, 39, 42, 48, 52 tuché: in Aristotle (fortune), 135–36, 203n29; as encounter with the real insofar as it is missed (Lacan), 135–36; in Lyotard—as dance ,136, 145, as debt, 204n39; and Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and Invisible as happy encounter (eutuchia), 203n29 Twittering Machine (Klee), 116, 129–30, 210n57 Tzara, Tristan: and Bachelard on “surrationality,” 86; collaboration with Klee, 69; L’Homme approximatif, 58, 69, 78; Jung influenced on, 195n40; on the poetic and the rational, 69–70; reading of Hegel of, 59; seeks to provide theoretical formulation for surrealism, 86 Uexkull, Jakob von, 113 unconscious, the: and Gadamer’s notion of shock of the Beautiful, 50–51; Jung

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on, 50, 80–81, 82; Schelling on art and, 61; surrealism as resource for accounts of, 59; Tzara’s privileging of, 69 utopia, 181 Van der Leeuw, G., 79, 194n32 Van Gogh, Vincent, 94, 96, 128, 160, 161, 174 Virgin in the Tree, The (Klee), 133, 207n26, 210n59 Warhol, Andy, 71, 73, 85, 87, 195n49 Wechsel, 7, 105, 108, 119, 134, 143, 178, 185n16, 203n28

Wege des Naturstudiums (Klee), 2, 17 Werckmeister, Otto K., 3, 20, 44, 57, 152, 183n4, 190n15, 198n11 Weyl, Hermann, 108 What Is Literature? (Sartre), 60, 62, 90 White, Hayden, 184n7 Winckelmann, Johann, 46, 181 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6, 79, 108, 184n14, 200n36 Worringer, Wilhelm, 5, 28, 41, 127, 166, 207n25 writing: automatic, 20, 64–65, 68, 82, 87, 197n60; Klee on painting and drawing and, 22–24