Van Gogh among the Philosophers: Painting, Thinking, Being 1498531369, 9781498531368

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Van Gogh among the Philosophers

Van Gogh among the Philosophers Painting, Thinking, Being Edited by David P. Nichols

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2018 by Lexington Books Excerpts from Jacques Derrida. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Reprinted with permission by University of Chicago Press. Excerpt from forthcoming book, icepoems. Dic Edwards. icepoem #010 vincent. Permission granted by Dic Edwards. Excerpts from History of Madness, Michel Foucault, 2006 Routledge, reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK. Excerpts from Martin Heidegger. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Off the Beaten Track, edited by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, translated by Julian Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press. Excerpts from Strindberg and Van Gogh by Karl Jaspers. Translated by Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin. ©1977 The Arizona Board of Regents. Reprinted by permission of The University of Arizona Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Nichols, David P. (David Paul), editor. Title: Van Gogh among the philosophers : painting, thinking, being / edited by David P. Nichols. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017044079 (print) | LCCN 2017050300 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498531368 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781498531351 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890—Criticism and interpretation. | Gogh, Vincent van, 1853-1890—Philosophy. Classification: LCC ND653.G7 (ebook) | LCC ND653.G7 V353 2017 (print) | DDC 759.9492—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044079 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

After the Cypress: An Introduction David P. Nichols

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1 Jaspers’ Pathographic Analysis of Van Gogh: A Critique and Appreciation Gregory J. Walters 2 Painting from the Outside: Foucault and Van Gogh Joseph J. Tanke

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3 The Problem of Agency in Heidegger’s Interpretation of Van Gogh Ingvild Torsen

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4 Sensuality, Materiality, Painting: What Is Wrong with Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s Van Gogh Interpretations? Christian Lotz

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5  Pointure mal, or If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit… K. Malcolm Richards

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6 Van Gogh, Heidegger, and the Attuned Life Stephen A. Erickson and Pauline E. Erickson

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7 Immanent Transcendence in the Work of Art: Jaspers and Heidegger on Van Gogh Rebecca Longtin Hansen

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8 Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Perception and the Art of Van Gogh: On “Going Further” and “Going Beyond” Galen A. Johnson

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v

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Contents

 9 Van Gogh in Tragic Portraiture: Jaspers, Bataille, Heidegger David P. Nichols

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10 Prometheus Dismembered: Bataille on Van Gogh, or   The Window in the Bataille Restaurant James Luchte

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11 Van Gogh’s Dark Illuminations: The End of Art or the   Art of the End Alina N. Feld

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12 Van Gogh and the Absence of the Work: Remnants of a   Hermeneutic Itinerary Stephen H. Watson

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Index 257 About the Contributors

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After the Cypress An Introduction David P. Nichols

One weekday morning in Amsterdam I arrived early at the entrance to the Van Gogh Museum, before its doors opened, aiming to maximize my time inside. I was looking for some inspiration for the project that would become this volume. To my surprise, a long line of people were already waiting for the museum to open. It must have taken an hour just for those in front of me to file through, while the line continued to swell behind me. Street vendors were beginning to sell tee shirts, mugs, and tote bags with images by the painter from the heath. Was not the much larger Rijksmuseum only a stone’s throw away? It made me wonder how a socially maladjusted painter, suffering the extreme symptoms of mental illness, could rise from relative obscurity— having struggled to sell his own paintings, unable to support himself financially—to become one of the most revered artists of all time. In truth there is much to be attracted to in Van Gogh’s art and his letters, much to relate to in his personal struggles. Perhaps there is an element underneath all of the Van Gogh fanfare, a magnetism, which speaks to a wider sea of human existence, as if from a language too deep for words. Given all of the haze surrounding Van Gogh, how can we ever hope to press through to what is truly at work in his art, instead of simply sauntering through the doors of the museum experience, the art critics’ conventional remarks, and the biographers’ mythoi? Philosophers have been no less immune to Van Gogh’s magnetism, although they differ widely with respect to what makes him so important. For those philosophers invested in psychopathology, the “madness” of the painter poses questions about the relation between artistic creativity and mental instability. For postmodernists of various stripes, he is a champion against the dehumanizing aspects of modern rationality, an intellectual estranged from massproduced cultural strains of the day, not unlike a Kierkegaard or a Nietzsche. This champion may also qualify as a tragic hero of sorts, one whose art has the 1

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power to upend reigning metaphysical structures for thinking. Or Van Gogh’s best contribution may belong to the category of human perception—how we see an image, the similarities for painting and seeing, and just what it means to be in a tactile world regardless of the images at play. It is not uncommon for philosophers commenting on Van Gogh to go so far as to claim that he dramatically changed art itself. That claim can stem from the view that he somehow managed to merge his art and his existence together instead of producing paintings that merely pointed. Or the claim can stem from the related notion that he found a way to actively shape meaning, to paint the world itself and not just his canvases. If he had been a Buddhist—and he did liken himself to a Zen master at one point—we might say that he used the medium of painting to “turn the wheel of dharma.” The wider point here is that we find much help for locating what is at work in his life and art by taking inventory of the various philosophical portraits and by bringing those portraits into dialogue with each other. This book about Van Gogh is quite unlike the many others: instead of art criticism, another biography, or any museum-like means for organizing his legacy, we have chosen what is more akin to a ghost story. “Well, we’ve got a ghost story on our hands here alright,” says Jacques Derrida.1 But this does not imply that we limit ourselves to the specter of Vincent within his own paintings and drawings, nor to the army of ghosts that make up his influences. Rather, we would follow the ghost of Van Gogh through the various hermeneutical alleyways of his most insightful philosophical interpreters. By tracing a postmortem “life” of Van Gogh among the philosophers—a ghost story, or series of ghost stories—we aim to accomplish at least three objectives. First, we want to gain from these philosophers of art, by way of their interpretations of Van Gogh, some perspective on what painting can tell us about the world and our place within it. This has nothing to do with a modern representational model for thinking about images on canvas as they relate to external objects, nor of tracing what is on canvas back to the intentionality of the artist. Rather, in Van Gogh’s case it has everything to do with placing us in a world through painting. The philosophers that we explore in this volume seem to agree on this much, that Van Gogh found a way through painting to let the world speak to us again in its strangeness, from the radiant source of its being. Second, we aim to learn more about where art is at in its own history. For some of these philosophers, Van Gogh is the quintessential apocalyptic artist, exemplifying what Hegel calls “the end of art” and what some might call art as life. Other philosophers at least attribute to him the deeper realization of art as a tradition always in excess, adrift with no final shore. If Van Gogh really did change painting forever, as some of them have boldly proclaimed, we want to explore how. Third, we aim to uncover new possibilities, inspired by the philosophy of art, for interpreting Van Gogh’s



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life and works. The goal in this instance is not to make knowledge about him an end in itself, nor to deliver, in gnostic fashion, “the real Van Gogh.” Far more fruitful, and realistic, would be a hermeneutical loop for which different perspectives about Van Gogh assist us in interpreting his specific works, and then in return, what those paintings open to us can continue to affect our wider philosophical grasp of painting. The effort to bring philosophical interpretations of Van Gogh into dialogue with one another ought to further each of these objectives, and perhaps open new avenues altogether. With that in mind, we begin with a preliminary sketch of some key philosophical interpretations. Although our primary objective is to trace a ghostly “life” of Van Gogh among the philosophers, we cannot help but begin our journey with an exception for one poet. Rainer Maria Rilke provides us with an early reception of the painter that forecasts many of the hermeneutical themes to come. In 1907, while making a study of Cézanne’s paintings at an exhibition in Paris, Rilke had the good fortune to observe many of Van Gogh’s works, including some paintings in a private collection, another collection in storage, as well as a portfolio of a hundred reproductions of drawings.2 The fascination with Van Gogh, and a sense of kinship with him, runs deep through Rilke’s correspondence with his wife Clara; he had already been reading Van Gogh’s letters only the previous year.3 Rilke describes the feud with Gauguin in the Yellow House as a problem ultimately born of solitude.4 He shares with Van Gogh the burden of a kairological sense of time, whereby “everything is yet to be done: everything.”5 That “everything” seems to fall on Rilke like an avalanche one day when he discovers, fortuitously, a Van Gogh collection hidden in the storage room of one Mr. Bernheim.6 The vivid account Rilke gives of that discovery— the “Blue, Blue, Blue” of rolling hills, “dark antique gold” sheaves of corn, and the “artificial wakefulness” and “emptiness” in the Night Café—heralds a treasury of great works just beginning to burst forth upon the art world. In the Letters on Cézanne the poet of solitude strikes a chord that would reverberate time and again for interpretations of Van Gogh: the importance of “being poor” in the arts.7 Here Rilke is not aiming at Van Gogh’s peasant studies so much as his ability to bring us back to the originality of our perceptual experience. But in his paintings (the arbre fleuri) poverty has already become rich: a great splendor from within. And that’s how he sees everything: as a poor man… his love for all these things is directed at the nameless, and that’s why he himself concealed it. He does not show it, he has it. And quickly takes it out of himself and into the work…8

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He makes his “saints” the same way, says Rilke, by forcing his models to somehow be the world in its glory.9 But the favored metaphor for “being poor” in Rilke’s Cézanne letters—he uses it no less than six times—is the hungry old dog. Van Gogh is a dog in a garden, beaten and left hungry, yet wholly in submission to his “incomprehensible master.”10 Or the dog sits in a shop window on the rue de Seine for twenty years with all the solemnity of a Last Supper.11 In the case of self-portraits, both for Van Gogh and Cézanne, the dog stares at itself in the mirror—a dog seeing itself as a dog.12 Solitude requires the discipline of emptying oneself, in order to simply be there, “the way the earth simply is,” and then from that dogged reality, to shine forth with its original, extraordinary grace.13 Karl Jaspers deserves credit, more than anyone, for having set in motion the long series of philosophical interpretations of Van Gogh. Jaspers’ pathography, Strindberg and Van Gogh, was first published as a series of psychiatric papers, then as a book in 1922.14 He compared the playwright August Strindberg with Van Gogh and Hölderlin on the basis of a common diagnosis, schizophrenia. Although that much was likely incorrect, at least in the case of Van Gogh, who probably suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, Jaspers did raise some important issues about the relationship between the artist’s creativity and psychosis. Chief among these was the insight that Van Gogh’s mental illness doomed him to a Grenzsituation, a dwelling place at the limits of ordinary existence. He stands at the boundary of the reigning horizon, unable to assume and live the particular reality that it offers. At the same time, his creativity swells in accord with his unusual sensitivity to the possibilities of transcendence. For Jaspers, the colorism, for instance, of Van Gogh’s later paintings is not coincidental to his psychosis, and yet such features of his art are no less genuine in their reception of the transcendent reality. Neither are these simply the workings of an intellectual imagination, but for Vincent, the lived experience of transcendence. Van Gogh even sets himself to work transforming his experience of “the infinite,” as source of possibilities, into a means of consolation for other shipwrecked souls. The new style for which he labors so feverishly must be one whereby he can “stand right in the midst of life.”15 Van Gogh’s paintings had already seized Jaspers’ attention a good decade before Strindberg and Van Gogh. In 1911, he saw fifty paintings by Van Gogh at an exhibition in Bremen; the following year, as part of a wider Impressionist exhibition in Cologne, 108 pieces.16 Cassirer’s two-volume German translation of Van Gogh’s letters, published in 1914, must have opened another dimension to the study for Jaspers altogether.17 The images he saw were not typical products of abstraction but rather the evidence of a lived art through and through, a personal struggle for existence accomplished in painting. Van



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Gogh’s personal crisis was no less a struggle for all humanity, one that sought a revolutionary answer at the most profound ontological level. Jaspers recognizes in Van Gogh an unusual ability to open bare empirical realities in a manner that begs for a new historical orientation. He has an urge for reality which causes him to recoil from mere imaginative painting—no matter how much he might feel drawn to it—and from mythical subjects. He simply wants to paint present actuality; in return he conceives this presence as a mythos; by emphasizing the reality he sees it transcendentally.18

Jaspers makes a similar observation in the third volume of his 1932 Philosophy, when he contrasts Van Gogh with artists such as Aeschylus, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Rembrandt, who work from ready-made mythical worlds. On the other side stands Van Gogh who dropped all myths, confined himself totally to reality, and thus lent transcendence a voice which of necessity is infinitely poorer, but is true for our time.19

When Jaspers describes this act of lending a voice to transcendence as “true for our time,” he indicates that Van Gogh found a means for bringing the torch of Prometheus to an age whose ciphers had long lost their hold. Jaspers had set the stage for a philosophical pathography of Van Gogh, and Georges Bataille would soon follow that lead. For Bataille, it was the painter’s decision to sever his left ear, about twenty-four hours prior to Christmas, 1888, that provided the crucial insight. In “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” 1930, Bataille associates the savage act with similar instances of auto-mutilation whereby the mentally ill person removes a body part in response to an overwhelming stimulus.20 He begins with contemporary examples of mental patients: a man staring at the sun outside of a cemetery obeys the sun’s orders to tear off his left index finger; a woman impregnated by her employer, who loses the child shortly after birth, fails to obey the orders of a man of fire to tear off her ears and split open her head, but at least manages to offer him her left eye. What these cases have in common with Van Gogh is “the necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself.”21 Here Bataille develops a symbolism quite opposite to consumption, opting instead for “the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume,” where the threatening force is, chiefly, homogeneity and its pressured compliance.22 He notes an increased use of the sun and sunflowers in the paintings immediately preceding the mental breakdown at the Yellow House, and along with it the increasing weight of humiliation and inferiority in the presence of

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Gauguin, followed by a loss of sun and turn to night luminaries thereafter. Bataille links these modern cases with ancient rites and myths for which the self-purging was much more frequent. His examples are numerous: wild Mediterranean cultic rites culminating in dismemberment, aboriginal palm paintings that lack digits, circumcision, Shi’a self-lacerations for the celebration of Ashura, and the mythical dismemberments of Orestes, Oedipus, and Prometheus. Animal sacrifice is only its cowardly substitution, says Bataille. Van Gogh’s creativity is best located in the tragic cycle of structured meaning and rebellion, where eagle meets Promethean liver— “the sacrifice of the god.”23 Bataille offers a short reprisal in 1937 with the essay “Van Gogh as Prometheus.”24 He offers an account of creative genius less indebted to solar ennucleation and sacrificial rite, albeit no less concerned with factors of homogeneity and heterogeneity. Van Gogh’s paintings resist the homogenizing forces of art criticism and the art museum, from which the viewer might hope to learn how to think about art. The paintings summon each of us to have an original experience, so that from the canvas a world may open that is different from the one we have taken for granted. The astonishing truth about Van Gogh is that, without so much as the cultic circle of a drunken crowd or beating drums, he reached the boiling point that tears ears and shatters images, that sent him storming into polite society with a ghastly gift of flesh, to the brothel and beyond, to a Saint Remy asylum and possibly to his greatest paintings. “Van Gogh, who decided by 1882 that it was better to be Prometheus than Jupiter, tore from within himself rather than an ear, nothing less than a SUN.”25 Again, the tragic cycle: the artist can create another way of seeing only by rebelling against, and eradicating from within, the reigning semblance. Bataille goes on to use the “sun” of Van Gogh’s horizon and the subterranean “lava” of his subjectivity in a manner reminiscent of Jaspers’ Encompassing and Existenz, sources for transcendence and immanence. At both poles we experience seemingly reliable and steadfast surfaces—the safe benefits of a distant luminary, the solidity of ground—until each shows from within itself a deeper volatility. After the shaking of the foundations, there remained for Van Gogh only an enflamed world, with “flowers which burst, beam, and dart their flaming heads into the very rays of that sun which will wither them.”26 The same year that Bataille finished “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” Martin Heidegger completed “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which included a brief interpretation of Van Gogh’s Old Shoes with Laces, 1886. Despite its brevity, it may be the most well-known—if not overused—example of a continental philosopher interpreting Van Gogh. Less known is the fact that Heidegger had shown interest in the painter much earlier, perhaps decades



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previous to the art essay. In a letter to Jaspers in 1922, he expresses familiarity with Van Gogh’s letters, but not yet with his paintings.27 Heidegger mostly responds critically to Jaspers’ Strindberg and Van Gogh manuscript, charging the author and his psychopathological approach with being too beholden to traditional ontological categories. The following year, in a letter to his former student Karl Löwith, Heidegger revealed a little more about what attracted him to Van Gogh. Löwith remembers the reference in his “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism” following the war. “For years,” Heidegger wrote me in 1923, “a saying of van Gogh’s has obsessed me: ‘I feel with all my power that the history of man is like that of wheat: if one is not planted in the earth to flourish, come what may, one will be ground up for bread.’ Woe to him who is not pulverized.”28

The fascination with this particular statement by Van Gogh—tragic, apocalyptic, Eucharistic—prefigures similar existentialist themes soon to emerge in Heidegger’s Being and Time—notably, the authenticity whereby Dasein gathers itself unto itself instead of fleeing from itself, takes ownership of its historical possibilities and, “in the resoluteness that hands itself down,” projects a future for itself.29 Woe to him who is not pulverized, says Heidegger, because the one who refuses to be ground into the meal of conventional life prepares for a fateful collision against an all encompassing whole. The first encounter that Heidegger had with original Van Gogh paintings came at a show in Amsterdam in March 1930.30 Something about Old Shoes with Laces made an impact on Heidegger at that exhibit, enough for it to resurface in his writings two more times. (See Figure 1.) The penultimate Van Gogh reference in Heidegger occurs in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics lectures. A painting by Van Gogh: a pair of sturdy peasant shoes, nothing else. The picture really represents nothing. Yet you are alone at once with what is there, as if you yourself were heading homeward from the field on a late autumn evening, tired, with your hoe, as the last potato fires smolder out.31

It is one of a handful of examples in rapid succession: a thunderstorm in the mountains, a distant mountain range under a vast sky, the portal of an early Romanesque church, the German state, and lastly, “a painting by Van Gogh.” In all of these examples Heidegger illustrates the affinity between Being and Nothing, whereby we dwell among beings in such a way as to experience their presence and absence simultaneously. In various ways we lay hold of

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Being and in various ways we do not. The painting points to the fundamental question of metaphysics, why there are beings at all instead of nothing.32 It places us in a world that both is and is not; it introduces us to a pair of shoes that both is and is not; it even brings us up against the “nothing else” but these solitary peasant shoes. From the fundamental question we are better suited to explore the fore-question—how it stands with Being itself—and to pursue an answer that locates the Not within Being. The basic dichotomy of presence and absence which Heidegger had associated with Old Shoes with Laces in 1935 would resurface with greater possibilities two years later in “The Origin of the Work of Art.”33 Heidegger identifies an ontological rift at work in artworks, one that runs deeper than the Aristotelian matter-form distinction or modern subject-object representation. Here the terms “world” and “earth” explain much of what Heidegger means by presence and absence, and first occur in the essay by way of his interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting.34 The shoes evoke a structured whole of phenomena, an environment, or “world”—a place to which they belong and have their usefulness. Meanwhile the shoes have a way of resting within themselves, in a kind of self-concealment of essence that resists compliance to their surroundings—an “earth” that allows the shoes to stand out, yet within themselves. What is at work in the painting is the truth about the shoes themselves, which in this case includes their usefulness as equipment, and their reliability. As equipment, the shoes provide a useful way for the peasant to belong to her surroundings; but the same usefulness depends upon the reliability of the shoes, which includes the repose of the ability to be this thing, this sort of equipment. The artwork itself is not useful in the way that equipment is useful, precisely because the peculiar work of this painting is to let equipment show itself as equipment. Of course Heidegger could have chosen some other painting to demonstrate how art reveals the truth of an object through the interdependency of world and earth. Van Gogh’s depiction of a pair of peasant shoes must have appealed, from the start, to the rustic proclivities of the Black Forest philosopher. Yet Heidegger’s readers have on occasion sensed more “at work” here in the essay, about the peasant woman’s labor, and the nostalgia for her work world. Is it merely the appeal of a peasant life similar to that of the Black Forest which surfaces in his musings about the peasant woman? Or does Heidegger’s account favor a view of labor commensurate with his own private National Socialism, an interpretive analysis whereby the Dutch painter is just German enough, and the shoes just enough “blood and soil”? His advice about recognizing the presence and absence of meaning turns on itself here, so as to force the reader to some difficult questions about what might possibly lie concealed below the surface of the text. Perhaps the impor-



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tant question here, given the priorities of the current volume, is to ask whether what Heidegger identifies in Van Gogh’s Shoes really is given to us by the painting itself. On the one hand, the opening of a rift or essential negation, the realization of that tension within the peasant’s work world, the showing of equipment as equipment, even the romanticizing of the peasant’s existence, may all belong to this masterpiece. On the other hand, Heidegger necessarily frames the artwork as he interprets it for us, and in so doing stamps it as his own, with some marks of his own lingering political commitments.35 The illustrative use of Van Gogh’s Old Shoes with Laces by Heidegger resulted in some traditional questions. The American art historian Meyer Schapiro responded with “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” in 1968, published in a collection of essays called The Reach of Mind: Essays in Honor of Kurt Goldstein.36 Schapiro’s criticisms fell into two categories, that Heidegger failed to recognize what the shoes truly represent, and that he failed to appreciate the presence of the artist in the artwork. After Schapiro narrows the painting down to one among eight possibilities—Van Gogh had painted a whole series of shoes—he draws the conclusion that they must have belonged to the painter, not a peasant woman. Moreover, by the time of the painting’s production in 1886, the shoes fit “a man of the town and the city” more than a man of peasant life.37 But the presence of the artist in the work is particularly significant according to Schapiro because we encounter the pair of shoes as facing toward the painter. The interface between painter and shoes forms a kind of mirror for which Vincent can recognize in the footwear the shaping caused by the physiognomy of his own feet, “like the ghost of my other I—a breathing portion of my very self.”38 As evidence for this Schapiro supplies a story from Gauguin’s notes, in which he records a conversation with Vincent from the Yellow House pertaining to the portrait in question. Vincent had described the shoes to Gauguin as ones that he had worn through the Borinage in his failed attempt to become a minister like his father. At least the journey had produced one successful missionary activity—the nursing of an injured coal miner back to life, upon whose brow Vincent detected the markings of a crown of thorns. Schapiro doubles down on this “sacred relic” story in his “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in 1994.39 He closes that later piece with the curious observation that Heidegger had added a handwritten sentence to his 1960 Reclam paperback edition of “The Origin of the Work of Art,” which reads, “From Van Gogh’s painting we cannot say with certainty where these shoes stand nor to whom they belong.”40 In “Restitutions of the truth in painting,” Jacques Derrida responds to Schapiro’s concerns about mimesis and the subjectivity of the artist. The first part of “Restitutions” was published in the journal Macula in 1978, the longer

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version in Derrida’s The Truth in Painting, 1987.41 In typical Derridean character, he opens wide a cache of interpretive possibilities for the muddied half boots: questions about their sexuality, fetishism, the real possibility that they are not a pair at all, the circular lace, and more. But the central question in the article is how to tie the shoes of the painting, mimetically, to shoes outside of the painting, as a matter of “restitution.” It is definitely an ambiguous relationship in Derrida’s view, one where the external shoes always intervene, “like the parergon, within the scene,” which is also to say, “as an outside assigned in the inside and yet irreducible.”42 The pointing back and forth, from painted shoes to worn shoes and then back again, resembles the interlacing that pokes through leather shoes only in order to return—a continuous insideoutside weave. Derrida observes that some instances of Heidegger’s account are actually neither here nor there, but instead describe the equipmentality of the shoes as if in an intermediate zone (Zwischenstellung), without clear reference to the locale of painting or field.43 All the while, the work of the painting, says Derrida, does provide for a different experience of the shoes, one which exposes them for what they are, in the “nudity” of their being.44 As for Schapiro’s insistence upon the presence of the artist in the painting, Derrida counters that a whole army of ghosts may be at play simultaneously, not just that of the painter.45 The possibility of any and all ghost stories is a matter of the strangeness (Unheimlichkeit) of the object, a term which Heidegger uses to relate presence to absence.46 It is not a matter of representation or copying, homoiosis or adequatio, not for some original pair of shoes, nor for the subject Vincent.47 Whereas Derrida brought much attention to Heidegger’s interpretation of Van Gogh, other French philosophers chose to further the themes of pathography, transcendence, and tragic cycle that had taken root in Jaspers and Bataille. Antonin Artaud, the playwright, theater director, actor, and quasiSurrealist philosopher, exemplifies this in his essay, “Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society.”48 In 1947 he published the essay as its own small book, complete with seven reproductions of Van Gogh paintings.49 Artaud respects Van Gogh for his authenticity, as “the most genuine painter of all painters,” who strictly limits himself to the framework of painting, not attempting an inert representation of some external world, and as a result managing to make of nature “a whirling force, an element torn right out of the heart.”50 Under the guise of representation he welded an air and enclosed within it a nerve, things which do not exist in nature, which are of a nature and an air more real than the air and nerve of real nature.51

Such comments in Artaud clearly echo Jaspers’ description of Van Gogh as the painter who pursues empirical reality in order to let it burst forth,



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transcendentally, as the presence for a new mythos. This echo resounds, moreover, in Artaud’s juxtaposition of Gauguin and Van Gogh: Gauguin’s symbolism sought out the possibilities for myth by having the symbols ready to use and enlarging present realities to fit them, but Van Gogh knew how to extract myth from the most ordinary things of life.52 Artaud could make this fit well enough with his own psychological materialism, which sought to lend to mental reality a hard corporeal bottom. He becomes the only real painter precisely because he is not a storyteller: “There are no ghosts in the paintings of van Gogh, no visions, no hallucinations.”53 Still, in Van Gogh “the myth of reality itself, mythic reality itself, is in the process of becoming flesh.”54 For Artaud all art is dramatic performance and action, ultimately “pure” theater, and at its best, indiscernible from life. Artaud’s Van Gogh dies as a martyr for the truth of a painting that is lived and no longer representational, that knows how to turn our original impression of the sky into its own swirling sea. Of course Artaud buys wholesale into the emerging mythology of Van Gogh’s demise, that he had committed suicide by shooting himself in the belly, that his Wheatfield with Crows was his last painting, his suicide note. (See Figure 2.) In that supposedly last painting—we now know that it was not—Van Gogh chooses to return to the infinite, to surprise the black fluttering demons of the crowd, hovering above his earth, that have so long choked his creativity with their excremental penchant for appropriation.55 One does not commit suicide by oneself, says Artaud.56 In truth we are all suicided by society, insofar as we have allowed ourselves to become bewitched by that social compliance that forces us to relinquish our earth.57 The only madness that Artaud can find in Van Gogh is that passion for the infinite always denied him by the social forces of institutional conformity, but welling up within him anyway for “bursts of Greek fire, atomic bombs.”58 The essay closes with an indictment of the spectators who viewed Van Gogh’s paintings at an exhibit in the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, from January to March 1946—an exhibit which Artaud had seen shortly before writing the essay. He says that those who shuffle by the fiery canvases are responsible, as much as their parents before them, for strangling Van Gogh to death. Then in words unmistakably reminiscent of Bataille, for whom Van Gogh tore from himself nothing less than a SUN, Artaud asks, But did there not fall, on one of the evenings I speak of, on the boulevard de la Madeleine, at the corner of the rue des Mathurins, an enormous white rock that might have come from a recent volcanic eruption of the volcano Popocatépetl?59

Something about Van Gogh’s work, albeit packaged by the museum for mass consumption, continues to stubbornly resist the pressures of conformity, art history, and art criticism.

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In the corpus of Maurice Merleau-Ponty we find only a handful of brief references to Van Gogh. Two of these have the commonality of capitalizing specifically on Van Gogh’s expressed desire to “go further.” One of the “going further” references occurs in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” which first appeared in Signs, 1960, and then posthumously, in shorter form, as a chapter for the unfinished book The Prose of the World, released in 1969.60 The other mention of going further occurs in “Eye and Mind,” published shortly before Merleau-Ponty’s death in 1961.61 In “Indirect Language,” Merleau-Ponty argues for a hermeneutical circle in painting that resembles the ongoing contextualization of meaning for spoken and written language. The history of painting, from its earliest cave images, “set forth the world as ‘to be painted’ or ‘to be sketched’ and called for an indefinite future of painting”—not unlike what the history of writing accomplishes, except by way of a visual metamorphosis.62 Van Gogh understands that his role as painter obliges him to project the next possibilities for seeing. It is just that Van Gogh’s “going farther” at the moment he paints The Crows no longer indicates some reality to be approached, but rather what still must be done in order to restore the encounter between his glance and the things which solicit it, the encounter between the one who has yet to be and what exists.63

The reader can easily imagine how to apply Merleau-Ponty’s “indefinite future,” his projection of painting motif, to Wheatfield with Crows, with its circular path of green through the field of harvest, and its less fecund path that diverges to one side. In “Eye and Mind” Merleau-Ponty expands upon the role of visibility in this change: the painter occupies a tradition that continually seeks out how to “break the skin of things,” so as to show depth, spatiality, color, and other simultaneous features of visibility.64 The “still further” of Van Gogh is the giving of himself entirely to his world for an immanent transcendence that actively thinks with painting.65 Such boldness is made possible because the act of painting is a bodily gesture encircled by a fleshy world—a world made of the same bodily stuff as the painter. In place of the Cartesian optics of a subject looking out upon an exterior world, MerleauPonty positions seer and world in an interdependent relation, paradoxical and reversible, so that seeing draws from what is seeable, and yet the seer also shapes what is seen. Van Gogh makes an equally brief appearance in the conclusion of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, 1961.66 The conceptualizations of madness that Foucault traces through Western history show how reason keeps finding its footing in opposition to an exterior other. Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and Artaud are for Foucault the three primary examples of madness in its latest configuration.



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When Nietzsche succumbs to syphilis, Van Gogh fights his losing battle against epilepsy, and Artaud suffers nine years at the sanatorium, their projects show themselves as islands floating over a truly dangerous abyss. The artist’s oeuvre serves the purpose of putting madness at bay and marking it as such: “Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness….”67 But the battle keeps modern human beings honest too, sets them adrift in a space for which they realize there can be no terra firma, no means of reconciliation. Now the oeuvre arraigns the world on account of its meaninglessness, holds it responsible for its inability to sustain ground. The Classical logic of the tragic drama, with its cycle and dialectic of meaning perpetually at odds with unreason, returns for higher stakes—the jeopardy of the whole of history and culture. Van Gogh’s artworks, like all works of history, illustrate the interdependency of reason and unreason, so as to demarcate being from nonbeing. What makes his oeuvre different, or timely, is that instead of containing madness, it lets the irresolvable breach of the artwork swell into the maelstrom of a disordered Real. One last interpreter, far more recent than the others, deserves mention here, largely because of the uniqueness of his perspective. In a collection of essays edited by Babette Babich entitled Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God, published in 2002, we find a few chapters written in response to Jesuit phenomenologist Patrick Heelan’s views about non-Euclidean visual space in Van Gogh’s paintings.68 Although much of that exchange has merit, one of the essays, Thomas Altizer’s “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” stands out above the others for its stimulating application of death of God theology to Van Gogh’s Wheatfield with Crows.69 Altizer offers a truly kenotic approach to understanding the painting when he claims that the eyes of Van Gogh, fully situated from within his paintings, not just at their periphery, require the perishing of the interior “I,” and that from this perishing can arise another totality of meaning. This sacrifice takes us through an “ecstatic transformation” that gives us eyes for the abyss, so that we see an absolute darkness about our world, an otherwise concealed meaninglessness. Vision in Wheatfield with Crows is what the Eye of God was to Byzantine iconography, except now no longer to see the world for its absolute light. Van Gogh’s Eye of God stems from an iconoclasm already at work in modern science as much as in his Zundert Calvinism, where no particular image of God, and no particular human face, is allowed a foothold as an organizational model for the world. In Van Gogh’s paintings—his portraits, his bare landscapes, even his religious scenes—the traditional “face” of Western art, which had long juxtaposed the human subject and world, finally reaches its dissolution. In the vacancy of that traditional effort, in Van Gogh, art leaves us with a new iconoclastic icon, the body of God that is inseparable from the Eye of God, the field of harvest under a dark sky.70

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The contributors to this volume interact with the philosophical interpretations sketched above, often bringing them into dialogue with one another. The concerns explored by the contributors frequently fall into at least one of a handful of categories. Not surprisingly, the pathography of Van Gogh constitutes one of these domains. In “Jaspers’ Pathographic Analysis of Van Gogh: A Critique and Appreciation,” Gregory Walters revisits Jaspers’ pathography of the painter, affirming many of Jaspers’ conclusions, albeit rejecting the diagnosis of schizophrenia and the assumption of suicide. Walters draws upon wider commitments in Jaspers’ psychopathology and existentialist philosophy, including his attraction to Nietzsche’s amor fati and Kierkegaard’s narrative unity of life, for which the whole is never complete. The ciphers of Vincent’s original personality, forged from his mental challenges and existential struggles, made him the “artisan des consolation par excellence” who continues to speak to us across generations, says Walters. Joseph Tanke, in his “Painting from the Outside: Foucault and Van Gogh,” instead proceeds down Foucault’s path of a genealogy of madness at the end of which emerges Van Gogh. Tanke responds to Foucault’s conception of the history of art as a working out of the contours of reason in opposition to unreason. He supports Foucault’s recognition of Van Gogh as a painter for whom the historical balance of sense and non-sense in the arts has dramatically shifted. The attempt in modern art to push madness to the margins of the work, by locating it in the artist or the observer, seems to crumble at the feet of Van Gogh, for whom the caesura of art can no longer speak through traditional dichotomies. Other essays in this volume interrogate the medium of painting in order to show how and what painting reveals. In “The Problem of Agency in Heidegger’s Interpretation of Van Gogh,” Ingvild Torsen addresses the issue of whether the agency of the painter is vital to a hermeneutics of the painter. The question is particularly appropriate for Van Gogh, who seems to invest himself personally in his paintings. In response to Schapiro’s criticism of Heidegger, that he failed to recognize how Van Gogh haunts his painting, Old Shoes with Laces, Torsen explores the importance of “creators and preservers” in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” The primacy of the Event that gives us the experience of art does not exclude the presence of the artist so much as it opens its possibilities among others. Christian Lotz argues in “Sensuality, Materiality, Painting: What Is Wrong with Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s Van Gogh Interpretations?” that both Jaspers and Heidegger failed to capitalize on the “materiality” of paint itself. This medium is hardly inconsequential for Van Gogh, who experiments with color and the thickness of paints, his brushstrokes like furrows of the field. Lotz observes that Heidegger fails to describe the “earth” of Van Gogh’s Shoes as resting in its paints or canvas, although he allows other artworks to rest within their materials, for example, the firmness of the temple



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that juts out from its rocky ground. This oversight misses a crucial principle for Van Gogh—that of the “living painting” whereby he presents the world as a painted world. K Malcolm Richards, in his “Pointure mal, or If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit . . .,” returns to issues of mimesis in painting raised by Schapiro against Heidegger and countered by Derrida. Richards contextualizes Derrida’s critique of Schapiro by drawing connections to other pertinent texts besides “The Still Life” and “Restitutions.” He shows that what began for Derrida as a criticism of the traditional representational elements in Schapiro’s aesthetics resulted in deepening concerns about related themes in Heidegger’s works: the role of the hand as bodily gesture, the comparison of human and animal “worlds,” and the relation of ontology to sexuality. Another prominent theme among the essays of this collection is the role of transcendence and immanence in painting. Stephen and Pauline Erickson, in their “Van Gogh, Heidegger, and the Attuned Life,” contrast instrumental and medium approaches to language. They show how Heidegger shares with Van Gogh a medium approach meant to uncover a transcendent dimension of reality from beneath ordinary and routine experiences. This attunement factor explains why Heidegger shares so much in common with Van Gogh, including nostalgia for peasant life, a less traditional but more ontological theology, and the privileging of art as a means for revelation. Rebecca Longtin Hansen brings together concepts of immanence and transcendence for her essay, “Immanent Transcendence in the Work of Art: Jaspers and Heidegger on Van Gogh.” She begins with Wilhelm Dilthey’s descriptions of modernism in art as the quest for a “new feeling of reality” that shatters conventional modes of thought and ultimately requires the artist’s further immersion in the material medium of the artwork. She finds these elements at work in Van Gogh’s post-Impressionism for an “immanent transcendence,” which is to say, an experience of reality no longer beholden to the near and far of the two traditionally exclusive concepts. Nevertheless, the immanent-transcendent interpretations of Van Gogh by Jaspers and Heidegger tend toward the “vertical” or “horizontal” respectively. Galen Johnson speaks of the “dehiscence” of Van Gogh’s art in the chapter “Merleau-Ponty’s Thinking of Perception and the Art of Van Gogh: On ‘Going Further’ and ‘Going Beyond.’” He explains how Merleau-Ponty recognizes in Van Gogh’s “going further” the pursuit of an ongoing mysterious surplus within the tradition of painting, and the realization of new depths of visibility in the reversibility of “flesh.” Johnson applies the “going further” motif back to Van Gogh’s art of seeing, and then to his art of living and his art of dying. Yet another touchstone for authors in this collection has been tragic elements of Van Gogh’s life and artworks. This includes a host of issues, such as Promethean rebellion, historical cycle, apocalypse, emptiness, and absence.

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I explore many of these factors within the context of painting and perception in my essay, “Van Gogh in Tragic Portraiture: Jaspers, Bataille, Heidegger.” By drawing upon these three philosophers, each of whom offered a tragic cycle for thinking about the history of art, I propose my own way of thinking about absence in Van Gogh’s works. I argue for what I call a “poverty of the appearances” whereby he exposes the emptiness of recycled images for the sake of returning us, apocalyptically, to their revelatory source. James Luchte explores the tragic cipher of dismemberment in Bataille’s interpretation of Van Gogh for the chapter “Prometheus Dismembered: Bataille on Van Gogh,” alternately titled, “The Window in the Bataille Restaurant.” He connects the Promethean imagery in Bataille’s two essays about Van Gogh to wider issues of homogeneity and heterogeneity. In the dismemberment of Prometheus, and Van Gogh’s ear, Bataille finds the symbolism for a de-sublimation—an exposure, subversion, and erosion—of the industries of social order, the “homogenous established units of life,” such as hospital, school, military, religion, and family. Van Gogh devoted himself to taking light away from homogenous power structures and awakening it in the common person, thus opening the possibility for a Great Night of heterogeneous meanings. Alina Feld explores the tragic dimension of Van Gogh from a more theological angle in her “Van Gogh’s Dark Illuminations: The End of Art or the Art of the End.” She raises points about absence and Abgrund derived from several standard bearers of Van Gogh interpretation, for instance, Jaspers, Bataille, and Derrida. But her main argument, derived from Altizer’s death of God theology, and reminiscent of Schelling’s abysmal nature of God, is that Van Gogh’s late paintings present to us an iconoclastic emptiness of the image, for a kind of apocalyptic, dark reversal of the Byzantine Eye of God. Finally, the volume closes—I think fittingly—with Stephen Watson’s “Van Gogh and the Absence of the Work: Remnants of a Hermeneutic Itinerary.” Watson masterfully weaves together insights from the various philosophical interpreters of Van Gogh, including some not mentioned in this introduction, in order to trace an “absence of the work” characteristic of Van Gogh’s art. Here the absence implies an un-working of the work as a result of its inability to statically hold on to its own meaning. Van Gogh’s works have a deliberate way of resisting, and disrupting, dialectical (and non-dialectical) attempts to fix them within a historical logic of any kind, instead complicating interpretation and pluralizing explanation. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who made this project possible. First and foremost, this includes Alan M. Olson and Gregory J. Walters, longstanding pillars of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America, for their support and advice. Also, I am indebted to the various respondents



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who offered their thoughts at panel discussions of the American Philosophical Association, including Frédéric Seyler of DePaul University, Dimitri Constant of Boston University, independent artist Constance Morley, Adrian Switzer of Park University, Colby Dickinson of Loyola University, Debra Riley Parr of Columbia College, Elena Bezzubova of UC Irvine, and Purushottama Bilimoria of UC Berkeley. Thank you, Hakhamanesh Zangeneh, California State Stanislaus, for your insights on Jaspers, Heidegger, and the uncanny. The present volume is greatly enhanced because of the challenges put forth by these scholars, and the energized dialogues about Van Gogh, many of which spilled from lecture rooms into hallways, down alleys, and into pubs. Thank you, Edward Economous, for your assistance with copyediting. I hope that this collection of essays will further the hermeneutic itinerary of that painter who suffered great truths and taught us the painting of thinking. NOTES   1.  Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Painting,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 257.   2.  J. B. de la Faille, ed., The Works of Vincent Van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (Amsterdam, Holland: Reynal & Company, Meulenhoff International, 1970), 22.  3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee (New York: North Point Press, 2002), footnote 66.  4. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 5–6.  5. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 21.  6. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 55–56.  7. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 65.  8. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 19.  9. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 16, 37. 10. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 37. 11. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 23. 12. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 42, 74–75. 13. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 62. 14.  Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, trans. Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977). 15. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 168–69. 16.  Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography, Navigations in Truth (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 123–24. In Strindberg and Van Gogh, Jaspers mentions the works from the Cologne exhibition, 108 in total, and lists the different years in which they were painted, but does not have titles to offer. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 163.

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17.  De la Faille, The Works, 10. 18. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 19.  Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 3, translated E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 172. 20.  Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” in Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 61–72. 21.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutiliation,” 67. 22.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutiliation,” 70. 23.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutiliation,” 70. 24.  Georges Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” in Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing, trans. Annette Michelson, October 36 (Spring 1986), 58–60. 25.  Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” 59. 26.  Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” 59. 27. The letter from Heidegger to Jaspers was written June 27, 1922. Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920–1963), trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (New York: Humanity Press, 2003), 33. 28.  Karl Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 170. 29.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 436–37. 30.  Meyer Schapiro had learned from correspondence with Heidegger that the latter had seen the painting at the Amsterdam show. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, ed. George Braziller (New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 1977), 136. 31. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 37–38. 32. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 44. 33. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 15–87. 34.  Heidegger, “The Origin,” 34. 35.  Several authors have explored the connection of Heidegger’s Shoes interpretation to National Socialism and labor. See Lesley Chamberlain, A Shoe Story: Van Gogh, the Philosophers and the West (Chelmsford Essex, UK: Harbour Books, 2014), 15–48. 36.  Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Honor of Kurt Goldstein, ed. Marianne L. Simmel (New York: Springer Science and Media, 1968), 203–10. Subsequent references to “The Still Life” will be from its later publication in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, edited by George Braziller. 37.  Schapiro, “The Still Life,” 138. 38.  Qtd. in Schapiro, “The Still Life,” 139.



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39.  Meyer Schapiro, “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, ed. Meyer Schapiro (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 143–45. 40.  Qtd. in Schapiro, “Further Notes,” 150. 41.  Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions de la verité en peinture,” Macula 3/4 (1978): 11–37. 42.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 271. 43.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 297. 44.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 300. 45.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 329. 46.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 378–79. 47.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 316–17. 48.  Antonin Artaud, “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,” in Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 483–512. 49.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 653. 50.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 501–2. 51.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 502. 52.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 491. 53.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 499, 504. 54.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 491. 55.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 489. 56.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 511. 57.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 504. 58.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 483. 59.  Artaud, “The Man Suicided,” 512. 60.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 39–83. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Indirect Language,” in The Prose of the World, ed. Claude LeFort, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 47–113. 61.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 121–49. 62.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 97. All further references to “Indirect Language” taken from this publication. 63.  Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language,” 94. 64.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 141. 65.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 123. 66.  Michel Foucault, A History of Madness, ed. Jean Khalfa, trans. Jonathan Murphy (New York: Routledge, 2006). See also the abridged Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1985).

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67. Foucault, A History of Madness, 537. 68.  Babette E. Babich, ed., Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J. (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). See the chapter “The Visual Space of Vincent van Gogh” in Patrick A. Heelan, Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 114–27. 69.  Thomas J.J. Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” in Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., ed. Babette E. Babich, 393–402 (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002). 70.  Another reason for including Altizer here: his efforts to sublimate insights from previous figures like Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault. Bataille describes Van Gogh’s psychosis in terms of an auto-mutilation whereby the ecstatic source of his creativity comes from an active, Promethean disgorging of himself. Altizer advances his own active, ecstatic self-nihilation when he says of Wheatfield with Crows, “now death is the very opposite of all possible passivity, and is ecstatically present, a presence releasing truly new eyes, eyes’ ecstatic finality, and one which we actually see….” Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 394–95. Also, where Merleau-Ponty identifies Wheatfield with Crows with the “going further” of a painting that actively thinks world, Altizer speaks similarly of the eyes. MerleauPonty seems to inspire Altizer’s statement that Van Gogh calls forth “a truly new grace, and a truly embodied grace, one embodied in the depths of body itself.” Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 393. Foucault’s account of Van Gogh as the culmination of the modern approach to art—the indictment of madness in the artwork— reverberates ever so slightly in Altizer when he describes Van Gogh instead as the culmination of modern iconoclasm and the ruin of the interior subject. This modern dissolution includes “a darkness which is only actually manifest with the birth of the modern world, a birth that is consummated in Van Gogh….” Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 396.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Altizer, Thomas J.J. “Van Gogh’s Eyes.” In Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., edited by Babette E. Babich, 393–402. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Artaud, Antonin. “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society.” In Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, translated by Helen Weaver, 483–512. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Babich, Babette E., ed. Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. Bataille, Georges. “Van Gogh as Prometheus.” In Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing, translated by Annette Michelson. October 36 (Spring 1986): 58–60.



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———. “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh.” In Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, edited by Allan Stoekl, 61–72. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Chamberlain, Lesley. A Shoe Story: Van Gogh, the Philosophers and the West. Chelmsford Essex, UK: Harbour Books, 2014. De la Faille, J. B. The Works of Vincent Van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings. Amsterdam, Holland: Reynal & Company, Meulenhoff International, 1970. Derrida, Jacques. “Restitutions of the Truth in Painting.” In The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, 255–382. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Originally published as “Restitutions de la verité en peinture.” Macula 3/4 (1978): 11–37. Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy, Vol. 3. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Foucault, Michel. A History of Madness. Edited by Jean Khalfa. Translated by Jonathan Murphy. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Vintage Books, 1985. Heelan, Patrick A. Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 15–87. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Heidegger, Martin, and Karl Jaspers. The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920– 1963). Translated by Gary E. Aylesworth. New York: Humanity Press, 2003. Jaspers, Karl. Strindberg and Van Gogh. Translated by Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977. Kirkbright, Suzanne. Karl Jaspers: A Biography, Navigations in Truth. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. Löwith, Karl. “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.” In The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin, 167–85. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen Johnson, translated by Michael B. Smith, 121–49. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994. ———. “The Indirect Language.” In The Prose of the World, edited by Claude LeFort, translated by John O’Neill, 47–113. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen Johnson, translated by Michael B. Smith, 76–120. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994. Originally published in Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 39–83.

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Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters on Cézanne. Edited by Clara Rilke. Translated by Joel Agee. New York: North Point Press, 2002. Schapiro, Meyer. “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, edited by Meyer Schapiro, 143–51. New York: George Braziller, Incorporated, 1994. ———. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, edited by George Braziller, 135–42. New York: George Braziller, Incorporated, 1977. Originally published in The Reach of Mind: Essays in Honor of Kurt Goldstein, ed. Marianne L. Simmel (New York: Springer Science and Media, 1968), 203–10.

Chapter 1

Jaspers’ Pathographic Analysis of Van Gogh A Critique and Appreciation Gregory J. Walters In his “Philosophical Memoir” Jaspers recalls the impact of a medical diagnosis on his own philosophy of life when only eighteen years old. One basic fact of my existence qualified all the decisions of my life: I was organically ill from childhood on (bronchiecstasis and cardiac decompensation). I was eighteen… when the correct diagnosis was made. Until then, false treatment of my condition had brought on frequent fever spells; now I learned to adjust my life to this disease. I read a treatise by Rudolf Virchow which described my ailment in every detail and gave the prognosis: in their thirties at the latest, these patients die of pyemia. I realized what mattered in treatment. I slowly learned the procedures, partly inventing them myself. They could not be carried out properly if I led the normal life of the healthy. If I wished to work, I had to risk what was harmful; if I wished to go on living, I had to observe a strict regimen and to avoid what was harmful. My existence passed between these poles. Frequent failures, by allowing fatigue to poison the body, were inevitable, and every time recovery was essential. The point was not to let concern about my illness turn the illness into the sum and substance of life. My task was to treat it properly almost without noticing it, and to keep working as if it did not exist. I had to adapt everything to it, without giving up to it. Time and again I made mistakes. The exigencies arising from my illness touched every hour and affected all my plans.1

It is little wonder, then, that nearly twenty years later, at the age of thirtynine, and writing between the first and second World Wars, Jaspers would devote a pathographic study to the Swedish dramatist and novelist Johan August Strindberg (1849–1912)—arguably Sweden’s greatest modern writer, and one burdened by “jealousy mania”—and the Dutch post-impressionist painter, the pioneer of Expressionism, the painter of peasants, Vincent van 23

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Gogh (1853–1890), a schizophrenic according to Jaspers, whose illness begged the question of the relationship between schizophrenia and creativity.2 Vincent van Gogh did not himself grant mental illness any positive causality for creativity. Where madness in artists is suggested, Vincent contends that such is caused by society’s rejection of painters that forces them into isolation. History shows us that he was derided, ridiculed, and put down many times on the streets of Paris while trying to work. It is society or culture that treat artists like “‘madmen, and because of this treatment [they] actually [go] insane, at least as far as their social life is concerned.’”3 This essay is divided into six sections, the first five of which correspond with the divisions used by Jaspers. I offer reflections on key takeaway elements. First, Jaspers brilliantly understands the nuanced physical and psychotic processes at work in Van Gogh’s health, but nevertheless makes some assumptions and attributions that need correction for the record. Jaspers misdiagnosed Van Gogh’s medical condition. He also forces some interpretations onto Vincent’s life, work, and artistic style. Jaspers assumes that Vincent had, in the evening, July 27, 1890, shot himself in the stomach and committed suicide. On July 29, “while conversing rationally with Dr. Gachet, and smoking a pipe. He revealed nothing in regard to the motives of his suicide. He merely shrugged his shoulders when Dr. Gachet asked him about it.”4 Jaspers judges van Gogh’s suicide as the telos of the psychotic break that stands in the continuity of psychosis with his ear-cutting on December 23, 1888. The date marks, for Jaspers, the key onset of his acute psychotic attack. Thus, for Jaspers, both the ear-cutting and suicide may be best understood, and tragedy is not enough to capture it all, as performances of Vincent’s psychopathology. In light of the judicious arguments set forth by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith—Van Gogh: The Life (2012)—we must now view Vincent’s death as causally related to a fatal wounding at the hands of teenagers. In spite of key errors, that is, a medical misdiagnosis, artistic style interpretation errors, and narrative assumption concerning suicide, Jaspers’ analysis of Vincent’s original personality and life remains substantive and perduring. The pathography gives testimony to methodological caveat and Van Gogh’s actualization of existence in aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions. Jaspers’ interpretation stresses Van Gogh’s sovereign attitude toward his illness and love of truth. His pathography paints a portrait of Van Gogh as a man who embraced amor fati, his historic truth in existence, and in singularly unique artistic expressions. I would say simply that, for Jaspers, Vincent’s “possible Existenz” is actualized qua artisan des consolation par excellence. Vincent, the man himself, still speaks to us across time in the ciphers of the struggling poor man, his ferocious artistic output, and treasure chest of letters to his



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brother. If ever there was an illustration of brotherly love, then it is surely found in the lives of Vincent and Theo, drawn at the hip of their childhood faith, manhood, love of art, and suffering. PATHOGRAPHY Jaspers sets forth his main sources from the outset.5 He views Vincent as an “original personality” dialectically caught up in the need for isolation but desirous of love and companionship. He has checkered relations with others. “He adapts with difficulty or not at all,” Jaspers explains.6 [Vincent] does not seem to have a goal, and yet there is something that fills him deeply, which we might call faith. Though, for a long time, he is without a stated aim or occupation, he is nevertheless conscious of the fate which carries him. Already in his youth he is deeply religious, and until the end he is sustained in all he does by a religious consciousness without adherence to a church or dogma. From the beginning his mind is directed toward the core, the essential, the meaning of existence. Hence, he, the employee, is unable to live up to the demands of the Goupil art store, because he places the value of art, the quality of the objects above the interests of the firm. He fails as a teacher in England, because here also demands are made on him which are foreign to the teaching profession. He fails as a theologian because his scholarly studies keep him too long away from the essential matter of carrying the Gospel to the people, and because he considers “the entire university, at least as far as the school of theology is concerned, one unspeakable great swindle, a school par excellence for Pharisaism.”7 Finally he becomes a voluntary cleric and helper among the minders of the Borinage; however, he allows his appearance to become so utterly neglected that, one day, his father comes for him, and returns home with him. He was then about twenty-six years old.”8

The initial reference to “faith” strikes one today as a paltry reading of Vincent’s early worldview. When Vincent left the ministry, he left the church of his father and uncle, but also “revelational faith,”9 a faith tied to religious traditions based on authority, whether the authority of sacred texts or institutions emerging after the Axial Age (800–200 BCE). For Jaspers, Van Gogh’s Christian faith is grounded in an authentic historicity. Vincent falls prey to neither Pharisaism (symbolized in the white-washed interior church wall), nor dogmatic, clericalist, totalistic views of faith. But beyond Van Gogh’s later (1889) fear of religious exaggeration, “crazy religious ideas” that could take hold of him when vulnerable, and his subjection to the superstitious ideas of the nuns at St. Remy, Jaspers has little else to say about Vincent’s “deep irrational faith.”10

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Vincent served as a voluntary cleric in the Borinage and on January 20, 1879, he was granted provisional salaried status for six months. Conditions in the mining slums of Petit-Wasmes in the Borinage were brutal, with frequent gas and mining explosions and accidents. Jaspers never discusses the trauma that the mine explosions must have had on Vincent. He had a preoccupation with the sick and wounded that eventually led his father to fetch him home in exasperation once his ministerial services were no longer needed by the Committee on Evangelism. Fate would have him take up the pencil and draw again. Vincent would leave the Church, not because he preferred naturalism…. but because the Church, particularly its ministers had failed him…. his break was not a theological but a deeply personal one, rooted in a fundamental mistrust of the clergy. This mistrust began with his dismissal from the Borinage by the Committee on Evangelism and extended to the two clergymen van Gogh had most admired and trusted, his uncle, Stricker, and his father, Theodorus.11

A fuller pathological analysis of Vincent that takes his early mistrust and traumas seriously will be highly anticipated because Jaspers’ pathographic analysis virtually glosses over the first twenty-six years of Vincent van Gogh’s early life and biopsychosocial development. “In 1870, at age 27, perhaps aware of his brief life expectancy, he allotted himself a maximum of 6 to 10 years to live.”12 Jaspers was not a fan of Freud. Perhaps we may see in Jaspers’ omissions, and in his description of the nature and methods of psychotherapy, a hidden psychological interlocutor.13 The trauma of mining disasters, the loss of his job and pittance salary, deep experiences of failure in the eyes of his lovers, family, and significant others, would perhaps be slightly traumatic, especially when one considers the environmental challenges, for instance, the extreme cold and hot weather that Vincent underwent to accomplish his outdoor sketches, drawings, watercolors, and oil works, whether North or South. We must also consider what Jaspers does only in passing, the homesickness Van Gogh often felt, as well as other early childhood development and adolescent traumas.14 Vincent failed to find a family, to form lasting adult relationships, but he did have relations with other painters. He never married, which may explain why he understood the displaced and desperate women dressed in red that were able to love so much. Jaspers provides only one paragraphed example, a conspicuously and strikingly small paragraph that bespeaks Vincent’s loves and relationships. In 1881 van Gogh falls in love with a young widow, but has to take no for an answer, as he had to once before in 1873, when a young girl was his first love.



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Shortly afterwards, he takes a poor, slovenly and pregnant woman into his house and showers all his love and care upon her until, disgusted and filled with grief over the sadness of life, he arranges a separation from the crude scheming creature.15

The women Vincent loved and to whom Jaspers refers above include, first, Eugénie Loyer from London.16 The “crude scheming creature” is Sien Hoornik. Vincent loved and cared for Sien and her two children with everything he had. Most dramatic, and certainly traumatic, is his falling in love with his cousin, Kee Vos, daughter of his uncle. We do well to recall the theological and clerical status in Amsterdam and Holland of The Right Rev. J.P. Stricker, who also served as Vincent’s spiritual mentor while living in Amsterdam. Kee became for Vincent “the object of an obsessive unrequited love from which he never fully recovered.”17 Vincent expressed his feelings for Kee in a letter to Theo. He explains holding his hand in the flame until Stricker would let him see his daughter. “You will not see her.” Well, it was too much for me, especially when they spoke of my wanting to coerce her, and I felt that the crushing things they said to me were unanswerable, and that my “she, and no other” had been killed.18

Vincent lost his soul-mate. Vincent longed for Kee like no other, but the reality of Vincent’s poverty did not allow him to realize the loving relationship. He could not support himself, much less a wife and children. Poverty, as much or more than mental illness, is causally determinate in all of his broken, failed relationships. One final example of trauma. In October 1880, Vincent moved from Cuesmes, in the Borinage, to Brussels. He had been given the pink slip with the evangelicals. He went to Brussels at the suggestion of Mr. Schmidt, successor to Vincent’s Uncle Hein (1814–1877) at the Goupil branch store there. He would stay only six months. Next Vincent applied at the Ecole des BeauxArts in Brussels. The teaching at the art school was free, but admittance was based on the condition of acceptance by the mayor of the city! Vincent’s request for admission was rejected. This would be the first of many disappointments in his “calling” to take up a career as an artist. I think it is fair to say that Vincent spent most of his short life at the grinding task, to gagne sa vie, apart from the generous and lifelong financial support of Theo. He was often crushed day-by-day with financial scarcity and debt. It made him feel worthless. Financial trauma, indeed, as we learn today from the social determinants of health or, more accurately, the economic determinants of health. How could he earn an income? He failed at everything else. He only sold one painting in his life. Canvas, paint, and brushes—his

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breadless and butterless tools—may be bought today with a 50% off coupon. After dying before his time, and going half-mad, the price of his work now seems a cruel and ironic fate indeed.19 CHANGE IN WORK INTENSITY Jaspers’ pathography is an “attempt.” In numerous places throughout the pathography, Jaspers makes clear why the word attempt is, itself, diagnostically important. Jaspers begins this section with a brief summary of his understanding of the process of psychosis at work in Vincent’s illness. Jaspers studies Van Gogh’s letters chronologically. He finds the “first signs of psychosis of later days” beginning in December 1885. Vincent mentions “physical disturbances” to Theo in his letters. Then, “psychic disturbances,”20 restlessness, “unaccountable excitement…. because my mind in a state of excitement, always concerns itself with infinity and with everlasting life.”21 “Once he sums up,” Jaspers writes: “My bones went to pieces. My brain is in complete disorder and unfit for normal life so that I should hurry to an asylum.”22 “The course of the illness (pre-stage 1888, first attack December 1888, then frequent attacks at intervals until his suicide in July 1890) corresponds with a change in work intensity.”23 The use of the word intervals here is not without diagnostic significance as we shall see. “During the pre-stage an increase over the former normal volume,” Jaspers continues, “then a loss of this intensity after the first attack, but a continued artistic niveau which even enjoyed a further development.”24 Jaspers adds the following footnote: A comparison of the number of paintings, finished in a single year, may serve as a superficial sign. Since a listing of his complete works does not seem to exist, I refer to the figures of the Cologne catalogue which contains 108 pictures and, therefore, can offer only a distorted and quantitatively unreliable reference. The details shown there for certain years (pictures in parentheses) are: 1884 (4), 1885 (5), 1886 (3), 1887 (12), 1888 (46), 1889 (30), 1890 (7).25

To be sure, Jaspers emphasizes the representational limits of the 1912 Cologne Expressionist exhibition, as well as the “controversial artwork” by Vincent, Paul Cézanne, and Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh’s paintings there, especially Wheatfield with Reaper, “attracted Jaspers like a magnet,” according to Jaspers scholar Suzanne Kirkbright.26 And yet Jaspers still attempts to make linkages between Vincent’s health attacks and his artistic work intensity. Moreover, he provides nuanced phenomenological descriptions based on extensive citations from Vincent’s gut-wrenching letters to Theo. The change in work intensity may be bracketed, in periods, to include March–April 1888



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(Arles), Vincent’s acute attack in December 1888, debilitating depression in January 1889, the growing intensity of a duty to work while living at the insane asylum (St. Remy), and finally, the last two months in Auvers. “After the acute attack (December 1888),” Jaspers writes that Vincent’s work, time and again, is completely disrupted over longer periods; what he creates during the intervals does not display the convincing power of the preceding year. Only for brief moments the ferocity and clear-mindedness return.27

Misdiagnosis of the etiology does not inhibit Jaspers from accurately identifying the exceedingly difficult life for Vincent from December 1888 onward: intervals of intense work, followed by physical and/or psychological attacks, followed by weeks or months of “dissoluteness” and unproductive work. Jaspers’ reference to illness intervals or recurrence is surely formed partially by the German psychiatrist, Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926), who had published the eighth and definite edition of his foundational textbook in 190928 four years before the publication of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology (Allgemeine Psychopathologie) in 1913.29 Kraepelin’s Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia divided mental illness into two main categories: dementia praecox or, as it was later called, schizophrenia (disordered thinking) and Manic-Depressive Insanity (MDI), which dealt with mood disorders. Although Vincent clearly suffered from depressions, Jaspers places Van Gogh in the category of schizophrenia, and not Manic-Depressive Insanity.30 He rules out epilepsy. “I see no justification for the diagnosis of epilepsy which was offered by the [French] doctors who treated van Gogh, because of the absence of epileptic seizures and of the specifically epileptic idiocy.”31 As we shall observe below, Jaspers attempts to link Vincent’s work and change in artistic style to his mental breakdown in 1888, with ever recurring intervals of deterioration during the late Arles period, at St. Remy, and then finally at Auvers. The most important works, according to Jaspers, are those from 1888 to 1890, which ostensibly reflect an assumption that first there was creative impulses for his work, a “new style” with the onset of psychosis, but then, alas, greater deterioration and ultimate decline to the point of suicide. CHANGE IN SELF-ANALYSIS Jaspers finds a clear change in Van Gogh’s self-analysis; the pivotal year is 1888. It would be altogether wrong to think that one might detect in van Gogh’s expressions about his art something directly caused by schizophrenia. It is merely

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a fact that there is a tremendous difference between 1888 and the time before, which any unbiased careful reader of the letters must notice; furthermore it is a fact that this contrast shows up rather suddenly, and it is also a fact that there is a temporal coincidence with the beginning of the psychotic process which can be detected on the basis of quite unrelated symptoms. It would therefore seem advisable that among all the various factors one would have to be found responsible for the psychosis. The deep sense of earnestness which pervades in all letters prior to and during the psychosis is the same throughout. These letters (and only about a fourth of them date from the time of the psychosis) are in their totality the documentation of a philosophy of life, of a human existence, of a highly ethical mind, the expression of an unconditional love of truth, of a deep irrational faith, of infinite love, of a bighearted humaneness, of an unshakable amor fati. These letters belong to the most touching expressions of the recent past. There is no relationship between this ethos and the psychosis. On the contrary, it is precisely during the time of the psychosis that it proves its worth.32

Vincent’s illness is not causally determinant of his philosophy of life, essential ethos, ethical development and nature, and so on, named above. There is also his humane largesse, a value not as significant, one suspects, as is Vincent’s unshakable amor fati. Jaspers discusses his understanding of amor fati in his Nietzsche book, which was written in 1936, fourteen years after the pathographic study. In “Book Two: The Basic Thoughts of Nietzsche,”33 Jaspers explains Nietzsche’s use of the expression. Nietzsche uses the expression amor fati to refer to an affirmation of being that is at the same time an affirmation of my own conation. When I am neither dissipated in a general affirmation of all being nor compressed within a single individual who clings anxiously to and wills nothing beyond himself, I have returned from both extremes to the present historicity of my existence in this actual world and am, precisely through this historicity, at one with being in itself…34

The following linkage between Nietzsche and Van Gogh seems more concrete: In amor fati the seemingly incompatible meet: intensified activity aiming at future fulfillments joins loving acceptance of whatever happens. But conceptual expression of this fusion is possible only through paradoxes. A merely rational distinction becomes specious, for it misses the point. The profound significance of amor fati is not even reached by the statement: “Before fate strikes us, we should guide it…. But once it has struck us, we should try to love it,” for this is temporally to separate a unity. At the same time the insight, thus expressed, that I cannot and must not promote fate as though it were something that I know and can set up as a goal, is existentially correct. On the other hand, the formulation



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furnished by basing amor fati on mere subordination of one’s destiny to the totality of events is not definitive either: to say “that all that a man does exerts an infinitely great influence on everything that is to come” and that “the fateful aspect of his nature cannot be separated from the fateful aspect of all that was and will be” can but mean that “fate is an edifying thought for one who comprehends that he is a part of it” (while also correctly pointing out that it is dependent even on me). Nevertheless, amor fati implies more than such antitheses express: as the affirmation of necessity itself, it amounts to the unity of becoming and being in the destiny of the individual within his world, the unity of his volition and his acceptance. In it the ethos of the authentic activity of the individual becomes one with his experience of events in being. Everything depends on Nietzsche’s interpretation of necessity.35

Vincent’s necessity is less philosophical than Nietzsche’s. How may I live without money? It is necessary for me to sell paintings immediately! How on earth might one will the eternal recurrence of Borinage mine explosions, unrequited love, vocational failure, a life of extreme poverty, and artwork that had no exchange-value? Vincent is pragmatic. One feels Vincent’s anxiety: “for the moment my aim must be to learn to make drawings that are presentable and salable as soon as possible, so that I can begin to earn something directly through my work. Because that is the necessity forced upon me.”36

THE WORK Jaspers aims in this section to make a comparison of the chronological succession of Vincent’s work and the development of his illness. I shall attempt to comment on the part which art played in van Gogh’s entire life, and how it had always had a decisive influence on him, be it prior to or during his psychosis. His personality, activity, ethos, existence and artistic creativity must be understood as a complex unity to an extraordinary degree. An isolated contemplation of his works of art, much less a few of them, will hardly lead toward an understanding of the very meaning of this art. The roots of his creations are part of the man’s total mentality. By themselves they would be mere aphorisms. It would be quite a different story if we did not have his letters and the reports on his life, if ours were only a few single pictures and pages and not the totality in its entire spread across his time. The works by themselves do not tell as much as they do if taken as part of the whole. It is an aesthetic bias of the singular, completed work of art which resists such an opinion. Perhaps not a single painting of van Gogh is absolutely perfect and complete in itself, except perhaps for someone who misunderstands the work in the widest sense from an artistic or decorative point of view.37

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The following statement on the polarity of art work presents, in a nutshell, his early philosophy of aesthetics. The contrast is between the well-rounded and the self-contained work of art. As a matter of fact there is such a thing as polarity in the work of creative art: on the one hand we have those well-rounded works, each a complete cosmos in itself, not forcing questions concerning a person’s life or other works, works which, in their blissful beauty permit timeless enjoyment; on the other hand, though, the history of Occidental art tells us time and again of creations which give the effect of the expression of a personality, as partial solutions, as steps along a trail, no matter to what extent the aesthetic form of the self-contained work of art is unquestionably still there. We find this latter possibility realized to the extreme in van Gogh’s paintings. His works, taken by themselves, would undoubtedly rank high among the great artistic creations of the last 500 years; his existence taken as a whole, which without his art would never be quite distinct, but which speaks clearly especially through that art, is of singular greatness. The implicitness, the high expectation, the realism, saturated with religious devotion, the absolute truthfulness—all of these combined, in their affect, present the total man. His work springs from this combination, thanks to the identity of his religious, ethical and artistic impulses. About 1877, when he unsuccessfully studies old languages for his theological endeavors, he says to his teacher: “…What I am after is to offer peace to the poor victims of their fate here on earth.” We find similar remarks throughout his life. He wants to console through his art.38

The appellation of singular greatness to Vincent by Jaspers may not be surprising. The idea of “greatness” would require far more extended discussion and commentary than possible here. Jaspers’ interpretation of Van Gogh is, philosophically, Nietzschean through and through.39 But yes, singularly great I say is Van Gogh as artisan des consolation! More important, note how Jaspers, in the above passage, interprets Vincent’s personality, activity, ethos, existence, and artistic creativity as a “complex unity.” The idea of complex unities and the problem of a unified whole is of utmost concern in the General Psychopathology (Part Six). On “The Human Being as a Whole,” Jaspers writes about complex unities and the problem of the unified whole in relationship to his methodological pluralism in psychiatry, and the distinction between causal explanations (Causal Analysis) and meaningful connections (Understanding Analysis). He warns against the problem of false conversions of complex unities into absolutes. Absolutization of one dimension of the complex unity of the person may take various forms of reductionism. The momentary whole tends to be taken for the ultimate whole: the psyche is consciousness and nothing else; the performance as a whole is the only objectivity, the only object for science; the body-psyche unity is reality itself; milieu



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and culture are absolutes to partake in which is psychic reality; personality is the essence of the psyche, its meaningfulness is its Being; theories grasp the true reality; causal connections are the substance of things, the body is everything, the psyche is only a transit-station for hereditary connections; clinical reality consists of only disease entities, constitutions and the life history as a unit; the individual is a function of society and history.40

The human being is always more than he or she can know about him or herself, and thus no complex unity of psychic life is ever the whole itself. In explicitly Kierkegaardian terms, Jaspers appreciates the religious, ethical, and artistic impulses that come together in the complex narrative unity of Vincent’s life. There is paradox here, too, in the fact that the failures of family life, personal love and affection, Christian ministry, hard labor and other forms of work at the Goupil art stores, in bookstore work, teaching, and preaching, all redound for Vincent into the consolation of art. To be sure, Vincent’s is a non-Christocentric art, with the exception of replacing the face of Christ in The Pietà—and the face of Lazarus in The Raising of Lazarus— with his own face and red hair. Two of the most colorful ciphers of Christ painted by the so-called “Christ of the Miners” in the Borinage! What is the take-away from Jaspers’ comparison of the chronological succession of Vincent’s work and the development of his illness? Did a change in mental state, intensity of activity, and artistic desires coincide with his artistic creations? “I would consider it rather curious,” Jaspers writes rhetorically, if it were to be a ‘coincidence’ that the psychosis were to begin at the very time at which we also witness the incredibly fast unfolding of the new style! One must be careful to avoid excesses in either direction. Nothing could be created with the help of schizophrenia if it were not for that immensely serious acquisition of artistic ability which was van Gogh’s through almost ten years of artistic effort and through the lifelong struggle for his existence. Neither does schizophrenia contribute anything absolutely new, but it will, so to speak, arrive at a compromise with already existing powers. Schizophrenia helps to create something out of the original telos which would never have come into being without psychosis.41

If this were to apply to Van Gogh, it would certainly seem to be a truism, but it is the subject-matter that Van Gogh decided to paint at St. Remy that best captures the effect of his illness.42 VAN GOGH’S ATTITUDE TOWARD HIS ILLNESS We may sum up Jaspers’ takeaway concerning Vincent’s attitude toward his illness in a single fatum: “quite an unusual phenomenon in regard to van

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Gogh: his sovereign attitude toward his illness.”43 His sovereignty issues from truth about his illness. His aesthetic worldview seeks to be free from illusion. Jaspers cites Vincent: “What consoles us is the ability to see modern life clearly despite its unavoidable sadness,” then continues: This is not sobriety and emptiness in van Gogh…. he has placed such massive strength, such inexpressible religiosity or philosophy of life, as one might call it, into his simple love of truth, into the formulation of the simplest things in this world.44

Vincent van Gogh suffered from a psychotic process to be sure. What type of process was it? How does one diagnose it? Jaspers can find “no justification for the diagnosis of epilepsy which was offered by the doctors who treated van Gogh, because of the absence of epileptic seizures and of the specifically epileptic idiocy.” Then, again, he notes that the only discussible possibility is that of a schizophrenic or a paralytic process. We cannot exclude a case of paralysis with absolute certainty. There seem to have been repeated possibilities in Van Gogh’s life that he might have contracted a syphilitic infection. Paralysis can be proven only by physical symptoms. We do not know of any. The only hint to that effect is a certain character of dissoluteness in some of van Gogh’s very last pictures, and of van Gogh’s own accounting of the certain insecurity in his hand. And yet, the absolute command of criticism and discipline despite such violent psychotic attacks over a period of two years renders a paralysis extremely improbable…45

To Jaspers “schizophrenia seems overwhelmingly probable. Psychiatric consciousness demands that we note the minimum of uncertainty which is peculiar to the diagnosis of van Gogh….”46 Unfortunately, “Because of van Gogh’s suicide, we are lacking the biographical sequel which, despite the lack of medical reports, could have provided confirmation.”47 How Van Gogh’s illness might have played itself out is unknown to this day. He was thirty-seven years old when fatally wounded. Close scrutiny of medical reports generated in the twentieth century proffers medical diagnoses that include Meniere’s, Gastaut-Geschwind phenomena (from partial seizures), Tinnitus (leading to ear-cutting), Bipolar Disorder, acute intermittent Porphyria, lead poisoning, Alcoholism (absinthe), Syphilis, and Digitalis Toxicity.48 Kathleen Powers Erickson weighs the evidence and concludes: No one has yet convincingly disproved the first theory that van Gogh’s mental illness was the result of some type of epilepsy, a dysfunction of one or both temporal lobes, which produced both episodic behavioral disturbances and reactive depression…. [Both] explain van Gogh’s self-mutilation, episodic psychosis,



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including his auditory and visual hallucinations, as well as his prodigious output of both letters and paintings. Until new evidence is uncovered to challenge this thesis, the credit for diagnosing and understanding van Gogh’s mental crises belongs to his first attending physician, Dr. Felix Rey.49

VINCENT’S FATAL WOUNDING Jaspers assumes that Vincent committed suicide and, indeed, for over one hundred years the idea has reigned supreme and gone virtually unquestioned in the traditional narrative. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, with rigourous scholarship, provide a compelling hypothetical reconstruction of the events of July 27, 1890.50 Vincent’s death was causally related to a “fatal wounding,” possibly by a sixteen-year-old rambunctious boy, René Secrétan, who had a Wild West cowboy outfit and an old .380 caliber pistol to match. His older brother, Gaston, eighteen years old, was friendly toward Vincent. The authors make no moral or legal claim about whether the harm was intentioned or not, a tragic accident, or even an adolescent prank gone terribly wrong. However, there was no suicide. No one knows what happened in the time between Vincent’s midday meal at the Ravoux Inn and the time he arrived home with a bullet lodged in his stomach close to the spine. There were no witnesses. Nobody knew where the shooting took place. Vincent’s easel, canvas, paints, and brushes mysteriously disappeared. There was no smoking gun; indeed, the gun surfaced much later in time. The Naifeh and Smith reconstruction relies on interviews that René Secrétan gave in 1956–1957 to Victor Doiteau, including his self-confessed abusive and bullying behaviors. Vincent called René Buffalo Bill, but with his “strange accent” the name came out as “Puffalo Pill.”51 More fodder for ad hominem ridicule. René claims in one interview that Vincent stole the gun from his rucksack; nor does René ever confess to having a role in the fatal wounding. The two may have encountered each other that fateful July night on the road to Chaponval. The road led to a bend in the river Oise. There was good fishing as well as an old poacher’s bar there. The brothers, from a wealthy family, often picked up Vincent’s tab. René had a history of taunting and teasing Vincent in order to provoke his anger. He would put chili powder on his brush ends, salt in his coffee, and even a snake in his paint box. Sunday evening, on July 29th, the pranks turned sour. Once the gun in René’s rucksack was produced, anything could have happened— intentional or accidental—between a reckless teenager with fantasies of the Wild West, an inebriated artist who knew nothing about guns, and an antiquated pistol with a tendency to malfunction.52

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The hypothetical reconstruction of Naifeh and Smith continues: Wounded, Vincent must have stumbled into the street as soon as he was able and headed toward the Ravoux Inn, leaving behind whatever painting gear he had brought. At first, he may have had no idea of how seriously he was hurt. The wound did not bleed profusely. But once the initial shock wore off, the pain of his abdominal injury had to be excruciating. The Secrétan brothers would have been terrified. Whether they tried to give Vincent assistance cannot be known. But they apparently had the time and presence of mind to collect the pistol and all of Vincent’s belongings before hurrying off into the gathering dusk.53

Their fatal wounding theory is staggering, startling, and, indeed, stupefying. It all makes perfect sense. Naifeh and Smith provide ample evidence and justificatory reasons that resolve the contradictions, fill “gaps,” and “fit[s] together many of the misshapen pieces of the traditional narrative of suicide that has dominated Van Gogh mythology since the day of the shooting.”54 The reconstruction accounts for the lack of evidence surrounding the incident and contradictions concerning the location of the shooting. From a forensic perspective, the bullet entered Vincent’s body from an “unusual, oblique angle”; the pistol would have been “too far out”55 for Vincent to pull the trigger. A shooting on or near the Chaponval road, instead of a wheat field on the other side of town, explains how he could have made it back to the inn only through agony, shock, and trauma again. Moreover, their reconstruction explains why there was no suicide note. And if Vincent meant to kill himself, why set out that day laden with canvas, paint, and other supplies? It explains why Vincent didn’t “finish himself off”56 when the first shot went wrong. It explains the case of the missing haystack from the traditional narrative. It explains why the origin of the pistol did not come to light until seventy years later. Gustave Ravoux’s daughter, Adeline, made connections between her father, René, and the gun, which he often brandished about in his buckskin tunic, boots and rodeo hat. Adeline had omitted René from the earlier narrative. Why? In order to protect her father, who had put a gun into the hands of a juvenile belligerent, as well as to protect the young brothers and wealthy family from police interrogation and possibly trial. Finally, their reconstruction explains why Vincent’s putative “confessions” to a suicide attempt were “so hesitant, halfhearted, and oddly hedged.”57 Why did Vincent not accuse the brothers? Why instead, did he tell the police: “Do not accuse anyone, it is I who wanted to kill myself.” When asked if he wanted to commit suicide, Vincent answered the police disingenuously, “Yes, I believe so.”58 The authors’ answer is that Vincent welcomed death. This is perhaps true, but one might also imagine Vincent saying, Father forgive them, for they know not what they did to me!



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Jaspers’ pathography identifies many of the physical and psychotic processes at work in Van Gogh’s health, but he misdiagnosed Van Gogh’s medical condition. Moreover, and in keeping with the narrative reception of Van Gogh’s death, Jaspers assumes that Vincent committed suicide. In spite of these two errors, the pathographic analysis of Van Gogh’s original personality and life remains substantive and perduring. The pathography gives testimony to Van Gogh’s historic actualization of existence in aesthetic, ethical, and religious dimensions. Van Gogh’s sovereign attitude toward his illness and love of truth are essential to the meaning of his existence. Jaspers pens a portrait of Vincent van Gogh as a man who embraced amor fati, his historic truth in existence and artistic expression. To use a Jaspersian expression, “the possible Existenz” of Van Gogh, artisan des consolation par excellence, speaks to us across time in the ciphers of his original personality, striking artistic impressions and letters. If there ever were a modern man who attempted to follow the imitatio Christi, then it was Vincent van Gogh. Vincent’s prints of biblical scenes and ecce homos where marked up, and written on, and under each Head of Christ, appeared the words of St. Paul: “Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.”59 Vincent van Gogh embraced amor fati, walked the stages along life’s way, and brought the consolation of Christ (even—if not, especially—after he left the Church), to the suffering and downtrodden. Vincent van Gogh’s remarkable achievements and beautiful, illuminating Spirit remain with us today. Knowing the truth that Vincent had epileptic form disorder and did not commit suicide will change his reception in history now. He would rather forgive those who wounded him than indict them, even when those wounds resulted in his own tragic, if welcomed, death. Rise again—you red-headed Lazarus—and cast your precious light upon us anew! NOTES 1. Karl Jaspers, “Philosophical Memoir,” in Karl Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays and Lectures, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: Henry Regenery Company, 1963), 198–99. 2. Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und Van Gogh, Versuch einer pathographischen Analyse unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Hölderline (Bern: Bircher, 1922), viii–131. Jaspers published a second German edition with Springer in 1926, and a third edition with Storm in 1949. The English translation used here is based on the translation of the Third German Edition: Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and van Gogh: An Attempt at a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Holderlin, trans. Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977). (Hereafter cited as Strindberg and Van Gogh.)

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  3.  Cited in Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, ed. Ronald de Leeuw, trans. Arnold Pomerans (New York: Penguin Books, 1997), xix.  4. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 163.  5. “Main source: Vincent van Gogh, Letters to his brother, compiled by his sister-in-law, J. van Gogh-Bonger, translated into German by Leo Klein-Diepold, 2 vols. (Berlin: Paul Cassirer, 1914), with a biographical introduction.—Furthermore Vincent van Gogh, Letters (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer). Among them letters to his friend Bernard.—E. H. du Quesne-van Gogh, Personal memories of Vincent Van Gogh (Munich: Piper, 1911). This latter work with illustrations; also Meier-Graefe, V. van Gogh (Munich: Piper); and in the larger opus Julius Meier-Graefe, Vincent (Munich: Piper); furthermore, in the van Gogh collection, published by Piper. Drawings by van Gogh have been excellently reproduced in a folio which was published by L. J. Veen, Amsterdam, prior to the war [WWI], and others in a folio of the Hans von Marees Society in 1919 (Piper).—Finally the catalog of the exhibition of the KölnerSonderbund of 1912.—Many illustrations also in the various annual publications of Kunst und Künstler.” Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 154, footnote. Jaspers is using the German translation of the Van Gogh-Bonger corpus of letters translated into German in 1914 and at the start of the First World War. As Jaspers notes elsewhere in the pathography, it was “due to a lack of available material I was unable to find out… whether the pictures of 1887 and prior to that time are of a smaller format than those of 1888.” Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 169, footnote.  6. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 155.   7.  Vincent had one year of theological studies from May 1877 to July 1878 in Amsterdam. Dr. M.B. Mendes da Costa tutored Vincent in Latin and Greek, but he also needed algebra and mathematics to complete his studies. “The Greek verbs became too much for him,” according to Dr. da Costa. Vincent wrote to Theo about his “terrible sense of fear” (ca. February 1878) that he would not be able to finish his studies. A few months earlier Vincent expressed his developing anxiety: “Oh, Theo, Theo boy, if only I might succeed in this! If I only might be freed from that terrible depression and from that torrent of reproaches that I had to endure because everything I have undertaken has failed; and if there might be given to me both the necessary opportunity and the strength to develop fully and to persevere in that course for which my father and I would thank the Lord so fervently.” Cited in Jan Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography (Ann Arbor: Fuller Publications, 1990), 52, Letter 92.  8. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 155.  9. Karl Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 10. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 171. 11.  Kathleen Powers Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998), 61. 12. Hannah Hyams, “Trauma: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the Case of Vincent Van Gogh,” International Journal of Psychotherapy 8(2), (2003): 95–107, at 101. 13.  Jaspers clarifies the function of therapy, in general, and psychotherapy in particular, under the headings “Methods of Suggestion,” “Cathartic Methods,” “Practice



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and Training,” “Methods of Re-education,” and “Methods that Address themselves to the Personality.” Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, Vol. 2 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 834–36. 14.  On October 29, 1876, Vincent gave his first and most oft-quoted Sunday sermon at the church in Richmond based on Psalm 119:19, “I am a stranger on the Earth, hide not Thy commandments from me.” His work schedule and travel across England was as brutal as it was inevitably a set-up for yet another failure. Hulsker, Vincent and Theo van Gogh, 41–42. 15. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 156. 16.  While living in London (1873–1875) and working as a minister, Vincent was perhaps most inspired by George Henry Boughton’s painting, Godspeed! Pilgrims Setting Out for Canterbury. Xander Van Eck, “Van Gogh and G.H. Boughton,” The Burlington Magazine 132/1049 (August 1990): 539–40. 17. Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate, 25. 18.  “Kee’s answer to Vincent, ‘niet, nooit, nimmer,’ is the most emphatic refusal possible. It was Vincent’s persistence beyond this that alienated Stricker and the rest of Kee’s family (L193, 14 May 1882, Lettres 1:351).” Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate, 26, note 52. 19.  Van Gogh’s, The Irises, sold at a record 53.9 million US dollars in 1987! 20. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 163. 21. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 158. 22. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 158. 23. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 163. 24. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 163. 25. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 163, footnote. Italics added. 26.  Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography— Navigations in Truth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 124. 27. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 165. Italics added. 28.  Emil Kraepelin, Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, trans. Mary Barclay (Edinburgh: E. S. Livingstone, 1920). 29.  Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, Vols. 1 and 2 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). 30.  Many persons “assume that MDI is now translated as bipolar disorder, but in fact Kraepelin’s MDI would correspond to today’s bipolar disorder plus MDD [Major Depressive Disorder]. For Kraepelin, the key feature of MDI was recurrence of any kind of mood episodes, depression or (not and) mania. Thus, ten depressive episodes was MDI; ten manic episodes was also MDI. What matters is the number of episodes, not the kind of mood state.” Nassir Ghaemi, Drugs, Diagnosis and Despair in the Modern World (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 24. 31. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 187. 32. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 170–1. 33.  Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. C. F. Wallraff and F. J. Schmitz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965), 367–70. 34.  Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction, 367.

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35. Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction, 368–69. Italics added, first sentence. 36.  Cited by Hulsker, Vincent and Theo Van Gogh, 90. Italics added. 37. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 173–4. 38. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 173–4. 39.  On Nietzsche’s ideas about “great” artistic creations, philosophy as “legislation of greatness,” Wagner’s greatness, the “superior man,” and the “Superman,” see Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction, 162ff. 40. Jaspers, General Psychopathology, Vol. II, 750–1. 41. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 178. 42.  “The Christ with the Virgin Mother, the depictions of the biblical stories of Lazarus and the Good Samaritan, the old man at the threshold of eternity, the prophetic vision of his star-filled skies, as well as the symbolic images of death and resurrection in van Gogh’s depictions of wheatfields, sowers, and reapers are all essentially religious subjects. They express van Gogh’s struggle with his illness, his hope for deliverance and renewal, and his concern with issues of death and immortality.” Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate, 149. 43. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 181. 44. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 182. 45. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 187. The English translation has this closing section of the chapter all in italics. 46. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 187. 47. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 187. 48. Kaylan B. Bhattacharyya, “The Neuropsychiatric Ailment of Vincent Van Gogh,” Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology 18/1(January–March 2015): 6–9. 49. Erickson, At Eternity’s Gate, 149. 50.  Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, “Appendix: A Note on Vincent’s Fatal Wounding,” in Van Gogh: The Life. (New York: Random House, 2012), 869–85. 51.  Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 871. 52.  Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 873. 53.  Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 873. 54.  Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 873. 55.  Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 873. 56.  Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 874. 57.  Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 875. 58.  Cited by Naifeh and Smith, “Appendix,” 875. 59.  The quote comes from 2 Cor. 6:10. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Herbert G. May (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bhattacharyya, Kalyan B. “The Neuropsychiatric Ailment of Vincent Van Gogh.” Annals of Indian Academy of Neurology 18/1(January–March 2015): 6–9.



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Bunyan, John. The Pilgrim’s Progress. World Classics Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Erickson, Kathleen Powers. At Eternity’s Gate: The Spiritual Vision of Vincent van Gogh. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1998. Ghaemi, Nassir. Drugs, Diagnosis and Despair in the Modern World. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Hulsker, Jan. Vincent and Theo van Gogh: A Dual Biography. Ann Arbor: Fuller Publications, 1990. Hyams, Hanna. “Trauma: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the Case of Vincent Van Gogh.” International Journal of Psychotherapy 8(2) (2003): 95–107. Jaspers, Karl. General Psychopathology, Vols.1 and 2. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. ———. Nietzsche: Einführung in das Verständnis seines Philosophierens. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1936. ———. Philosophical Faith and Revelation. Translated by E. B. Ashton. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. ———. “Philosophical Memoir.” In Karl Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays and Lectures, translated by E. B. Ashton, 193–314. Chicago: Henry Regenery Company, 1963. ———. Strindberg und Van Gogh, Versuch einer pathographischen Analyse unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Hölderline. Bern: Bircher, 1922. ———. Strindberg and van Gogh: An Attempt at a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Holderlin. Translated by Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. Kempis, Thomas à. The Imitation of Christ. Edited by Harold C. Gardener. New York: Image Books, 1955. Kirkbright, Suzanne. Karl Jaspers: A Biography— Navigations in Truth. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Kraepelin, Emil. Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia. Translated by Mary Barclay. Edinburgh: E.S. Livingstone, 1920. Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith. “Appendix: A Note on Vincent’s Fatal Wounding.” In Van Gogh: The Life, 869–85. New York: Random House, 2012. ———. Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House, 2012. The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha. Edited by Bruce M. Metzger and Herbert G. May. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Van Eck, Xander. “Van Gogh and George Henry Boughton.” The Burlington Magazine, 132/1049 (August 1990): 539–40. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Edited by Ronald de Leeuw, translated by Arnold Pomerans. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

Chapter 2

Painting from the Outside Foucault and Van Gogh Joseph J. Tanke

This essay examines Michel Foucault’s scattered remarks in the History of Madness on the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh in order to understand Foucault’s appreciation for Van Gogh’s work, as well as the philosopher’s somewhat cryptic remarks regarding the relationship between art and madness. In this chapter, we see that even though Foucault never came close to devoting a full-length essay to Van Gogh, his fragmentary presentation nevertheless speaks to a consistent vision of Van Gogh as an artist, one that might be placed in a fruitful dialogue with the other European theorists and philosophers—most notably Martin Heidegger, Antonin Artaud, and Jacques Derrida—who have commented on Van Gogh’s work. Further, by attending to Foucault’s discussion of Van Gogh, and considering it in terms of his propositions regarding the relationship between art (or the oeuvre) and madness, we hope to shed light upon Foucault’s early and, I would argue, largely abandoned, notions of art and creativity, as well as something of Foucault’s understanding of artistic modernity, a concern that becomes more pronounced in Foucault’s later writings on art.1 It should be made clear at the outset that even though Van Gogh (along with Nietzsche and Artaud, and to a lesser degree Hölderlin and Nerval), occupies a privileged position in a work on madness, Foucault is eager to challenge the conventional picture of Van Gogh as a “mad artist,” one whose work could be understood in terms of his mental illness. In fact, Foucault’s aim in the sections where he treats painting, literature, and poetry is to show that art is incompatible with madness, even if, paradoxically, modernity has made madness a constitutive aspect of the work of art. Foucault’s well-known yet scarcely understood dictum in the “Preface” to the 1961 edition, later suppressed in the 1972 edition, explains succinctly that madness [folie] is “nothing other than the absence of an oeuvre.”2 This remark is echoed several times 43

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in the book’s final section, where the most substantial remarks on Van Gogh are to be found. The last page of the French edition, for example, explains that “Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness” [là où il y a oeuvre, il n’y a pas folie].3 Further, Foucault attempts to clarify the specific case of Van Gogh by explaining that “Van Gogh, who did not want to ‘ask the doctors’ permission to paint,’ knew very well that his oeuvre and his madness were incompatible.”4 As we will see, we can understand Foucault to mean by this that the work of art, the active work of making art, exploits but continually defers madness. Foucault again: “There is only madness as the last instant of the oeuvre—for the oeuvre indefinitely repels madness to its outer limits.”5 In these passages on madness and the oeuvre, there is a twofold movement whereby Foucault seeks to understand the connection between art and madness, while dismissing its common associations with mental illness. For Foucault, mental illness is a recent and limited instantiation of madness, a form deprived, by two centuries of confinement, of the voice and power madness once contained. Foucault thus attempts to shift the discussion of art and madness away from the psychological consideration of individual artists, towards the constitutive role played by madness in the artistic forms associated with modernity. While it is problematic to understand these artists in strictly psychological terms, Foucault claims that it would be equally foolhardy to ignore the frequency with which the connection between art and madness asserts itself in the modern era. Foucault: Nietzsche’s madness, and the madness of Van Gogh or Artaud, belong to their oeuvre, perhaps no more or no less profoundly, but in a totally different way. The frequency in the modern world of these oeuvres that explode into madness no doubt proves nothing about the reason of this world, the meaning of these oeuvres, nor even about the relationships that are made and unmade between the real world and the artists who produce such an oeuvre. And yet that frequency must be taken seriously, like the insistence of a question; since Hölderlin and Nerval, the number of writers, painters and musicians who have ‘lapsed’ into madness has multiplied, and yet we should not be deceived—between madness and the oeuvre there has been no arrangement, no more constant exchange, and no communication between languages. The confrontation now is far more perilous than before, and their competition allows no quarter: their game is one of life and death.6

While Foucault does not yet describe his own analysis as “historical ontology,” like he later will, it is helpful to view these considerations in those terms. Foucault seeks to explain how art and madness come to be paired so frequently throughout modernity, as well as to understand the specific configuration that those two fields of experience, “art” and “madness,” will



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be assigned by Western culture. By what accidents, historical events, and transformations did madness come to voice itself in modern art? What are the consequences for art of it having done so? And, why is it that artists must risk madness in the pursuit of their oeuvre? Foucault never dwells at length on these points throughout the History of Madness, and so one must piece together the book’s position on art by examining its various discussions in terms of the significance he assigns to the historically constituted forms of madness on examination throughout. It is nevertheless clear that Foucault thinks of modernity as ushering in a decidedly new cultural form, one that makes the thought and practice of art dependent upon the experience of unreason (déraison), the Classical Age’s form of madness. Modern art is different from what came before it in that it subjects the artwork to the experience of unreason. Foucault claims that “after Goya and Sade, and since them, unreason [déraison] belongs to all that is most decisive in the modern world in any oeuvre: anything that the oeuvre contains which is murderous or constraining.”7 Since modern art must pass through the experience of unreason, its practitioners risk being taken as mad. In this regard, Van Gogh emblematizes for Foucault the new relationship between reason and art established at the outset of modernity. His work incorporates some of the experiences that Western culture silenced during the course of its long battle with madness; however, in doing so, Van Gogh opens himself up to the possibility of a serious misunderstanding, and therewith a diagnosis as “mentally ill.” As we see, these propositions regarding the changing nature of art, and thus regarding Van Gogh, are tied to Foucault’s analysis of madness’s historical permutations. And we will only fully understand Foucault’s claims regarding madness’s silence and eventual expression in art, once we have explored the transformations that Foucault isolates across the course of his study. The History of Madness examines how, since the end of the Renaissance, the Western world has struggled to confine, classify, control, and silence everything deemed Other. Art—embodied in the figures of Nietzsche, Artaud, and Van Gogh—functions as Foucault’s reminder that this process is never entirely successful and madness never completely silenced. These figures thus come forward at certain crucial moments in Foucault’s history in order to indicate the limits of Western reason in its drive to efface all forms of unreason. Thus, in order to better appreciate how these paeans to art function in the History of Madness, and therewith to understand how Foucault saw Van Gogh, we must examine the major transformations that define madness’s history. At issue here, then, are the historical permutations that condition the relationship between madness and oeuvre in Foucault’s account of Van Gogh.

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The History of Madness theorizes that madness is the inevitable by-product of the priority Western culture has accorded to reason. The different periods analyzed by Foucault configure and reconfigure a basic divide between sense and nonsense, giving rise to the different experiences of madness in question throughout Foucault’s study. Foucault describes a “first caesura,” buried deep within Western history, as the “division from which madness became possible.”8 This caesura gives rise to a “structure of refusal,” a basic series of distinctions determining what belongs to thought and what remains outside of it.9 This division, Foucault explains, is what allows for “a discourse [to be] denounced as not being language, a gesture as not being an oeuvre, [and] a figure as having no rightful place in history.”10 Foucault thus postulates something of an initial moment of revulsion whereby Western culture decided to rid itself—its thought, its art, its life—of everything deemed incompatible with reason. Not only does this division found rational speech, it simultaneously gives rise to its outside—that which the Western world knows as madness. Foucault: “This structure is constitutive of what is sense and nonsense, or rather of that reciprocity through which the one is bound to the other; it alone can account for the general fact that in our culture there can be no reason without madness….”11 This is a way of saying that as soon as Western culture subscribes to the idea that there is a rational language, it commits to the “necessity of madness.”12 Foucault once again: “The necessity of madness throughout the history of the West is linked to that decisive action that extracts a significant language from the background noise and its continuous monotony, a language which is transmitted and culminates in time; it is, in short, linked to the possibility of history.”13 The History of Madness postulates a fundamental and far-reaching divide between sense and nonsense, one that has tremendous ramifications for the development of Western culture. A function of this early “Preface” seems to be to demonstrate that the question of madness should not be restricted to purely medical or even epistemological consideration, but to show that madness has far-reaching consequences detectable in fields such as art and literature. Foucault thus intends to clarify how, at different points in history, this divide between sense and nonsense is subjected to different practical measures, assigned different legal and medical concepts, and thereby subjected to different historical configurations, all of which result in fundamentally different experiences of madness. Foucault is well known for arguing in The Order of Things (1966) that the shape of knowledge is fundamentally different from one period to the next, and that the Renaissance, the Classical Age, and modernity have each given rise to fundamentally different configurations of knowledge.14 While the heterogeneity of these periods is not emphasized as much in the History



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of Madness as it will be in The Order of Things, it is nevertheless clear that Foucault wants to demonstrate how each period gave rise to a fundamentally different experience of madness. Foucault devotes most of his analysis to the Classical Age—the period in European culture running from the middle of the seventeenth century up until approximately the start of the nineteenth, or from the time of Descartes up until the French Revolution—because it harbors the most serious consequences for our understanding of madness today. However, his history deals with three different historical periods and develops three distinct conceptions of madness. Foucault does not claim, as some have charged, that madness is purely a cultural construction. His guiding assumption is that madness is a historically variable phenomenon determined largely by the relationship that a given time and place take up with it. As such, madness is best grasped by means of a “structural study,” Foucault’s early formulation for the methodology that will later be conceptualized as archaeology.15 This form of analysis attends to the ensemble of cultural and institutional practices, artistic and literary representations, police and judicial measures, and scientific concepts that “hold captive a madness whose wild state can never be reconstituted.”16 One of the primary aims of such a study is to sensitize readers to the transformations that take place throughout the life of a concept, field, or form of experience, particularly one thought to be without such a history. However, instead of offering readers a linear history of the forms of knowledge constituted on madness, Foucault examines the ways in which each age prepares for itself fundamentally different forms of experience through artistic and literary representations, legal structures and ethical forms of consciousness, practices (such as confinement), and finally medical concepts themselves. In the first instance, then, Foucault reconstructs the experience of madness that animated Western European societies from the Middle Ages to the end of the Renaissance. While it is evident that madness was of concern throughout the Renaissance, Foucault points to the relative degree of liberty that it enjoyed during this period, a point of comparison that is significant for understanding the transformations wrought by the Classical Age’s widespread practice of confinement. Moreover, throughout the Renaissance, madness was thought to offer a privileged insight into the nature of the world and the fate of humanity. For the Renaissance, madness testifies to the threat of death hanging over humanity and the tragic structure of the world more generally. Foucault isolates this mentality in some well-known works of visual art from the fifteenth century, most notably those by Bosch, Brueghel, Bouts, and Düer. This allows Foucault to describe what he calls the “tragic madness of the world” [la tragique foile du monde], the line of thought according to which the world itself is thought to be mad and fated for a horrific

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apocalypse.17 Foucault juxtaposes the tragic madness of the world to a “critical consciousness of man” [conscience critique de l’homme], a relationship with madness that is found in the humanistic literature of the period, and which was fated to win out over the tragic conception of madness at the dawn of the Classical Age.18 With the triumph of the critical consciousness of man, the tragic madness of the world was banished from Western consciousness, and a fundamentally moralistic relationship with madness began. The critical consciousness of man allowed Western culture to place madness outside of itself, thereby stripping it of its prophetic powers and reducing it to silence. Ultimately, this mentality will spur the practice of confinement throughout the Classical Age. Before examining the Classical Age, however, we must further develop the interplay between these two cultural strands, that is, between the tragic madness of the world and the critical consciousness of man, for it is essential for understanding the role art plays in the History of Madness. Despite the triumph of the moralistic relationship with madness at the close of the Renaissance, Foucault nonetheless claims that Western culture never completely effaced the tragic conception of madness from the world. Foucault: “Behind the critical consciousness of madness in all its philosophical, scientific, moral and medical guises lurks a second, tragic consciousness of madness, which has never really gone away.”19 In fact, Foucault identifies the persistence of the tragic madness of the world with the work of certain modern artists and writers, including Van Gogh, as well as Nietzsche and Artaud. “It is that tragic consciousness that is visible in the last words of Nietzsche and the last visions of Van Gogh…. And it is that same consciousness that finds expression in the work of Antonin Artaud.”20 Foucault continues: It is only by examining such extreme discoveries that we can finally come to understand that the experience of madness common since the sixteenth century owes its particular face, and the origin of its meaning, to that absence, to that dark night and all that fills it. The linearity that led rational thought [la pensée rationnelle] to consider madness [la folie] as a form of mental illness [maladie mentale] must be reinterpreted in a vertical dimension. Only then does it become apparent that each of its incarnations is a more complete, but more perilous masking of tragic experience—an experience that it nonetheless failed to obliterate. When constraints were at their most oppressive, an explosion was necessary, and that is what we have seen since Nietzsche.21

Despite the heterogeneity frequently attributed to Foucault’s chronicle of madness, we should note that modernity is marked by the unlikely persistence of the tragic consciousness that animated the Renaissance experience. Modern art keeps alive this older, more originary form of madness, the one which



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deems madness capable of speech. This resurgence of the tragic experience of madness, as Foucault’s language above indicates, is what gives to modern works of art their explosive force. And it is the persistence of this tragic structure that allows him to describe the works of Van Gogh, Nietzsche, and Artaud as events that momentarily destabilize the configuration of reason within Western societies. By now it should be clear that “madness” (la folie) is nothing like what comes to be known in our era as “mental illness” (maladie mentale). However, in order to understand the role madness plays in the works of Van Gogh (alongside Nietzsche and Artaud), we must examine the transformation of madness (la folie) into unreason (déraison) throughout the course of the Classical Age. Ultimately, it is the historically conditioned form of madness known as unreason that is incorporated into the oeuvre. If one wanted to assign the start of the Classical Age a precise date, it would be 1657, the year the Hôspital Général of Paris was founded to confine the poor and other undesirables. This event signals the rise of a new practical relationship with madness, one that would spawn many other houses of confinement throughout Western Europe during the seventeenth century. Foucault terms this process the “Great Confinement.” The Great Confinement refers to the attempt by Western European societies to silence everything incompatible with reason, order, and thrift. In the early days, it was largely the poor who were confined, as part of an effort to rid cities of beggars; however, before long confinement included libertines, prostitutes, criminals, those prone to creating a public nuisance, the wayward sons of the bourgeoisie, as well as those individuals modernity would later recognize as suffering from “mental illness.” One should refrain from classifying the victims of incarceration as “insane,” for the whole point of Foucault’s analysis is to demonstrate that the practice of confinement, along with the guiding concept of unreason (déraison), were too indiscriminate and too crude to sustain such classifications. It was only at the close of the eighteenth century that madness became the object of medical perception. In fact, the taxonomies and therapeutics developed by the specifically modern institution of psychiatry has as its historical precondition the mass incarceration that was practiced throughout the course of the seventeenth century, for this event is what first allowed for the objectification of madness.22 During the Classical Age, however, people were confined, not because they had been diagnosed by medical doctors, but because they had been judged by government functionaries as having lost their reason. Throughout the Classical Age, those deemed “mad” were understood and incarcerated with the use of the concept of unreason (déraison). As the inverse of reason, unreason is simply a form of error. As such it is easily

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discovered and denounced by those in possession of reason. At bottom, Foucault explains, unreason is the “empty form [of reason], without content or value, purely negative, where all that figures is the imprint of a reason that has taken to its heels….”23 As a result of this conceptual transformation, madness (folie) was stripped of its capacity for prophetic wisdom and steadily reduced to silence. No longer does madness testify to a world tragically out of joint, but rather to the banal fact that an individual has made improper use of his liberty. This transformation of madness into unreason also harbors a number of important interrelated practical consequences for the Classical Age’s unique experience of madness. In the first instance, the simplicity, self-evidence, and expansiveness of the concept “unreason” propels and justifies the alreadyestablished practice of mass incarceration. The concept brings together the poor, the criminal, the sick, and the rebellious under a common category, without allowing for a way to distinguish among them. Moreover, the perception sustained by the concept of unreason actively inhibits the medicalization of madness. From the vantage point of unreason, madness is an ethical failure to be corrected by the rudimentary disciplinary techniques being developed in the houses of confinement. Confinement, then, was a large-scale social practice sustained by the concept of unreason, which served to define the meaning of the Classical Age’s experience of madness. In various ways, the Classical Age constrained madness, furthered the social prejudices against it, and subjected it to a series of practical and conceptual constraints. It was only then, after madness had been rendered inert, that it could be objectified by the so-called sciences of mental medicine. For the purpose of understanding the role that unreason plays in the constitution of modern art, the most important aspect of the opposition between reason and unreason is the way in which the conceptual opposition itself silences unreason and consigns it to non-being. An essential aspect of Foucault’s presentation of modern art, and in particular the works of Van Gogh, centers on the way in which these works occasion the partial return of the Renaissance experience, in particular the theme of the tragic madness of the world. Throughout the Renaissance, madness spoke, testifying to the tragic nature of existence. During the Classical Age, however, unreason was assigned an institutional and cultural position deemed fundamentally incompatible with speech. This is why Foucault characterizes (modern) psychiatry as a “monologue by reason about madness,” and his own project an “archaeology of that silence.”24 Given that the History of Madness revolves around the differences between Renaissance-era madness (folie), the unreason (déraison) of the Classical Age, and phenomenon of mental illness (maladie mentale) characteristic of



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the modern period, many first-time readers may be surprised that Foucault has less to say about modernity and “mental illness” than he does confinement and the Classical Age. Instead of directly critiquing psychiatry, Foucault leaves it to his readers to draw their conclusions regarding its epistemological status. It is likely that Foucault spares us a polemic against modern mental medicine because he feels as though his analysis of confinement and the role it plays in the constitution of mental illness performs much of the necessary work. The dominant understanding of mental illness as “alienation,” and the mad as “aliéné,” is, according to Foucault, the by-product of the historical movement that removed certain men and women from society.25 The actual confinement of the words, behaviors, thoughts, gestures, and people deemed incompatible with reason provided the grounds for understanding mental illness as that which confines man through the impairment of his reason. Foucault’s claim is not that psychiatry is without any therapeutic value or its taxonomies without any basis; rather, his point is that the “science” itself relies upon a long historical process of objectification. This means that the phenomenon medicalized as “mental illness” should be understood as the result of the practical measures undertaken throughout the Classical Age. It was only after madness was put at a distance, consigned to remain in one place, castrated at the conceptual level, deprived of a voice of its own, and forced to blankly mime the rhythms of reason and therapy that “the relation to the self that is known as ‘psychology’” could be established.26 Perhaps Foucault’s presentation of modernity is less concerned with the concept of mental illness than one might expect because he is in fact more interested in describing the unlikely resurgence of madness against the mechanisms designed to constrain it. The last two sections of the work leave readers with the distinct impression that Foucault’s intention may have been to use the “structural study” of madness to better understand certain currents within art and literature. On Foucault’s account, a central aspect of modern art pertains to the way in which it reactivates that which Western civilization has tried to rid itself of since the end of the Renaissance. Of course there can be no such thing as a direct repetition of the Renaissance experience, no matter how much modern art may seek to appropriate its tragic wisdom. The works of Van Gogh are decidedly different, if only because they also inherit the transformations carried out on madness by the Classical Age. As we have seen, the great experiment by which Western man consigned to silence everything in himself judged to be troubling was largely, but not completely, successful. The one place where madness has attained expression is art. If Foucault’s analysis is right, the very existence of these voices is largely an accident, resulting from the fact that the pressures

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placed on madness throughout the Classical Age were both too great and too inconsistent. This dynamic of repression and transgression explains why, in Foucault’s estimation, the most important events in modern culture have assumed the forms that they have. According to Foucault, these events exploit unreason, with all the significance that the Classical Age assigned to it, in order to trouble reason itself. We have already seen Foucault claim that madness is a constitutive aspect of the oeuvre, even though he explains that the oeuvre is incompatible with madness, and that artwork as work of art seeks to keep actual madness at bay. But how exactly should we understand madness’s role in the formation of modern art? At the dawn of modernity, art was locked in a struggle with reason. After Goya and Sade, art began to incorporate into itself the forms of experience that the Classical Age had attempted to silence. As we saw, unreason is a broad category that indiscriminately collects behaviors and personalities already overlaid with social stigma. It thereby designates the thoughts, emotions, forms of sensibility, and experiences that contradict the strict order of reason. Incorporated into art, that is, something worked and ordered, these same gestures, modes of thought, and forms of experience cannot be easily dismissed (or confined) as nonsense. The oeuvre preserves that which is otherwise easily denounced as unreason. The oeuvre thereby redraws the line between sense and nonsense, presenting itself as an alternative to the dominant configuration of reason. Hazarding something of a cliché, one might say that the work of modern art functions like a counter-world, offering viewers a novel configuration of the originary divide between sense and nonsense, and therewith an alternative to the form of experience common in the West. This process exposes the order of reason—the “structure…constitutive of what is sense and nonsense,” of which the “Preface” speaks—as thoroughly contingent.27 In doing so, it exposes the mechanism which extracts sense from nonsense, as well as the violence with which reason represses its origins. This is how, for the first time since the Renaissance, madness assumes the capacity for speech, as well as the powers of contestation and indictment. Van Gogh’s paintings—like the words of Nietzsche and Artaud—persistently shift the boundary between sense and nonsense, confronting the modern world with that which the Classical Age had excluded from the domain of human experience in the name of reason. In this regard, Foucault invites us to see Van Gogh’s canvases as the redeployment of the sensations, emotions, thoughts, and ways of reasoning that had been placed beyond the limits of Western experience throughout the course of the Classical Age. With the advent of modern art and the incorporation of unreason into the oeuvre, madness turns the tables on reason for the first time in Western history. In doing



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so, art transforms the guilt formerly associated with madness into an indictment of the world and the way in which it has sought to silence madness. This is how Foucault explains this process: By the madness that interrupts it, an oeuvre opens up a void, a moment of silence, a question without an answer, opening an unhealable wound that the world is forced to address. By it everything that is necessarily blasphemous in an oeuvre is reversed and, in the time of the oeuvre that has slumped into madness, the world is made aware of its guilt. Henceforth and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes guilty (for the first time in the history of the West) in relation to the oeuvre: it is now arraigned by the oeuvre, constrained to speak its language, and obliged to take part in a process of recognition and reparation, to find an explanation for this unreason, and explain itself before it. The madness where an oeuvre plunges into a void is the space of our work, the infinite path to understanding it at last, our confused vocation as apostles and interpreters. For that reason it matters little when the voice of madness first whispered within Nietzsche’s pride or Van Gogh’s humility.28

Here, I understand Foucault to be pointing towards some of the ways in which modern art is fundamentally different from the cultural forms that preceded it. In this passage, “madness” refers to the ways in which art defies rational explanation and systematic exposition. This passage ties art’s capacity for evading the strict order of reason to our “vocation as apostles and interpreters,” thereby suggesting that the incorporation of unreason into the artwork, sets it up as that which transcends full understanding. By many accounts artistic modernity has as one of its historical preconditions the wide-scale recognition that it is no longer possible to found the production and reception of art upon rules or principles, as Classicism and Rationalism once taught. In a sense, this is part of what it means to say that, at a fundamental level, modern art has a madness to it. For modernity, art is conceived in extra-rational terms. For example, as a result of some of the postulates put in place by Romanticism, the materiality of art comes to be endowed with an obscure force of expression, said to resist discursive articulation.29 At the most basic level, this means that artworks, as well as our experiences of them, are thought to surpass rational exposition, and to instead become a vehicle for everything that is irreducible to reason—sentiment, emotion, and affect. When considering artistic production, the artists and aestheticians associated with modernity gave up the idea that art could be compared to science, instead invoking notions such as chance, inspiration, and genius to “explain” the emergence of new works. Likewise, throughout modernity, the spectator’s experience of art comes to revolve increasingly around the ways in which artworks escape the constraints of rational thought,

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thereby issuing a challenge to reason itself. Art’s capacity to escape reason founds one of the most commonplace ideas about art today, namely that, as art, a work is never exhausted by a single interpretation, and it thereby enriches thought and reason. Foucault understands Van Gogh as having fashioned one such escape from the confines of reason. However, instead of understanding Van Gogh’s art as expanding thought because of its ability to surpass reason, Foucault’s presentation of this familiar dynamic as a confrontation between madness and reason turns Van Gogh’s art into a more serious, extreme, and sinister phenomenon. His paintings do not reinvigorate (philosophical) reason, they humble it. And in stepping over the basic divide between reason and unreason, Van Gogh risks more than a misunderstanding; he hazards a diagnosis. In the scattered remarks on Van Gogh, Foucault emphasizes the ways in which Van Gogh displaces painting’s capacities for representation by foregrounding the expressiveness of painting’s materials. For Foucault, such a shift away from the rational or conceptual aspect of painting—its capacity for capturing the truth of the world—towards that which lies outside of the control of reason, returns us to that fundamental division within Western culture, the divide between sense and nonsense. Van Gogh’s paintings insist that sense be made of that which has been placed beyond the bounds of sense, in particular the subjective associations that can be attached to sensation. The overall effect is to pervert reason with sensuousness, thereby altering the distribution of sense and nonsense. The most illuminating of Foucault’s accounts of Van Gogh is found towards the end of his long “Introduction to Part Three” of the History of Madness. Foucault once again describes Van Gogh’s works in terms of an interplay between reason and unreason, and Van Gogh himself as an artist who fundamentally alters the Western experience. Foucault presents Van Gogh—along with Raymond Roussel, Artaud, Hölderlin, Nerval, and Nietzsche—as having inherited the new conception of art that opened up towards the close of the eighteenth century. Again, this is for Foucault the form of art that subjects reason to a trial by unreason. Here, Foucault credits this new idea of art—in fact a new relationship between sense and nonsense—to Diderot and his Le Neveu de Rameau.30 Foucault’s language is here much more lyrical than in his discussions of Magritte and Manet. And this is because Foucault replaces this abstract theoretical style with a more exacting empirical language attuned to the functioning of individual canvases. The passage is worth quoting at length, since it can teach us a lot about Van Gogh, as well as Foucault’s own development. Foucault: …the experience of Rameau’s Nephew already demonstrated all that it contains of the drunkness of the sensible, the fascination with the immediate, and the



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painful irony where the solitude of delirium originates. What is at stake here is not the nature of madness, but the essence of unreason. If that essence could go unnoticed, it was not simply hidden, but that it loses itself in all that might bring it out into the light. For—and this is perhaps one of the fundamental traits of our culture—it is impossible to remain in a decisive and indefinitely resolved fashion at the distance specific to unreason. For it must be forgotten and abolished no sooner than it is measured, in the vertigo of the sensible or the confinement of madness. Van Gogh and Nietzsche in different ways were evidence of this. Fascinated by the delirium of the real, by its scintillating appearance, and by time abolished and absolutely re-found in the justice of light, ensnared by the immutable solidity of the most fragile of appearances, they thus were rigorously excluded and trapped within suffering beyond all exchange, and which figured, not only for others but for them as well, in their own truth, which had once more become immediate certitude, madness itself. The moment of the Ja-sagen, of the embrace of the lure of the sensible, was also the moment they retreated into the shadows of madness [la folie].31

Foucault’s argument is a bit difficult to follow, but I understand him to be suggesting that Van Gogh, along with the others mentioned in this context, create their works by means of an interplay between sense and nonsense, what the Classical Age experienced as the difference between reason and unreason. Not only does his practice return us to that moment where sense was extracted from nonsense, it creates an experience that reconfigures sense more generally. In terms of Van Gogh’s work, the use of unreason corresponds to the deployment of painting’s sensuous aspects against its capacities for representation. Van Gogh, as we know, accentuated the extra-rational aspects of his art—the expressive use of color, the force of gesture, the materiality of paint and canvas—against the order of line and drawing. He affirms a mad world where (self-) portraits threaten to disintegrate, the night sky swirls with vibrant energy, a humble workman’s cafe teems with an ominous foreboding, and where a flock of crows tear through a chaotic wheat field. In short, Van Gogh’s works produce a tension between depiction, which is on the side of reason, and expression, the incarnation of madness. By allowing painting’s sensible and expressive capacities to overtake depiction, Van Gogh creates experiences that reconfigure the balance between sense and reason, and therewith the boundary between sense and nonsense. As Foucault points out, the form of reason that has triumphed in Western culture is never seriously challenged by the simple refusal to make sense. At various points, Foucault tries to dampen enthusiasms for art, in particular the claims made on behalf of its ability to sustain fundamentally different ways of thinking. A key characteristic of Western culture since the Classical Age is the tenacity with which it pursues all attempts to sidestep reason. As Foucault

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reminds in the passage above, it is “impossible to remain…at the distance specific to unreason.”32 As a result of how it was constituted throughout the Classical Age, unreason is incapable of speaking in its own name. However, reason can nevertheless be challenged and subtly altered through the strategic use of unreason, techniques designed to burrow into reason and pervert it from the inside. Despite the explosive quality Foucault assigned to the works of Van Gogh—as well as the thought of Nietzsche and the language of Artaud—this is why he stresses that madness must be given shape as oeuvre, if it is not to be dismissed as mental illness. Art does not issue a pure cry of insanity; it is the ordered unreason of the oeuvre. Modern art’s primary technique hinges on the ontological status assigned to unreason throughout the Classical Age. It exploits the nothingness of unreason in order to create a void with respect to the rest of the world, a void from which art’s powers of contestation are generated. In terms of the work of art, this nothingness corresponds to the obscure logic animating what is sometimes referred to as an “artistic strategy.” As the designation implies, an artistic strategy seems to partake of reason. However, as we know, the reasons behind modern art can never be fully comprehended or articulated, even by its practitioners. When considered beside that for which we may provide reasons, the “logic” governing the work appears incomplete. Modern art is thus a strange admixture of reason and unreason, being and nothingness, oeuvre and madness. It issues in otherwise unprecedented forms that, above all else, give voice to madness. In the passage quoted above, Foucault hints at a number of different ways to understand the strategies employed by artists working in the wake of Diderot. This is what Foucault terms the “drunkenness of the sensible,” a “fascination with the immediate,” and the “delirium of the real.”33 Taken together, these strategies all occasion a new relationship between the sensible and the intellectual aspects of art. They therewith retrieve that which had been placed beyond the scope of reason, and inject madness into the otherwise ordered space of the work. It is difficult to correlate these descriptions with any single work or technique. We should thus understand Foucault’s account less as a response to any particular work, and more as a historico-ontological account of the idea of art that prevailed in Europe with the dawn of modernity. What Foucault describes are the artistic strategies (i.e., forms of unreason) that gradually undermined the classical idea of art by shifting the emphasis from the work’s rational properties (its supposed ability to convey a story or adequately represent reality) unto its sensible qualities and the expressive potential of its materials. In this regard, Foucault’s point is quite simple: modern artists such as Van Gogh, as well as Nietzsche, Artaud, Hölderlin, Nerval, and Roussel,



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practice a form of art-making that emphasizes the work’s sensuous and extrarational qualities, instead of its capacities for order and reason. They reject the idea, common throughout the Classical Age, that art could be understood and practiced in terms of a system of rules determining in advance what art is, how it is to be made, as well as how it will be judged. These artists were, in their own way, decisive turning points within Western culture, each of which allowed that culture to dispense with the idea that art could be practiced and understood in terms of reason alone. In the case of Van Gogh, this consists of creating a form of painting designed to celebrate the “drunknness of the sensible,” a “fascination with the immediate,” and the “delirium of the real” through the impassioned application of paint, the expressive use of brushwork, and color choices that communicate the intensity of emotion. Considered from a strictly art-historical point of view, Foucault’s presentation of Van Gogh is not especially novel, nor particularly well developed. Readers should nevertheless remember that these passages were not intended to provide a complete account of Van Gogh’s life and work. Instead, they contain the makings of an interesting account of the broader historical significance of Van Gogh’s work. In this regard, they provide readers with a provocative framework for understanding the formal innovations typically associated with Van Gogh’s work. As I have been presenting it here, the primary virtue of Foucault’s account hinges upon its ability to present Van Gogh’s formal innovations as part of a larger story regarding the shifting balance between sense and reason within the work of art, and thus within the idea of art itself. Although Foucault’s remarks are not as developed as many readers might like, they nevertheless open up a fruitful line of research. This line of research revolves around the constitutive role that madness plays in the experience of the modern work of art. As we have seen, this consideration compels us to assess the ways in which modern art differs from all that came before it, and it allows us to understand some of its most significant formal developments in terms of an interplay between that to which Western culture has granted reason (being) and that to which it consigned to unreason (nothingness). This line of philosophical research should provide a necessary counterpoint to the largely unhistorical speculation that European thought has consecrated to the work of Van Gogh. Unlike the dominant understanding of Van Gogh within the European philosophical tradition—the conversation running from Heidegger to Derrida via Schapiro—Foucault’s thought offers us a way to think more concretely about the works of Van Gogh, without subordinating them to the philosophical preoccupation with truth. Foucault shows us that the modern work of art is a unique admixture of truth and falsity, that is, reason and

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unreason. According to the propositions contained in the History of Madness, modern art is to be distinguished from that which came before it in that it ties the creation and reception of art to the experience of unreason; indeed, as we have seen, it makes the trial of unreason a constitutive feature of the artwork itself. As a result of the fact that artists must incorporate unreason into their works, they run the risk of lapsing into the form of madness characteristic of modernity, namely, mental illness. This is why Foucault understands Van Gogh as emblematic of the new relationships between world, work, and madness that were fashioned at the outset of modernity. This is also why Van Gogh’s work requires a broader framework to sensitize viewers to the full range of its destabilizing force. One recovers the capacity of Van Gogh’s work to shock and unsettle, not by treating it as a ready-made example of an ontology of art, but by approaching it through the lens of historical ontology. This shock results not from the cheap provocations that have come to be associated with art, but from our dawning awareness that the division between sense and nonsense that occasions our thought has begun to give way. NOTES 1. Throughout the History of Madness, Foucault describes artistic and literary creativity in terms of an interplay between reason and unreason. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (New York: Routledge, 2006). I am inclined to describe these early formulations as Foucault’s “romantic conception of creativity” because of the role that madness as unreason plays in Foucault’s account of art during this period, and because his presentation of art is not as historical and nuanced as it will later become. In Foucault’s later writings on art and literature, this early position was replaced by the idea that creativity could be understood as a disciplined unmaking of the rules that govern a given medium or practice. This, for example, is how Foucault presents both Manet and Magritte in, respectively, Michel Foucault, Manet and the Object of Painting, trans. Matthew Barr (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), and, Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California University Press, 2008). Even though Foucault never explicitly repudiated these propositions on art and creativity, one can nevertheless read the suppression of the “Preface” to the 1961 edition of the History of Madness—the place where many such “romantic” formulations are to be found—as a gesture signaling Foucault’s reconsideration of many of these notions. As I understand it, Foucault’s attempts to clarify archaeology as historical and philosophical methodology led to a change in the way in which Foucault approached art. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1972) contains several suggestions that Foucault was interested in using the notions that he had developed



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throughout the course of his studies of medicine and the human sciences—that is, the statement, the event, discursive formation, and the archive—to approach painting. As a result of this new orientation, Foucault’s encounters with art became more nuanced, more closely tied to individual works, and more concerned with understanding how specifically modern works of art could be understood as staging their departures from the conventions of the past. This is something that I have analyzed in Joseph J. Tanke, Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 2009), where I try to explain how many of these archaeological notions might be adapted for the analysis of non-discursive phenomena, such as painting. It should also be mentioned that in The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault subjects the notion of the oeuvre, understood as a unifying principle that informs the reception of artistic and literary events, to a thoroughgoing critique. Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1972). For reasons that will become clear throughout the course of this chapter, I think it is accurate to say that the “oeuvre” that is at stake in the History of Madness is markedly different than the ordering principle whose influence was criticized in The Archaeology of Knowledge.  2. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxi.  3. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), 663. Foucault attempted to clarify this dictum in the 1972 essay “Madness, the Absence of an Oeuvre,” now reproduced as an appendix to the English-language edition of the History of Madness, 541–49.  4. Foucault, History of Madness, 536.  5. Foucault, History of Madness, 537.  6. Foucault, History of Madness, 536.  7. Foucault, History of Madness, 535.  8. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii.  9. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii. 10. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii. 11. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii. Readers should keep in mind that these formations appear in the “Preface” to 1961 edition of the History of Madness, and that Foucault had them removed from all subsequent editions. It is likely that Foucault viewed these formulations as incompatible with his methodological commitments to archaeology and genealogy. In “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault opposes genealogy to the search for origins, and therewith metaphysics and a teleological conception of history. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1998), 369–92. Foucault’s 1961 “Preface” appears to postulate an origin for madness, even though Foucault’s focus is clearly directed towards the various historical permutations undergone by madness. For example, Foucault describes madness as born of “an obscure, equivocal region: pure origin, as it is from there that the language of history would be born, slowly conquering so much confusion with the forms of its syntax and the consistency of its vocabulary….” Foucault, History of Madness, xxxi. Italics are my own. 12. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii.

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13. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii. Italics in the translation reflect Foucault’s own points of emphasis. 14.  Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Pantheon Books, 1970). 15. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxiii. 16. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxiii. 17. Foucault, History of Madness, 20–21, 26. 18. Foucault, History of Madness, 21–25, 27. 19. Foucault, History of Madness, 27. 20. Foucault, History of Madness, 28. 21. Foucault, History of Madness, 28. Translation modified. See Foucault, Histoire de la folie, 48. 22.  In some of the most impassioned sections of the History of Madness, Foucault stresses that the medicalization of madness only occurred as a result of confinement, and that confinement rarely, if ever, found justification in a medical diagnosis. Foucault: “People who claim that madness [folie] became an object of calm scientific psychiatric study when freed from the ethical and religious associations with which it had been saddled by the Middle Ages should be brought back to this decisive moment when unreason [déraison] was made into an object and thrown into an exile where it was to remain mute for centuries. They should have this original sin constantly before their eyes, and be ceaselessly reminded that it was only this obscure condemnation that opened the way for a discourse about unreason, reduced to silence at last, whose neutrality is proportionate to its own forgetfulness. Is it not important for our culture that unreason could only become an object of knowledge after it had been subjected to a process of social excommunication?” Foucault, History of Madness, 103–4. 23. Foucault, History of Madness, 174. 24. Foucault, History of Madness, xxviii. As Foucault describes how modernity inherits the silencing of madness that took place throughout the course of the Classical Age, he explains that “in the midst of the serene world of mental illness, modern man no longer communicates with the madman: on the one hand is the man of reason, who delegates madness to the doctor, thereby authorizing no relation other than through the abstract universality of illness; and on the other is the man of madness, who only communicates with the other through the intermediary of a reason that is no less abstract, which is order, physical and moral constraint, the anonymous pressure of the group, the demand for conformity. There is no common language: or rather, it no longer exists; the constitution of madness as mental illness, at the end of the eighteenth century, bears witness to a rupture in dialogue… (Foucault, History of Madness, xxviii). 25. Foucault, History of Madness, 434–39 and 473–77. 26. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxiv. 27. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii. 28. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. Italics in the translation reflect those in the original French text. 29.  This historical postulate that an obscure logos is present in the materiality of art is what Jacques Rancière has referred to as “mute speech.” For his account of its



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role in the configuration of Romanticism, see, among other things, Jacques Rancière, The Aesthetic Unconscious, trans. Debra Keates and James Swenson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009). 30. Foucault, History of Madness, 343–52. 31. Foucault, History of Madness, 351. The translation has been modified. 32. Foucault, History of Madness, 351. 33. Foucault, History of Madness, 351.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Foucault, Michel. Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. Paris: Gallimard, 1972. ———. Manet and the Object of Painting. Translated by Matthew Barr. London: Tate Publishing, 2012. ———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Essential Works of Foucault, Vol. 2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, 369–92. New York: The New Press, 1998. ———. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Vintage, 1982. ———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. ———. History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. This Is Not a Pipe. Translated by James Harkness. Berkeley: University of California University Press, 2008. Rancière, Jacques. The Aesthetic Unconscious. Translated by Debra Keates and James Swenson. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Tanke, Joseph J. Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity. New York: Continuum, 2009.

Chapter 3

The Problem of Agency in Heidegger’s Interpretation of Van Gogh Ingvild Torsen

THE PROBLEM Heidegger has been criticized for leaving out any consideration of Van Gogh’s biography in his understanding of Van Gogh’s work.1 Despite using Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes as the most prominent example in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger pays no attention to Van Gogh’s development as an artist, his other works, his influences, interests, or intentions—features that are all presumably relevant to understanding what Van Gogh was trying to do in his art practice.2 Meyer Schapiro criticizes Heidegger’s use of the painting: for overlooking the particularity of the artwork (he claims Heidegger either confused several of Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes or at best worked from some imprecise impression of these); for wrongfully asserting that the boots are farmer’s boots (instead, Schapiro argues they are the artist’s own boots, used for walking the streets of Paris); and for offering reflections Heidegger might as well have had from merely looking at a pair of shoes. In Schapiro’s words, Heidegger overlooks “the artist’s presence in the work.”3 Heidegger’s peculiar blindness to the activity of the artist appears to be a consequence of what is central to “The Origin of the Work of Art” and to Heidegger’s philosophy of art as such: the claim that art is a happening of truth, an event. What that means for Heidegger is not straightforward and most interpretations of Heidegger’s essay are devoted to this question.4 Heidegger’s positive description is that the artwork is a special kind of being which gives shape and sense to everything around it. It does this by working, that is, through the artwork. Not all artworks succeed in setting truth to work, so that an event takes place, but a great artwork is defined by opening 63

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up a world and setting forth earth. In short, art, understood as something that happens, is an occasion for the region of intelligibility to be articulated and held in place in a new way. This “region of intelligibility” is the whole within which all of our understanding, doing, and living, happen and make sense. It is our world. It is important for Heidegger to stress that what he means by world is not an unbounded infinite world. It is a geographically and historically limited whole in which things are connected and make sense, and it is held in place by something that it is not, something that grounds it, but cannot itself be articulated, and this is what Heidegger calls earth. So an artwork, when truth happens in and with it, is an event that opens up a way for things to make sense. It holds a new region of intelligibility in place by setting it in earth, which often means, quite literally, setting it in stone, sound, or color.5 Van Gogh too becomes who he is in relation to this event. On this analysis, the world-opening event of art is primary and logically antecedent both to the artist and to the work of art itself. Hence Heidegger’s description is focused on the event, and Van Gogh’s life and actions are left out of consideration. Heidegger’s approach raises some questions about art creation and especially about the artistic creator. If the world-opening and earth-positing event that art is has this priority, by whom or how is the event itself brought about? Is the event of art best understood as the result of “the genius of being,” that is, as a kind of historical given that afflicts us at a certain time and place, and to which artists and audiences are at best accomplices?6 “It is it that spoke,” Heidegger says of Van Gogh’s painting.7 But what does it say, and how does it speak to us? Might not the painting have even more to say to us than what Heidegger claims to hear, if we asked questions like these: Van Gogh chose to paint his shoes—why? Why so many times? What does the progression in stylistic innovation seen in the shoe paintings reveal? My purpose in raising these questions about action and creation is not to recommend focusing on the artist’s intention or restoring the authority of the work’s meaning to its author; I am setting aside any considerations of historical-biographical methods or appeals to intention. Nor is the purpose to favor art-historical approaches over the more speculative philosophical ones; nor to do justice to Van Gogh, for that matter. However, even readers who are sympathetic to Heidegger’s ideas about the centrality of the event of art as a first engendering of a particular meaning ought to acknowledge that something is lost when the artist is not considered in the encounter of the work of art. To paraphrase Robert Pippin, a weakness of Heidegger’s account is that it does not allow interpreting the work as deed: “The logic of aesthetic intelligibility is the logic, the social logic, of a deed, not a mere event, even a ‘happening of truth’ event,” Pippin writes, and infers that Hegel’s aesthetics is superior to Heidegger’s precisely because it can account for this dimension



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of art.8 If Pippin is right, and Heidegger’s philosophy gives us an interpretative approach that does not let us see artworks as expressive of human agency (be it reflective or fueled by intoxication, psychosis, or religious vision), then his approach is impoverished. This is the problem I want to take seriously. My purpose is to argue for the proper place of human agency in Heidegger’s account, as it is presented in the essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” via a reconstruction and filling out of the picture presented to us in that essay. Hence, I am more interested in Pippin’s question about agency than Schapiro’s concern with biography. I devote the rest of this chapter to arguing that, on Heidegger’s own terms, the notion of event in Heidegger does not make sense unless human agency—particularly the agency of artists and audiences—is afforded a role in it. Heidegger’s downplaying of the role of the artist in his analysis can partly be explained by his resistance to two historically relevant theses regarding artistic creation: first, the idea that the artistic creator is a special kind of craftsman; and, second, the idea that the artist imposes form on matter. Heidegger’s own “event ontology” is precisely meant to replace the “thing ontology” with which those aesthetic theses are associated. Once we flesh out Heidegger’s view, we see that there is an essential role for both Van Gogh and the work’s audience in this event. My conclusion will be that the event of art involves a collective deed with two moments, what Heidegger called creation and preservation, and that only if we assume a social dimension of the artwork, in which it is understood as a deed, will Heidegger’s account of the event actually make sense. In this manner, the event of art, on Heidegger’s view, is a result of collective or shared agency. FROM ONTOLOGY TO ART CREATION There is a long tradition in philosophy of distinguishing between action and events; this is a central question of so-called philosophy of action. Under a certain description, anything a human being does can be understood as an event, as something that occurs as the effect of a cause. However, it is generally thought that something is lost by viewing human affairs in this way, since when human beings experience and understand certain events as their actions and not just occurrences that happen to them, those actions are understood as expressive of their agency, and hence as deeply significant for who they are. One way to separate actions from events is to say that actions are expressive of intentions and have reasons. Heidegger does not use the terminology of contemporary action theory, but in Being and Time, the meaning of Dasein’s being is described as care, that is, as embedded in a Sorgestruktur where all

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doing and being is understood and connected in a matrix held together by the aim of caring for Dasein’s being. Put in more contemporary terms, the human realm is meaningful just because it is constituted by an intentional, caring subject, and acting for reasons can ultimately be brought back to acting on the basis of such care.9 In other words, it is clear that Heidegger has a quite sophisticated view of how the meaning of all beings and events in Dasein’s world is tied to Dasein’s particular way of being, with its characteristic kind of agency. A central question that runs through Heidegger’s texts is how to best understand the relationship between what is, being, and who and how we are, which includes what we do and how we engage what is. The use of the terms “event” and “truth” are key to raising this question for Heidegger, but they are not to be understood in opposition to agency.10 Heidegger’s shift towards talking about art as event and offering what we can call “event ontology” is not primarily to be understood as contrasted with an emphasis on action and agency, as this would undermine his overall picture of what it is to be human.11 His target is rather what we might call a “thing ontology,” which Heidegger thinks is one of the most dominant figures of thought in the tradition of Western philosophy that he calls metaphysics. Very briefly put, a “thing ontology” approaches ontology as a question about beings understood as entities, whereas an “event ontology” like we have in “The Origin of the Work of Art” approaches being as something that happens or occurs. In Being and Time, the so-called ontological difference, between a being (Seiende) and what it is to be (Sein), offers a general methodological tool for rethinking the meaning of being, whereas in the art-essay, Heidegger is showing (rather than arguing) that the work of art is better understood as a verbal phrase rather than a noun phrase. The “thing ontological approach” can be seen as operative in both intentionalism in the explanation of meaning of art—where the artist creates, and thus determines the meaning of, this thing—and in the emphasis on aesthetic response when explaining the value of art—where the audience has an aesthetic experience of, and thus determines the value of, this thing. Heidegger’s insistence on understanding the work of art as an event can be understood as a corrective to these misguided views. Again, Heidegger’s target is not action or agency as such, but rather a certain account of work and subjectivity that is influential in traditional aesthetics. Heidegger’s emphasis on event is not in contrast to an emphasis on Dasein, but rather a way to think about what Dasein does in a new way. In order to see the role of agency in Heidegger’s philosophy of art, it is crucial to notice that all the lofty ontological descriptions of art that Heidegger gives in his art essay are anchored in the ontic. It should perhaps seem obvious, but this point is sometimes lost sight of in treatments of Heidegger’s thinking about art: on his view, what is so amazing about art, and what gives



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it the potential to succeed as a world-transforming event—and also, what makes it very different from reading a treatise in metaphysics or experiencing some sort of revelation of religious faith—is that art is held in place in a concrete, particular being, that is, a work, and that this can be encountered by any person in its vicinity. Thus, even though Heidegger’s text gives us the tools to think of art as operating on the level of ontology, and indeed this is a legitimate goal for a work of philosophy, we experience art only as works, that is, for example, as particular buildings in neighborhoods we navigate, or as poems written with words in a language we know. Or, as in the case of Van Gogh, as representations of familiar objects like shoes that are captured in the opacity of paint and the thickness of brushstroke, which together create a sense of space in the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. We do not encounter artworks directly as paradigm-shifting ontological events or as prisms that let the world and its limits appear anew to us. The remarkable thing about artworks is that such particulars can be events that change our whole understanding of what is, of other beings and our place among them. These great works, however, do not work without appropriate action on behalf of Dasein, and not just one particular Dasein, but a whole host of them. In the third section of the art-essay, called “Truth and Art,” Heidegger sets out to make an explicit connection between the general ontological description and the particular artwork. The section is meant to answer how truth happens as the strife between world and earth—his description from the previous section—and how truth can happen in an actual artwork (wirkliches Werk).12 He immediately turns to creation in order to answer these questions, since he concedes that we miss the work’s reality if we do not also understand what it means that the work is something made (ein Gewirktes, or “something worked” in Young’s translation).13 The first few pages of this elaboration might give the impression that Heidegger is precisely not acknowledging that the question of creation also includes questions of agency, since the subject in Heidegger’s description of creation is truth itself. However, as I will show, this impression is mistaken, and it is in these pages that we eventually can get an “ontic grip” on the at times highfalutin ontological account. And what first offers this grip is the account of artistic creation. CREATION In Heidegger’s discussion of creation, he is moving between a positive description and a twofold negative task.14 The negative task is, first, showing how artistic creation is fundamentally different from the production of tools, and second, showing how the hylomorphic understanding of artworks as

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form-matter compounds is misguided. The tool craftsman (as we know him from Plato’s analogy in book 10 of the Republic, for example) takes the uses to which the tool will be put as the orienting end or goal; he thus chooses and shapes his materials in light of these purposes. This is, Heidegger claims, an unpromising analogy for understanding the creation of the artwork. Whatever the artist does, thinking of him or her as guided by an end, and then giving a particular, fitting form to the material in light of this end or function, seems fundamentally wrong.15 The inadequacy of the analogy can be seen from several perspectives: first, the work does not use up or consume its material the way a piece of equipment does—the metal of the hammer disappears in the tool, whereas the bronze in a sculpture remains; second, when the tool is formed, that work is finished, whereas the artwork is better thought of as a beginning, inviting an unfolding of truth. The analogy of tools and skill is tied to traditional “thing ontology,” so a different ontology of art will also need a different model for creation. Heidegger goes on to describe artistic createdness in terms of two positive characteristics—its fixing truth in the figure, and the striking fact of an artwork’s existence at all—and his discussion must be understood in light of these alternative paradigms. The Role of Figure “Createdness of the work means: the fixing in place of truth in the figure [Gestalt],” Heidegger writes.16 To create a work is to fix the strife between unconcealment and withdrawal, between world and earth, as a figure, and to do this in an actual, particular being that is the artwork. That means that the figure is the middle term between the ontological description and the concrete work; put differently, figure plays a mediating role between the ontological and the ontic: “What we here call ‘figure’ is always to be thought out of that particular placing and placement [Stellen und Ge-stell] as which the work comes to presence when it sets itself up and sets itself forth.”17 The figure is what makes art specific and particular, and it is how art works at both the ontic and ontological levels at the same time. It is, in addition, the artist who is the agent of the processes by which figures come to be. The strife between earth and world, between withdrawing and unconcealment, causes a rift—a collision, tear, or marking up—and figure is the result of the rift being set back into “the carrying of the stone, the mute hardness of wood, the glow of colors.”18 Capturing this strife through the “rifting” that makes a figure is what the artist does. The most intuitive example of an artwork where we can see the rift as the figure of the work is an engraving. The rift is the marking out of a difference or contrast in the material, and it is this that makes up a work; it rips up; it outlines; it



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makes the basic design and the sketch.19 In German, the modulations of the verb rissen lend themselves to a multi-dimensional characterization of the artist’s actions that culminate in the figure.20 Heidegger invokes the words of Dürer to illustrate this point: “For truly, art is in nature, and whoever can tear [reissen] it out from nature has it.”21 Heidegger claims that “tear” in Dürer’s statement means “the drawing out of the rift and seizing the rift with the drawing feather on the drawing board,” tying together Dürer’s concrete activity as a draftsman, his description of what art is, and Heidegger’s own definition of what is happening in the artwork.22 On Heidegger’s reading, we ought not think of the engraving as only line or pure shape, that is, as the form that is given a material and which is what is seen on paper when printed, but rather, we should think of the engraving as a “collection of rifts,” which are both expressive and open up meaning, but at the same time set back in something other that is closed off, that is, the material thickness that opposes and carries the line. In the Appendix to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger is at pains to qualify the “placing and placement” of the above characteristic.23 He wants to stress that, ontologically speaking, this should not be taken to mean that human beings can subject truth to art at will.24 This means that how a rift is captured in a figure, that is, how the “strife of being” can be captured in a being like an artwork, is still rather opaque. Thought in more mundane, ontic terms, we can however make sense of this passage in a manner that is less ontologically committed: “The particular placing and placement,” or alternatively, the particular setting and structure, of such a rift points to how the happening of truth takes on a particularity in art. That particularity of setting and structure has to do with choice of materials, which can include the most physical elements of pigment or stone, but also choices and restrictions with respect to tropes and genre conventions, as well as what kind of marking, outlining, or rissen that are historically available as possibilities for understanding something as a figure. Further, the particular will include a specific historical and geographical setting from which and to which the artwork can work. This also means that the happening of art always involves and draws on a social logic, be it more general or specific to the artworld, which was a feature Pippin found missing when art is considered as event and not deed. The development of twentieth-century visual art nicely illustrates this point—it is only in a specific time, place, and a historically rich medium like the painting, that, for instance, the particular placing of rifts of Cy Twombly’s kind can be figures and not merely a kind of nonsense or scribbling. That Twombly’s work is recognized as such also entails that it is understood as a deed and not a mere accident. In these passages describing the figure, what is of importance for Heidegger is not downplaying the activity of Dürer or

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other artists, but rather, to give a positive description of their doing—their creation—that differs from the familiar understanding of production as giving form to matter. “That it is” The second characteristic of createdness that Heidegger offers is that the fact “that it is” is striking to us, where the ‘it’ refers to the work.25 The “that it is created” is explicitly experienced in the artwork, in a manner that it is not in the use of equipment. The explicitness of being created does not mean that it is remarkable that the work is made by a great artist, nor should it make us think of the artwork as an achievement that heightens our estimation of the achiever, Heidegger claims. What is striking is the simple factum est— that such a work exists instead of not existing.26 This “that it is” reveals the “thrust” that a creation is, as a kind of proposal to its audience, and this is clearly connected to the claim that the work is a beginning, rather than something finished, even after the artist completes it. Heidegger’s analysis here may seem harder to square with an interest in the agency of the artist, since the fact of the artist’s creation seems to be explained away, or perhaps even replaced, by the fact of the artwork’s existence and its reception by the audience. Indeed, Heidegger’s further claims that this “that” of creation is most apparent where the artist, the procedure, and the context of the coming to be of the work are unknown to us do appear to be in opposition to any interest in agency.27 Such statements seem to imply that knowing the causal origin of an artwork and thinking of it as the result of an individual’s skill in fact contribute to making the that-ness of the work less striking in the experience of the work. Indeed, it is tempting to read the last comment as claiming that it is somehow better to experience the artwork as something that we just come upon, as if it were some found object, and as something that happens to us, as some mysterious and unique “event of Being.” However, I want to offer two reasons for not reading Heidegger’s characterization of createdness this way: the first concerns the contrast between artworks and tools; the second concerns the contrast between artworks and nature. First, the contrast between artworks and tools is both a recurring theme in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and immediately relevant in this section. The reason for Heidegger’s emphasis on the extraordinariness of the existence of artworks is primarily to resist a maker-skill-tool model for understanding the creation of works of art. Whereas the being of a piece of equipment disappears into its functioning well, which is related to the goal of the user and which guided the craftsman’s skillful action in making it, the artwork insists on its existence in a manner that makes its very being striking and unusual.28



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“What is more ordinary, than that there are beings?” Heidegger asks rhetorically, referring to tools and all the other stuff we are surrounded by; “in the work, by contrast, this, that it is as such, is what is extraordinary.”29 Once we are aware of the important difference between the coming to be of artworks and the making of other stuff that falls under Heidegger’s wide category of tools, we can see a fundamental difference between the agency of the maker of tools and that of the artistic creator. We are able to resist historically prominent accounts of hylomorphic production and techne as the appropriate analogy for understanding the artist’s action. In the end, Heidegger’s second characteristic of createdness is quite explicitly a complement to the first point about the artist’s role in the creation of figure, and thus cannot be understood as moving away from the artist and his or her agency in general. Second, it might be helpful to contrast the striking experience of the “that it is” of an artwork with another that shares this feature, namely, certain experiences of nature. Beautiful sunsets, breathtaking vistas, or raging mountains are classic cases of the beautiful and the sublime of nature, and they can also occasion the phenomenon Heidegger is getting at: the experience of the mere existence of something as striking and the attentiveness to being that goes with such an experience. Coming upon a beautiful tree, one might think that it is amazing that this being is in the world, rather than not. In light of such a striking case of the tree’s factum est, one could think of the tree as a creation of “the genius of Being” (or, more commonly, of the genius of a deity). If this is how we are to understand the second characteristic of createdness, the distinction between artworks, found objects, or natural beauty collapses, but this is clearly the wrong way to understand Heidegger. Heidegger does address the relation between artwork and nature (in the context of Dürer, mentioned above), and comments thus: “Certainly there is in nature a rift, measure and limit, and the possibility to create—art—is constrained by this. But still it is certain that this art in nature becomes apparent only because it is originally put in work.”30 Heidegger agrees that art is in nature in the sense that the potential for bringing-forth and the limits of the artistic possibilities are in nature, but Heidegger is at pains to stress that only with creation does the kind of meaning and truth we are after here come to be. That is something that can only happen when the strife is put to work, and this is what the artist does. The existence of natural beings might be striking, but they are not striking as figure, as offering a certain meaning. Therefore, it seems clear that the characteristic Heidegger is getting at here is tied to a sense of createdness understood as someone having done something—in this case, sketched, etched, created as measure or mark, and thereby made manifest. In sum, nothing Heidegger has said implies that creation does not involve agency. The second characteristic gives us a criterion for creation, and for

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separating artworks from mere tools, but does not explain how this comes to be or how one succeeds in making such an artwork. The “that it is” point can be understood as a kind of transitional moment in the analysis where Heidegger begins to move away from the agency of the artist and towards that of the audience of the artwork and its particular role in the event of art—namely, preservation. In order for the artwork to work, it requires the agency of its audience to play their role as preservers. Together, creation and preservation offer a rich and complex sense of Dasein’s agency in the case of the artwork and develops the pragmatic picture of human activity from Being and Time PRESERVATION Artworks are incomplete without preservation. This is not a banal point about the need for institutions to house art or the requirement that audiences have experiences of the work as art. It is rather a deeper, ontological point: there is no artwork understood as event without preservers. The artist’s creation is not the only expression of human agency present in the event of art—the preservation of an audience is also partly constitutive of that event. For Heidegger, the work only becomes the kind of event that it is when it is preserved by people. As we know, the failure of preservation with respect to the poetry of Hölderlin is a source of regret for him—the poem sounds, but is not heard by Heidegger’s contemporaries, and as such, the poem is a thrust into our world, but not a happening of truth. Hölderlin’s poetry shares the features of createdness: it captures being in a figure and its being is striking to us (this is apparent from Heidegger’s own readings of Hölderlin).31 Still, it is not preserved. Preservation is a recognition of the world that is opened up by the work and the earth that harbors it. This recognition need not show itself in any explicit reflection on behalf of the audience, but can be affirmed by people taking it up and living it, that is, acting out their lives as agents in line with the standard offered by the work. Preservation is parallel to the way Heidegger characterizes understanding, so that understanding a particular being, for example, reveals itself in a practical taking up of the possibility afforded us by the being in question. So what exactly do preserves do? Take the Greek temple as an example— it serves as a standard or measure in the Greek world, in relation to which everything else gets its place, order, and rank. Heidegger claims it is a work that sets truth to work and opens up a new region of intelligibility if and only if the work is recognized as a standard by people who then organize and understand their world and its limits around it. Again, how a temple can be recognized as a standard is under-described in Heidegger’s essay and must



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be filled out by us. The Greeks worshiped the gods which the temple housed, gods that were not merely symbolized, but made present in the artwork; they let the temple be a central point of orientation for their understanding of the world; and in general they oriented their practical lives around the values and standards of goodness and success set forth by the temple. In short, their very agency as such was an expression of this standard set by the temple, and as such their entire lives preserved the temple. Heidegger’s thought is that the temple as a great work of art, that is, a happening of truth, is not merely an expression of a theological doctrine or a worldview already in place, but a first, concrete ground for a world and a way of life. But how can a work of art come to take up such a role and what kind of agency would preservation represent on this picture? One might worry that the role of preserver seems passive in relationship to the world opened up by the artist. Even if the audience preservation is constitutive, it is constitutive in virtue of being a recipient of what appears as a given, the standard of the artwork. Further, it seems implausible to think that artworks could actually cause radical changes in worldview instantly, as it were. It seems, in short, strange to think that, say, the people living in Athens, including its children, foreigners, slaves, women, in addition to those recognized as citizens, wake up one day to a whole new world order which they somewhat blindly succumb to and live by (e.g., when the temple is finished or the tragedy festival has come to a close). Two responses are appropriate, and both of them insist upon keeping a temporal horizon in mind. First, the temple is itself an architectonic structure that has been built over time and which the whole city has been engaged in bringing about, so it seems clear that the figure is slowly taking shape within a world. In the construction of the temple, the rock is taken out of the quarry, the familiar landscape is used at the site and then, when set to work, the open (world) happens “in such a way, indeed, that now, for the first time, in the midst of beings, it brings them to shine and sound.”32 The world is experienced as if for the first time. By comparison, the first staging of Sophocles’ tragedy might be thought an event that works in an instant, but even here the world the work opens up is only possible on the background of the world that precedes it. We see the relationship between actions and fate as if for the first time, through this new open realm that gives sense to this relationship in a new way. The work does not instantly create an entirely new world out of nothing; it rather reorients the way people are already thinking about and experiencing the world, effecting some fundamental shift in them. The experience of this Gestalt shift may be jarring and surprising, but nothing suggests that it must happen all at once or that the right way to conceptualize it philosophically is as a kind of passive affliction.

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Second, one cannot encounter a work at all, as something that affords new outlooks, except against the background of already established practices in which one is already engaged. In this sense, preserving the work cannot be a blind taking up of truth. In order to make sense of a new world at all, this new world must be understood in relation to what came before. If the poem sounds as a poetic saying that gathers sense around it in a new way, it can only do so in relation to the language of the world that precedes the event of the poem. For the poem’s saying to be recognized as offering a measure that is a measure and that is new, and not just noise or nonsense, it needs to be related to what came before it and then taken up, recognized, and confirmed as a new paradigm for sense-making. All of this is the doing and acting entailed by preservation. The historical work of an artwork can only be experience by a historically situated Dasein, and historical situatedness is fundamental to the kind of agent that Dasein is. In short, worlds are related—artworks need preservation, hence preservers need a kind of continuity between the old and the new. The new paradigm for meaning that the event represents is only encountered and understood by having an ontically recognizable figure. It is a happening that is held in place in the figure carved out of rock or spoken through a native language. The appropriating events Heidegger is interested in cannot completely break with what preceded them, but seem necessarily to have a kind of temporal and practical duration as well as a concrete anchoring in the artwork’s material, in which the potential of the work is understood and recognized as projecting a new region of intelligibility. Artworks are not abstract worldviews but particular, ontic beings that we engage in their particularity when we preserve them, that is, live in the truth they open up and set forth. This is a kind of agency, “a willing that is a knowing that completes creation,” Heidegger claims, that is necessary for the work to be anything more than a missed opportunity.33 CREATING AND PRESERVING VAN GOGH’S WORK In the preceding sections, I have shown that the event of art requires both creation and preservation and that these are functions of the agency of the artists and the audience. Given Heidegger’s own logic, we cannot think of art as transformative “events of truth” that happen out of nothing. Even though ontologically speaking these events have priority, their “firstness” (they make us see beings as if for the first time) needs to be understood as a kind of feat that can only be successful on the background of past practices, modes of understanding and given materials. I agree with Pippin that there is little recognition of deed in Heidegger, but I hope to have shown that “logically”



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there could be no such event that is not also a deed—in fact, the truth of art is particularly demanding of action both on behalf of audience and artist and must necessarily draw on and shape a social logic. On a Heideggerian picture, by agency is not meant action that is (necessarily) revealing of some sort of self-reflection, conceptual awareness, acting according to principle, or anything of the sort, but rather a very practical kind of agency that still is expressive of norms, since responding to a situation by displaying a certain kind of behavior is revealing of a choice, as well as a practical kind of understanding or know-how. In short, agency is central to art and the opening of worlds that it brings about because a lot of people have to do things and understand the work as expressive of “doing something” in order for this event to be more than a promise of truth. What Heidegger is offering his readers in his essay is an understanding of what an artwork can be and that the event of art should be understood as demanding a peculiar kind of agency; what he is not offering us is a good account of how this happens. The descriptions of how the particular placing of a figure becomes a work that lives up to the description of the event of art are missing, or at most merely sketched.34 The ontic dimension of art is under-described in the art-essay, and I have tried to build out this dimension in this chapter. A Heideggerian inspired art criticism should hence try to make Heidegger’s account resonate in an interpretation that is sensitive to all the historical and material particularities that make up the “world” and “earth” that are held together in the specific work. What then of Van Gogh? How did Van Gogh’s painting, understood as event, come to be? According to the above analysis, we need to look at Van Gogh’s creation of the painting and then at the audience’s preservation of it. The remarkable fact that it is, as contrasted with tools, is striking in Old Shoes with Laces—that much we can certainly grant to Heidegger. (See Figure 1.) How to bring this about, how to find a figure that captures the coming into being of a sense, as described in his essay, is what Van Gogh does. The first characteristic of createdness is the fixing of the strife of earth and world in a figure. The figure that fixes the happening of truth in Van Gogh’s work is only in these particular brushstrokes, in the thickness of the pigment and in the movement in the stroke, and all these particular, ontic, features of painting are part of the material that art incorporates in order to set truth to work. Van Gogh’s world—say, his landscapes, his culture, and in particular the presence of nineteenth-century impressionist painting—is what gives resistance and provides material to be worked on and to hold in place a figure that can be the happening of truth that art aspires to be. The history of painting, with its genre conventions, materials, and changing subject matter, is part of what Van Gogh can make use of to make a figure whose that-ness can be striking to us. Within such a setting, the particular placing of a figure—proposed as a

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standard that suggests a new way of making intelligible—is what Van Gogh can offer his audience. As for the preservation of the artwork of Van Gogh, we know that according to Heidegger, Van Gogh’s world, and everyone else’s, is reconfigured with the happening of truth, which is the grounding and demarcation of a new way of being. A different region of intelligibility, at least a different way of relating to man-made objects in the case of Old Shoes with Laces, is opened up. Now even Heidegger, going to the Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam in 1930, is very aware of seeing a body of work of a single individual.35 By the turn of the century, painting is established as a genre that allows for diverse and individual styles of expression and content. Paintings are not made in workshops by schools, they are made by individuals, and in the case of the famous post-impressionists Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, by individuals we know were all pursuing development of their specific original styles at high personal cost. When a late modern European artwork like a painting works—when it speaks, as Heidegger says about Van Gogh—it does so in a climate where it is interpreted (and furthermore preserved) as a personal achievement or deed. Painting is bringing out something not yet intelligible and making it open to be taken up, understood, and preserved by an audience. Such grasping of works would include understanding genre, history, and subjectivity—the “that it is” of a work of art includes the “that it is made,” and by someone. This means that on the ontic level, which is the only level on which one can actually experience art, the work is always understood as a gesture and as such as a kind of proposal or deed in the world that precedes it. What kind of gesture the work is will be very different in different moments of the history of art and aesthetics. Correspondingly, any preservation of the work is always revealed in a kind of practical recognition of the truth of beings that the work offers. The reception of Van Gogh includes both a fascination with his dramatic biography and his psychological well-being and appropriation of works for philosophical use; I am skeptical but will leave as an open question whether any of these qualify as preservation on Heidegger’s terms. The interpretation of the truth of art that I have proposed here amounts to arguing in favor of understanding being as never independent of beings and persons—truth is not some mystical, eschatological sending that ends one world and replaces it with a new one. The events of being, the originating of new regions of meaningful being and doing, are always residing in the concrete, particular, and ontic and hence are intimately intertwined with our being as always simultaneously thrown, projecting, social, and historically situated agents. This is what is characteristic of art and this might ultimately be why art is so interesting to Heidegger: it shows how a particular historical



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region of being comes to be and is held in place by the joint agency of creators and preservers in the happening of truth that is made concrete and held in place in the artwork. NOTES 1.  In 1968, the art historian Meyer Schapiro published an essay in which he criticizes Heidegger’s use of the painting. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object— A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy in Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 135–41 (New York: Braziller, 1994). Heidegger never responded to Schapiro in print, but a decade later Derrida wrote the “polylogue” entitled “Restitutions” as a response to the disagreement between the two thinkers. Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, 255–82 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Schapiro added another rejoinder in 1994. Meyer Schapiro, “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy in Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 143–51 (New York: Braziller, 1994). 2.  Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Band 5 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994). English translation: Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, ed. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). I have consulted the English translation, but will at times deviate from the English text. 3.  Schapiro, “The Still Life,” 139. 4.  In the following, I will assume some familiarity with Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.” For brief introductions to this text and an overview of some of its idiosyncratic vocabulary, see my entry, “‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and Its Legacy,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 3, ed. Michael Kelly, 296–99 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Also, see Iain Thomson, “Heidegger’s Aesthetics,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ heidegger-aesthetics/, accessed October 20, 2016. 5. Heidegger’s example of a Greek temple might be the easiest way to make sense of this account: this architectural work is a building that functions as a physical standard for a certain way of being. With the temple, the religious and mythological understanding, the practical rituals, and the organization of the city-state are held in place. Truth is “set to work” in Heidegger’s words, and by organizing their lives around the building and recognizing and confirming the meaning it embodies, the people of the Greek city-state act as preservers of the work and in this way complete its truth. Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 31–35. 6.  The expression “genius of Being” is Jay Bernstein’s, suggesting that the only agent in Heidegger’s philosophy of art is Being itself. See his reading of “The Origin of the Work of Art” in J. M. Bernstein, The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 66–135.

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  7.  Heidegger has spoken for the painting in the paragraphs preceding this statement, and the message has been an ontological insight about the being of equipment: More fundamental than their usefulness is their reliability. Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 24.   8.  Robert Pippin, After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2104), 125.   9.  This is one of the goals of the analysis of the first part of Being and Time. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986). English translation: Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). The kind of intentionality that is characteristic of Dasein’s action in this work is described in practical and temporal terms, as a directedness and projection into the future that is oriented by a past, rather than in terms of reflection and deliberation, but despite these original differences, Heidegger’s whole account is importantly first-personal with a notion of agency (although often confused or handed over to the conformity of others) in its center. 10.  In the Appendix to “The Origin of the Work of Art,” written decades after the published, final version of the essay, Heidegger acknowledges that the essay might be read as wavering on the question of agency. He notes that there exists a tension between the use of terms like placing and setting-to-work on the one hand, and letting and allowing to happen on the other. He claims this is part of his ongoing attempt to find a way to think about agency that straddles the divide between active and passive: “properly thought, the ‘fixing in place’ of truth can never run counter to ‘allowing to happen.’ In the first place, this ‘allowing’ is nothing passive; rather, it is the highest form of action.” Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 71. 11. As this remark suggests, I do not think Heidegger’s thinking undergoes a radical break with respect to the relationship between Dasein and truth between the publication of Being and Time and the writings from the early thirties, although there is a marked shift of emphasis in how to understand that relation. It is beyond the scope of the present text to attempt to defend this view. 12.  As I will claim below, Heidegger’s account of this connection and his answers to these how-questions remain wanting in detail. Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 46. 13.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 46. Heidegger, “The Origin,” 34. 14.  This negative task is part of the overall stated aim of “The Origin of the Work of Art” to overcome aesthetics, understood as a branch of traditional Western philosophy and is explicitly addressed already in the first section of the essay. See Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” note 16. 15.  The shortcoming of traditional aesthetics, due to the influence of a widespread, but distorting, understanding of being, is a central motivation for Heidegger’s own project. I discuss his understanding of these shortcomings in Ingvild Torsen, “Disinterest and Truth: On Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics 56/1 (2016): 15–32. Another very good source for understanding why aesthetics is a kind of metaphysics, in Heidegger’s derogatory use of the term, is Iain Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 16.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 52. 17.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 52. Heidegger’s emphasis.



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18.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 51. 19.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 51. 20.  It might be worth stressing that there is no basis for assuming that such a figure needs to be recognizable or representational, that is, figurative, on Heidegger’s view. 21.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 58. 22.  The etymological kinship between Dürer’s work and Heidegger’s definition of the figure as rift is stronger and more striking in German: “Reissen heisst hier Herausholen des Risses und den Riss reissen mit der Reissfeder auf dem Reissbrett” Heidegger, “Der Ursprung, 58. 23.  See note 10 above. 24.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 70–72. 25.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 53. 26.  This feature is similar to one of the first questions of metaphysics, “why is there something instead of nothing?” For Heidegger’s take on the origin of metaphysics and how philosophy “begins in wonder,” see Martin Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag 1998). English translation: Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 27.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 54. 28.  Characteristic of a well-made tool is precisely that its being is not striking to us; as Heidegger’s famous analysis of the use of a tool in Being and Time shows, we barely notice it at all until it breaks down and stops working properly, see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 67–77. 29.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 53. 30.  The quotation from Dürer reads: “For truly, art is in nature, and whoever can tear [reissen] it out from nature has it.” Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 58. 31.  See for example the readings in Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1971). Heidegger gives many other lecture courses on the poet as well. 32.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 36. 33.  Heidegger, “Der Ursprung,” 55. 34.  The richest descriptions of how art works are tied to the Greek examples; the Van Gogh example has very few references to particular features of the painting or descriptions for how the artist contributes to the createdness in this case, nor of how an audience ought to preserve the work. 35.  This is according to a letter Heidegger wrote to Meyer Schapiro, preceding “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” see Schapiro, “The Still Life,” 136.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernstein, J. M. The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992.

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Derrida, Jacques. “Restitutions.” In The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, 255–82. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Heidegger, Martin. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag 1998. ———. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. ———. Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1971. ———. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1986. ———. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.” In Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe Band 5. Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1994. ———. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Off the Beaten Track, edited by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, translated by Julian Young. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pippin, Robert. After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Schapiro, Meyer. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy in Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 135–41. New York: Braziller, 1994. ———. “Further Notes on Heidegger and Van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy in Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 143–51. New York: Braziller, 1994. Thomson, Iain. “Heidegger’s Aesthetics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2015. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heidegger-aesthetics/. Accessed October 20, 2016. ———. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Torsen, Ingvild. “‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ and Its Legacy.” In Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, vol. 3, edited by Michael Kelly, 296–99. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. ———. “Disinterest and Truth. On Heidegger’s Interpretation of Kant’s Aesthetics.” British Journal of Aesthetics 56/1 (2016): 15–32.

Chapter 4

Sensuality, Materiality, Painting What Is wrong with Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s Van Gogh Interpretations? Christian Lotz In what follows, I will try to demonstrate that both Jaspers and Heidegger miss the essential dimension of Van Gogh’s art by reducing it to its subjectivistexistential (Jaspers) and pseudo-objective (Heidegger) qualities. What both miss is the role of materiality in and for painting. Van Gogh’s art is characterized by the attempt to preserve a certain non-representational quality of the sensational experience of the world through the materiality of painting, but this gets lost in Heidegger’s attempt to eradicate all traces of subjectivity in Van Gogh. Regarding Jaspers’ subjectivist view of Van Gogh’s art, his thesis that Van Gogh’s change of style during the late ’80s goes back to his schizophrenic illness ignores the fact that Van Gogh’s change of style emerged out of his attempt to position himself within the new styles of painting that developed at the end of the nineteenth century in Paris. As a consequence, though Jaspers is aware of the material qualities of Van Gogh’s painting, he is unable to look at the paintings as paintings, and, instead, he recedes to an expressivist position. Similarly, Heidegger’s thesis that the work of art establishes a unique synthesis of earth and world—for which he uses Van Gogh as an illustration—ignores the role of the materiality and expressiveness of Van Gogh’s painting, and thereby ignores the subjective and specific element in painting. As a consequence, Heidegger reduces the paintings to pictures, which is especially odd if we compare his treatment of architecture with his treatment of painting. Accordingly, while Jaspers is ultimately more truthful to Van Gogh, insofar as he points to the formal style of Van Gogh’s art, unfortunately, he reduces the new way of painting that Van Gogh developed in the ’80s to his psychic de-personalization and alienation. Jaspers and Heidegger do not see the materialist vision behind Van Gogh’s art that leads to a new conception of images as emerging from their intrinsic features as paintings. As T.J. Clark puts it, 81

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Existing from positivism—casting aside the possibility of art’s going back to the moment at which sensation becomes sign—is in practice exiting from the hope of art’s inhabiting a public, fully translatable world. And that […] had been the utopian motor of modernism from Courbet and Manet to Seurat and even van Gogh. (There is no “even” about it, in fact. Van Gogh believed in the material world, and art’s responsibility to retrieve the shock of it, and to translate the shock into a new and fully public language, as no one had ever believed before. He was the Prince Myshkin of positivism. That after his death he became the model of alienated individuality, and the patron saint of visionaries, is I guess what simplicity gets for its pains.)1

What T.J. Clark refers to as the sensational-material quality of Van Gogh can also be analyzed in terms of color and stroke, as Van Gogh’s paintings can hardly be understood without taking the relationship between drawing and painting into account. The strokes are essential to Van Gogh’s style of painting, insofar as Van Gogh was not a colorist. In a letter from September 1889 he says about another artist: “And he quickly loses his touch for drawing with the brush. This probably comes from the old training method, which is the same as the current one—in the studios—they fill in outlines.”2 What Van Gogh means by “drawing with the brush” refers to his own attempt to bring together drawing and painting on a higher level, where neither color nor the outline, the conflict of which played a major role in modern art theory, has priority over the other. The consequence of this is, however, that we need to acknowledge the primacy of the material mark over the represented, since the brushstroke and the paint are significant for the pre-expressionist world that Van Gogh’s art invokes. Put in T.J. Clark’s terms, the signifier itself becomes meaningful in Van Gogh’s art. The result is what we might call painted drawings. It is, therefore, even more troubling that Heidegger misses this aspect in Van Gogh’s art, as Heidegger’s distinction between earth and world could easily be applied to Van Gogh as a painter and not, as Heidegger has it, as a picture maker. In what follows, I will first discuss Heidegger’s and Jaspers’ positions, before I move on to Van Gogh and outline some of the aforementioned principles of this newly established synthesis of materiality and meaning. HEIDEGGER, PAINTING, AND MATERIALITY, OR WHERE IS THE PAINTING? Given that Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” essay is well known, I shall only briefly indicate the central aspects that are important for this chapter: let us recall that Heidegger does not fully reject the matter-form



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distinction; rather, he gives it a new meaning through a phenomenological reinterpretation (Auslegung).3 As we know, in the first part of his essay he argues that the matter-form distinction is derived from and depends upon instrumentality in the form of equipment (Zeug). If we understand the work of art by using the matter-form distinction as its ontological basis, then, according to Heidegger, we end up with an understanding of the work of art as an ontological subclass of instrumental objects. In this case the work of art would be reduced to crafts. Against this, Heidegger argues, we need to pose that the work of art goes beyond the matter-form distinction and its being by making something visible about this distinction. And it is precisely at this juncture that Heidegger introduces Van Gogh’s shoe painting, as he seeks to demonstrate that the being of Van Gogh’s painting as a work of art is not simply something (matter) made by an artist (form) for a purpose “X,” since the work of art reveals something about equipment (in this case the shoes) depicted by Van Gogh and is therefore truth-related. (See Figure 1.) In order to understand why this move is astonishing let me briefly recall how Heidegger deals with the Greek temple, which he uses after Van Gogh’s shoes and Meyer’s fountain, as a third, and the most important, example in his essay. In his analysis of the Greek temple, Heidegger argues that the temple, in relation to what he calls “earth,” sets forth a world: “By the opening of a world,” as Heidegger puts it, “all things gain their lingering and hastening, their distance and proximity, their breadth and their limits.”4 While the world establishes an a priori framework of meaningfulness in which all entities and relations are established in their basic coherence, at the same time this opening up of meaningfulness is tied back to a concrete geographical and natural setting that does not appear as mere nature, but instead as earthly foundation (Boden). In relation to the temple, one might say that Heidegger’s conception of art comes very close to the idea that the material bearer is not simply the “matter” for meaning, given that matter, now conceived as a concrete earthly setting, is itself signifying. Given Heidegger’s position that the work of art is based on the conflict and strife between earth and world, his take on Van Gogh is odd, since one would have expected Heidegger to look at Van Gogh’s painting exactly as he looks at the Acropolis. Indeed, it is astonishing that Heidegger does not use the same distinctions that are operative in the case of the temple in the case of Van Gogh’s painting. For he suppresses, overlooks, or misses the materiality of the painting, namely, its paint. For example, in regard to Van Gogh’s depicted shoes, Heidegger writes, “This equipment belongs to the earth and finds protection in the world of the peasant woman.”5 It is as if Heidegger looks through the painting into something else. In this way, he immediately identifies the painting with a kind of window. In contrast, in the temple case,

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Heidegger refers to the distinction between earth and world as something that shows up in the temple as something made with rocks. I am not alone with my astonishment. As Schufreider has argued, this different handling of architecture and painting is most likely caused by Heidegger’s unintentional reduction of the painting to a picture, especially if we assume that a reproduction in the form of a photograph would indeed take the materiality of the painting away and would transform it into a twodimensional picture plane. Schufreider writes: Unfortunately, Heidegger does not view the picture in relation to the paint (as he will the stone of the temple later in the essay) but creates a narrative in which the world/earth correlation is approached pictorially, as he sees the peasants’ world in relation to the Earth in the appearance of the shoes as items of gear.6

Put differently, Heidegger handles Van Gogh’s painting as if it is a photograph or a reproduction of a painting. This, in turn, can also explain why later in the essay Heidegger lists as the “material” of painting “color,” which is very imprecise and shows the idealistic vision of painting with which Heidegger operates in the essay. For it is not simply “color” that shines through in a painting; instead, it is the flesh-like quality of paint itself, and, again, it is precisely this feature that characterizes Van Gogh’s style.7 Heidegger writes: When a work is brought forth out of this or that work-material—stone, wood, metal, color, language, tone—we say that it is made, set forth [hergestellt] out of it. But just as the work required a setting up, in the sense of consecratingpraising erection (since the work-being of the work consisted in a setting up of world), so a setting forth [Herstellung] is also necessary, since the work-being of the work has itself the character of a setting forth.8

Heidegger’s list of work-materials is telling, since he thinks about color as if it is the same thing as wood and metal. In my view, he should have listed paint (and canvas) at this point. In the same passage, Heidegger goes on and explains that in contrast to useable things, the work of art does not hide its own material qualities; rather, it brings them out by putting them into a conflictual situation with the world that the work sets up. For example, the sturdiness and heaviness of the stone used in the temple shines forth through the setting up of the world and establishes an ongoing conflict between that which enables the world to be this precise world (stone of a Greek temple) and that which enables the stone to be this precise stone (stone of a Greek temple). Furthermore, later in the same passage Heidegger advances that [i]n the manufacture of equipment—for example, an ax—the stone is used and used up. It disappears into usefulness. The less resistance the material puts up to



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being submerged in the equipmental being of the equipment the more suitable and the better it is. On the other hand, the temple work, in setting up a world, does not let the material disappear; rather, it allows it to come forth for the very first time, to come forth, that is, into the open of the world of the work. The rock comes to bear and to rest and so first becomes rock; the metal comes to glitter and shimmer, the colors to shine, the sounds to ring, the word to speak. All this comes forth as the work sets itself back into the massiveness and heaviness of the stone, into the firmness and flexibility of the wood, into the hardness and gleam of the ore, into the lightening and darkening of color, into the ringing of sound, and the naming power of the word.9

We can see here that Heidegger operates with the old genre distinctions that we find before the event of modern art throughout non-modern history, since Heidegger assumes that architecture and painting differ from each other because architecture does not depict anything, whereas paintings project a two-dimensional world onto their picture plane through their colors. This assumption, as we know, has been shattered by modern art (though we find it already in painters, such as Rembrandt—whom Van Gogh admired—and Turner),10 since modern art, as T. J. Clark underlined, is based on a thorough materialism, which is to say, it does not simply posit “colors” as its basis; instead, it posits the materiality of paint (or the canvas) as its ground. Only this shift makes it possible for painters, such as Van Gogh, to start to paint with the paint tube itself. It is this discovery of technique as visible property of art that Heidegger’s anti-modern position misses. Paint should, especially in Van Gogh’s art, appear as the ground of painting, which, then, also must point to (and here I deviate from Schufreider) other things such as the history of paint, materials, and techniques.11 Put differently, why should the ground of painting simply be “paint,” as if, by analogy, the material of a symphony would be the instruments, and not the whole history of the differences and developments of instruments? Similarly, the “material” in Van Gogh’s paintings is not simply “paint”; rather, we should think about it as a historically given material, which, as a consequence, also contains brushes, the material of the brushes, painting techniques, and so on. And even if we do not want to go so far (fearing that we need to give up a phenomenological and ontological approach to art and to turn to an aesthetics à la Adorno), we should reformulate the earth/world problem that is present in painting with Heidegger.12 WHAT DOES THE WORK REVEAL? As a consequence of what I argued in the last section, we should note that that which Van Gogh’s painting as painting reveals is not, as Heidegger claims,

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primarily the world of the peasant; for this world only comes forth in the painting as a picture. Instead, we should claim that the painting in the very way in which it is a painting, that is, painted, sets up a world to which the paint as paint belongs and which comes into the open through the world that it sets forth, namely, that which might be called a historically specific painted world vision. Van Gogh, for example—in his later work—used to start his painting by directly applying the paint from his paint tubes onto the canvas, and then, in a second step, he used to make the paint move through his brush strokes. (I shall come back to this point in the last section of this chapter.) At this point, however, it is important to note that the way in which Van Gogh handles the paint sets forth a painted world, and not, as Heidegger argues, a world in the painting as a picture. As the temple builds, a painting paints. It projects, so to speak, a world established by and through this specific way of doing paintings (similar to how a temple provides, founds (stiften), and projects the Greek world. It is hard to understand that Heidegger totally suppresses the poetic moment in painting. It is, of course, difficult to determine exactly what kind of world Van Gogh’s work sets up, since it might no longer be comparable to what we receive as the unity of the “Greek” world that the temple sets up, but it is safe to claim that Van Gogh’s work sets up a specific post-impressionist and preexpressionist modern world in which subjective moods and feelings are experienced as objective properties of the world. All we need to do is to imagine a cultural world in which the meaningfulness of that world would be established by Van Gogh’s painting (instead of a temple). It would be a world in which nature, especially in the form of landscapes, would have another status. My suspicion is that, as a consequence, we would see that Van Gogh’s paintings project a specifically modern world. For example, Van Gogh’s handling of the tube as a brush brings out a specific industrialized world in which painters need to buy paint in tubes and are able to carry around their materials and work outside their studios. Put differently, it contains a different relation to the inside and outside, as well as a different relation to nature. The way in which one paints does not simply refer to a world; rather, it contains in it a world, which, if we would further analyze it, would also contain social and political relations. For example, the tubes that Van Gogh uses, that is, the possibility of painting the way he paints, includes references to a specific mode of production. The genius of Van Gogh is that he, even if not always explicitly, somehow realizes that his new way of approaching the world has to do with the way in which paint becomes paint in the (modern) world in which he lives. Paint, for Van Gogh, is a paste. Moreover, the expressiveness of this paint establishes a mythic environment that is in some sense “alive.” So, in this larger sense, Van Gogh’s painting belongs to a specific “sub-world” of the modern age.



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The failure of Heidegger to acknowledge the materiality in painting and to apply his own distinctions to Van Gogh’s work is even more astonishing if one considers Van Gogh’s own words. In a letter to his brother on June 9, 1889, he writes: When I see a painting that intrigues me, I can never help asking myself, “in what house, room, corner of the room, in whose home would it do well, would it be in its rightful place.” Thus the paintings of Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer are only at home in the old Dutch house.13

We can see clearly that Van Gogh himself was well aware that paintings in their specific historical configurations set forth specific worlds, such as the bourgeois Dutch world. All we would have to think about is the specific world that Van Gogh’s work sets forth; it is safe to assume that it no longer brings out the “meta-frame” of a whole culture, as Heidegger tries to argue, happens in the case of the temple.14 Moreover, I do not think that we should read Van Gogh’s statement as an arbitrary empirical statement; rather, he is fully aware of the fact that a painting reveals its world through its being, that is, that it reveals a painted world. Van Gogh’s seriousness, which Jaspers also mentions, is not based on his psychological derangement; instead, it is the attitude of an artist who is fully aware of the truth-related aspect of his work. Regarding a painting, the conflict between earth and world comes out, but it can only come out if we understand it as a painting, which includes the material structure of the painting. Van Gogh saw his own activity of painting against the background of hard peasant labor, and since he viewed the world and work of peasants as a quasi-religious devotion to the earth and to God, he also understood his own activity of painting in this light. As he says in a letter, “I am plowing on my canvases as they do on their fields.”15 Accordingly, the soil here is not something revealed in a picture; rather, with Van Gogh we need to claim that it is in the painting, as the earthly quality of paint(ing). Indeed, the goal is that “of marking the canvas with tangible signs of a labor equivalent to that of his subject.”16 Hence, it would be more appropriate to speak of Van Gogh as someone who—prior to artists such as Fautrier and Schumacher—literally works on his canvases. Similarly, trees in the wind, fields in the sun, or, for that matter, sunflowers, need to be translated into “living paint” that brings out the qualities of the scene or the object in the very way that it is painted. In sum, the fact that Van Gogh painted shoes and how the painting reveals the world of the shoes is secondary, since it is the way in which this modern master painted the shoes that (could have) set forth a specific world, just as the temple-world contains references to the sky, to the holy, to rocks, and to the Athenian people.

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JASPERS, PAINTING, MATERIALITY, OR WHERE IS THE PAINT? Let me now briefly turn to Jaspers. Interestingly, though I am skeptical in general about Jaspers’ reduction of art to existential and psychological expression, his understanding of Van Gogh is far superior to Heidegger’s understanding, especially because Jaspers is fully aware that without a careful analysis of the way in which Van Gogh puts the mark on his canvases, major aesthetical insights get lost. In the framework of Heidegger’s philosophy of art we are forced to treat Van Gogh’s painting as an illustration for a specific ontology of art. Undoubtedly, with Jaspers we are moving closer to the specific nature of Van Gogh’s art. Nevertheless, Jaspers’ otherwise enlightening attempt to push the reception of Van Gogh away from his “madness” and “sickness” by claiming that his sickness together with his art led to an important and internally coherent projection of a meaningful existence (Sinn der Existenz) and to a realization of an existential “ethos,” in the end, falls back onto a position that reduces the materiality of Van Gogh’s art to the outcome of psychological factors.17 As Marlene Putscher has it in her review of medical literature on Van Gogh, taking into account the psychological condition of Van Gogh could perhaps render more understandable some of the themes that Van Gogh selected, or it could perhaps help us understand the mood of some landscapes, but this approach to Van Gogh is unable to help us understand the artistic form as that which, in German, is called the “Gestaltungsprinzip,” that is, the formative principle of his works.18 Despite the fact that Jaspers has a clear understanding of Van Gogh’s realism, and his attempt to show the transcendent in the real, and Van Gogh’s deep sensualism, Jaspers misses this principle.19 To be fair, Jaspers’ thesis is not simply that Van Gogh’s work is the expression of his psychic illness; rather, he tries to merge both together with his idea that we can understand the schizophrenic condition better through the world of the artist, which, for Jaspers, is a whole psychic and existential world of an individual who sees reality and life even more truthfully than others. Nevertheless, this “reverse” relation between art and existential projection underestimates that the formative will that underlies the art of Van Gogh needs to be interpreted as an expression of the schizophrenic Dasein. This therefore underestimates that the true advancement of Van Gogh’s art is not his existential authenticity, but, instead, his push towards a new position in the history of painting. Seen from this point of view, Van Gogh’s art is authentic because it gives us a new way of understanding how painting can project a world, and a new way of how painting and a painted world can be seen and carried out. Similarly, Beethoven’s and Schoenberg’s authenticity



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lies in their redefinition of music composing and of their handling of the material of music. Similarly, Jaspers’ existential interpretation misses the most significant aspects of Van Gogh, namely, that he is a painter. In addition, the idea that paintings are the “expression” of something psychic, even when seen as an existential totality, overlooks that every work of art is mediated by the materials (broadly construed) and techniques. It took Van Gogh years to develop his specific style of painting and drawing. He worked in an extremely disciplined and reflective way on his painting techniques, and all of this happened in an ongoing exchange with his contemporaries after he discovered the amodernity of his earlier work in the 1880s. This exchange with his contemporaries is based on the attempt to redefine painting itself. Not only the different drawing and painting techniques, but also the different brush types and pens have to be included here, as they are not arbitrary. But Jaspers is still deeply tied to a “genius theory of art,” according to which the artistic productivity comes directly out of the nature of the artist and not, as is clearly the case with Van Gogh, through hard labor, work, and observations of what others around him are doing. As one commentator has it in regard to Van Gogh’s creative process: First, van Gogh’s practice of painting repetitions was far more extensive and vital to his creative process than many people realize. Second, contrary to the deeply ingrained perception of van Gogh as an artist who always painted before nature in a flash of emotional excess, his approach to the creative process was often more deliberate, controlled, and conceptual than the popular stereotype suggests.20

In addition, as we know, Seurat, for example, was very interested in nineteenth-century scientific color-theory and, as such, he prioritized the attempt to paint natural light.21 Van Gogh, however, followed Gauguin in his attempt to relate color to match psychological and emotional properties, though this is not due to Van Gogh’s sickness, as it goes back to developments within nineteenth-century art theory and artistic practice. The danger of Jaspers’ interpretation, therefore, is the possible loss of Van Gogh’s work as a work of art as well as the dismissal of Van Gogh’s attempt to push the development of art and the possibilities of painting forward, through a new way of combining color, paint, and drawing. Jaspers’ reduction of Van Gogh’s way of painting to existential expressions overlooks that Van Gogh tries to capture objective qualities of his objects and themes. For example, the “mood” of a landscape or an “anxious” situation is not necessarily something subjective; rather, it can be conceived as a property of the object, although this property is subjectively perceived. A dangerous

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looking lion is not dangerous because I feel fear when I see him; for “being dangerous” is a property of the lion that I discover through my fear. Similarly, Van Gogh is an anti-impressionist because he is not interested in the subjective impression of a scene; instead, his turn to lines and strokes, and, finally, to painted lines and painted strokes, is a turn towards the object, the real, and reality. To be fair, Jaspers seems to acknowledge this fact at least sometimes. For example, referring to Van Gogh’s famous coffeehouse painting, he says that Van Gogh wanted to display the coffeehouse as a place in which one can commit crimes.22 Painted colors, hence, do not have a subjective meaning alone, given that they are the way through which one can discover something that had so far been unseen in a scene, an object, or a landscape. THE MATERIALITY OF VAN GOGH’S PAINTINGS Finally, let me briefly mention a few central aspects of Van Gogh’s art that, I think, get lost in Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s interpretations of his work. Van Gogh’s art depends upon a totally new way of constructing the image as something that is independent from its relation to a constructive principle found outside of the image, though he does not reach this point through what we later find in Cézanne, for whom the painting emerges out of its elements, namely, painted “spots.”23 Nevertheless, Van Gogh already tries to let the image emerge internally through its own genesis, which, in his case, is only possible because in some of his later works he moves away from treating drawing and painting as two different things, that is, he revolutionizes the function of the outline. As such, Van Gogh tries to bring both together and treats paint as if he would be drawing. In a letter to his brother on June 9, 1889, he writes: But there you are, to get back to the point, since the Egyptian artists thus have a faith, working from feeling and instinct, they express all these intangible things: goodness, infinite patience, wisdom, serenity, with a few masterly curves and marvelous proportions. That’s to say once more, when the thing depicted and the manner of depicting it are in accord, the thing has style and quality.24

It is very clear, then, that Van Gogh tries to reveal something about his objects, themes, and scenes by evoking it through a specific way of treating paint and painting itself. The revolutionary change of painting into painted drawings, the attempt to draw with the brush, as well as the idea that the thickness, length, expressiveness, and shape of the strokes determine the thing depicted, led to a totally new way for how painting can be related to what is painted. Moreover, that which is painted is no longer simply “out there” to be copied, given that the image can only evolve out of its own



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painterly genesis. One commentator calls this procedure imitating the material (materialmimetisch), since Van Gogh tries to wrestle the picture out of the materiality of painting.25 The method of drawing by painting allows Van Gogh to abstract the essential from what he perceived as reality. He thereby discovers the qualities of the reality in his own painting marks. Paint, in other words, becomes meaningful through itself. In this sense, T. J. Clark’s remark about Van Gogh’s materialism is absolutely correct. For example, Van Gogh speaks of the “rustic quality” of his paintings and of the “smell of the earth” in them.26 Again, Van Gogh painted in the same way that peasants labored. We can see here that the irony of all this is that the role of labor, the relation to nature, the peasant’s world, and so on, that is, that which Heidegger mentions in regard to the depicted shoes could be more properly applied to Van Gogh’s paintings themselves. During his time in southern France, Van Gogh especially improved his pen-and-ink-drawing, which he developed in a way that is similar to how etchings are done. In a letter to Theo on January 1, 1883, Van Gogh compares different forms of drawing with different music instruments.27 The properties of certain objects, accordingly, depend upon the way in which the property is handled and brought forth. Line and color are supposed to be one, in order to achieve the goal of drawing with color, or, to be more precise, in order to draw with paint. For example, for some paintings of trees and landscapes, Van Gogh presses the stems and branches of trees directly out of the tube in order to reveal their inner quality. Again, we can see here that it is not simply color that we need to take as the “material” of painting; instead, it is the paint itself, and Van Gogh brings this out by handling painting as if it would be drawing. Color, for Van Gogh, is a paste that needs to be treated, formed, destroyed, and distributed. It is only the latter move that pushes Van Gogh away from impressionist painting. Similiarly, the speed and the rhythm of how he “plows through the paint” are equally important. In this connection, we can see that during his Paris time, Van Gogh thinks painting in the form of points, lines, and strokes. His language is characterized by a rhythm of movements that have to do with the different speeds for how he distributes the paint throughout the canvas.28 The conflict between color and line, between coleur and dessin, plays an important role in nineteenth-century theory of art, and it deeply influenced artists such as Van Gogh.29 In regard to his famous Olive Tree painting Van Gogh even refers to woodcuts for his arrangement.30 Accordingly, in this case the attempt is to paint “woodcut style.” In the same letter, he writes: All in all the only things I consider a little good in it are the Wheatfield, the Mountain, the Orchard, the Olive trees with the blue hills and the Portrait and the Entrance to the quarry, and the rest says nothing to me, because it lacks personal will, feeling in the lines [de lignes senties]. Where these lines are

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close together and deliberate the painting begins, even if it may be exaggerated. That’s what Bernard and Gauguin feel a little bit, they won’t ask for the correct shape of a tree at all, but they absolutely insist that one says if the shape is round or square—and my word, they’re right.31

What is translated as “feelings in the lines” really means that the lines are sensed like wind, and, accordingly, the lines need to be painted in a “windy” style.32 As T. J. Clark reminds us, “Modernism was materialist where it really counted. […] its essence lay in the immediate sensation, and it operated under the most drastic possible reduction of the visual act.”33 As I tried to demonstrate, this reduction is not a reduction of meaning to materiality; instead, we should understand Van Gogh’s art as the attempt to make materiality, that is, painting, itself meaningful. Clark adds, “The stuff of painting was interesting only if it was recognized as the raw material for meaning—what we should call the signifier of some complex, intractable world. Matter was a moment of signification.”34 Though a simple juxtaposition of art history and philosophy is certainly insufficient, my main argument against Heidegger’s failure to understand the essence of Van Gogh’s art forces me to agree with Schapiro’s well-known comment that Heidegger projects his philosophical framework into Van Gogh’s painting. Heidegger’s comments on Van Gogh, Schapiro claims, “are grounded rather in his own social outlook with its heavy pathos of the primordial and earthy. He has indeed ‘imagined everything and projected it into the painting.’ He has experienced both too little and too much in his contact with the work.”35 The same, I submit, is true for Jaspers. NOTES 1.  Timothy J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 130. 2.  Vincent Van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters, ed. Nienke Bakker et al. (Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2009). Accessed August 6, 2016. vangoghletters .org/vg/. Letter 607. Italics mine. 3.  Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–56. 4.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 23. 5.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 14. 6. Gregory Schufreider, “The Art of Truth,” Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010): 355. 7.  For the magic relation between painting, vision, and flesh, see Georges DidiHuberman, Die leibhaftige Malerei (München: Fink, 2002). He points out that it had



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long been the dream of painters to use colors as the “material substrate” of a surface since doing this is supposed to bring out the object itself in its “flesh-like” qualities. Dolce is supposed to have said about Titian that he used real flesh for his colors.   8.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 24.   9.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 24. 10.  For example, Wagner characterizes very well Turner’s famous painting Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) as a “war with the material(s)” (Materialschlacht); for this, see Monika Wagner, Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne (München: Beck, 2001), 188. 11.  Schufreider, “Art of Truth,” 356. 12.  On a more philosophical level, the status of materiality could be discussed in relation to Adorno and Gadamer, as Gadamer tends to overlook the negative aspect of the materiality of art, whereas for Adorno this is constitutive. Heidegger also underestimates the fact that the “earth” is a negative moment that “disturbs” the process of understanding. For this, see Christoph Menke, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 36, 43. 13.  Van Gogh, The Letters, Letter 779. 14.  One commentator of an earlier draft of this essay remarked that the reference to “culture” might be misguided, given that Heidegger himself does not use the term and that the term “culture” is generally problematic. What I have in mind in using this term is the problem of how we can determine and speak of separate “worlds.” For example, in the art essay, Heidegger refers to “the” world of “a people” and “the” world of “the Greeks.” See Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–56. As such, there is a way in which he assumes that there is such a thing as “one” world or, in my terms, “one” culture that makes everything “in” this world meaningful in the same way. Though I have some sympathy for Heidegger’s claim, I am not sure whether we can go so far as to claim that “the” world of the Greeks shows up in “the” temple (especially since Heidegger clearly refers only to a specific temple). In reference to another example by Heidegger, it is doubtful whether the Heidelberg bridge and the Schwarzwald Hof to which Heidegger refers to in his essay on building and dwelling really bring out “the” world and the “Fourfold” in a manner that is what I call above “mega-frameworks.” See Martin Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 152–58. It seems to me that Heidegger “experiments” most successfully with specific worlds in his interpretation of Trakl’s poems. See Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 187–210. Moreover, the question of whether there are “paradigmatic” artists for paradigmatic worlds (such as Hölderlin) should also be asked. In this vein, one would need to ask whether there is only “one” artist for “one” world? Is Hölderlin the poet of the West or of Germany, or of all speakers of German? Is there a Hölderlin for Swahili? Finally, all of these questions tend to end up in questionable metaphysical distinctions that (initially) were meant to be “bracketed,” including the distinction between “the” West versus “the”

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East, and so on. Similarly, the claim that “the” modern world is rendered visible in Van Gogh’s art seems to be problematic, although, again, I would like to leave this question open. 15.  Quoted in Debra Silverman, “At the Threshold of Symbolism: Van Gogh’s Sower and Gauguin’s Vision after a Sermon,” in Critical Readings in Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, ed. Mary Tompkins Lewis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 273. 16.  Silverman, “At the Threshold,” 277. 17.  Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und van Gogh: Versuch einer vergleichenden Pathogenese (München: Piper, 2013), 146, 162. 18.  Marlene Putscher, “Jaspers und van Gogh—Oder über Krankheit und Kunst,” Janus 67/1 (1980): 162. 19. Jaspers, Strindberg und van Gogh, 165, 166. One commentator of an earlier draft of this essay remarked that Jaspers does not reduce Van Gogh’s art to a subjective or psychological interpretation and that my take on Jaspers is reductive. As I mention above, Jaspers’ take on Van Gogh is in many regards superior to Heidegger’s “use” of the painter. However, what I want to claim in this essay is that Jaspers does not focus on the world projection that is implied in how the world comes out in the way in which the paintings are painted. The fact that Jaspers acknowledges Van Gogh’s empiricism and the primacy of perception and seeing, that is, his attempt to overcome any kind of symbolic and mythic understanding of painting, differs from the question of how this “realism” comes about in and through materiality. For example, in his Philosophy, Jaspers refers to Van Gogh as an artist who finds transcendence through his realism, which is a claim with which I agree. See Karl Jaspers, Philosophie, vol. 3: Metaphysik (Heidelberg: Springer, 2008), 197. However, Jaspers does not deal with the constitution of this position in the painting through painting. Accordingly, against Jaspers, we might claim that Van Gogh does not find transcendence in reality; instead, he finds transcendence in his way of painting and in how he “finds” the world in paint. Put differently, for Van Gogh the world is steeped in paint and, as a consequence, I disagree with Jaspers’ claim that, although true to our times, Van Gogh’s painting is somehow “poorer” than paintings that refer to external transcendence. I do agree with the commentator that we should neither simply juxtapose Heidegger and Jaspers nor reduce Jaspers to a psychopathologist, especially given that Jaspers’ thinking about art is more complex than it may seem from his famous essays on Strindberg and Van Gogh. See Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und van Gogh: Versuch einer vergleichenden Pathogenese (München: Pieper, 2013). 20.  William H. Robinson, “The Artist versus the Legend: Repetitions and Madness,” Van Gogh: Repetitions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 8. 21. See Fred Leeman, “Lignes senties—van Gogh in Diskussion mit Gauguin und Bernard in Arles und Saint-Remy,” in Van Gogh: Gezeichnete Bilder, ed. Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Heinz Widauer (Köln: Dumont, 2006), 93. 22. Jaspers, Strindberg und van Gogh, 159. 23. For the principle of inner genesis in modern painting, see Max Imdahl, Reflexion, Theorie, Methode, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 303–81.



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24.  Van Gogh, The Letters, Letter 779. 25.  Thanks are due to Monika Wagner whose reading of modern art through its relation to materials taught me much. See Wagner, Das Material der Kunst, 32. 26.  Quoted in Silverman, “At the Threshold,” 273. 27.  Van Gogh, The Letters, Letter 298. 28. Klaus Albrecht Schröder, “Gezeichnete Bilder,” in Van Gogh: Gezeichnete Bilder, ed. Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Heinz Widauer (Köln: Dumont, 2006), 13. 29.  See Leeman, Lignes senties, 85. 30.  Van Gogh, The Letters, Letter 607. 31.  Van Gogh, The Letters, Letter 607. 32.  One commentator on an earlier draft of this essay critically remarked that I am in danger of falling back into a hylomorphism and that Heidegger tries to overcome hylomorphism. Though this problem would require a longer response, let me respond for the sake of brevity in the following way: I would argue that neither Heidegger nor Jaspers (or for that matter, any philosopher) can simply “overcome” the dualities that we carry with us whenever we use metaphysical concepts. However, having said this, I see the task of phenomenology and hermeneutics in untangling what is contained in metaphysical distinctions. As such, at least in my mind, Heidegger does not operate beyond the form-matter distinction, but his phenomenological interpretation of art tries to reveal where this distinction emerges and comes from, that is, his distinction between earth and world seems to be based on the claim that we can trace back certain metaphysical distinctions (which, for him, lead to an instrumentalist conception of art) to a non-instrumentalist phenomenal “ground” of the distinction where the distinction itself no longer makes sense. Put differently, Heidegger tries to show that the metaphysical dualisms are a misinterpretation and covering up of the original phenomena and, as a consequence, ontology can be “corrected” by phenomenology. Similarly, Heidegger does not simply reject epistemology and the subject-object distinction in Being and Time; rather, he subjects these conceptions to a phenomenological analysis and shows that they are, if we take them to be the “primary” phenomena, misconceptions of ourselves and our being. Accordingly, I would argue that Heidegger does not “overcome” epistemology in Being and Time, as if he shows that epistemology is simply false; instead, he shows that any attempt to define ourselves epistemologically and to define access to our being epistemologically should be taken as a secondary approach to asking the question of what it means to be the entity that we are. 33. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 129. 34. Clark, Farewell to an Idea, 129. 35.  Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 2010), 138.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Clark, Timothy J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.

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Didi-Huberman, Georges. Die leibhaftige Malerei. München: Fink, 2002. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Off the Beaten Track, translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes, 1–56. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 143–61. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. ———. “Language.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 187–210. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. Imdahl, Max. Reflexion, Theorie, Methode, Gesammelte Schriften, Band 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996. Jaspers, Karl. Philosophie, vol. 3: Metaphysik. Heidelberg: Springer, 2008. ———. Strindberg and Van Gogh. Translated by Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977. ———. Strindberg und van Gogh: Versuch einer vergleichenden Pathogenese. München: Piper, 2013. Leeman, Fred. “Lignes senties—van Gogh in Diskussion mit Gauguin und Bernard in Arles und Saint-Remy. ” In Van Gogh: Gezeichnete Bilder, edited by Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Heinz Widauer, 83–98. Köln: Dumont, 2006. Menke, Christoph. Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988. Putscher, Marlene. “Jaspers und van Gogh—Oder über Krankheit und Kunst. ” Janus 67/1 (1980): 157–69. Robinson, William H. “The Artist versus the Legend: Repetitions and Madness.” In Van Gogh. Repetitions, edited by Eliza Rathbone, William H. Robinson, Elizabeth Steele, and Marcia Steele, 8–16. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013. Schapiro, Meyer. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, Selected Papers, 135–51. New York: Braziller, 2010. Schröder, Klaus Albrecht. “Gezeichnete Bilder.” In Van Gogh: Gezeichnete Bilder, edited by Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Heinz Widauer, 11–18. Köln: Dumont, 2006. Schufreider, Gregory. “The Art of Truth.” Research in Phenomenology 40 (2010): 331–62. Silverman, Debora. “At the Threshold of Symbolism: Van Gogh’s Sower and Gauguin’s Vision after a Sermon.” In Critical Readings in Impressionism and PostImpressionism, edited by Mary Tompkins Lewis, 271–86. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Wagner, Monika. Das Material der Kunst: Eine andere Geschichte der Moderne. München: Beck, 2001. Widauer, Heinz. “Zeichnen mit Linien, Farbe und Worten.” In Van Gogh: Gezeichnete Bilder, edited by Klaus Albrecht Schröder and Heinz Widauer, 99–113. Köln: Dumont, 2006. Van Gogh, Vincent. Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters. Edited by Nienke Bakker, Leo Jansen, and Hans Luijten. Amsterdam: Van Gogh Museum, 2009. Accessed August 6, 2016. vangoghletters.org/vg/.

Chapter 5

Pointure mal, or If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit . . . K. Malcolm Richards

Jacques Derrida’s “Restitutions de la vérité en pointure,” the final essay in La vérité en peinture,1 brings together, as a pair, Martin Heidegger’s “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” and Meyer Schapiro’s brief text, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” a relationship triangulated through a painting by the Dutch born artist Vincent van Gogh.2 (See Figure 1.) The pairing of Heidegger and Schapiro is not unexpected, given that Heidegger’s text is the pretext for Schapiro’s text, yet Derrida’s reading of these texts opens an array of questions pertinent to aesthetics, psychoanalysis, philosophy, art history, art criticism, and art. Given the complex and challenging quality of Heidegger’s essay, the position of Schapiro in the history of art history, and Derrida’s exhaustive, if for some exhausting, reading of their texts, I don’t propose to exhaust the possibilities or suggest that they are exhausted, something requiring a great deal of space and time. Rather, in the midst of this exhaust, I want to trace some of the broader lines of discussion that Derrida’s text provides, in order to then situate three texts. The first text is Meyer Schapiro’s “The Apples of Cézanne,” a text that is intimately related to “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” but one not considered by Derrida in his reading.3 The second and third texts are Derrida’s “Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference (Geschlecht I)” and “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” essays written shortly after “Restitutions,” but whose topics are broached elliptically in some of the seemingly marginal passages of the earlier text.4 In tracing out these interconnections, I am not seeking to resolve the tensions between these texts and especially between the work of Derrida and Heidegger, but, instead to make these tensions more productive and conducive to a continued challenging of the fields impacted by their respective thought. 97

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In particular, this juxtaposition of texts deepens the problems in Schapiro’s reading of Heidegger, emphasizing further the willful misreading by Schapiro that Derrida addresses, while touching on larger issues within the discipline of art history, especially in regard to the treatment of the work as a mirror or window onto a “real” world and the conflation of the artist and work that Schapiro’s emphasis on the presence of the artist in the work enacts in his act of restitution.5 These problems ignore Heidegger’s investigation of the ontological status of the work of art. In regards to Derrida’s later texts on Heidegger, “Restitutions” sets in motion questions that he continues to critique around Heidegger’s privileging of the hand and hand-work, as well as a privileging of the human over the animal, while simultaneously probing in an affirmative fashion Heidegger’s speculations on ontology and sexuality. The concerns of these later texts extend the challenge Derrida frames in “Restitutions” through his allusive and elusive questioning of the binary structure and strictures of gender and sexuality posed around the boots depicted in Van Gogh’s work, furthering Derrida’s conflicted and complicated negotiation with Heidegger. “Restitutions” builds on the experimental formal techniques seen in Glas, while using a device that starts to appear more frequently in his later work. In taking the form of a polylogue, a discussion among an undetermined number of interlocutors, “Restitutions” facilitates Derrida’s complex and conflicted reading of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” setting different lines of thought apart from and sometimes against one another. If individual voices may not immediately appear, over the course of the essay different perspectives regarding the texts by Heidegger and Schapiro emerge. These interpretations of Heidegger and Schapiro are rarely represented by one voice solely, as interruptions, asides, and supplementary thoughts intervene through other threads of text, fragmenting the strands of argument further. Some general observations, however, can be made concerning the different readings offered in “Restitutions.” First, in regard to Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art,” at different points, a spectrum of interpretations are offered, some building upon one another, often in defense of the reading presented by Schapiro in “The Still Life as a Personal Object.” One, Heidegger never concentrates on a given painting in “The Origin of the Work of Art” in the manner of an art critic or art historian. He is not describing a specific picture, not even a work of art, but, instead discussing the being-product of a product. Schapiro thus accuses Heidegger of doing something that is never his task and that he never attempts. Second, peasantry is irrelevant to what Heidegger has to say about shoes. The same could be said of city shoes. What Schapiro has to say about



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the particular shoes in Van Gogh’s painting is not germane to Heidegger’s discussion. Three, the truth presented is not peasant truth. It could be presented by any shoe, indeed, by any product. Again, the particular identity of the painting or of the shoes in the painting is not at stake for Heidegger. Four, Heidegger doesn’t speak of painting, because he lets the painting speak. For this textual thread, this would be worse than Schapiro’s mistake, but what is at stake, again, is not painting, but being-product. Five, Heidegger is using his example to open up a discussion of Verläasslichkeit or reliability. Schapiro again has untied the shoes from their context in Heidegger’s essay. Six, Heidegger’s association of the peasant with Van Gogh’s painting is for identificatory support, even if it brushes against projection. Seven, Heidegger was using the painting for the purposes of intuitive presentation, not illustration, as Schapiro suggests. Although I am not representing all the speculations provided in “Restitutions,” some of the contours to Derrida’s reading of “The Origin of the Work of Art” should at least be indicated. Another line of thinking in “Restitutions” defends Heidegger, pointing to numerous problems in Schapiro’s text. Schapiro presumes a notion of realism that accepts as a given that something depicted in a painting necessarily corresponds to some real object in the real world, a notion of mimetic realism that Heidegger’s text obliterates in making room for his discussion of aesthetics.6 As Derrida notes, [Schapiro] also gets wrong a Heideggerian argument which should ruin in advance his own restitution of the shoes to Van Gogh: art as “putting to work of truth” is neither an “imitation,” nor a “description” copying the “real,” nor a “reproduction,” whether it represents a singular thing or a general essence. For the whole of Schapiro’s case, on the other hand, calls on real shoes: the picture is supposed to imitate them, represent them, reproduce them. Their belonging has then to be determined as a belonging to a real or supposedly real subject, to an individual whose extremities, outside the picture, should not remain bare for long… 7

Schapiro presumes a fully identifiable, fully centered subject whose metaphysical underpinnings are never questioned. A different textual thread takes up another aspect to Schapiro’s misreading of Heidegger, pointing to the reliance on a translation of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” By not taking into consideration the German, Schapiro presents a reading of Heidegger suggesting that Van Gogh’s painting is serving as an illustration in his argument, instead of as an aid in intuitive presentation. Beyond problems between German and English that Schapiro ignores, he also ignores the distinctions in Heidegger’s philosophical terms. Another strand of text discusses how Schapiro has not read Heidegger’s passage in its context or ignores this context,

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something stated through the voices that try to defend Heidegger’s text from Schapiro’s simplistic reading. That said, inside this movement, Heidegger’s gesture, with all the craftsmanlike subtlety of a cobbler with a short awl, going quickly from inside to outside, speaks now of the picture, in it, now of something quite different, outside it. In a first movement and most importantly, the question which provokes the reference to the picture in no way concerns a work of art. In a manner of speaking the primary motivation of the passage does not concern painting. And yet, through this lacing movement we were talking about (from inside to outside, from outside to inside, his iron point passing through the surface of the leather or the canvas in both directions, pricking and pointing), the trajectory of the reference is divided and multiplied. In a way which is doubtless both wily and naïve, but following a necessity which Schapiro’s lawsuit seems to me to overlook.8

While not all of the threads invested in supporting Heidegger’s text agree, the passage on Van Gogh’s boots being the main, but not sole, site of contention, all the threads seem, in the end, to concur that Schapiro’s reading does a great deal of violence to Heidegger’s text, using a judicial tone and forensic methods in the process. Then there is the word evidently, the word clearly which comes in again later, when a picture is identified in a catalog, the words his own which several times so calmly declare property, propositions of the type “this is that” in which the copula ties a “real” predicate to a “painted” object. One is surprised that an expert should use all this dogmatic and precritical language. It all looks as though the hammering of the notions of self-evidence, clarity, and property was meant to resound very loudly to prevent us from hearing that nothing here is clear, or self-evident, or proper to anyone or anything whatsoever.9

Still, while Schapiro is several times the target for the ire of a particular voice in Derrida’s text, there remain voices that try to support Schapiro or, at least, present Schapiro as being less wrong than Heidegger in the attributions made concerning the painting by Van Gogh. Among the voices questioning Schapiro’s text, a reading emerges that presents “The Still Life as a Personal Object” as a personal object. That is to say, one of Derrida’s textual voices presents an interpretation of Schapiro’s essay on the still life, or nature mort (dead nature), as a gift to his deceased friend, Kurt Goldstein. The act is even likened by one of the voices to Van Gogh’s alleged gift of a part of his severed ear.10 In this interpretation, Schapiro’s essay enacts an act of restitution in taking back from Heidegger the boots he has appropriated for a rural rhetoric of the peasant, a rhetoric that from Schapiro’s perspective may be tied to the politics that drove Goldstein



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from Germany in 1933, just before Heidegger wrote the first version of “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Derrida’s text notes the context of Heidegger’s text, while offering a reading of Schapiro’s own act of interpretation as something personal within “The Still Life as a Personal Object.”11 In interpreting Van Gogh’s painting of boots as a painting of the artist’s own boots and noting that, at the time of the painting, Van Gogh was a man of the city, Schapiro presents a reading that returns the boots to a displaced urban dweller that arrived via Amsterdam from a foreign land. Or, rather, Schapiro projects Goldstein’s identity onto van Gogh to whom the boots are properly returned. Moreover, they are wrested from “Professor Heidegger” and his “rural pathos” to Goldstein, the individual who first noted the attempted annexation to peasantry. Even without a psycho-biographical reading of the context around Schapiro’s essay, the peculiar attribution made by Schapiro, that at the time Van Gogh painted the painting he was “a man of the city,” remains. As the textual voices in “Restitutions” work through Schapiro’s essay, playing with his rhetorical moves, as much as Heidegger’s are attentively read by them with care, the metaphysical presumptions grow around “The Still Life as a Personal Object.” In one direction, it leads to the aforementioned challenging of mimetic realism that Heidegger’s text offers. In another direction, however, it reaches a critical mass around the notion of the artist’s presence in the work. It is the final step in Schapiro’s assault on Heidegger’s alleged attribution of peasantry to the boots in Van Gogh’s painting. According to Schapiro, it is a presence that Heidegger overlooks in illustrating his point about truth and that Schapiro perceives clearly and retrieves through his act of attribution. At the end of the offensive, we will no longer be dealing with a detachable personal object (a personal item or a piece of the body), an object in short which would belong to Van Gogh without being confused with him, even if it were a phantom member. We would be in the presence of Van Gogh himself. The painting would manifest the “presence” of the artist himself in his “selfportrait,” not only “a piece of his own life” but a non-detachable piece and one which therefore drags his whole body with it, one of those “things inseparable from his body” and even from his upright, “erect” body.12

Derrida’s text lets the metaphysical assumptions arise and fall apart, leaving ruinous accumulations through which the textual strands pick. In particular, the textual threads note elements that open up to considerations informed by psychoanalytic theory, as well as echoing larger themes of Derrida’s work, such as the phantom limb and prosthesis. The declaration of the artist’s presence in the painting offers a claim that Derrida’s text exploits to further

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unsettle Schapiro’s claim to make the shoes not only Van Gogh’s, but also urban shoes. Whether the shoes are urbane to discuss is another question, as a different line of thinking suggests that both Heidegger and Schapiro have fallen short in some fashion. If Schapiro rushes too quickly and with a judicial tone of evidentiary self-truth, pointing finally to the presence of Van Gogh himself in the painting, something unverifiable, then Heidegger’s text also bears problems surrounding how the work by Van Gogh functions in his essay, as well as the loaded associations that accrue between painting and text, during Heidegger’s discussion of being-product. Both get the wrong shoe size. The boots do not fit in either case. That’s why… I did not say, like Heidegger, they are peasant shoes, but against him: nothing proves that they are peasant shoes (Schapiro’s only incontestable proposition, in my view), and I did not say, like Schapiro, they are the shoes of a city dweller and even of Van Gogh, but against him: nothing proves or can prove that “they are the shoes of the artist, by that time a man of the town and city.”13

The attribution of a definitive identity or general identity goes too far in either case. At another level, for one of the textual strings, the problem is not so much whether each text is adequate to itself, but, rather, the assumption of a pair in the first place. Here, the textual strands draw upon visual evidence, while also exploring idiomatic expressions involving the foot, feet, and shoes in French, as well as in English and German.14 The visual reading of Van Gogh’s painting of boots performed in the text, if perhaps humorous at points, is also insightful into the strangeness of Van Gogh’s painting. In particular, the text explores the strange placement of the lace in the lower right-hand corner that is normally reserved for the signature.15 The way that the boots seem to hover above ground is also noted, as well as the nondescript empty space around the boots, a space that suggests little about the wearer of the shoes. The last is something that Schapiro notes too, which makes his definitive attribution of the boots not only to Van Gogh, but also to “a man of the city” all the more strange. Schapiro’s interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting becomes even more strange and strained if we take into consideration his proximate essay published in 1968, “The Apples of Cézanne.” While Derrida notes Schapiro’s book on Van Gogh, the psychoanalytic reading that Schapiro offers of Cézanne’s still life paintings seems to have not drawn his attention. Granted, his critique of Schapiro is thorough enough, but there are a number of interesting elements that arise in a consideration of this essay written so near his engagement with Heidegger.



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Schapiro’s essay begins as an iconographic study, offering an analysis of the subject matter for an undated painting by Cézanne. The painting, which depicts four nude women and a man who offers one of them a basket of apples, had been attributed the subject matter of the Judgment of Paris. Schapiro points to the qualities that make the mythological subject an unlikely source, such as the basket of apples, instead of a singular apple, and, the inclusion of four women, instead of three.16 Using iconographical analysis, Schapiro suggests instead that Cézanne is depicting a pastoral feast, an established pictorial subject where nudity would be natural. Schapiro, however, sees a displaced eroticism in the basket of apples. This leads to a psychoanalytic reading of Cézanne’s memories of his childhood friendship with Émile Zola, focusing on one story in particular. As a boy, Cézanne had stood up to a group of bullies who were taunting the younger Zola. The next day Cézanne brought Zola a basket of apples. Along with letters between Zola and Cézanne, as well as classical texts, Schapiro uses his evidence to read the apple as a symbol for the unexpressed, unfulfilled homoerotic attraction that Cézanne bore towards Zola, one displaced through his depiction of apples. When Zola later denigrates Cézanne’s paintings, the rejection is thought of in terms of Zola rejecting his apples in painted form. In this rejected gift of painted apples, Schapiro again reads the still life not only as a personal object, but one that also mirrors personal life. A number of points appear bearing relevance to Derrida’s reading of “The Still Life as a Personal Object” in “Restitutions.” First, Schapiro points to how objects can take on a personal meaning for an artist that goes beyond the everyday, yet emerges from an experience of them on an everyday basis. In a nutshell, he offers a reading of the still life as a personal object that is the basis for the essay “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” an essay Schapiro cites in “The Apples of Cézanne.” The painter’s habitual selection comes in time to stand for the artist and is recognizably his. The imitators, in devotion to Cézanne as a composer, represent the same apples and cloth and table, in spite of their belief that the structure of form and color alone gives Cézanne’s painting what value it has. This involuntary homage to the objects does not carry with it, however, an insight into the choice itself. The latter is taken for granted, and even if Cézanne’s choice is admitted to be personal, it is not explored for deeper meanings or grounds.17

The notion of the object here, in its personal significance to the individual, is an idea not wholly unrelated to the notion of the fetish, something explored in “Restitutions” at a number of points.18 Second, Schapiro points to the way that not every still life is filled with personal significance to the artist. Again, this seems reasonable and not at all incompatible with psychoanalytic theory.

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A cigar sometimes is a cigar. Third, Schapiro notes the speculative nature of his assertions. While offering a reading of Cézanne’s early still life paintings as a manifestation of repressed homoerotic feelings for his childhood friend Émile Zola, Schapiro notes that such a reading is only speculation. This sketchy formulation, suggested by psychoanalytic theory, leaves much unexplained, I must admit, in the painter’s devotion to still-life. It abstracts a single factor from a largely hidden, complex and changing process of artistic work. It does not tell us why and how Cézanne shifted from the direct expression of his feelings in erotic pictures that include some remarkably uninhibited images, to his expression by means of innocent disguising objects.19

In doing so, Schapiro demonstrates an admitted fallibility that is absent in the declarative certainty displayed in “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” an infallibility that is one of the earlier text’s fallible points, according to Derrida’s textual voices. Fourth, Schapiro cites Van Gogh as an artist who produced still life paintings associated with the peasantry. In distinguishing Van Gogh from Cézanne, Schapiro writes, “Van Gogh, too, painted still-lifes with apples; but their heaping and abundance tell of the peasant’s harvest rather than of the intimacy of the bourgeois home.”20 Such a reading supports Heidegger’s association of peasantry with Van Gogh’s painting of boots and goes directly against Schapiro’s definitive attribution of the boots to a man of the city. It also offers a painting that speaks, telling of the peasant’s abundant harvest. Fifth, Schapiro demonstrates a familiarity with French and German, as well as Latin. This is significant, for it would seem that Schapiro relied upon an English translation of “The Origin of the Work of Art” given his focus on “illustration” as a word in his critique of Heidegger. In using “illustration,” Schapiro conflates two distinct German words in Heidegger’s text, something facilitated by drawing upon the English translation.21 Schapiro could have read the German essay and been attentive to the distinction in terms. Sixth, while noting Cézanne’s earlier still life paintings as disguised symbols of erotic feelings, the later paintings of apples hold an ambiguous place, at one moment just formal experiments and in another moment as personal as any of Cézanne’s still life paintings and bearing the signs of displaced erotic anxieties. When noting the still life painting as non-erotic object, as impersonal, Schapiro curiously brings philosophy into the conversation. The later still-lifes of apples and rumpled tablecloths have no such allusiveness. We cannot so readily make of them anecdotes or symbols of a personal state. They have seemed to many observers no more than arbitrary assemblages of the studio, pure instrumentalities of the painter, like the casual objects with which



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a philosopher illustrates on his desk a point about perception and empirical knowledge.22

Schapiro presents philosophy as a field that illustrates ideas, but also takes a casual relationship with the objects it uses to make its point, a point resonating with the suggested mistaken use of Van Gogh’s painting by “Professor Heidegger” to casually illustrate his ideas. It is, however, also a question of authority, of a one-who-knows that is involved in being able to make the determination of when a still life is personal and when it is not, something that touches on institutional problems around art history and its reliance on the juridical and forensic.23 Seventh, Schapiro again reads the presence of the artist in the work, going so far as to see a physiognomic portrait of Cézanne, evoking Cézanne’s late still life paintings in the process. I venture to say the apple was a congenial object, a fruit which in the gamut of qualities in nature’s products attracted him through its analogies to what he felt was his own native being. In reading the accounts of Cézanne by his friends, I cannot help thinking that in his preference for the still-life of apples—firm, compact, centered organic objects of a commonplace yet subtle beauty, set on a plain table with the unsmoothed cloth ridged and hollowed like a mountain— there is an acknowledged kinship of the painter and his objects, an avowal of a gifted withdrawn man who is more at home with the peasants and landscape of his province than with its upper class and their sapless culture. This felt affinity, apart from any resemblance to his bald head, explains perhaps the impulse to represent an isolated apple beside a drawing of himself.24

Schapiro’s investment in the presence of the artist in the work of art points to a whole other set of stakes in painting than those posed by Derrida. Where “The Apples of Cézanne” doesn’t echo the problems found in “The Still Life as a Personal Object,” it only exacerbates them further. While claiming the late still life paintings bear no extra significance, they bear the given significance of the artist himself, becoming anthropomorphic, physiognomic, revelatory self-portraits. If admirable in its eclectic usage of iconographic study, formal analysis, psychoanalysis, social history, and semiotics, “The Apples of Cézanne” wields these tools upon a foundation that is markedly unquestioned, murkily assuming a fully retrievable, fully present subject whose presence is born(e) in art objects whose identities are their own, both verifiable and stable.25 It assumes a way of knowing that has not questioned thoroughly the categories upon which its knowledge is based and becomes susceptible to the form of questioning posed by Derrida and Heidegger.

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Unlike Schapiro, Derrida’s reading of Heidegger is not seeking the same goals, whether it is a simple matter of identifying whose boots are depicted in a painting by Van Gogh or seeking restitution for a deceased friend. Instead of setting up terms for an open and shut case, deciding terms for the trial and then proceeding to summary judgment by providing unexamined documentation, Derrida slowly unfurls a complex and open-ended reading of Heidegger, a series of inquiries and appeals, pointing beyond Schapiro’s limited reading to a reading that is, in part, opened up by Heidegger’s text. While the problematic aspect of Heidegger’s evocation of a peasant woman is explored and exploited by Derrida, he also points to the way that the theme of the rural is not wholly inappropriate given the example of Van Gogh. Of course you have to analyze the choice, and the limits, of the exemplary model for such a discourse on The Origin of the Work of Art. And you have to ask analogous questions about Heidegger’s poetic models. But still what remains is that the risks of projection were more limited. The “projection” is at work in the choice of the model rather than in the analysis of it, once the exemplary corpus is that of Van Gogh. A certain analogy between Heidegger and Van Gogh, whatever its limits from other points of view, a certain community of “pathos” paradoxically provided a support for identification which reduced by so much the risks of “projection,” of hallucinatory delirium. The “pathetic” paragraph on the silent call of the earth is consonant, in another correspondence, with this or that letter of Van Gogh.26

The rural, along with the artisanal, hand-work, and other hand products are used as examples to counter the negative force of technology in Heidegger’s texts on a number of occasions, as Derrida maps in “Heidegger’s Hand.” Written near the time of “Restitutions,” an essay it refers to, it offers some insights that help bring into focus aspects of Derrida’s questions regarding Heidegger’s philosophy. Derrida’s essay considers the role of the hand in Heidegger’s philosophy across a number of texts from Being and Time to “What Is Thinking?” In particular, Derrida points to a distinction between the hand and hands that marks Heidegger’s thinking. The hand of man: you will certainly have noticed that Heidegger does not only think the hand as a very singular thing that rightfully belongs only to man. He always thinks the hand in the singular, as if man did not have two hands but, this monster, a single hand. Not a single organ in the middle of his body, like the Cyclops who had a single eye in the middle of his forehead, although this representation, which leaves something to be desired, also gives one to think. No, the hand of man, this signifies that we are no longer dealing with prehensile organs that resemble hands; the man of the typewriter and of technology in gen-



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eral uses two hands. But the man who speaks and the man who writes by hand, as one says, is he not the monster with a single hand?27

The hand is about showing, not simply in an indexical, demonstrative fashion, but in a conceptual way. The hand becomes a distinguishing feature, independent and different from hands. The hand points to a higher relation, a more reified state of being. The hand points there. The hand points to the there of there-being. Not to be confused with actual hands, the hand represents a form of thinking, a way of being. Derrida notes how the hand works its way through Heidegger’s writing, following closely a number of different texts to trace out the trajectory of his reading. Before initiating his reading of Heidegger’s use of the hand and related terms, Derrida mentions Heidegger’s own hands, or, rather, the representation of Heidegger’s hands in a number of photographs. The issue of L’Herne in which I first published “Geschlecht I” bore on its cover a photograph of Heidegger holding his pen with both hands above a manuscript— a studied and significant choice. Even if he never used it, Nietzsche was the first thinker of the West to have a typewriter, of which we have a photograph. Heidegger himself could write only with the pen, with the hand of a craftsman and not a mechanic, as the text we are going to look at prescribes. Since then I have studied all the published photographs of Heidegger, especially in an album bought in Freiburg when I gave a lecture on Heidegger there in 1979. The play and theater of hands in the album would deserve an entire seminar. Were I not to renounce this project, I would stress the deliberately craftsmanlike staging of the hand play, of the monstration and demonstration that is exhibited there, whether it be a matter of the handling of the pen, of the wielding of the cane, which points rather than supports, or of the water bucket near the fountain. The demonstration of hands is as gripping in the accompanying discourse. On the cover of the catalogue, the only thing that overflows the frame, the frame of the window but also of the photograph is Heidegger’s hand.28

The hand breaking the frame provides a nice visual play on ideas that Derrida explores in his essay “Parergon,” which offers another facet to his engagement with Heidegger’s aesthetics. Indeed, Derrida’s consideration of photographs of Heidegger and what they give to be thought provides another manifestation of the supplemental logic embedded in the parergon.29 The parergon is something that frames the ergon or work. Not essential to the work, the parergon helps make the work a work. The frame on a painting, clothing on statues, and columns on buildings are the three examples that Derrida cites from Kant in his reading of the Critique of Judgment. The shoe offers, in this context, another instance of the parergonal, an article of clothing, something detachable that Derrida explores at junctures in “Restitutions,” along with

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other forms of clothing, including gloves, while a photograph offers another supplemental object, something seemingly marginal, yet bearing significance, that is explored by Derrida as a way of opening up the questions he wants to pose to Heidegger’s texts. At the same time, the photographs point to a particular artifice in Heidegger’s self-presentation, something marking his visual representation as an artifice, even as Derrida questions Heidegger’s style as a writer, its affects and effects, as well as their maneuverings through and around particular words and phrases. Derrida’s focus on the staging of Heidegger pictorially and rhetorically sets up a tension with Heidegger’s framing of the hand in terms of authenticity. As with “Restitutions,” Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s work is conflicted. On the one hand, Derrida points to the way that Heidegger’s views on the hand repeat a privileging of the human over the animal, a distinction that Derrida focuses a great deal of attention on in his later work as part of a critique of what he terms at one point carno-phallo-logo-centrism.30 Even in the shift towards Dasein, there remains a trace of the metaphysical hierarchy that tries to place humanity above the animal. On the other hand, the difference between the Hand and hands also leads Derrida to a consideration of how some of these questions relate to sexual difference and its place within Heidegger’s ontology. In a word, to save time, let me just say that it is about the hand, about the hand of man, about the relation of the hand to speech and to thought. And even if the context is not at all classical, at issue is an opposition that is posed very classically, very dogmatically and metaphysically (even if the context is far from dogmatic and metaphysical), between a man’s hand and an ape’s hand. Also at issue is a discourse that says everything about the hand or the gift as a site of sexual desire, as one says of the Geschlecht in sexual difference.31

“Heidegger’s Hand” continues Derrida’s reading of Heidegger’s use of the word Geschlect, a word that Derrida does not translate, but points to as being able to “be translated by ‘sex,’ ‘race,’ ‘species,’ ‘genus,’ ‘gender,’ ‘stock,’ ‘family,’ ‘generation’ or ‘genealogy,’ or ‘community.’”32 “Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference: Geschlect I” explores the role of sexuality in Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein, noting the few times the subject is mentioned in Sein und Zeit, while finding an intriguing discussion within the 1928 Marburg lecture that anchors Derrida’s speculations. While indicating how sexuality and gender would be seen as something not worthy of a founding study of being, Derrida points to how Heidegger’s text suggests that Being, before being marked by gender difference and the coercion into a dualistic system of gender identity, bears sexual (pre)differentiation, a sexu-



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ality before (dual and dueling) sexuality, before being categorized, labeled, socialized, and so forth.33 Derrida also discusses the role of the neutral or neuter in Heidegger, as positing a position before binary sexual difference and the understanding of sexuality proposed by anthropology and psychology.34 If Dasein as such belongs to neither of the two sexes, that does not mean that it is deprived of sex. On the contrary: here one must think of a pre-differential, or rather a pre-dual, sexuality—which, as we shall see later, does not necessarily mean unitary, homogeneous, and undifferentiated. And beginning with that sexuality, more originary than the dyad, one may try to think at its source a “positivity” and “potency” that Heidegger is careful not to call “sexual,” fearing no doubt to reintroduce the binary logic that anthropology and metaphysics always assigns to the concept of sexuality.35

The issues at stake in both “Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference” and “Heidegger’s Hand” echo the stakes sounded in different junctures of “Restitutions,” initiating the trains of thought signaled by some of the themes found in “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Questions around the hand and sexual difference mark the shift from peasant to peasant woman noted in “Restitutions,” a shift from the neutral/neuter to the feminine, a shift from a position before sexual difference to one marked by gender difference. Derrida notes the times that sexual difference is marked, especially when it is a matter of the feminine within Heidegger’s text, notably in relation to the discussion of things.36 Even before the epigraph to “Restitutions,” in the margins, Derrida notes that the polylogue is comprised of “n+1 feminine voice(s).” Moreover, it is a question not only about sexual difference, but also the marking of that difference by binary thought, something that gets challenged in another guise in Derrida’s text. In the seemingly marginal discussions, “Restitutions” presents a textual voice that questions whether Van Gogh has painted a pair of shoes. On visual evidence, one textual strand offers a formal analysis that suggests Van Gogh potentially depicted two left shoes. On another occasion, it is suggested that they are shoes from different pairs. Over the course of the text, the question of the pair becomes complicated further. For Derrida, the assumption of a pair cannot safely be made in this case, if it ever can be made. The polylogue explores limit possibilities to great lengths. What seems like an innocent question becomes a trap for Heidegger and Schapiro both, and for all viewers who would immediately ascribe a pair, let alone an identity, to the two shoes in Van Gogh’s painting. Questions resonating with Derrida’s later texts on sexual difference come to the fore in the midst of these discussions of pairs, anticipating the questions of sexual difference addressed in the texts on Geschlect.

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To which sex are these shoes due? This is not exactly the same question as that posed earlier, when we were wondering whether or not there was a symbolic equivalence between the supposed “symbol” “shoe” and such-and-such a genital organ, or whether only a differential and idiomatic syntax could arrest bisexuality, it is not the same question and yet the attribution of shoes (in painting) to a subject-wearer (bearer) —of shoes and of a sex —a masculine or feminine sex, this attribution is not without its resonance with the first question. Let us not forget that The Origin deals with the essence of truth, the truth of essence and the abyss (Abgrund) which plays itself out there like the “veiled” destiny which transfixes being. Graft sex onto the shoes. This graft is not arrested by The Origin: sometimes the indeterminacy slips by force of language toward the masculine, sometimes the feminine wins out. There is some peasant(liness) and the peasant woman, but never a peasant man. For Schapiro, it comes down without any possible argument on the side of the masculine (“a man of the town and city”), Vincent van Gogh’s sex being in no doubt for the signatory of the “Still-life.”37

Given the marginal role of sexuality in Heidegger’s text, Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger can shift the terms upon which it occurs, allowing for the introduction of psychoanalysis and other fields that did not bear a relevance to Heidegger’s philosophy, but nonetheless lead to important questions relevant not only to the particular question concerning his reading of a painting by Van Gogh, but to larger questions about ontology, especially in regard to sexuality. Derrida’s investigation of terms bearing a sexual resonance permeates his work, especially in the period around the essays comprising La vérité en peinture. Both Glas and The Post Card share this with “Restitutions.”38 Not the lone means for Derrida to try to unsettle Heideggerian thought, it is also important to understand the ways that Heideggerian thought unsettles psychoanalysis. One gets a glimpse of this in the moments where Derrida brings the texts of Freud into proximity with Heidegger, something that happens in “Restitutions” around the term unheimlich, the notion of the fetish and the Thing, and the da shared between Dasein and Freud’s fort/da.39 In this frame, the presumption of a pair not only renounces the potential visual evidence, that perhaps two left shoes are depicted, but also points to a larger question that Derrida probes regarding the preference for the two over the one, when it comes to the shoe. A pair of shoes is more easily treated as a utility than a single shoe or two shoes which aren’t a pair. The pair inhibits at least, if it does not prevent, the “fetishizing” movement, it rivets things to use; to “normal” use; it shoes better and makes things walk according to the law. It is perhaps in order to exclude the question of a certain usefulness, or of a so-called perverse usage, that Hei-



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degger and Schapiro denied themselves the slightest doubt as to the parity or pairedness of these two shoes. They bound them together in order to bind them to the law of normal usage. They bound, chained, repressed the diabolical, that which would be diabolical about a duplicity without parity, a double without a pair. They ligatured a worrying dismemberment in order to limit it. This was a condition of their doing justice to the truth they thought they owed in painting. What would they have done, try to imagine it, with two shoes for the same foot, or with a shoe even more solitary than these two here?40

Simultaneously avoiding the potential sexuality of the singular shoe as fetish object and not posing problematic questions concerning identity and utility, the rigid ascription of a pair already begins a stabilizing process that the painting does not necessarily warrant, something Derrida’s allusions to Antonin Artaud’s “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society” also suggest.41 Nevertheless, in the end, none of Derrida’s textual voices want to claim the pair of shoes or even risk claiming them a pair, at least as it pertains to the painting identified by Schapiro, even as some textual voices seem skeptical of any pair, including the pairing of Heidegger and Schapiro. The shoes, regardless, never fit. The size is always wrong, no matter who puts them on, ill-fitting whomever tries, no matter the pointing, yet defenseless from all claims to ownership, even those of Heidegger, Schapiro, Bataille, Artaud, and others, no matter the point. The impossibility of putting painted boots on a real, identifiable subject becomes Derrida’s acquittal of Heidegger, a charge denied in the first place, and becomes, at the same time, a fundamental problem to the discipline of art history that remains still largely unaddressed, pushed to the margins whenever it enacts a history of art as the artist or treats the work as a window, mirror, or other framing device for reality in studying its history. In closing, I want to leave any thoughts of art history behind for the moment and return to the photographs of Heidegger in order to conclude these speculations on some of the currents flowing through Derrida’s “Restitutions.” If, at one level, Derrida’s “Restitutions” presents an experimentation in style that allows for a multiplicity of voices, views, and arguments to be made simultaneously, then, at another level it is also an experimentation in form that attempts to draw upon some of the possibilities of literature. As a form of writing, literature asserts its crafted fictional nature, namely, that it is, in the end, textual representation, words representing thoughts—consciousness in the patterns of black letters on a white page. Given Derrida’s investment in literature and poetry as a means of challenging philosophy, I would like to turn to a writer who also considers Heidegger’s work, though with a little less sensitivity than Derrida. The photographs of Heidegger appear in a work of fiction, Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard, a writer whose formal style is

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comprised predominantly of interior monologues by pessimistic characters who relate accretionary stories about other individuals who, while often the main characters in the novel, appear only in language, in the stories of the narrator. Many of the novels appear with no paragraph break, as is the case in Old Masters. In the midst of a lengthy diatribe against Heidegger that should be read in its entirety, there is a passage that brings together some of the stakes at play in Derrida’s text and his larger reading of Heidegger, initiated through the contemplation of photographs. I have seen a series of photographs which a supremely talented woman photographer made of Heidegger, who in all of them looked like a retired bloated staff officer, Reger said; in these photographs Heidegger is just climbing out of bed, or Heidegger is climbing into bed, or Heidegger is sleeping, or waking up, putting on his underpants, pulling on his socks, taking a nip of grape juice, stepping out of his log cabin and looking towards the horizon, whittling away at his stick, putting on his cap, taking off his cap, holding his cap in his hands, opening out his legs, raising his head, lowering his head, putting his right hand in his wife’s left hand while his wife is putting her left hand in his right hand, walking in front of his house, walking at the back of his house, walking towards his house, walking away from his house, reading, eating, spooning his soup, cutting a slice of bread (baked by himself), opening a book (written by himself), closing a book (written by himself), bending down, straightening up, and so on, Reger said. Enough to make you throw up.42

NOTES 1. Not the final essay written, though. La vérité en Peinture formally poses whether the book includes four essays and an introduction or introductory essay or if the book includes five essays, given the length and content of the essay. Not quite four essays, not quite five essays, the opening essay, “Passe Partout” humorously offers a key, a means of passing through, while questioning the very concept of a key that would unlock a text or a mode of engaging with a text that would not have to negotiate its passage through the text in question. The essay functions as a parergon itself, an idea that is brought into the midst of the textual conversation that Derrida enacts in “La vérité en pointure.” See Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing (Pointure),” trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, in The Truth in Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 343. The parergon is one of the concepts explored by Derrida in “Parergon” in The Truth in Painting, 37–82, in particular. 2.  Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 17–87. Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, ed. George Braziller (New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 1977), 135–42.



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  3.  Meyer Schapiro, “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of StillLife,” in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers, ed. George Braziller (New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 2011), 1–38.  4. Jacques Derrida, “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference,” trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 7–26. Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II),” trans. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 27–62.   5.  See Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 21–53. Preziosi uses Van Gogh as an example of the tendency in art history to treat the artist and work as being one and the same.   6.  Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), 36–37.   7.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 312.   8.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 300–1.   9.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 313. 10.  The gift also becomes the topic for part of the polylogue, picking up on Derrida’s larger investigation of the gift, one that, in passing through the Heideggerian text, considers the Es gibt in Heidegger’s work. Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 342. See also Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). The French edition, Heidegger et la question: De l’esprit et autres essais, includes the essays “Différence sexuelle, différence ontologique (Geschlecht I)” and “La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II).” See Jacques Derrida, “Différence sexuelle, différence ontologique (Geschlecht I)” and “La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)” in Heidegger et la question: De l’esprit et autres essais (Paris: Flammarion, 1990), 145–72 and 173–222. Both of these essays will be considered in the last section of this essay. Lastly, on the gift, see Jacques Derrida, Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 11.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 271–75. 12.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 369. 13.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 364. 14.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 271–74. 15.  Derrida plays on the French lacet and its potential meanings in regard to laces and traps. The lace becomes an important signifier in Derrida’s text as he loosely ties together the different insights performed by the textual voices being enacted. Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 277. 16.  Schapiro works through possible identities that would make the inclusion of a fourth woman consistent with the Judgment of Paris, such as the fourth woman being Helen of Troy, but no reading seems to account for other discrepancies from the subject, such as the basket of apples. 17.  Schapiro, “Apples of Cézanne,” 24–25. 18.  “Restitutions of the Truth” broaches the topic of the fetish at several points. See Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 266–70, 332–6. I would also like to thank

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Colby Dickinson, whose comments to an earlier version of this essay focused on the fetish within the spectral economies of Derrida’s hauntology. 19.  Schapiro, “Apples of Cézanne,” 12. 20.  Schapiro, “Apples of Cézanne,” 15. 21.  Veranschaulichung and bildliche Darstellung. See Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 32, and Martin Heidegger, “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes,” in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), 18, and compare with Schapiro, “The Still Life,” 135. Also see Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 294–95. 22.  Schapiro, “Apples of Cézanne,” 14. 23.  It also raises questions relating to the power structure of the analyst and relationship within the tradition of psychoanalysis. 24.  Schapiro, “Apples of Cézanne,” 27. 25.  It is curious to note that Schapiro is at his most perceptive in describing a society that is unstable and ambiguous. That is to say, in his reading of Impressionism and its reframing of the leisure activities of the bourgeoisie, Schapiro, a pioneer in what may be terms a social art history, offers an interpretation of Impressionist painting as providing visual insight into the way identity was at stake in early modernity. See Meyer Schapiro, “The Nature of Abstract Art,” in Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers, ed. George Braziller (New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 2011), 185–212. 26. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 368. 27.  Derrida, “Heidegger’s Hand,” 49–50. One could juxtapose this discussion of the hand with Jean-Luc Nancy’s ruminations on the hand and aesthetic creation in his essay “Painting in the Grotto.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, “Painting in the Grotto,” in The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 69–79. 28. Derrida, Psyche, 35–36. 29. Derrida, significantly, discusses photography on two other occasions. See Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection, trans. David Wills (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), and Jacques Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 30.  On Derrida and the relation between the human and the animal, see Jacques Derrida, “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” in Who Comes After the Subject?, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), 96–119, and Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 31. Derrida, Psyche, 35. 32. Derrida, Psyche, 28. 33.  This could be thought of as a sexuality of alterity or, rather, an always already altered sexuality, a sexuality that remains other to later definitions. Yet, at the same time it should not be seen as a “pure” or simply undifferentiated sexuality, not an originary sexuality, but, rather, where sexuality springs forward. It is a realm of potential sexualities existing before a world where sexual identity and identification delimits sexuality. It is a question of sexual difference without differentiation. On Derrida and questions of gender and sexuality, see Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald, “Interview: Choreographies,” Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 55–76,



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and Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32. 34.  On Blanchot and the neutral see Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 298–306. 35.  Derrida, “Geschlecht I,” 14. 36.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 306–7. 37.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 306. 38.  Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), and Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 39.  Jacques Derrida, “To Speculate—on Freud,” in The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 259–409. 40.  Derrida,“Restitutions of the Truth,” 332–33. 41. “Restitutions of the Truth” opens with an unattributed citation from Artaud’s essay, which is finally returned to and attributed at the end of the essay. See Derrida,“Restitutions of the Truth,” 257 and 379–80. Derrida uses a quote from Artaud in the epigraph to “Heidegger’s Hand.” See Derrida, Psyche, 27. 42. Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy, trans. Ewald Osers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 45.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blanchot, Maurice. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Bernhard, Thomas. Old Masters: A Comedy. Translated by Ewald Osers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography. Translated by Jeff Fort. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. ———. “‘Eating Well’ or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Who Comes After the Subject?, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, 96–119. New York: Routledge, 1991. ———. “Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference.” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 2. Translated by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 7–26. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. Given Time I: Counterfeit Money. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ———. Glas. Translated by John P. Leavey, Jr., and Richard Rand. Lincoln: of Nebraska Press, 1986. ———. “Heidegger’s Hand (Geschlecht II).” In Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Vol. 2. Translated by Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, 27–62. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. “The Law of Genre.” Translated by Avital Ronell. Glyph 7 (1980): 202–32.

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———. Of Spirit. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. ———. Heidegger et la question: De l’esprit et autres essais. Paris: Flammarion, 1990. ———. “Parergon.” In The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, 37–82. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing (Pointure).” In The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, 255–382. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. Right of Inspection. Translated by David Wills. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998. ———. The Post Card. Translated by Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. “To Speculate—on Freud.” In The Post Card. Translated by Alan Bass, 259–409. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Derrida, Jacques, and Christie V. McDonald. “Interview: Choreographies.” Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 55–76. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 17–87. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Nancy, Jean-Luc Nancy. “Painting in the Grotto.” In The Muses. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, 69–79. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Preziosi, Donald. Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Schapiro, Meyer. “The Apples of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still-Life.” In Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers, edited by George Braziller, 1–38. New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 2011. ———. “The Nature of Abstract Art.” In Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers, edited by George Braziller, 185–212. New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 2011. ———. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, edited by George Braziller, 135–42. New York: George Braziller Incorporated, 1977.

Chapter 6

Van Gogh, Heidegger, and the Attuned Life Stephen A. Erickson Pauline E. Erickson

Our essay unfolds on the basis of a distinction between “toolbox” and “medium” views of language. In accordance with the former view, language is a set of instruments to be used to accomplish varying tasks. In accordance with the medium theory, language, and here we include artistic impression through painting and music, can either reveal a transcendent dimension of reality or express an inner dimension of the person. It may also do both simultaneously. We locate the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in the “medium” category. Each was concerned with capturing an underlying reality present, yet obscured in our normal and routine experience: for Van Gogh by capturing Nature, for Heidegger by exploring Being. Obvious complexities and controversies are endemic to the interpretation of what Heidegger intends by Being. We shall interpret Heidegger’s Being as inextricably involving meaning. Thus whatever else Heidegger conveys, on our account he is exploring and hoping to explicate meaning itself, especially in its extra-linguistic dimensions. We also reflect upon significant similarities in each of our two major thinkers: a concern with the rural and untrammeled environment, an avoidance of merely traditional modes of theological understanding, and a strong sense of art as having the capacity to transcend conceptual thought in a revelatory way. How to bring Van Gogh and Heidegger together in our reflections, one might ask? And, more importantly, why even undertake such an exploration? Let us begin by addressing the first question. Most of those who make the connection between Van Gogh and Heidegger do so through a reference Heidegger makes in his “The Origin of the Work of Art” to a painting by Vincent van Gogh depicting a pair of beaten-down 117

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shoes, shoes belonging to a peasant woman, according to Heidegger.1 In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger is addressing what he sees to be the most important question to understanding art: What is the origin and nature of art? Only if the answer to this twofold question can be reached, can we begin to understand the various dimensions of art as they play out in history and in our lives. And it is quite specifically through Heidegger’s approach to Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes that this understanding is first disclosed. His choice is by no means arbitrary or accidental. To explore where the nature of art can be found, Heidegger seeks to highlight and endorse “the simple life” where a connection to the soil provides a necessary grounding for life in this world. Taking Van Gogh’s painting of the worn shoes as an example, Heidegger reflects on the kind of life the image of the shoes evokes. He writes: “The soles have slid along the loneliness of the footpath running through the field in the descending night.”2 There is no cultural emphasis in the life portrayed, nor of a religion or of a transcendent world. According to Heidegger, the shoes simply speak of a life grounded in the soil of the homeland, and within that is revealed the unavoidable cycle of birth and death. By viewing a work of art, it is not only an environmental image that is engendered, according to Heidegger, but a much deeper meaning is being revealed as well, namely, the meaning of our most fundamental existence. Our existence and its meaning are caught up in the particular world that we inhabit, a world consisting not simply in a set of proximate objects, but in a way of being open and engaged, that reveals various environmentally relevant items to us. Not the least of these relevant items is our relatedness to ourselves as mortal beings. For Heidegger the artwork and the artist are not so much separated into distinct components: “creator” and “creation.” Rather, these two exist in a much more intimate relationship with each other where the one becomes the occasion and impetus for the other. A mutual reciprocity arises that is far more fundamental than notions such as producer and product, inspiration and response. The artist does not have complete control of what is being engendered. As the “creation” comes into focus, “art” itself becomes the force that gradually comes to control the actions of the artist and, thus, greatly influences the eventual outcome. “Neither is without the other. Nevertheless, neither is the sole support for the other,” Heidegger claims.3 It may be best to understand the dynamic of this reciprocity as involving revelation and its reception, a reception that is absorbed and conveyed rather than created. But revelation cannot altogether dominate. Without such reception there could not have been a revelation in the first place. A revelation received by no one is no revelation at all. This is the grounds and the core of the reciprocity involved.



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One has to question why Heidegger was so focused on the painting of a pair of tired-looking peasant shoes. (See Figure 1.) A partial answer is that Heidegger was on the warpath against cosmopolitan life and the shallow sophistication he thought it brought in its wake. Focus upon the Van Gogh painting was still another way to fight this battle, even though Heidegger was probably wrong to assign the shoes to a particular peasant woman. The shoes in the painting more likely than not were Van Gogh’s own shoes, according to some experts, among them Meyer Schapiro. In his essay, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh” (1968), Schapiro claims that Heidegger’s interpretation was a manufactured construction, and that we should see the painting more in a historical context, simply as the worn shoes of the owner, Vincent van Gogh himself.4 In the wake of this controversy, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida also entered the argument about the meaning of Van Gogh’s shoes. In his “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing” [Pointure] (1978), he claims that the portrayed shoes might not even be a pair and that there is no way to prove whom they belonged to. They are what they are on the canvas, naked things without usefulness, stripped of their use-value.5 Other “readings” of Van Gogh’s painting are also possible, even to some considerable extent viable. But we will not pause to consider them, for what we have already opened for further consideration is an underlying indeterminacy regarding interpretation itself, a circumstance that Heidegger himself both embraces in his special way and uses to his advantage. Had Van Gogh lived to read Heidegger on such matters, it is quite likely that he would have agreed, for it was in the nature of Van Gogh’s painterly expressionism to absorb ambiguity rather than to attempt to overcome it. A further answer to the question of why Heidegger chose to highlight this particular work of Van Gogh is that Heidegger embraced the traditional, and was very suspicious of new advances in science and technology that were making their entrance into early twentieth-century Germany. Revelations were to be sought in the “ordinary,” not in the novel and cutting edge. But again, let us not let these considerations of interpretation come in the way of our argument. It is enough to comprehend that Heidegger’s Van Gogh was revealing a rural world of existence in a number of its interlocking dimensions. Though we would have been remiss not to mention this much discussed link between Heidegger and Van Gogh, it is not primary to our sense of how best to bring them together. And this brings us to our second question: Why even undertake this exploration? Why bother? As we have indicated, there has been a long-running disagreement between those who believe that language is primarily a toolbox and set of instruments for “dealing” with things, and those who experience language as a medium through which something gets revealed or expressed, either from

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a place beyond us, thus through us, or from somewhere deep within us. The toolbox faction appears to have prevailed, as can be seen from recent works coming from philosophers of language and also from the world of abstract expressionism and its many variants and successors. What seems to be most prized in these kinds of settings are dexterity, facility, experimentation, and inventiveness. Tool and “object” become entangled and fuse, thereby confusing those who analyze them. Though we do not wish to make an exclusive and irrevocable choice, we ourselves are far more sympathetic with the pre-abstract expressionist view of language as a medium. Not only this, we view language in an expanded way so as to include other visual arts and music as well. It is very clear to us that both Van Gogh and Heidegger assumed the inclusion of these avenues as part of the realm of “language.” Both the philosopher and the artist attribute a revelatory, very often narrative nature to these modes of expression. So often they reveal various worlds, thus the historical comings and goings of peoples. Returning briefly to the famous and variously interpreted painting of the shoes, we can all agree that this painting is less about a pair of shoes than about the person wearing such shoes. A personal and not altogether transparent world comes to expression through them. Heidegger argued that there is a depth, mystery, and hiddenness to such realities. It exits behind the initial and often persistent and conventional appearance of common “things.” In this regard Heidegger himself thought that the philosophical tradition had missed the mark. It had understood things as (1) substances with properties or bearers of traits;6 or as (2) the manifold of sense perceptions;7 or as (3) formed matter.8 Heidegger’s decision to illustrate his own theory of things through “art,” and specifically with the Van Gogh painting, was clearly meant to illustrate his point, that traditional theories have been inadequate and misleading. Heidegger also hoped to make the reader and viewer reflect upon the owner of the shoes differently, and not through various well-worn philosophical abstractions. We are meant to experience the toil and sweat of the owner of the shoes, an owner caught up and involved in a world, rather than focusing only on the visual image of the painted object. In this way the painting became “language” and both Van Gogh and Heidegger deeply understood that art undergone as “language” was genuinely revelatory. How might an underlying, non-conceptually saturated reality be captured; how might it be expressed, how could it reveal itself, and thus be available to human beings? Both Van Gogh and Heidegger were obsessed with such matters, as were many other thinkers. Friedrich Nietzsche and the composer Gustav Mahler were among them. The famous English musicologist Deryck Cooke, for example, argued in his 1959 book, The Language of Music, that music is essentially a language of the emotions.9 He concluded that compos-



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ers throughout history had tended to choose the same musical phrasing to express similar feelings or dramatic situations or, as Heidegger might say, to express similar underlying moods and attunements. Further, Dr. Gachet, Van Gogh’s physician and friend, wrote in a letter to Theo, shortly after Vincent’s death, “The more I think of it, the more I think Vincent was a giant. Not a day passes that I don’t look at his pictures. I always find a new idea, something different every day…. Besides, he was a philosopher.”10 Surely, predominantly conceptual images could not have conveyed such emotions to Dr. Gachet or to anyone else. And, perhaps without fully realizing it, Gachet was adumbrating an alternate understanding of the role of the philosopher, now construed as someone seeking dimensions of human life partially transcendent of any conceptual means of their articulation. We strongly endorse the view that art and music also function as language, especially since in our present time the instrumentalist understanding of language is clearly prevailing. Understanding art and music as modes of language as well serves as an antidote to the current “technicalization” of the human spirit. We know that this looming influence of technology much concerned both Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. With and after the philosopher Kant (1724–1804) it was commonly thought in philosophical circles that one was only truly and fully human through engaging in questions regarding what life meant. Would technology not close off such questioning, making it increasingly instrumental and pragmatic? Would the advance of technological tools not close off self-referential openness (and open-endedness)? These were the basic concerns that so focused the existential ambience of Heidegger’s thinking. A “toolbox” view of language is, of course, aided by the internet revolution, and there is much to be said for it. However, we are putting internet stimulated applications of language aside in these deliberations. We could be said to be “bracketing” them off. Even though binary digital “linguistic bits” may be viewed by many as far more efficient and significant than the “subjective,” often diffuse, vague, and sometimes disjointed offerings of a myriad of engaging though somewhat inscrutable paintings, we nonetheless believe, as do Van Gogh and Heidegger, that expressive modalities conveyed through art—and even more through those who create it—offer more than any instrumentalist account can easily explain. A continuing problem, of course, is how to convey this “more” without conceptualizing and thereby partially denying it or cancelling it out. Can one suggest, adumbrate, and allude in informative ways without falling into the modalities and thus pitfalls of conceptual articulation? This remains a most problematic methodical question. The Western world in which Van Gogh and Heidegger came into their own had always equivocated between comprehending the essence of human life as

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knowing and understanding it as a problematic journey toward another realm, real or metaphorical. Life as a journey and its undergirding in axial thinking were deeply engrained in both of their temperaments. Each hoped to bridge the gap between consummated revelation and open-ended venture. And they had an illustrious predecessor. As many after him, Plato, too, tried to bridge this gap through claiming that the best and highest life involved a particular journey: the escaping from a dark cave of deceptive appearances and attendant ignorance to a domain of post-discursive cognitive apprehension. He sought to reach a transformative realm of liberating light and insight. In many ways this imagery haunts us even today, perhaps especially in utopian scientific hopes and their attendant research agendas. Using differing vocabularies and cultural materials, many of the world’s religions can also be understood as engaged in just this “enlightened” journey toward “enlightenment” itself. Within most if not all of these traditions is found a strain of suffering as well: this life unavoidably involves burdens, even agonies, and a concern regarding how to be delivered from them becomes a searching issue and undertaking. In the words of a song involving his life and work, for example, Van Gogh is said to have “suffered” for his sanity.11 Insofar as someone believes that the prime cause of life’s travails rests within the self and that one, thus, is in some way significantly responsible for these travails, desperation may set in. This may well have been the case with Van Gogh in the very last years of his life. The goal of life’s journey may then come to be seen as the attainment of redemption and thereby escape from sorrow, or at least the development of the capacity to deal with sorrow in a less painful, more courageous, and graceful manner. Such concerns were near to the heart of both Van Gogh and Heidegger. Neither was at home in standard religious doctrine. Van Gogh was raised a Protestant, Heidegger a Catholic. The almost fanatic way in which Van Gogh approached his religious beliefs as a young man, even becoming a minister, were washed away in disappointment and disenchantment. Vincent’s initial involvement in religion and his decision to become a preacher came from a desire to “do good” for others, an opening and emptying of his own being to enable the flow of love and caring to reach others. He sought for himself a being-in-the-world with the simple and disadvantaged and believed that this could nurture and transform the lives of others. His sister-in-law Johanna, Theo’s wife, wrote in her memoir that Vincent wanted “to forget himself, to humble himself, to sacrifice himself, mourir à soi-même (to mortify himself)—that was the severe ideal he tried to reach as long as he sought his refuge in religion.”12 During this time this was his primary “openness to Being.” But work as a preacher involved submission, and Van Gogh could not submit



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himself to the will of others, not even to God. The more he observed man’s suffering—be this in the coal mines, in the potato fields, or in the underbelly of big cities like London, Brussels, and Paris—the more he experienced humanity’s entrapment in unremitting suffering and the more troubled he became over a narrowly religious vocation. The primary relief from suffering for Van Gogh came to be found in nature. This was not altogether unlike the solace Heidegger found through his wanderings in the Black Forest. Van Gogh left Paris for the peace and beauty of the Provence. Through observing and depicting nature in his paintings, Van Gogh experienced a deep connection to the mystery and rhythm of life. Van Gogh thought that nature, not painters, was the locus of the language to be heard. At times he even felt that he had become a divine tool, more probably a medium through which the holy spirit of the natural world could find expression. Gauguin, who lived briefly with Van Gogh in Arles in 1888, remembers Vincent exclaiming, “I am whole in Spirit, I am the Holy Spirit,”13 while working on a painting. In some way his art became a calling for Van Gogh, not so different from his earlier missionary calling. He wrote in one of his letters to Theo that a good picture was equal to an act of charity. Painting had thereby become his primary means both of expression and of revelation. Analogously, Heidegger was caught up in the notion of “calling” and pondered figures such as Hölderlin and Nietzsche through whom the very absence of Spirit was endured for the sake of a possible renewal. He may have gone through these very experiences himself. Whether Heidegger did so personally or not, however, is almost beside the point. Heidegger’s continuing allusions to openness, enthrallment to nature, to resonance with respect to primordial language and homecoming are telling. Even his recurrent reference to Angst, not as anxiety but as sustainable and orienting tranquility in the midst of a dispersed existence caught up in thoughts and actions is revealing of his pathway. In fact, all of these phenomena attest to Heidegger’s own attunement to a Van Gogh-like fusion of suffering and rapture. This is especially so if we understand suffering as undergoing and construe rapture as the Heideggerian expression of the ecstatic. In important ways, both Van Gogh and Heidegger were displaced persons. Each was part of, yet beyond a traditional sense of religious orientation. Each was seeking to touch and also to be touched by something at once both familiar, yet utterly strange. Not satisfied with conventional doctrines, nor the commonly available ways in which they were being conveyed, both Van Gogh and Heidegger were seeking new and different means of expressing something that might itself come to be experienced as quite new, quite different, somewhat precarious, and without guaranties. In ways more obvious in the circumstances of Van Gogh than of Heidegger, the lives these two

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led—one in the midst of farm fields and the sunny flower fields of Arles, the other in the Black Forest—illuminate in significant though often elusive ways the modes of belief and transcendence they yearned after. In this respect, it would be quite misguided to identify Heidegger solely with his existential pathway in Being and Time. By the 1930s this pathway had already largely been traversed and new territory had been reached. Heidegger was able to understand our being-in-the-world as, at its best, a “letting be,” an allowing of that which is to come into presence. Thinking became thanking, a set of acts of gratitude, better understood perhaps as confessions of wonder and appreciation. It is not in the least controversial to understand Van Gogh in the same way, responding with paintbrush rather than pen. Like Heidegger, Van Gogh had an innate love for nature and he became obsessed with the desire to capture its powerful spirit in his paintings, to represent its force and beauty. In a letter to his sister, Wilhelmina, he writes, “By intensifying all the colours, one arrives once again at quietude and harmony. There occurs in nature something similar to what happens in Wagner’s music….”14 And what happens through Wagner is expressivist contact, almost fusion with multiple non-rational (not thereby irrational) rhythms, attunements, that speak to aspects of our nature that are more fundamental than the discursive. It is a sad fact that Van Gogh’s more forceful attempts to become and be the person and painter who he was were and often still are connected to his agitated mental state. In the popular mind the personality of Van Gogh is often allowed to detract from an understanding and appreciation of Van Gogh’s mission as he came to understand it. We need to question, however, if his documented mental illness influenced his painting style or whether it was more the other way around. Maybe what he sought to capture just could not be put on any canvas and his inability to do so is in part what drove him “mad,” a madness closer associated with exhaustion and frustration than insanity. A respected Dutch painter, Jozef Israëls (1824–1911), who attended one of the first shows of Van Gogh’s paintings in Holland in May of 1892 (and whose etchings were greatly admired by Van Gogh) remarked about Vincent’s work: “There are impassable boundaries between things that can be painted and things that cannot, and Vincent often wanted to paint things that were impossible, for instance the sun.”15 In this context we should also mention a quote from an 1883 letter to Theo in which Vincent writes: “… every study I make, every attempt in the direction of painting, every new love for or struggle with nature, successful or unsuccessful, gets me one little unsteady step closer.”16 In Heidegger’s circumstance madness did not come into play, unless one counts his “breakdown” in the context of pending denazification hearings



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he was forced to undergo, or his altogether sympathetic (and probably selfidentifying) reading of Nietzsche’s Madman. Nonetheless, from early on Heidegger struggled mightily with the notion of “speaking Being.” Already in Being and Time Heidegger proclaimed that we had neither the vocabulary nor even the grammar for such attempts. Was this in large part a relentlessly sincere problem for Heidegger, not to be dismissed as a cover story for an arrogant and disdainful obscurity? We believe that this is the case, though questions regarding the motives and intent of Heidegger’s prose will always remain controversial. The cost of Heidegger’s most unusual prose, both its vocabulary and style, was immensely high, and the price paid often went beyond criticism to overt ridicule. Both Heidegger’s and Van Gogh’s passion for the pulsing power of nature—and here we should include the underlying and parallel rhythms of the composer Mahler as well—remind us of a form of pantheism. Even though their “language of expression” took different forms, all three, each in a different (though overlapping) medium, were trying to capture something they far more felt than clearly and conceptually understood, something larger than life, something that was not quite of this world, something, thereby, ambiguously transcendent. In a more religious language we could say that Van Gogh, Mahler, and Heidegger struggled with the notion that nature could be seen as God’s clothing, a major strain of thinking in Romanticism, one not altogether absent from a number of expressionists and certainly not absent from Heidegger’s elusive “environmentalism,” present as early as his Being and Time. But however similar in their search to express the inexpressible, we do not believe that these giants in their field would necessarily understand or agree with each other in many overt ways. Heidegger, for one, was much influenced in his views of art, and reactively so, by Nietzsche, and because of this, struggled to reach an understanding of truth in art, not primarily in the artist. Nietzsche considered “created” art a superior form of truth, something about which Heidegger was at best ambivalent. According to Heidegger, traditional artistic methods did not necessarily convey an understanding of truth, and he often criticized the gathering of art in museums, places he viewed at times more like mortuaries or funeral homes. More importantly, for Heidegger philosophy was meant to find a way to surrender to art, once properly undergone, on honorable terms—a notion further explored in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method. Heidegger felt that a work of art should always be considered in the context of the world in which it existed, and not primarily as an extension of the artist.17 Perhaps what is most important to grasp is that Heidegger saw his role far more as vehicle or channel of expression and revelation, not as their creative agent. The same can be said of Van Gogh, especially in his later works. For neither

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Van Gogh nor Heidegger the sort of strident “humanism” illustrated by Nietzsche was in play. They saw themselves far more as responsive agents than as agents of initiation and dominance. Here it is illuminating to bring into play Heidegger’s notions of “earth” and “world.”18 Heidegger struggled with the question of whether a work of art was still harboring “truth” when the world out of which it had been engendered no longer existed and its “earth,” its grounding in the soil, the rocks, the paint, and so forth. had been superseded to such an extent that this particular world and its earth were no longer present to and supportive of each other. With “world” Heidegger meant the immediate and extended context, the web of vital significance that surrounded a particular thing at the time of its coming into and remaining in the mode of presence. This raises a significant question, and it is well illustrated through reference to Van Gogh. If Heidegger is right in his assumptions, do we have to conclude that the soul Van Gogh saw, for example, in Rembrandt’s portraits is no longer “truth” and thus an illusion or an untruth? We find ourselves disagreeing with the implication of Heidegger’s account on this point. Rembrandt indisputably lived in an earlier era than we, an era earlier than that of Van Gogh and Heidegger as well. Surely, however, there are evocative dimensions of some works of art that, though emerging into being at a particular historical moment, are nevertheless and in another sense not time bound. But the truth of such a claim will need to rest upon a resonant undergoing of the art in question. Insofar as expressive or revelatory modes of art are involved, linear arguments based on inferential reasoning are about to fail. Confirmation of these claims can be found in some remarks that Van Gogh conveys in his letters to his brother Theo. Van Gogh very much saw his art as a language through which he wanted not only to convey but also to contribute something important to humanity. He saw himself as a spokesperson, a transmitter, as well as a “creator.” He writes to Theo, Oh, my dear brother. Sometimes I know so well what I want. I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, ill as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life—the power to create…. In a picture I want to say something comforting, as music is comforting. I want to paint men and women with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolize, and which we seek to convey by the actual radiance of vibration and colorist.19

Again, Van Gogh was a great admirer of Rembrandt’s portraiture and thought that Rembrandt had captured the souls of his models. To Theo, he further writes, “Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language.”20 On this point surely Van Gogh



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and Heidegger would agree. And is it not true that they themselves are in fact exemplars of what Van Gogh attributes to Rembrandt? Do they not follow pathways often revealed only through intimations? We conclude our deliberations with yet another quote, this one made by the painter Whistler in his “Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock” lecture, given in London in 1885. It illustrates what both Heidegger and Van Gogh were after, namely, that language is a medium and not a tool and that nature properly encountered holds a fundamental key to everything and certainly the key to the origin of art. Nature contains the elements, in colour and form of all pictures, as the keyboard contains the notes of all music. But the artist is born to pick, and choose, and group with science, these elements, that the result may be beautiful—as the musician gathers his notes, and forms his chords, until he brings forth from chaos glorious harmony. To say to the painter, that Nature is to be taken as she is, is to say to the player, that he may sit on the piano.21

NOTES   1.  Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 159.   2.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 159.   3.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 143.   4.  Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 296–300.   5.  Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 301–15.   6.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 148–51.   7.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 151–52.   8.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 152–56.  9. Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 10.  Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Van Gogh, Volume I, trans. J. van Goch-Bonger and C. de Dood (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1959), li. 11.  Don McLean, “Vincent,” American Pie, EMI America Records, 1971. 12.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, xxviii. 13.  Meyer Schapiro, “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994), 145. 14.  Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Van Gogh, Volume III, trans. J. van Goch-Bonger and C. de Dood (Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1959), 44. 15.  Van Gogh, Complete Letters I, lxiii.

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16.  Van Gogh, Complete Letters II, 238. 17.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 167. 18.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 174. 19.  Van Gogh, Complete Letters III, 25. 20.  Van Gogh, Complete Letters II, 417. 21. James McNeill Whistler, “The Correspondence of James McNeil Whistler: Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock,” University of Glasgow, 2010, accessed September 27, 2017, http://whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Derrida, Jacques. “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, 301–15. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cooke, Deryck. The Language of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, 139–212. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. McLean, Don. “Vincent.” American Pie. EMI America Records, 1971. Schapiro, Meyer. “Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 143–51. New York: George Braziller, 1994. ———. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, edited by Donald Preziosi, 296–300. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Complete Letters of Van Gogh, Volume I. Translated by J. van Goch-Bonger and C. de Dood. Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1959. ———. The Complete Letters of Van Gogh, Volume II. Translated by J. van GochBonger and C. de Dood. Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1959. ———. The Complete Letters of Van Gogh, Volume III. Translated by J. van GochBonger and C. de Dood. Greenwich: New York Graphic Society, 1959. Vergo, Peter. The Music of Painting. London: Phaidon, 2010. Whistler, James McNeill. “The Correspondence of James McNeil Whistler: Mr. Whistler’s Ten O’Clock.” University of Glasgow. 2010. Accessed September 27, 2017. http://whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/.

Old Shoes with Laces, 1886

Figure 1.  Vincent van Gogh: Old Shoes with Laces, November 1886, oil on canvas, 38.1 cm × 45.3 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

Wheatfield with Crows, 1890

Figure 2.  Vincent van Gogh: Wheatfield with Crows, July 1890, oil on canvas, 50.5 cm × 103 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

Sunflowers, 1889

Figure 3.  Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers, 1889, oil on canvas, 123.6 cm × 101.2 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

Starry Night, 1889

Figure 4.  Vincent van Gogh: Starry Night, June 1889, oil on canvas, 73.7 cm × 92.1 cm, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

The Sower, 1888

Figure 5.  Vincent van Gogh: The Sower, November 1888, oil on canvas, 32.5 cm × 40.3 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

Roots and Tree Trunks, 1890

Figure 6.  Vincent van Gogh: Roots and Tree Trunks, July 1890, oil on canvas, 50.3 cm × 100.1 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

Window in the Bataille Restaurant, 1887

Figure 7.  Vincent van Gogh: Window in the Bataille Restaurant, February–March 1887, pen and ink, chalk, on paper, 54.0 cm × 39.8 cm, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).

Portrait of the Artist, 1889

Figure 8.  Vincent van Gogh: Portrait of the Artist, 1889, oil on canvas, 65 cm × 54.5 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Chapter 7

Immanent Transcendence in the Work of Art Jaspers and Heidegger on Van Gogh Rebecca Longtin Hansen Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings exemplify modernism and its significance as not only the birth of a new art movement but also a new way of seeing the world. Wilhelm Dilthey’s description of the radical transformation of art during this time, that is, the rise of modernism, helps us to understand the philosophical import of Van Gogh’s work.1 Dilthey saw the art at the end of the nineteenth century as such a radical shift in expression and style that it required an entirely new approach to aesthetic theory, which he outlined in “The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics” (1887) and The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task (1892).2 In observing this shift in the visual arts, literature, and theater, Dilthey describes these new styles as an effort to “express the oppressive feeling that the structures of life in society have become old, senile, and untenable.”3 Modern art, in contrast to Classical or Romantic art, emphasizes the mundane and commonplace in an attempt to overthrow these worn-out structures and rediscover the world in a genuine sense, or as Dilthey describes it, “to manifest reality, as it actually is.” Dilthey diagnoses this impulse to rediscover the world as rooted in “a new feeling of reality” that “has shattered the existing forms and rules.”4 He describes one of the defining characteristics of modern art as an attempt to “ground each art more firmly and solidly in reality and in the nature of its particular medium.”5 Modern art expresses not only a return to the mundane, but also a loving immersion in the material medium of the work of art. We see this tendency especially in the history of painting. Not only did French impressionist and post-impressionist painters defy the traditional standards of art maintained by the Académie des Beaux-Arts with their innovative techniques, but they also painted common life and reality with new intensity and emphasized the basic elements and medium of painting rather than symbolic meaning or ideals. As Dilthey describes, “Painting has returned to color as its fundamental means of expression. It is seeking to do away with 137

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all traditional schemata of perception and composition, and to look at the world as though with new eyes.”6 Van Gogh’s paintings in particular present the world in this way, that is, as a return to the material of painting in order to see the world with new eyes. In a letter from 1888, Van Gogh wrote, “The imagination is certainly a faculty which we must develop, one which alone can lead us to the creation of a more exalting and consoling nature than the single brief glance at reality—which in our sight is ever changing, passing like a flash of lightning—can let us perceive.”7 This letter captures not only his intent as an artist, but also expresses the power of his paintings. Van Gogh’s paintings embody this imaginative capacity—the ability to present the everyday object or scene in a way that goes beyond the limitations of our ordinary sight. Van Gogh makes us feel the heat of the sun, the motion of a living landscape, the growth and death of cut flowers, and the desolation of a worn-out pair of shoes. What is present to sight becomes more. Van Gogh transforms how we see the world. His paintings draw out the transcendence of the immanent, or the extraordinary in the ordinary, which Dilthey identifies as the impulse at the heart of modernism. The following will explore Van Gogh’s art in light of immanent transcendence—which I take to be one of the characteristics that define modernism. Immanent transcendence describes a way of thinking that breaks from dualisms and distinctions that denigrate the material world. “Immanence” pertains to what is closest to us, what is given in experience, what is concrete. The Latin roots of the term mean to remain (manere) within (in). By contrast, “transcendence” pertains to what is beyond us, what cannot be experienced. Patrice Haynes notes that within a dualistic framework immanence and transcendence form a hierarchy where the immanent is associated with “that which is limited or constrained, closed off from the beyond (transcendence), thus in some way fallen, incomplete.”8 Immanent transcendence, however, breaks from this dualism by rethinking the immanent in a way that does not denigrate it and instead sees its openness and possibilities, particularly in terms of its concrete materiality. As a trend within twentieth-century Continental thought, immanent transcendence presents a new concept of our reality by resuscitating the material world. As Haynes explains, “immanence no longer signifies limitedness and confinement but a site of movement, excess and creative transformations.”9 This concept of the immanent is at work in the new feeling of reality that Dilthey describes in the rise of modernism. Along similar lines, Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei has used immanent transcendence to describe the particular kind of modernism found in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke and Wallace Stevens. Gosetti-Ferencei introduces a distinction between two separate concepts of transcendence to account for the radical innovation of modernist immanent transcendence: vertical tran-



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scendence, which situates the transcendent in a separate higher world, and horizontal or horizonal transcendence, which describes the non-hierarchical configuration of immanent transcendence. According to Gosetti-Ferencei, horizontal immanence must be understood phenomenologically, “to indicate the intentionality of consciousness which is always beyond itself (Husserl), as a surpassing of the given, through the imaginary, in order to make a world of it (Sartre), as the structure of in-der-Welt-sein, or as that of poetic language itself bringing forth from concealment to appearance in disclosure (Heidegger).”10 Regina Schwartz makes a similar distinction between other-worldly and this-worldly transcendence, which Gosetti-Ferencei calls “a transcendence immanent to a world we can experience or imagine.”11 Immanent transcendence thus redefines this world in a way that is significant for understanding not only modern art, but also phenomenology. This means that phenomenology becomes particularly relevant in investigating the relation between immanence and transcendence in modern art, especially with works of art like Van Gogh’s paintings, which present us with such an intense experience of the material world. To explore Van Gogh’s paintings as embodiments of immanent transcendence, the following essay will turn to Karl Jaspers’ and Martin Heidegger’s separate accounts of transcendence in relation to their descriptions of Van Gogh’s art. I will contrast Jaspers’ more vertical account of immanent transcendence to Heidegger’s horizontal one, to borrow Gosetti-Ferencei’s distinction. This difference between their separate understandings of transcendence manifests itself in their estimations of the significance of Van Gogh’s art. Using phenomenology to understand Van Gogh’s art in light of immanent transcendence, moreover, illuminates a new understanding of transcendence as the “beyond” that is always already here in the immanent and reveals the ability of an object to point beyond itself. Both of these concepts are at work in Van Gogh’s art as well as modern art in general as the expansion of reality through new sight. Immanent transcendence and Van Gogh’s art are different but interconnected ways of rethinking experience beyond the limits of positivism and the myth of the given. Van Gogh’s art thus embodies a sensible world transformed. In particular, Van Gogh’s landscapes and still life series suggest the inexhaustibility of the things we so often overlook in our everyday experience. IMMANENT TRANSCENDENCE IN JASPERS AND HEIDEGGER Transcendence is central to Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie. For Jaspers, existence is always incomplete and contradictory and thus points toward some-

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thing that can complete and unify its paradoxes, that is, the transcendent. The transcendent is the unknowable and ineffable unconditioned that forms the conditions for existence. Human existence cannot come to understand itself until it confronts the transcendent as its conditions. For this reason, the transcendent is necessary for thought and for self-realization. In Philosophy of Existence, Jaspers states, “If there is unity, it is only in transcendence. From the standpoint of transcendence, unity can be apprehended in the world; we can feel the one God in the unconditioned, exclusive unity of our self-realization.”12 The transcendent forms the unconditioned conditions for existence, the unity that forms the foundation for all existence. Yet the path to this underlying unity is a via negativa.13 As unconditioned, transcendence outstrips all concepts and all forms of determinant thought that would provide a positive account. Instead, we can only point toward the transcendent as the unknowable and ineffable, which in Jaspers’ philosophy is the role of ciphers. Ciphers bridge the immanent and transcendent. This bridge, however, is not between an absolute divide. Jaspers does not place the transcendent in a sphere or realm completely separate from the immanent. As Jaspers explains, transcendence is not absolute separation: “A pure beyond is empty; it is as if it were not. Hence the possibility of experiencing being proper requires an immanent transcendence.”14 The transcendent cannot be completely separate from the immanent but must be in relation to it. Thus ciphers do not join the immanent to some transcendent beyond, but instead draw out the transcendence of immanence. In Truth and Symbol, Jaspers explains the role that ciphers play in immanent transcendence. A cipher is a transformed and suspended object that illuminates being. Instead of simply standing as an individual object, the cipher suspends its specificity and manifests its being as an object. Jaspers explains, “The cypher is the object which is least of all only object, but rather in its being-an-object is already no longer an object like all other specific objects. As a cypher the object is, as it were, in suspension.”15 Being-an-object is transcendent because being is neither objective nor subjective, but rather the deeper relation prior to subjects and objects. A cipher overcomes the objective-subjective divide to illuminate what encompasses all subjects and objects: being as such.16 The cipher is thus an object that transcends itself to express the transcendence of existence. But since this transcendence is not something to be grasped and understood, interpreting a cipher is always an infinite task. The cypher is the inexhaustible signification with which no definite interpretation is commensurate, but which rather demands in the interpretation itself an endless movement of interpreting. Interpreting is not a form of cognition of the meaning of the cypher, but is itself a metaphorical act, a game. To interpret is



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impossible; Being itself, Transcendence, is present. It is nameless. If we speak of it, then we use an infinite number of names and cancel them all again. That which has significance is itself Being.17

The cipher is a sign that signifies inexhaustibility and there is no definitive way of interpreting or understanding it. A cipher’s meaning is inexhaustibility because it manifests what cannot be signified: transcendence. Yet this transcendence is immanent because it is presented by the cipher, which as an object is immanent. Moreover, for Jaspers any object can be a cipher insofar as it can manifest this transcendence.18 Jaspers explicitly discusses ciphers and immanent transcendence in terms of art. For Jaspers, particular works of art and certain artists19 can bring out this transcendence of objects: “the art of immanent transcendence turns the empirical world itself into a cipher. It seems to imitate things that occur in the world, but it makes them transparent.”20 Art acts as a cipher by revealing the deeper reality of things. It makes “the infinite space of all things, all being and nonbeing, accessible with playful ease” at the same time that it “manifest[s] the wealth of the real world.”21 The work of art draws together transcendence and immanence. In this way “the artist of immanent transcendence teaches how to read existence anew, as a cipher.”22 Van Gogh is such an artist. Jaspers names Van Gogh as an artist of immanent transcendence who teaches us to read existence. Yet we must note that Jaspers considers the transcendence of Van Gogh’s painting to be limited in comparison to other artists. When Jaspers discusses Van Gogh, he contrasts him with the great artists who “gave reality a share in powers we can no longer conceive in the language of reality alone.”23 Jaspers lists Aeschylus, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Rembrandt among these great artists that effectively unite myth and reality to form an “enhanced reality” and casts Van Gogh apart from them by stating that he “dropped all myths, confined himself totally to reality, and thus lent transcendence a voice which of necessity is infinitely poorer, but is true for our time.”24 For Jaspers, Van Gogh might reveal the transcendence of immanence to some degree, but this revelation is limited due to his emphasis on reality, on the concrete world around him. Jaspers’ account of immanent transcendence might have some sense of verticality and have more in common with otherworldly transcendence given that he sees Van Gogh’s emphasis on the immanent as a deficiency rather than a strength. By contrast, Van Gogh’s immersion in concrete reality makes his painting significant for Heidegger’s attempt to overcome modern aesthetics by rethinking art in terms of the thing. Heidegger’s account of Van Gogh in “The Origin of the Work of Art” focuses on the artist’s ability to reveal reality in a way that draws our attention to things as things. This discrepancy between

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Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s accounts of Van Gogh parallels their different approaches to immanent transcendence. Jaspers sees the immanent as pointing beyond itself to a greater, more divine reality, which is contained by the immanent and yet bears some resemblance to the more traditional, hierarchical concept of transcendence. Heidegger’s approach to immanent transcendence, however, treats the thing as inexhaustible as a thing, which makes the “beyond” of its transcendence more immanent. Heidegger’s immanent transcendence is more clearly horizontal.25 To arrive at a concept of immanent transcendence in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is more difficult and relies upon the similarities in Heidegger’s account of the world of the work of art and the transcendence of the world in his writings just after Being and Time. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger describes the work of art as opening up a world. Heidegger tells us, “To be a work means to set up a world.”26 “World” means something very specific here. Heidegger wants to avoid definitions that determine it as (1) an empirical reality that is simply there for us, that is, as an object or a set of objects correlated to us as subjects, or (2) the subjective a priori conditions for the possibility of experience. Both descriptions of the world are reductive and overly subjective. Instead Heidegger describes the world as “the ever-nonobjective to which we are subjects.”27 We are subjected to the world, which is a happening, a “self-disclosing openness.”28 The world discloses things to us, it is the opening of things, the bringing of something to light. That is to say, things are revealed to us in the world, not in some hypothetical, pure space of subjectivity. For this reason, Heidegger often uses world as a verb, rather than a noun: the world worlds. The world is not an object or set of conditions determined by the subject; the world is the open relation that allows the possibility of an object or subject. This account of world in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is similar to the world in Being and Time and Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1928), yet these earlier texts emphasize the transcendence of the world. In Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger uses world as a verb (welten) to express that the world is a mode of being.29 As a mode of being, the world is a how, not a what. The world is “the how of beings.”30 It is this sense of the world that expresses its transcendence, since the disclosure of being is transcendence for Heidegger. In Being and Time, Heidegger explains, “Being and its structure transcend every being and every possible existent determination of a being. Being is the transcendens pure and simple. The transcendence of the being of Dasein is a distinctive one since in it lies the possibility and necessity of the most radical individuation.”31 For Heidegger as for Jaspers, the being of beings is transcendent. The existence of something is more than simply what it is. Moreover, as the



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being for whom being is a question, Dasein opens up this transcendence in a radical way. For Heidegger, transcendence is “the primordial constitution” of Dasein as being-in-the-world. We must be careful, however, in how we think about this transcendence. Heidegger emphasizes that this transcendence is not breaking away from the subject to reach an external world, which is how transcendence is often formulated in theological and epistemological accounts that define the transcendent in a hierarchical opposition to the immanent. In traditional metaphysics, the transcendent is the unconditioned conditions that determine contingent beings. The transcendent is what is beyond the subject. For Heidegger, this concept of transcendence treats the self like a box that must overcome its limits to reach the exterior world.32 Heidegger’s notion of transcendence as being-in-the-world contradicts this model by insisting that transcendence is not a relation between interior and exterior realms such that a barrier belonging to the subject would be crossed over, a barrier that would separate the subject from the outer realm. But neither is transcendence primarily the cognitive relationship a subject has to an object, one belonging to the subject in addition to its subjectivity. Nor is transcendence simply the term for what exceeds and is inaccessible to finite knowledge.33

The transcendence of being-in-the-world breaks down the distinction between interior and exterior, between subject and object, between contingency and conditions, and between the immanent and the transcendent. The subject and object already transcend themselves in a more originary relation. The transcendence of the world breaks down the subject-object framework by addressing the very possibility of being. If the “subject” is conceived ontologically as existing Da-sein, whose being is grounded in temporality, we must say then that the world is “subjective.” But this “subjective” world, as one that is temporally transcendent, is then “more objective” than any possible “object.”34

For this reason, “[t]he world is, so to speak, already ‘further outside’ than any object could ever be.”35 For Heidegger transcendence is neither a type of separation nor an indication of hierarchy. For Heidegger, existence is already outside itself because “existence originally means to cross over. Dasein is itself the passage across.”36 Dasein is always “out there” with beings as beingin-the-world. Dasein is not first an interior that needs to go beyond itself, Dasein is always transcending, always beyond itself within the world.37 In this way, the immanent is always already transcendent. While Heidegger does not use this description of transcendence in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the dynamic between earth and world does

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suggest immanent transcendence insofar as there is always more to the given than what is revealed on the surface. Heidegger’s account of the thing especially indicates an immanent transcendence at work insofar as it demonstrates a radical rethinking of materiality as ecstatic. In Heidegger’s thought, as Andrew J. Mitchell explains, things are ecstatically open. Things are an intersection of complex relations and dynamics, not static objects. Mitchell distinguishes between the thing as ecstatic and the concept of an object as the correlative of a Cartesian subject: things unfold themselves ecstatically, opening relations with the world beyond them. Unlike the self-enclosed object of modern metaphysics, the thing is utterly worldly, its essence lying in the relations it maintains throughout the world around it, the world to which it is inextricably bound. The world becomes the medium of the thing’s relations.38

The thing is always beyond itself and not contained within itself. Yet this “beyond” is of this world and thus is immanent. Things are ecstatic in “The Origin of the Work of Art” due to the conflict between the world that discloses and the earth that withdraws. The worlding of the world discloses being to us at the same time that it rests on the earth. That is, the world’s unconcealment relies upon a more original concealment, that is, the earth. The world reveals, while the earth conceals. In this conflict, the world allows the earth to rise and “stand forth as that which bears all, as that which is sheltered in its own law and always wrapped up in itself.”39 Yet the earth struggles to keep itself concealed and closed. The earth is a ground, however, it is a “groundless ground” and not a firm and unchanging foundation.40 Heidegger describes this conflict not as a rift that separates, but as “the intimacy with which opponents belong to each other.”41 The conflict between world and earth allows truth to be set into work: “Truth is present only as the conflict between lighting and concealing in the opposition of world and earth.”42 The work of art is an event that reveals truth in this dynamic between earth and world, that is, the tension between disclosure and unconcealment, which necessarily relies upon a deeper concealment. This deeper concealment is what makes things inexhaustible. A thing is never completely accessible—it never fully belongs to us and our purposes but has its own mysterious depths. This inexhaustibility belongs to things as thingly, however, which emphasizes the immanent in a way that Jaspers’ idea of transcendence does not. Unlike Jaspers, Heidegger’s concept of transcendence has no hints of a vertical hierarchy. Instead Heidegger tries to break away from this more traditional concept of transcendence developed in theological metaphysics.43 Heidegger’s emphasis on the work of art as a thing differs from Jaspers’ ac-



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count of ciphers as suspended objects that point beyond themselves because the sense of “beyond” is not the same. For Heidegger, things are always beyond themselves because they are groundless. This difference might explain why Jaspers sees Van Gogh’s art as limited in its significance, whereas Heidegger does not. Yet, despite the differences in Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s accounts of transcendence, both present a similar idea of art. Namely, art is not simply representational or mimetic. A work of art is not a re-presentation of a reality that is set apart from us as subjects, but the opening up of a world that reveals things in a new way. In art we recognize the deeper relations that form our world. The concept of art as a cipher or event not only challenges the distinctions between transcendence and immanence between subjectivity and objectivity—this approach to art also signals a reworking of sensible-intelligible distinction in which concrete, perceptual experience takes on greater significance. Van Gogh’s paintings of everyday objects reveal a transformed sense of both the immanent and experience, which we see in Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s descriptions of his art.

VAN GOGH’S URGE FOR REALITY Jaspers discusses Van Gogh first in his 1922 book Strindberg and Van Gogh, then a decade later in the third volume of his Philosophy (1932). The former is an “attempt at a pathographic analysis” and belongs to his larger project, the Psychology of Worldviews (Weltanschauungen), while the latter is a treatise on metaphysics that focuses on transcendence. The purpose of Strindberg and Van Gogh is to explore the relation between schizophrenia and creativity. To this end Jaspers analyzes Van Gogh’s style of painting and its evolution in relation to his unraveling mental condition. Yet the book also has philosophical significance as well. In “On My Philosophy” (1941), Jaspers retrospectively describes his psychology of worldviews as a “hidden philosophy” that “misunderstood itself as objectively descriptive psychology.”44 This self-reflection on his intellectual development sees his psychology as an attempt to systematically present all the possibilities for human existence as “a synthesis of polarities” that “everywhere demonstrated the stream of lapses, voids, inversions.”45 He considers his Philosophy as a more systematic approach to analyzing the complexity of human existence that he observed in his psychology of worldviews.46 For this reason, I will analyze Strindberg and Van Gogh through the lens of his Philosophy and treat the two accounts of Van Gogh together. Despite the differences between descriptive psychology and metaphysics, his separate treatments of Van Gogh both deal

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with the artist’s intense engagement with the world and draw out the same tension between the sensuousness of his art works and the intangible meanings they present. This tension between the sensible and intangible in Van Gogh’s works illuminates the possibilities of art and exemplifies the philosophical questions that concern Jaspers, especially those that point toward the ineffable.47 Jaspers describes Van Gogh’s paintings as a study of objects that renders them mythical and transcendent. His psychological and philosophical examinations of Van Gogh draw out this paradoxical tension in his art. In Strindberg and Van Gogh, Jaspers writes that Van Gogh possesses “an urge for reality” that is expressed in the objects and scenes he chooses to paint.48 Van Gogh frequently painted the objects and landscapes around him, familiar sights that formed his everyday reality. He not only painted ordinary objects, but also painted the same object or type of object several times. His oeuvre is full of series of the same objects: sunflowers, olive trees, cottages, shoes, a blue vase, and so on. Jaspers describes this repetition in Van Gogh’s paintings as an ongoing search, rather than a complete project: “All his works are of a tense searching.… His are not so much works but work studies, not completed totalities but single analyses and syntheses.”49 Each work of art presents itself not as a whole, but as an incomplete picture that captures some aspects of the object while other aspects elude direct representation. His art expresses an impulse to connect to the real objects in front of him, but always in a way that does not grasp them fully. Van Gogh paints the thing in a way that suggests there is more to it. Van Gogh’s style of painting expands our concept of the object before us. Observing the floral paintings from 1887–1888, Jaspers describes Van Gogh’s depiction of flowers as an expression of their infinite abundance.50 Examining one of his sunflower paintings illustrates this description. (See Figure 3.) The intense stylized lines and colors focus on the object without making it static or timeless; rather, the vitality and movement of the flowers, their growth and possibility, bodies forth. The sunflowers twist away from each other, their petals tousled and wild as if dancing in the vase. The flowers are so vibrant and alive that this work can hardly be called a still life. In this painting, life is energy, movement, and passion—anything but still. The same emphasis on movement and vitality characterize his landscape paintings. As Jaspers describes, “The ground of the landscape appears to be alive, waves seem to rise and ebb everywhere, the trees are like flames, everything twists and seems tormented, the sky flickers.”51 (See Figure 4.) His thick, exaggerated paint strokes make grass, trees, clouds, mountains, and sky appear as one rhythm, like the ebb and flow of the ocean or the rippling of a fire. In viewing his paintings, we experience the same primal draw as a roaring bonfire or churning sea, chthonic powers that affect us at our core. Through



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this technique, his still life and landscape paintings bring the object to life in a way that reveals its deeper reality. As Jaspers describes the effect of Van Gogh’s style, “One does not ask what specific kind of an object that might be, and yet one seems aware of looking into the deepest meaning of reality.”52 In other words, Van Gogh’s paintings draw our attention not to the concept of what something is, but rather to the idea that it is—its very existence and reality. Van Gogh’s paintings do not replicate the real, but draw out the meaning of reality, which creates a dramatic tension in his art. Jaspers notes the contrast between Van Gogh’s ordinary subject matters and the uncanny vibrancy with which he paints them. Van Gogh’s paintings present a realism that is not realistic. His paintings demonstrate an urge for reality in his attention to ordinary objects, and yet he paints them as though they were fantastic—more colorful, more energetic, more alive than the objects he observes. Jaspers describes the intensity of his style and its mysterious effects. The colors are aflame. [Van Gogh] succeeds, through mysterious complicated combinations, to bring about glaring and intense results which one hardly would have considered possible. He paints no shading, knows no air, but merely linearperspective depth.53

The result is that “[e]verything is sensually present; the blazing noon sun is his métier.”54 The intensity of Van Gogh’s colors and lines are unrealistic, yet he makes the blazing heat of the sun tangible. The unrealistic features of his works makes the landscape more present to us, more evocative of what it is like to stand in a field under the midday sun than if he observed the rules of perspective and composition. (See Figure 5.) As Jaspers points out, “what is so strange about all this is the fact that this compelling reality is fantastically effective.”55 Though stylized, the scene appears more tangible and becomes more real to us as viewers. For Jaspers, the combination of Van Gogh’s urge for reality and his highly stylized technique presents the object as a mythos. As Jaspers explains, Van Gogh “wants to paint present actuality; in return he conceives of this presence as a mythos.”56 In this sense, Van Gogh reconceptualizes the reality and presence of things. The object is not simply given or there for us. The object transcends what can be grasped—it is ecstatic. Van Gogh’s urge for reality draws out the transcendence of the object. These two contrasting qualities—the presence or attention to the actuality of the object and its depiction as transcendent or mythical—present the world in a new light. In the third volume of his Philosophy Jaspers describes this effect of Van Gogh’s paintings as “mythical realities.”57 With mythos,

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reality “is seen as such” and at the same time is seen as transcendent.58 Van Gogh’s paintings expose the transcendence of the world. His urge for reality opens up the mysteriousness of things. There is more to the object than what presents itself in a simple glance. Heidegger’s account of Van Gogh also emphasizes the artist’s ability to reveal the extraordinary in the ordinary things around him.

VAN GOGH’S SHOES AND THE REALITY OF THINGS Heidegger’s discussion of Van Gogh’s painting, Old Shoes with Laces, in “The Origin of the Work of Art” illustrates the power of art to reveal the reality of things. While his treatment of Van Gogh’s painting is controversial and some scholars have overlooked its significance,59 Iain Thomson argues that this interpretation of Van Gogh’s painting is “the most important part of his essay” because it allows us to “learn how to transcend modern aesthetics from within.”60 Thomson emphasizes how the painting’s interplay between emerging and withdrawing reveals the strife between earth and world and opens up the groundless ground of things, a revelation that makes the subjectobject distinction of modern aesthetics thoroughly inadequate for explaining the work of art. Thomson focuses on how the painting of shoes reveals the “nothing,” that is, the groundless ground of things, in order to explain how Heidegger’s philosophy of art overcomes the problem of ontotheology in modern metaphysics.61 Like Thomson, I see Heidegger taking up Van Gogh’s painting of shoes as an ontological task, but I will focus on its specific significance for rethinking the thing. Heidegger begins “The Origin of the Work of Art” by emphasizing that works are thingly. That is, works of art are things just like other things in the world. We hang up a painting on the wall, just as we might hang up a hat. Works of art are “shipped like coal” and stored “like potatoes in a cellar.”62 This observation might seem obvious. Clearly works of art are things. Yet in emphasizing this idea, Heidegger breaks from the tradition of aesthetics that tends to focus on the subjective experience of the spectator, the creative process of the artist, or the intellectual content of the work of art, all of which ignore the thingly aspect of the work of art. Aesthetics tends to intellectualize art immediately and treat its materiality as subordinate to content rather than being significant in itself. Heidegger does not want to approach the work as a physical vehicle for the expression of an idea, but as a thing. Yet Heidegger quickly establishes that we do not really know what the thing is. The thing evades philosophical thought because all our attempts to define the thing reduce its essence to utility, that is, to our purposes rather than the thing as



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it is. To reorient thinking about the thing, Heidegger looks to Van Gogh’s painting of shoes, a rhetorical move that not only sets up the work of art as a way to mediate our thinking of things but also gestures toward the insights that Van Gogh has into things as they are. Heidegger’s discussion of the need to re-examine the thing rests on his visual analysis of Van Gogh’s painting of shoes. Van Gogh’s paintings are sensitive to the thingliness of things, which is why Heidegger chooses one of his paintings63 to illustrate a central point in his reorientation of philosophy and aesthetic theory. (See Figure 1.) Van Gogh’s painting of shoes situates them in a nondescript, shadowy space removed from other objects—an “undefined space” to use Heidegger’s words.64 The shoes lay as if cast aside at the end of a long day. Heidegger describes these shoes—which he interprets as a peasant woman’s shoes—in the following way: From the dark opening of the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field. This equipment is pervaded by uncomplaining anxiety as to the certainty of bread, the wordless joy of having once more withstood want, and trembling before the impending childbed and shivering at the surrounding menace of death. This equipment belongs to the earth, and is protected in the world of the peasant woman.65

This poetic description of the painting suggests the many aspects of the shoes that Van Gogh captures in paint. The shoes are worn—they show that someone has toiled in them, as conveyed by Van Gogh’s dark colors, twisted outlines, and rough brushstrokes. The shoes are stiff and heavy, which gives us a sense of their use as well as how the person walked in them and where she walked. They are weatherworn from rough wind and wet soil. The soil connects the shoes to the fields that give the woman grain to sustain her life. The shoes are tied not only to the cycle of life and death in the field, that is, growth and harvest, but also the human lives that are sustained by the field, lives that are stretched between birth and death. In this way, Heidegger describes the shoes in relation to the peasant woman’s world and to the world in an even larger sense. The painting is an event that illuminates truth. Heidegger tells us that this painting “lets us know what shoes are in truth.”66 The painting reveals the shoes as they are. For Heidegger, Van Gogh’s painting of shoes expresses a different approach to the thing than one that focuses on simply what the shoes are or

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how they are used. Van Gogh allows the shoes to shine or appear without limiting it to a simple conceptual framework. Van Gogh’s study of the shoes approaches them in a way that counteracts the way we usually approach things. Namely, we usually reduce the concept of the thing to its use or a definition that can easily be grasped. But for Van Gogh and Heidegger, rather than limiting and defining the thing, we ought to understand it in terms of the many dynamic relations and events that intersect in it and complicate our attempt to grasp it fully. This is what a work of art can do, and what Van Gogh achieves so beautifully in paint. Works of art preserve the complexity of things, their refusal to submit to our ideas and uses. Heidegger explains “the sculptor uses stone just as the mason uses it, in his own way. But he does not use it up… the painter also uses pigment, but in such a way that color is not used up but rather only now comes to shine forth.”67 The work of art—and Van Gogh’s painting in particular—recognizes that the thing cannot be exhausted. The thing is more than what is present to us, more than what we think about it. Heidegger tells us: “Color shines and wants only to shine. When we analyze it in rational terms by measuring its wavelengths, it is gone. It shows itself only when it remains undisclosed and unexplained.”68 The work of art recognizes the inexhaustibility of the thing qua thing and preserves its thingliness. Art lets the thing rest in itself. Van Gogh’s painting illustrates this letting be. He paints the shoes with an intensity that draws our attention to them as things—not as an idea or a symbol of a higher reality. If anything, the ambiguity and mysteriousness of the shoes are revealed, rather than a firm and determinate idea of them. Thomson describes the resistance of things to our vision and understanding, or “the subtle but dynamic tension between what shows itself and what recedes in Van Gogh’s paintings,” as what drew Heidegger to his works: “Heidegger seems to have been deeply moved by the way half-formed figures seem to struggle to take shape in the background of Van Gogh’s paintings, less in clear lines than in the thick texture of the paint, brush strokes, and deep fields of color.”69 Van Gogh does not treat things as allegories that represent some other reality or as objects to be grasped by a subject. His paintings allow us to approach things as they are. Both Jaspers’ and Heidegger’s descriptions of Van Gogh emphasize the artist’s ability to paint in a way that focuses intensely on the thing while gesturing at more than what is simply there. Van Gogh’s intensity suggests instead that the thing exceeds itself, or transcends itself. That is, the thing presents more than simple presence, or what is revealed with a simple glance. Immanent transcendence and its embodiment in Van Gogh’s works thus present a rethinking of experience that has implications beyond aesthetic experience.



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VAN GOGH, MODERN ART, AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF EXPERIENCE Immanent transcendence requires a broader and more complex notion of perceptual experience. Immanent transcendence means that experience is neither just empirical data received by the senses nor a subjective projection. Instead, for Jaspers and Heidegger, experience is a meaningful relation between self and world that cannot be exhausted by simple correlation.70 Immanent transcendence means recognizing that subjectivity is grounded by something deeper and that experience is not a self-enclosed given. Heidegger’s preface to his 1973 seminar in Zähringen describes experience in this way. Perceptual experience implies a space of relations in which perception and the perceivable are open to one another. Heidegger claims that [f]or perception to be able to be encountered at all by the perceivable, it must hold itself open.… Both perception as well as presencing require for their own possibility—and this means at the same time for their “to one another”—a free and open dimension, within which they encounter one another.71

That is, perception is not determined by the unconditioned conditions of consciousness nor by the perceived object itself, but by their open and mutual relation to one another. Sensation is responsive, creative, plastic, alive, and dynamic. This notion of sensation allows for the possibility of transformative experience, or the experience of immanent transcendence. Experience involves a necessary openness that is neither purely receptive nor simply a projection. To properly address experience and its transformative possibilities, the immanent must be seen as transcendent.72 Heidegger discusses transformative experience earlier in “The Nature of Language” (1957–1958). Here Heidegger rejects the notion of experience defined in terms of Cartesian subjectivity to discuss experience as a happening that transforms us. Heidegger emphasizes experience as an event that we undergo, not as a product of a priori conditions of subjectivity that we project as exterior to us. He explains, “When we talk of ‘undergoing’ an experience, we mean specifically that the experience is not of our own making; to undergo here means that we endure it, suffer it, receive it as it strikes us and submit to it.”73 Here Heidegger wants to discuss the experience of language, an experience that “touch[es] the innermost nexus of our existence” to transform us. It is this sense of experience that we might apply to the transformed world of the work of art. Art transforms the way in which we ordinarily sense and participate in the world. Art displaces or frees sensation from utility and presupposition.

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The world is not set apart from us as something to be used, but as something that moves us as we move within it. Art allows us to see things as they are because it transforms our accustomed ways of thinking, perceiving, and relating to things. For Heidegger art “thrusts the extraordinary to the surface” and “thrusts down the long-familiar.”74 Art transforms by displacing us and the world in which we live. “To submit to this displacement means: to transform our accustomed ties to world and to earth and henceforth to restrain all usual doing and prizing, knowing and looking, in order to stay within the truth that is happening in the world.”75 Art thus embodies a particular way of thinking and comporting oneself within the world that does not treat the world as a collection of mere objects apart from us as subjects, but instead reveals the meaningful relations within the world to which we belong and in which we partake. Art is the destabilization of our normal relations and ways of thinking—subject and object, sense and sensation, real and ideal, immanent and transcendent—that allows us to understand the more originary dynamism from which these relations emerge. Art thus describes a way of being, an existence that is grounded in the immanent without reducing the immanent to sensory data. In this sense, immanent transcendence in art presents us with a re-enchantment of the world. Given this sense of art and aesthetic experience, the immanent transcendence of Van Gogh’s paintings presents us with the need to think beyond the limits of modern aesthetics and its Cartesian framework that separates us from the world. Immanent transcendence overturns modern subjectivism and complicates its assumed dichotomies and divisions by making the “beyond” always already there in the things around us. Van Gogh’s paintings make the world more present in terms of how they present, rather than being fully visible and clear, which avoids confining things to our vision and our uses. Through his work, we overcome the limits of our ordinary way of seeing the world and arrive at a more authentic relation to things. Van Gogh’s art shows us how a world comes into being and the significance of that event. NOTES 1.  Dilthey does not reference Van Gogh specifically in the following texts, but he addresses trends in the art world that are relevant to the artist and gives us one of the earliest philosophical accounts of the rise of modernism, which gives us an interesting historical perspective. It is worth noting, however, that many of the art history categories we apply to this period, that is, modernism, were coined after the publication of these texts. 2. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics,” in Poetry and Experience, Wilhelm Dilthey Selected Works, Vol. V, ed. Rudolf A.



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Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, trans. Michael Neville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 29–173. Wilhelm Dilthey, “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task,” in Poetry and Experience, Wilhelm Dilthey Selected Works, Vol. V, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, trans. Michael Neville (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 175–222.   3.  Dilthey, “The Three Epochs,” 176.   4.  Wilhelm Dilthey, “Imagination of the Poet,” 31.   5.  Dilthey, “The Three Epochs,” 177.   6.  Dilthey, “Three Epochs,” 178.   7.  Vincent Van Gogh, “Letter to Emile Bernard, Arles, April 1888,” in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 31.  8. Patrice Haynes, Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 4.  9. Haynes, Immanent Transcendence, 4–5. 10.  Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, “Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens,” The German Quarterly 83, 3 (2010): 275–76. 11.  Regina M. Schwartz, “Transcendence Beyond… Introduction,” in Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina M. Schwartz, vii–xii. New York: Routledge, 2004. Gosetti-Ferencei, “Immanent Transcendence,” 275. 12.  Karl Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 76. 13. See Charles F. Wallraff, Karl Jaspers: An Introduction to His Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 38. 14.  Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 3, trans. E.B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 119 15.  Karl Jaspers, Truth and Symbol, trans. Jean T. Wilde, William Kluback, William Kimmel (Albany: New College and University Press, 1959), 38. 16.  “For [the cypher] is itself not a definable object but that which encompasses both the subject and the object in what is objective. For this reason the cyphers are not still another new objective domain. They are not an objective conclusion. They are rather hidden in all objectivity” (Jaspers, Truth and Symbol, 38–39). “Every mode of objectivity becomes a shackle if it is simply regarded as Being itself; the lack of objectivity, however, becomes emptiness also in subjectivity. Only in the polarity of subject and object is our life. In this polarity the object can attain that suspension which at the same time allows it to exist and elevates it. From this depth of Being the object obtains an irreplaceable meaning” (Jaspers, Truth and Symbol, 39). 17. Jaspers, Truth and Symbol, 42. 18. Jaspers, Truth and Symbol, 39. 19.  Unlike Heidegger, Jaspers connects immanent transcendence directly to “the independence of the individual artist” (Jaspers, Philosophy, 172), whereas Heidegger emphasizes the significance of the work of art apart from the artist. 20. Jaspers, Philosophy, 172.

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21. Jaspers, Philosophy, 174. 22. Jaspers, Philosophy, 172. 23. Jaspers, Philosophy, 172. 24. Jaspers, Philosophy, 172. 25. Rudolf Makkreel describes Heidegger’s concept of transcendence as “sideways” in contrast to a vertical concept of transcendence that creates a hierarchical relation between the immanent and transcendent. Makkreel points out that in What Is a Thing? Heidegger poses transcendence as our relation to objects, not an upward relation to a different realm of ideas. Rudolf A. Makkreel, “Heidegger’s Non-Idealistic Reading of Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy,” in Examining Heidegger’s Question of Being: Dasein, Truth, and History, ed. Holger Zaborowski (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2017), pages forthcoming. 26. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial Classics, 2001), 43. 27.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 43. 28.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 47. 29.  Martin Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, trans. Michael Heim (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 170. 30. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations, 172. 31. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 33–34. 32. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations, 161. 33. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations, 165. 34. Heidegger, Being and Time, 335. 35. Heidegger, Being and Time, 335. 36. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations, 165. 37. For a more thorough discussion see Ingtraud Görland, Transzendenz und Selbst. Eine Phase in Heideggers Denken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1981). 38.  Andrew J. Mitchell, The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015), 3. 39.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 61. 40.  See chapter 2 of Mitchell, The Fourfold, 71–115. 41.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 61. 42.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 60. 43.  It should be noted that even though Jaspers situates transcendence in relation to God, his approach to the divine is similar to negative theology, which makes his philosophy more akin to Heidegger’s finite transcendence than other theological accounts. 44.  See Karl Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1975), 183. 45.  Jaspers, “On My Philosophy,” 183. 46. In his 1949 foreword to Strindberg and Van Gogh, Jaspers writes that the motivation for writing on this topic “stems from the quest for the limits of comprehensibility of human life and creativity.” Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, trans. Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), ix.



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47.  This concern with the limits of comprehensibility characterizes Jaspers’ descriptions of Van Gogh’s art and his approach to philosophy in general. Wallraff points out that Jaspers has a tendency to focus on “those ingredients in human experience that could be described as obscure, impalpable, ineffable, imponderable, immaterial on diaphanous” (Wallraff, Karl Jaspers, 29). 48. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 49. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 175. 50. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 180. 51. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 52. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 180. 53. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 54. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 55. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 56. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 57. Jaspers, Philosophy, 115. 58. Jaspers, Philosophy, 116. 59. Julian Young sees Heidegger’s treatment of Van Gogh as “anomalous,” and Hubert Dreyfus sees it as irrelevant. Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22. Hubert L. Dreyfus, “Heidegger’s Ontology of Art,” in A Companion to Heidegger, ed. H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 409. 60. Iain Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 71, 72. 61.  “In other words, the encounter with nothing in the work of art ‘shatters’ the taken-for-granted obviousness of the modern theoretical framework in which subjects seek to master external objects, a framework implicit in the basic aesthetic view according to which subjects undergo extensive experiences of art objects. For Heidegger, the phenomenological encounter with Van Gogh’s painting undermines the obviousness of the modern worldview by returning us directly to the primordial level of engaged existence in which subject and object have not yet been differentiated” (Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 97). 62.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 19. 63. Part of Schapiro’s infamous critique of Heidegger is the ambiguity around which painting of shoes he referenced, since Van Gogh painted multiple paintings of shoes, so the exact painting is unknown. This version is the one most frequently used by scholars. See Meyer Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: George Braziller, 1994). See Derrida’s response to Schapiro and defense of Heidegger in Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 255–382. 64.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 33. 65.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 33. 66.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 35. 67.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 46. 68.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 45. 69. Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity, 105, 106.

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70.  Dermot Moran argues that Heidegger adopts Jaspers’ concept of immanent transcendence to transform the concept of intentionality in Husserl’s phenomenology. Moran sees Heidegger’s use of transcendence in the 1920s as an attempt to reorient phenomenology away from Cartesian subjectivism and ground it in concrete human existence. See Dermot Moran, “What Does Heidegger Mean by the Transcendence of Dasein?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22, 4 (2014): 491–514. 71.  Martin Heidegger, “The Provenance of Thinking,” in Four Seminars, trans. Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 93. 72.  For a longer discussion of the relation between transcendence and immanence in phenomenology, see Dermot Moran, “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82, 2 (2008): 265–91. Moran explains that transcendence is necessary for phenomenological method to deal with the given without falling into positivism or simplistic concepts of experience. He explains the role of transcendence in Husserl’s phenomenological method, which remains rooted to immanence, and Edith Stein’s critique of Husserl’s concept of “pure immanence.” Moran uses Jaspers’ conception of transcendence and its necessary relation to existence as an illustration of the significant place transcendence must hold in phenomenology’s attempt to address the immanent. 73.  Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 57. 74.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 64. 75.  Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 64. For a longer discussion of art as displacement, see the preface to John Sallis, Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 1–10.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “The Imagination of the Poet: Elements for a Poetics.” In Poetry and Experience, Wilhelm Dilthey Selected Works, Vol. V, edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, translated by Michael Neville, 29–173. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “The Three Epochs of Modern Aesthetics and Its Present Task.” In Poetry and Experience, Wilhelm Dilthey Selected Works, Vol. V., edited by Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi, translated by Michael Neville, 175–222. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Dreyfus, Hubert L. “ Heidegger’s Ontology of Art.” In A Companion to Heidegger, ed. H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Görland, Ingtraud. Transzendenz und Selbst. Eine Phase in Heideggers Denken. Frankfurt: M. Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, 1981.



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Gosetti-Ferencei, Jennifer Anna. “Immanent Transcendence in Rilke and Stevens.” The German Quarterly 83, 3 (2010): 275–96. Haynes, Patrice. Immanent Transcendence: Reconfiguring Materialism in Continental Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. ———. Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Translated by Michael Heim. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. ———. “The Nature of Language.” In On the Way to Language, translated by Peter D. Hertz, 57–108. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. ———. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 15–86. New York: Perennial Classics, 2001. ———. “The Provenance of Thinking.” In Four Seminars, translated by Andrew Mitchell and François Raffoul, 93–97. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Jaspers, Karl. “On My Philosophy.” In Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufmann, 158–84. New York: Penguin, 1975. ———. Philosophy. Vol. 3, translated by E.B. Ashton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. ———. Philosophy of Existence. Translated by Richard F. Grabau. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. ———. Strindberg and Van Gogh. Translated by Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. ———. Truth and Symbol. Translated by Jean T. Wilde, William Kluback, and William Kimmel. Albany: New College and University Press, 1959. Makkreel, Rudolf. “Heidegger’s Non-Idealistic Reading of Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy.” In Heidegger’s Question of Being: Dasein, Truth, and History, edited by Holger Zaborowski. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2017. Mitchell, Andrew J. The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2015. Moran, Dermot. “Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein, and Karl Jaspers.” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82, 2 (2008): 265–91. ———. “What Does Heidegger Mean by the Transcendence of Dasein?” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22, 4 (2014): 491–514. Sallis, John. Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Schapiro, Meyer. Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society. New York: George Braziller, 1994. Schwartz, Regina M. “Transcendence Beyond… Introduction.” In Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, edited by Regina M. Schwartz, vii–xii. New York: Routledge, 2004. Thomson, Iain. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

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Van Gogh, Vincent. “Letter to Emile Bernard, Arles, April 1888.” In Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, edited by Herschel B. Chipp. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Wallraff, Charles F. Karl Jaspers: An Introduction to His Philosophy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Young, Julian. Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Chapter 8

Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Perception and the Art of Van Gogh On “Going Further” and “Going Beyond” Galen A. Johnson In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty makes the following comment: “The art of Van Gogh has been installed in me for all times, I have taken a step I cannot go back on, and my entire aesthetic experience will henceforth be that of someone who has known the work of Van Gogh.”1 These strong words would perhaps imply that Merleau-Ponty wrote a good deal about Van Gogh, but in truth the opposite is the case; he wrote very little. Nevertheless, Van Gogh was on Merleau-Ponty’s mind. There was a famous Van Gogh exhibition in Paris in January—March 1947 at the Musée de l’Orangerie and Merleau-Ponty would not have missed it. The catalog of the exhibition lists 172 Van Gogh works which included the signature work Merleau-Ponty references, Wheatfield with Crows (July 1890) and many of the best known works of Van Gogh’s last year: Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1890), Irises (1890), and L’Arlésienne (1890).2 The status of specific artists and works as paradigmatic of Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic philosophy and argument is critical—Cézanne, Klee, Matisse, Leonardo. He takes the artists’ own testimony together with their art as decisive for aesthetic thinking, both the philosophy of perception and philosophy of art. Eye and Mind was his third and finest essay on modern art published in early 1961 just prior to his early death in May 1961 at age fifty-three. In a note to himself written in one of its three manuscript drafts, Merleau-Ponty signaled that he thought it necessary to add other examples: “To add to the place where I cite Giacometti: Van Gogh who wanted the living painting….”3 The phrase that recurs in all of Merleau-Ponty’s references to Van Gogh is “going further” (veut aller “plus loin”). He said this in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” in relation to one of Van Gogh’s last paintings, Wheatfield with Crows (July 1890): “Van Gogh’s ‘going further’ at the moment he paints The Crows no longer indicates some reality toward which one 159

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must go. It shows what still must be done in order to restore the encounter between his glance and the things which solicit it.”4 (See Figure 2.) He repeats it in the last lines of part 1 of Eye and Mind: “What, then, is the secret science which he has or which he seeks? That dimension that lets Van Gogh say he must go ‘still further’ (veut aller ‘plus loin’).”5 There is no question that today we approach Van Gogh sedimented beneath layers and screened by filters of cultural legend and myth—the legend of genius, the myth of suicide or martyrdom. The most recent comprehensive biography of Van Gogh disputes that his death was a suicide based upon the report from the two doctors from Vincent’s bedside.6 We also approach through layers of critical studies and interpretations: Fauvism and German Expressionism in the early twentieth century, French Romanticism between the wars, and since 1945 a boom of books by celebrity writers such as Irving Stone and Henry Miller, a film by Robert Altmann, and critical studies by leading art historians: John Rewald, Roger Fry, and Meyer Schapiro.7 This unknown and unappreciated artist sold only one painting for 400 francs in his lifetime. Today five Van Gogh works count among the best sellers of all time.8 In one of history’s profound ironies, Van Gogh had written to his brother Theo as early as July 1882: “It would greatly astonish me if in time my work did not become just as salable as that of others. Of course I cannot tell whether that will happen now or later.”9 In light of all this, there is no question of “fully innocent, bracketed” direct access to Van Gogh. We will make an approach and an attempt. First we will seek to conceptualize “going further” in its home context in relation to the art of seeing, then extend it to the art of living, and finally to the art of dying. Our focus is upon the aesthetics of Merleau-Ponty, but we will introduce interrelated writers and texts: Cézanne, Klee, Rilke, Jaspers, Artaud. GOING FURTHER IN THE ART OF SEEING We need strong words to address the power, truth, and progress of Van Gogh’s art, words like astral, apocalyptic, explosion, passion, epiphany.10 Merleau-Ponty’s word “dehiscence” is apt. Van Gogh not only painted, he also “painted in words,”11 leaving us three volumes of letters—works of art in themselves—that report the details of his efforts and attempts, failures and successes, not quite an autobiography since these are not retrospective reflections at a distance from his life but expressions of ongoing daily events. Van Gogh wrote: “There is the art of lines and colors, but the art of words is there nonetheless, and will remain.”12 As philosophers we are wary of a transition from images to words that is too quick and too smooth, for along that path



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are all the questions of philosophy of language pertaining to natural signs and conventional language systems. The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke knew an early edition of Van Gogh’s letters and argued that the words inject an element of deliberation and consciousness that disturbs the artistic process. “Ideally a painter,” he wrote, “should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his reflective processes, and incomprehensibly to himself, all his progress should enter so swiftly into the work that he is unable to recognize them in the moment of transition.”13 Therefore, “that Van Gogh’s letters are so readable, that they are so rich, basically argues against him.”14 For me the view Rilke expresses here about artistic creation overly stresses subconscious inspiration, yet Paul Klee, another artist who believed above all in rigor and discipline, also took note of the difference between direct experience of nature and the words we use to speak about it, as well as the singular individual and the persona that individuals may create: “Van Gogh is congenial to me, [that is] ‘Vincent’ in his letters.”15 Thus cautioned, we will proceed with the only direct evidences we have, which are three: the drawings, the paintings, and both entwined with the letters. Van Gogh wrote of his own aims in art this way: “Art is jealous… so I do what she wishes… I want to progress so far that people will say of my work, he feels deeply, he feels tenderly—notwithstanding my so-called roughness, perhaps even because of it.”16 Here is our theme: going further. Though he studied and was influenced by the art of other painters, especially Rembrandt, Delacroix, and Millet, and though he corresponded with Bernard and Gauguin, he did not seek the language of painters but the language of nature and the language of the emotions. “The feeling for the things themselves, for reality,” he wrote, “is more important than the feeling for pictures—at least it is more fertile and enlivening.”17 In seeking to justify himself and his expenses to his younger brother, Theo, who supported him all his adult life, he spoke of going further: “Of the drawings which I will show you now, I think only this: I hope they will prove to you that my work does not remain stationary, but progresses in a reasonable direction… I think the surest way, which cannot fail, is to work from nature faithfully and energetically. Sooner or later feeling and love for nature meet a response from people who are interested in art.”18 Van Gogh speaks directly about what Merleau-Ponty calls the “reversibility” he feels with the natural world in which the roles between the painter and the visible switch. Merleau-Ponty cited the words of Paul Klee from André Marchand’s interview: “Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me.”19 In very similar terms, Van Gogh writes: “I find in my work an echo of what struck me, after. I see that nature has told me something, has spoken to me, and that I have put it down in shorthand… there is something

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of what wood or beach or figure has told me in it, and it is not the tame or conventional language derived from a studied manner or a system rather than from nature itself.”20 Merleau-Ponty explains what he means by “going further” in the art of seeing in terms of the Husserlian notion of institution: “It is as if each step taken called for another step and made it possible, or as if each successful expression prescribed another task to the spiritual automaton or founded an institution whose efficacy it will never stop experiencing.”21 Here “going further” in the act of creation is presented in both quantitative and qualitative terms: each step is a repetition in a serial order, yet one single step can interrupt and originate a whole new direction of work. Thus a successful work of artistic creation exists within a tradition as repetition and contains an “excess” or “surplus” that is anomaly and mystery and requires future work: more learning, more exploring: this is good, this is not sufficient. The phrase “spiritual automaton” (l’automate spirituel) is highly unusual in Merleau-Ponty, who so much stresses the powers of the living body that unify the Cartesian mind and body substances, but its force here seems to stress the forward necessity for future work and expression, compelled quite like a mechanical body or robot.22 This places the emphasis upon the element of passivity in the progress of creation and marks a blend or mixture (mélange) of activity and passivity in the historical movement of instituting. In Husserl’s terms, a tradition such as geometry is the historical movement from Urstiftung (founding) to Nachstiftung (repetition) and Endstiftung (goal, telos). Institution, thus thoroughly situated in historical time, anchors and increasingly replaces the philosophy of individual intentionality in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Philosophy has never spoken—I do not say of passivity: we are not effects—but I would say of the passivity of our activity… it is not I who makes myself think any more than it is I who makes my heart beat. From there leave the philosophy of Erlebnisse and pass to the philosophy of our Urstiftung.”23 There is also a tension about this “going further” and the notion of progress in the thought of Merleau-Ponty, because he ended the final section five of Eye and Mind with the idea of the time of art as “stationary”: “the whole of human history is, in a certain sense, stationary… because the very first painting in some sense went to the farthest reach of the future.”24 I think we need to hold on to both sides of this paradox. At the same time that Van Gogh’s art was progressing, there is also a permanence, a deep time or “mythical time” expressed in the works that remain ever new and “at the first day”—an “ever new” and “always the same” in the starry night, those wheat fields, their sun and sky.25 Van Gogh only had a breathtakingly short ten years as a painter through the decade of the 1880s until his death in July 1890. Yet in studying the paintings



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and drawings and reading the letters, I have come away with a feeling of intensity and the impression of labor, hours and days and months of work. Van Gogh worked, he worked hard, and he worked at the problems of painting. He worked at perspective. Near the beginning, he was excited at the discovery of a perspective frame made for him by a blacksmith through which he could look at a meadow or shore like looking through a window and seeing the verticals, horizontals, diagonals, and division of squares.26 Near the end, use of the perspective frame diminished and Van Gogh wrote of his desire to have no recourse to “the old tricks and eye-deceiving devices of intriguers.”27 Nevertheless, the recent article by Marcia and Elizabeth Steele from the Phillips Collection and catalog, Van Gogh: Repetitions, argues that infrared reflectography has revealed perspective frame lines on a number of thinly painted Van Gogh pictures dating from November 1885 to May 1888, and on a drawing as late as November 1889.28 Therefore, we much conclude that there was ambiguity in Van Gogh’s attitude toward the perspective frame and it remained one of the tools in his repertoire. Nevertheless, in “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty argued that Cézanne gave up linear perspective in favor of painting the “lived-perspective,” which is not easy to explain, especially in light of the “distortions” in Cézanne’s still lifes and portraits.29 Lived-perspective is about the organization of space and time within the picture in a way that approximates living perception constituted by binocular vision, eye movement, bodily movement, depth, and a certain monumentality or solidity in things. Rather than livedperspective, or perhaps in addition to it, in light of what Van Gogh stresses about expressing feeling in his artworks, Van Gogh sought something more singular that we might call the felt-perspective, which would be about Van Gogh’s own perspective and the feelings evoked in the works. Though Merleau-Ponty, in “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” criticized Malraux’s concept of style for its subjectivity, Malraux seems on the track of something important about Van Gogh when he spoke of style as “the annexation of forms by means of an inner pattern” and said that “the modern artist’s supreme aim is to subdue all things to his style beginning with the least promising objects. And his emblem is Van Gogh’s famous Chair.”30 Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers (June 1890) with its swollen, contoured walls also swells with feelings of tenderness, love, and perhaps nostalgia as it echoes the artist’s painting of his pastor father’s church in Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen (January 1884). The little figure, Sorrow (November 1882) showing a seated nude woman holding her bent head in her arms aches with sadness, and Worn Out: At Eternity’s Gate (November 1882) shows an old man seated in a similar bent, seated pose, bald head held in his hands with his arms leaning on his knees expressing the

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depths of age and fatigue, maybe despair. These precious drawings display a fineness, finesse, and draftsmanship that belie Van Gogh’s better-known rough and heavy brushstrokes of the late paintings. Each one is a small miracle like the gift of an angel. Cézanne sought movement in his art, as did Klee. To look at Van Gogh’s art is also to see movement, but it is, perhaps above all, to be moved. Here visual perception overlaps with imagination and emotion creating a synesthesia between sight and touch, between sight and being touched. Van Gogh also worked on the problem of depth. For Merleau-Ponty, depth is the ever-new problem of modern art, which means achieving depth without the eye-tricks of fixed-point perspective. When Merleau-Ponty noted to himself to add Van Gogh to his discussion of Giacometti in Eye and Mind, that discussion was about depth: “I believe Cézanne was seeking depth all his life,’ says Giacometti.”31 Merleau-Ponty wrote about Rembrandt’s Nightwatch in which the shadow of the captain’s outstretched arm falls on the lieutenant’s uniform and creates the experience of depth. Van Gogh also found the voluminosity of depth in working with black and white to create the shadows: “one must be able to go from the highest light to the deepest shadow, and this with only a few simple ingredients.”32 Francis Bacon has made a moving series of paintings (1957) inspired after Van Gogh’s SelfPortrait on the Road to Tarascon (August 1888), in which each of the six studies alters and adjusts the shadow cast by Van Gogh in the original portrait as he walked on the sunlit road wearing his straw hat, laden with boxes, props, and canvases.33 Van Gogh also loved painting figures and portraits as a way of searching for depth, though here he may have meant less visual depth than depth of character. Speaking of his paintings of the old postman, Joseph Roulin, whom he painted in his blue uniform and whom he found interesting because “he has a head like Socrates,” Van Gogh expressed a feeling of confidence when doing portraits, “knowing that this work has much more depth—it isn’t the right word perhaps, but it is what makes me cultivate whatever is best and deepest in me.”34 Finally, Van Gogh worked on the problem of color. He found that there are only three fundamental colors—red, yellow, and blue; “composites” are orange, green, and purple. By adding black and some white one gets the endless varieties of grays—red-gray, yellow-gray, blue-gray, green-gray, orange-gray, violet-gray. He wrote: “The colorist is the man who knows at once how to analyze a color, when he sees it in nature, and can say, for instance: That green-gray is yellow with black and blue, etc. In other words, the man who knows how to find nature’s grays on his palette.”35 Very early in his years as a painter, in 1882, he declared exuberantly: “I know for sure I have an instinct for color, and that it will come to me more and more, that painting



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is in the very marrow of my bones.”36 These metaphysical-mystical words are very much like those of Klee on his early trip to Tunisia in 1914 where he discovered color and wrote in his Diaries: “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.”37 Merleau-Ponty named Klee and Matisse, together with Cézanne, as the masters of color who thereby came “nearer to ‘the heart of things.’”38 Nevertheless, for me and I am sure many others, Van Gogh was also a master of color who created figures, things, and worlds from nothing other than colors. Merleau-Ponty found in Van Gogh an experience of the “radiance of being”: “Colors, sounds, and things—like Van Gogh’s stars—are the focal points and radiance of being.”39 In February 1888, Van Gogh, the man from Holland in the north of Europe, then living in Montmartre in the north of Paris, left Paris for Arles in the south of France. Living in Arles in 1888 into 1889, Van Gogh went further with his art than ever before and created many of his best known and most beloved works. Arles is located in the geography and landscape of Cézanne, and a distance of only seventy-five kilometers separates Arles and Aix-en-Provence, today less than an hour’s drive. Near Aix is the village of Tholonet and Cézanne’s studio. What links Cézanne and Van Gogh is both this geographic proximity and a common friend and correspondent, Émile Bernard. Bernard visited Cézanne several times in Aix and Van Gogh wished for Bernard to live with him in Arles at the same time as Gauguin in fall 1888, dreaming of a utopian artists’ association. There is a letter from Cézanne to Bernard in which Cézanne advises the younger artist to avoid being influenced by Van Gogh: Allow me to tell you that I’ve had another look at the study you did from the ground floor of the studio. It’s good. I believe you need only to continue along that path. You know what should be done, and you’ll soon be able to turn your back on the Gauguins and Gogs [Goghs].40

This passing comment conflicts with the view of Joachim Gasquet, who reports that Cézanne was quite sympathetic with the work of Van Gogh and enjoyed two Van Gogh paintings Gasquet had at his house.41 If Cézanne may have been reticent about the art of Van Gogh, the reverse was not the case, for Van Gogh shows only respect for Cézanne. When Van Gogh encountered the land, sky, sun, olive trees, and flowers of southern France in Arles and its surrounds, inevitably his palette changed, it brightened, and the browns and dark-toned grays of earlier master works like The Potato Eaters (April 1885) gave way to greens, blues, and yellows, especially that un-

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believably high-tone of yellow Van Gogh called chrome yellow, or sometimes sulfur yellow. The blues, greens, violets, reds, and yellows were amplified, saturated, and loud, created with Van Gogh’s signature thick brushstrokes, whether interiors, landscapes, self-portraits, and portraits, often painted like landscapes.42 In these changes, Van Gogh was responding to a brightness in his new surroundings he had never experienced before and he was also thinking of the colors of Cézanne. He exclaimed: “The green, and the blue! I must say several landscapes of Cézanne’s which I know render this very well, and I am sorry not to have seen more of them.”43 By June 1888 Van Gogh was experiencing true progress with his color palette. He wrote: “The last canvas absolutely kills all the others; it is only a still life, with coffee-pot and cups and plates in blue and yellow; it is something quite apart….”44 And the letter ends with a comparison to Cézanne: If coming home with my canvas, I say to myself, ‘Look! I’ve got the very tones of old Cézanne!’ I only mean that Cézanne like Zola is so absolutely part of the countryside, and knows it so intimately, that you must make the same calculations in your head to arrive at the same tones. Of course, if you saw them side by side, mine would hold their own, but there would be no resemblance.45

Seen by themselves, Van Gogh wrote, the Cézanne colors might not be so striking, “but put near other pictures they washed the color out of everything else… which means the color scheme was pitched very high. So perhaps I am on the right track.”46 It has not often been remarked that Rilke’s Letters on Cézanne also speak frequently of Van Gogh. He notes that Cézanne always painted the humblest of objects—cooking apples, flowers in a vase, a gardener—and “like Van Gogh he makes ‘saints’ out of such things; and forces them— forces them—to be beautiful.”47 Writing of Van Gogh’s colors in Landscape with Setting Sun (1889), Rilke speaks of “a setting sun, yellow and orange red, surrounded by a shining of yellow, round fragments: against it, full of revolt, Blue, Blue, Blue the slope of curved hills… in the slanted front third of the picture, you can make out a field and leaning groups of upright sheafs of corn.”48 In another very fine passage, Rilke speaks of Van Gogh “going further” and this desire for the labor of painting we have called excess and surplus: I believe I do feel what Van Gogh must have felt at a certain juncture, and it is a strong and great feeling: that everything is yet to be done: everything…. It must come out of insight, from pleasure, from no longer being able to postpone the work in view of all the many things that have to be done.49



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GOING FURTHER IN THE ART OF LIVING We are brought to this juncture of art and life because the art of Van Gogh is entwined so deeply with his life of poverty, illnesses, and suffering. During the last two years of his brief life of only thirty-seven years, Van Gogh experienced the onset and deepening of a mental illness that Karl Jaspers, philosopher and psychiatrist, diagnoses as schizophrenia in his work titled Strindberg and Van Gogh (1922), for which Blanchot wrote the preface to the French translation.50 For Blanchot, “going further” means that the work is “the absence of the work,” in a phrase that calls to mind Balzac’s Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu and the struggles of Frenhofer.51 Jaspers diagnoses Van Gogh as schizophrenic with symptoms that include auditory and visual hallucinations, a manic intensity with his work, and acute attacks of depression, nervous anxiety, and blackouts. Van Gogh’s doctor at St. Rémy diagnosed epilepsy, which Jaspers disputes “because of the absence of epileptic seizures…. To me, schizophrenia seems overwhelmingly probable.”52 Merleau-Ponty himself also adopted a view of Van Gogh as epileptic, in his 1951–1952 Sorbonne lecture titled “Method in Child Psychology,” reporting the findings from Françoise Minkowski’s De Van Gogh et Seurat.53 There is some ambiguity in Jaspers’ text about whether he means the strong thesis that Van Gogh’s illness was the cause for the way Van Gogh painted or if he means the weaker claim that the illness was one of the conditions, alongside others such as poverty, with which the artist struggled. In one passage he states: “It would be altogether quite wrong to think that one might detect in Van Gogh’s expressions about his art something directly caused by schizophrenia.”54 Another passage says: “Schizophrenia is not creative by its own merits…. For this kind of personality schizophrenia is later the prerequisite (causatively speaking) for the opening of the abyss.”55 What is clear in Jaspers’ diagnosis is the claim that Van Gogh’s illness caused changes in his painting during his last two years, first in Arles, then the asylum at St. Rémy, and finally under the care of Dr. Gachet at Auvers. We will come to these changes momentarily. Merleau-Ponty’s statement regarding Cézanne’s paranoia and schizothymia harmonizes with what Jaspers seeks to express regarding Van Gogh: “Although it is certain that a man’s life does not explain his work, it is equally certain that the two are connected. The truth is that that work to be done called for that life.”56 “Calling for” a certain life is the delicate translation of the French “à faire exigeait,” searching for an English phrasing in between pure freedom and pure destiny, even though the French phrase would place the stress upon necessity and obligation.57 The work to be done places constraints and obligations, though it does not eliminate agency completely; that

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is the tension to be articulated. In a related passage of “Cézanne’s Doubt,” Merleau-Ponty expresses the tension or paradox another way: Two things are certain about freedom: that we are never determined and yet we never change, since, looking back on what we were, we can always find hints of what we have become. It is up to us to understand both these things simultaneously.58

Jaspers is cautious with his diagnosis of schizophrenia because he recognizes that the diagnosis depended upon a chronology of the artworks that was unavailable at his time, for it would take such a precise chronology to be able to correlate the attacks of mental illness with changes in the art. He relied upon the catalog of 108 artworks from the 1912 Van Gogh exhibition in Cologne. The first chronological catalog was published in 1928, and to give some idea of the scale Jaspers was lacking, the definitive 1970 catalogue raisonée of Van Gogh’s art presents 1,732 artworks.59 In general, Jaspers based his diagnosis upon three main factors. First, he finds a correspondence between the attacks of illness that began in December 1888 and a greatly heightened, manic, and obsessive work intensity and outpouring of artworks in 1889 and 1890. Second, he also observes the change in Van Gogh’s color palette that we have outlined, namely, the introduction of “full brightness and clarity of colors” that Jaspers finds pushed to the extreme of the “glaringly yellow tone” of the sunflower picture of 1888.60 Third, Jaspers perceives a decline in the last paintings. Here are two such passages outlining that decline: The inner tumult seems to loosen his self-discipline. The mannerism of strokes and curves becomes cruder, the mode of painting more vulgar. I remember two pictures of Auvers as examples for this statement, a wheat field and some houses.61 . . . The very last pictures of his last weeks leave a somewhat chaotic impression…. they take on a wild character…. Elementary massive impulses, no longer creatively rich but monotonous…. The pictures look poorer, details seem coincidental. At times the violence turns into wild daubing without form. Energy without meaning, despair and shuddering without expression. No longer new ‘formation of concepts.’62

If we consider only a few of the master works from Van Gogh’s last months in Auvers, they include The Church at Auvers (June 1890) and Portrait of Dr. Gachet (June 1890), and the preceding period from the asylum at St. Rémy, which includes the best known of the night sky paintings, Starry Night (June 1889), and the detailed, intricate, and complex Irises in a Vase (May 1890). Of this latter work, John Rewald has written that this painting of flowers is among the “happiest” Van Gogh ever painted: “their colors are



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subtle even where they are contrasting, their execution is swift, flowing, without hesitancy and torment, their arrangements are masterly. There is nothing tortured or wild about them…. They seem relaxed and full of joy, soft and yet of tremendous power.”63 The same could be said of Branch of an Almond Tree in Bloom (1890) that Van Gogh painted for his newly born nephew, whom his brother Theo named “Vincent.” It reflects a delicate blending of Japanese and impressionist aesthetics. With regard to the paintings of houses in Auvers that Jaspers mentions, Van Gogh’s paintings are strikingly similar to Cézanne’s paintings of the houses in Auvers from 1873, including The House of Dr. Gachet in Auvers (1873) and the well-known Hanged-Man’s House in Auvers (1873). Thus, it is necessary to conclude that the aesthetic judgment of decline in Van Gogh’s last works is, at best, selective, and certainly based on the requirements of a more classical aesthetic too little familiar with the experiments of modern art. To comment but briefly, the chronology Jaspers creates from 1885 to 1890 to demonstrate decline uses the aesthetic standards of order, tranquility, beauty, perspective, and abundance.64 Such realist or representational requirements of art are ill-suited to the efforts of modern art to “go further.” Nevertheless, Jaspers is not alone in finding a sense of “wildness” or even pathological madness in Van Gogh. From a diary entry in March 1908, Paul Klee speaks of two exhibitions where he had just seen Van Gogh’s works, “very famous pieces, like L’Arlésienne [November 1888] and many others.”65 Klee comments: “His pathos is alien to me, especially in my current phase, but he is certainly a genius. Pathetic to the point of being pathological, this endangered man can endanger one who does not see through him. Here a brain is consumed by the fire of a star. It frees itself in its work just before the catastrophe. Deepest tragedy takes place here, real tragedy, natural tragedy, exemplary tragedy. Permit me to be terrified!”66 “Too bad,” Klee wrote, “that the early Van Gogh was so fine a human being, but not so good as a painter, and that the later, wonderful artist is such a marked man.”67 Some years later in spring, 1911 Klee sounded a more appreciative note on Van Gogh: At present, I begin to understand many things about Van Gogh. I develop more and more confidence in him, partly because of his letters of which I own a selection. He was able to reach deep, very deep into his own heart…. he came without a break from Impressionism and yet created novelty. His line is new and yet very old…. The realization that there exists a line that benefits from Impressionism and at the same time conquers it has a truly electrifying effect on me. “Progress possible in the line!”68

In Antonin Artaud’s work, Van Gogh le suicidé de la société, written in response to the Van Gogh exhibition of 1947 in Paris, Artaud found this

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“wildness” congenial. “I don’t know a single psychiatrist who would be able to scrutinize a man’s face with such crushing power…. Van Gogh’s eye is that of a great genius…. it is no longer the genius of a painter I sense alive in him at that moment but that of a certain philosopher whom I have never met in actual life. Socrates hadn’t such an eye.”69 Artaud adds that the only philosophical glance akin to the eye of Van Gogh was, for him, that of “poor Nietzsche.”70 I am reminded of Thoreau’s search for a person who was fully awake: “To be awake is to be alive. I have never met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?”71 Artaud shared with Van Gogh sympathy for his mistreatment by the psychiatric establishment, which he had also repeatedly experienced, for Van Gogh at St. Rémy was virtually a prisoner, isolated, neglected, malnourished, and unwashed. He was cared for by Dr. Peyron, a voluntary intern with little medical training who diagnosed epilepsy and in his final report when Van Gogh left the asylum for Auvers in May 1890, wrote: “Cured.”72 Though Dr. Gachet at Auvers was a friend of Theo, Cézanne, and others, he also comes under the suspicions of Artaud. “It is nearly impossible to be a doctor and an honest man,” he wrote, and he spoke of Gachet as himself marked by a touch of madness, atavism, and the enemy of genius.73 Indeed, Van Gogh also had spoken of Dr. Gachet’s own mental illness and neglect.74 In these ways in the life of Van Gogh, he was “going further” than the frames and filters of “normal” experience to an intensity and depth in perception and life that is terrifying or admirable. It is both of these simultaneously. He was certainly a mind, heart, and hand “on fire.” Merleau-Ponty writes of this aesthetic of fire in Eye and Mind, adapted from Klee’s “Creative Credo”: “A certain fire wills to live; it wakes. Working its way along the hand’s conductor, it reaches the canvas and invades it, then, a leaping spark, it arcs the gap in the circle it was to trace: the return to the eye, and the beyond”75 Van Gogh went further (plus loin), he went beyond (au-delà), he burned, and no doubt, burned himself out.76 Merleau-Ponty could understand and appreciate Van Gogh for he wrote of vision itself as a kind of delirium or madness: “The painter’s world is a visible world, nothing but visible: a world almost mad…. Painting awakens and carries to its highest pitch a delirium which is vision itself.”77 This is what Rilke ultimately also came to feel and admire in Van Gogh’s “going further.” In contrast with psychiatric and societal meanings of madness, Rilke thinks about how “mad” and “destructive” it would have been for Van Gogh to have been forced to share his vision with someone and explain or justify his motifs before he made his pictures. There is a singularity in his vision that he himself could only come to. Rilke writes: Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.



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The further one goes, the more private, the more personal, the more singular an experience becomes, and the thing one is making is, finally, the necessary, irrepressible, and, as nearly as possible, definitive utterance of this singularity.78

This singularity, according to Rilke, is our own personal “utmost,” and he adds, “our own personal madness, so to speak.”79 GOING FURTHER IN THE ART OF DYING I find Van Gogh’s life of poverty and self-sacrifice to the labor of his art remarkable as well as his commitment to the love of nature and love of the humblest of mankind: peasants, farmers, postal workers, miners, fishermen, weavers, shepherds, prostitutes, potato diggers, wood cutters, his brother, his sister, his fellow artists. For Van Gogh, nature and these humble ones were sacred, and though he may have mistreated them in bouts of anger or depression, they were his deepest attachments and raison d’être. Jaspers stresses that Van Gogh was filled with a religious urge that let him “sense eternity”: “he resists all direct symbolization of the supernatural…. Instead he has placed such massive strength, such inexpressible religiosity or philosophy of life, as one might call it, into his simple love of truth, into the formulation of the simplest things in this world.”80 Jaspers emphasizes this because a frequent attitude of schizophrenic persons is to indulge in religious “superstitions.” Jaspers appreciates that Van Gogh held himself in check, rejected any influence of such indulgences over himself, and found his sense of eternity in what was humble and small. Van Gogh’s particular sense of eternity finds one of its most profound expressions in the last letter Van Gogh wrote to Bernard and which became the occasion for a cooling in their friendship; certainly it marked the end of their correspondence. Bernard had a propensity both for over-theorizing his art and for making religious art in the manner of Italian art of the Renaissance. This was fundamental to Bernard’s aesthetic and without it he felt there was an absence of truth and beauty. Bernard was to fall out with Cézanne over this very point when he said these things to the old master. Bernard reports: “Cézanne stopped. He regarded me with a terrible look in his eyes, where I thought I saw some tears. Then he turned around and said brusquely: ‘I am old… It is too late… The truth lies in nature; I will prove it!’”81 One might have thought Bernard would have learned his lesson, for that was in 1904 and Van Gogh had attempted a very similar lesson in his own last letter more than a decade earlier in 1889. Bernard had sent Van Gogh a sketch of a “Christ in the Garden of Olives” and Van Gogh wrote back and called it a “nightmare”: “good Lord, I mourn over it, and so with the present letter I ask you again,

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roaring my loudest, and calling you all kinds of names with the full power of my lungs—to be so kind as to become your own self again a little. The ‘Christ Carrying his Cross’ is appalling.”82 Van Gogh went on to call these kind of works “clichés” and not art. “One can try to give an impression of anguish without aiming straight at the historic Garden of Gethsemane; that it is not necessary to portray the characters of the Sermon on the Mount in order to produce a consoling and gentle motif.”83 Van Gogh urged Bernard to make more painting with simple subjects like Bernard’s Madeleine in the Wood of Love, 1888, to make little things after nature that “create grace out of nothing.” Vincent’s brother Theo was also alarmed by the turn toward religious images in the art of both Bernard and Gauguin and he praised Vincent precisely for “going further” with color, but not only that, with nature and living creatures rather than a religious symbolism that “tortures the form.” “But how your brain must have labored, and how you have risked everything to the very limit, where vertigo is inevitable!”84 Sometimes, quite rarely in fact, Van Gogh expressed his sense of eternity by speaking of God: “In this print [of a “little old man,” an experiment in lithography] I have tried to express… what seems to me one of the strongest proofs of the existence of ‘quelque chose la-haut’ [something on high] in which Millet believed, namely the existence of God and eternity…. there is something noble, something great, which cannot be destined for the worms.”85 But then immediately Van Gogh returned to his more customary form of expression and spoke of the beauty of the passage from Uncle Tom’s Cabin “where the poor slave, sitting with his wife for the last time, and knowing he must die, remembers the words,” Let cares like a wild deluge come, And storms of sorrow fall, May I but safely reach my home, My God, my Heaven, my all.86

Van Gogh concludes: “This is far from theology, simply the fact that the poorest little woodcutter or peasant on the heath or miner can have moments of emotion and inspiration which give him a feeling of an eternal home, and of being close to it.”87 Sometimes too, in spite of his estrangement from the dogmas of the Reformed Church of his pastor father, Van Gogh still spoke of eternity in terms of Christ, but this was a Christ imagined as an artist on Van Gogh’s own terms: “The figure of Christ, as I feel it, has been painted only by Delacroix and Rembrandt… [Christ] lived serenely, as a greater artist than all other artists, despising marble and clay as well as color, working in living flesh.



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That is to say, this matchless artist… loudly proclaimed that he made… living men, immortals.”88 He concluded that these considerations “lead us very far, very far” for they raise us above art itself.89 Finally, one of Van Gogh’s most idiosyncratic expressions for the sense of eternity and going home came in his statement that “life is round.” In spite of the advances of science, Van Gogh argued, most people persist in believing that “life is flat and runs from birth to death. However, life too is probably round, and very superior in expanse and capacity to the hemisphere we know at present.”90 It is difficult to know all that Van Gogh meant by the “roundness” of life, and Bachelard has made an attempt in a little chapter titled “The Phenomenology of Roundness” in The Poetics of Space that includes Jaspers’ statement that “every being seems in itself round.”91 Certainly in Van Gogh’s painting, as his art matured, we find more curves, arcs, circles, contours, bulges, and spheres, like those heavenly spheres surrounding the stars in his series of starry night paintings. The ancients thought that there were many heavens, that the sky was a sphere surrounding the earth, and there was a set of concentric spheres one inside the other.92 The context for Van Gogh’s statement is his discussion of the metamorphosis of insects, “a phenomenon no more unusual and no more surprising that the transformation of the caterpillar into a butterfly.”93 Thus it is possible to imagine the existence of a “painter-butterfly” that would inhabit a heavenly body after death, thus death as a sort of star-bridge.94 This produces an admonition quite Stoic: “It would be praiseworthy of us to maintain a certain serenity with regard to the possibilities of painting under superior and changed conditions of existence.”95 “Painter-butterfly” and “star-bridge” are metaphors and allusions, giving names to the delicately implicit, and what must ultimately be silence, in the face of mystery that brings philosophy closer to the written style of literature, never finished, always “on the way.”96 The point here is not that philosophy and art are the same and collapse into one another, rather the key is “openness” (ouverte), that the philosopher and artist enter into their experience of the world in the same manner, their work remains ever open and porous.97 In the painting-butterfly work of Van Gogh, aesthetic experience and the act of painting is an event (événement). We use this humble word, event, to signify what is most powerful, the moment in time that introduces “newness” and “irruption” that can never thereafter be suppressed. The first such great event of life, and the event par excellence for Merleau-Ponty, is the event of birth and in each new event that is to come there is a repetition of the “proto-event” of birth. This is what Merleau-Ponty wanted to signify by his ultimate ontological term Flesh: growth, genesis, the “ever new” and “always the same,” the invisible that is the lining and depth of the visible.98 The event

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of Van Gogh remains a constellation in the world’s Flesh; now we simply perceive wheatfields, stars, and sunflowers “according to Van Gogh.” Artaud understood this profoundly and wrote: Simply a painter, Van Gogh, and nothing more . . . these sunflowers of bronzed gold have been painted: they have been painted like sunflowers and nothing else, yet to understand a real sunflower in nature, one will no longer be able to avoid returning to Van Gogh.99

Merleau-Ponty ended Phenomenology of Perception with a reference to the art of dying and the hero who is able to go farther, and here he writes au delà with its possible implicit reference to “going beyond” this world into “the beyond” (l’au-delà): “it is by living my time that I can understand other times; it is by plunging into the present and into the world, by resolutely taking up what I am by chance, by willing what I will, and by doing what I do, that I can go farther (je peux aller au delà).”100 Though Klee’s death caused by the disease of scleroderma was starkly different from Van Gogh’s demise, he shared with Van Gogh the sense of an ending as “going beyond,” “going home.” Klee had an instinctive bond with the Near East, and though his previous knowledge of Egypt was no greater than his knowledge of Tunis when he had gone there some years earlier, on arrival in Egypt he felt as though he had been there before. “Where are we going? Always home.”101 NOTES 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 353–54. 2.  Vincent Van Gogh et al., Musée de l’Orangerie, janvier—mars, 1947 (Paris: Presses artistiques, 1947), 5–8. 3.  Manuscript of L’Oeil et l’esprit, Vol. 5, 154, in the salle des archives, Bibliothèque Nationale, rue Richilieu. Cited in Stéphanie Ménasé, “Merleau-Ponty: une écriture élaborée? Lecture génétique de L’Oeil et l’Esprit,” Rue Descartes, No. 50, “L’Écriture des philosophies” (November 2005): 104, footnote 27. “Parfois, MerleauPonty signale qu’il faudrait ajouter d’autres exemples. Ainsi, lorsqu’il note: ‘Ajouter à l’endroit où je cite Giacometti: Van Gogh qui voudrait que la peinture vive, Butor: ces raisins, qui n’ont jamais existé sont les raisins mêmes. Pas d’alternative imitationcréation, être-néant, objet-subjet.’” 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 57. 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evan-



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ston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 123. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’Esprit (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964), 15.   6.  Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, eds., Van Gogh: The Life (New York: Random House, 2012), 862–85. Naifeh and Smith argue that Van Gogh’s death was not a suicide. Their last chapter, 43, and Appendix A has the information on Vincent’s fatal wounding. The report from the two doctors from Vincent’s bedside said: 1) the bullet had not exited the body but had come to rest near the spinal column; 2) the gun that inflicted the wound was a small-caliber pistol; 3) the bullet had entered the body from an unusual, oblique angle (not straight on); and 4) the gun had been fired at some distance from the body, not close up. No physical evidence was ever produced. No gun was ever found. None of the painting equipment that Vincent took with him was ever recovered. No autopsy was performed. The bullet was not removed. Nevertheless, the hypothesis of Naifeh and Smith has been more recently disputed by Van Tilborgh and Meedendorp from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, published in Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp, “The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh,” Burlington Magazine 155, no. 1324 (July 2013): 456–62. See also Julian Bell, Van Gogh: A Power Seething (Boston: New Harvest, 2015), 163, n. 67.  7. A. M. Hammacher, “Van Gogh and the Words,” in The Works of Vincent Van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (catalogue raisonné), ed. J. B. de la Faille (Amsterdam, Holland: Reynal & Company, Meulenhoff International, 1970), 10–37.   8.  The top-selling Van Gogh work, Portrait of Dr. Gachet (June 1890), sold at Christie’s for $82.5 million in 1990, at the time the largest amount ever paid for a work of art, $142.5 million in today’s economy.  9. Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Volume I (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), 426 Letter 221. 10.  All these “strong” words for Van Gogh’s art appear in Antonin Artaud, Van Gogh le suicidé de la société (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 11.  Vincent van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh, Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard, ed. Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, Nienke Bakker (NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007), 7. 12.  Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Volume III (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), 481 Letter 4. 13. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, ed. Clara Rilke, trans. Joel Agee (New York: Fromm International Publishing Company, 1985), 75. 14. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 75–76. 15.  Klee’s own diaries also amply display his own personality/persona division. Paul Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918, ed. Felix Klee (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1964), 220. 16.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 416 Letter 218. 17.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 416 Letter 218. 18.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 426 Letter 221. 19.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 129. 20.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 448 Letter 228. 21. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 53.

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22.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signes (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960), 66. 23. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 221. 24.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 149. 25. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 243, 267. 26.  “The vertical lines and the horizontal line of the frame and the diagonal lines and the intersection, or else the division in squares, certainly give a few fundamental pointers which help one make a solid drawing and which indicate the main lines and proportions…. Long and continuous practice with it enables one to draw quick as lightning—and, once the drawing is done firmly, to paint quick as lightning, too” (Letter 223 to Theo, late July or early August, 1882, Vol. I, 432–433). 27. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 474 Letter 1. He also says, “Working directly on the spot all the time, I try to grasp what is essential in the drawing—later I fill in the spaces which are bounded by contours—either expressed or not, but in any case felt—with tones which are also amplified… In short, my dear comrade, in no case an eye-deceiving job”([“there’s no attempt at perspective”] Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 478 Letter 3). 28.  Marcia Steele and Elizabeth Steele, “Methods for Making Repetitions,” in Van Gogh: Repetitions, ed. Eliza A. Rathbone, William H. Robinson, Elizabeth Steele, and Marcia Steele (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 174. The catalog for the exhibition, Van Gogh: Repetitions, was organized by the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. 29.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 59–75. 30.  André Malraux, “The Museum Without Walls,” in The Voices of Silence, trans. Gilbert Stuart (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 119. Merleau-Ponty critiqued Malraux’s “subjective” interpretation of the meaning of style and modern art in his essay “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence” published both in The Prose of the World and a longer version in Signs. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Indirect Language,” in The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill, ed. Claude LeFort (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 47–113. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,” in Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 39–83. 31.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 140. 32.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 518 Letter 256. 33.  Brendan Prendeville, “Varying the Self: Bacon’s Versions of van Gogh,” Oxford Art Journal 27/1 (2004): 25–42. 34.  Vincent van Gogh, The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Volume II (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1978), 625 Letter 517. 35.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 425–26 Letter 221. 36.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 448 Letter 228. 37. Klee, Diaries of Klee, 297. 38.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 141, 143.



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39. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 15. 40.  Paul Cézanne, The Letters of Paul Cézanne, ed. Alex Danchev (Los Angeles, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), 334–35 Letter 1. In a footnote to Cézanne’s letter to Émile Bernard, Aix, 15 April 1904, Danchev writes: “It is not often remarked that Cézanne (nine letters in 1904–06) and Van Gogh (twenty-two letters in 1887– 1889) had Bernard in common, and indeed other minor characters such as the amateur Dr. Gachet and the colour merchant Père Tanguy. The comparison between those two habitual letter-writers and fabled temperaments is an interesting one—as Bernard himself must have realized, for he staged a fictitious encounter between them, in Tanguy’s paint shop. Van Gogh is supposed to have shown Cézanne his work and asked for an opinion. After inspecting it all, Cézanne, whose character was timid but violent, said to him: ‘Truly, you paint like a madman!’ The invention is instructive. Bernard’s testimony has the ring of authenticity, yet it is not completely reliable.” Bernard’s fictitious encounter is undocumented by Alex Danchev. Nevertheless, see Vincent van Gogh, Vincent Van Gogh Letters to Emile Bernard, ed. Douglas Lord (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938), 73. At footnote 10 Ford refers to the encounter between Van Gogh and Cézanne at Tanguy’s and documents it: “I have compiled this note from an article on Julien Tanguy by Emile Bernard, in Mercure de France, of December 16, 1908.” 41.  Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 100. MerleauPonty chose the statement from Gasquet’s memoir on Cézanne regarding the mystery of painting as the epigram for the beginning of “Eye and Mind.” 42.  Joseph J. Rishel et al. Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2000). The catalog of the exhibition, Van Gogh: Face to Face, was organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 43.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters II, 566–67 Letter 488. 44.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters II, 583 Letter 497. 45.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters II, 584 Letter 497. Van Gogh’s letters to Émile Bernard also include several comments related to Cézanne. To Bernard, last week of June 1888: “If you saw my canvases, what would you say of them? You won’t find the almost timid, conscientious brush stroke of Cézanne in them. But as I am now painting the same landscape, la Crau and Camargue—though at a slightly different spot—there may well remain certain connections in it in the matter of color. What do I know about it? I couldn’t help thinking of Cézanne from time to time, at exactly those moments when I realized how clumsy his touch in certain studies is—excuse the word clumsy—seeing that he probably did these studies when the mistral was blowing. As half the time I am faced with the same difficulty, I get an idea of why Cézanne’s touch is sometimes so sure, whereas at other times it appears awkward. It’s his easel that’s reeling.” Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 498–99 Letter 9. And again to Bernard, 17 July 1888, Van Gogh writes: “I have just sent you—today—nine more sketches after painted studies. In this way you will see subjects taken from the sort of scenery that inspires ‘father’ Cézanne, for the Crau near Aix is pretty similar to the country surrounding Tarascon or the Crau here…. As I know how much

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you like Cézanne, I thought these sketches of Provence might please you; not that there is much resemblance between a drawing of mine and one by Cézanne. Oh, for that matter, no more than there is between Monticelli and me! But I too very much like the country they have loved so much, and for the same reasons: the color and the logical design.” Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 502 Letter 11. 46.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters II, 583 Letter 497. 47. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 40. 48. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 62. 49. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 22, 23. 50.  Maurice Blanchot, “La Folie par excellence,” in Karl Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, Swedenborg-Hölderlin, étude psychiatrique comparative, trans. Hélène Naef, M. L. Solms-Naef, and M. Solms (Paris: Ed. De Minuit, 1953), 9–32. 51.  Merleau-Ponty reports: “Cézanne was moved to tears when he read Le chefd’oeuvre inconnu and declared that he himself was Frenhofer.” Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 68. In this short novel by Balzac, the artist Frenhofer struggles for ten years to paint his masterwork and, in the end, in disappointment that his prize students cannot perceive its beauty, burns his paintings and dies the same night. Honoré de Balzac et al., Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu (Paris: Flammarion, 1981). 52.  Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh: An Attempt at a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Hölderlin, trans. Oskar Brunow and David Woloshin (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 187. 53.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952, trans. Talia Welsh (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 421 54. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 170. 55. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 178. 56. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 70. 57. Merleau-Ponty, Signes, 34–35. 58.  Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” 72. 59.  There was no chronological catalog until the work of Dr. Jacob Baart de la Faille (1886–1959) who worked for eleven years to produce the first catalog in 1928. In regard to this history of cataloging Van Gogh’s artworks, see the prefatory materials to J. B. de la Faille, ed., The Works of Vincent Van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (catalogue raisonnée) (Amsterdam, Holland: Reynal & Company, Meulenhoff International, 1970) , 10–37. 60. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 174, 171. 61. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176–77. 62. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 180–81. 63. John Rewald, Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1956), 383. 64. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 179–81. 65. Klee, Diaries of Klee, 224. 66. Klee, Diaries of Klee, 224. 67. Klee, Diaries of Klee, 222. 68. Klee, Diaries of Klee, 259–60.



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69. Artaud, Van Gogh le suicidé de la société, 105-10. English translation in Hammacher, “Van Gogh Words,” 29–30. The wider text reads, “Je ne connais pas un seul psychiatre qui saurait scruter un visage d’homme avec une force aussi écrasante et en disséquer comme au tranchoir l’irréfragable psychologie. L’oeil de van Gogh est d’un grand génie... c’est n’est plus le génie d’un peintre que je sens en ce moment vivre en lui, mais celui d’un certain philosophe par moi jamais rencontré dan la vie. Non, Socrate n’avait pas cet oeil, seul peut-être avant lui le malheureux Nietzsche.” 70.  Hammacher, “Van Gogh Words,” 29–30. 71.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 85. 72. Rewald, Post-Impressionism, 384. Of Dr. Peyron, Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, from Auvers in July 1890, reflecting on his treatment at St. Rémy: “Certainly my last attack, which was terrible, was in a large measure due to the influence of the other patients, and then the prison was crushing me, and old Peyron didn’t pay the slightest attention to it, leaving me to vegetate with the rest, all deeply tainted.” (Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 294 Letter 648). 73. Artaud, Van Gogh, 38: “Il est à peu près impossible d’être médecin et honnête homme.” 74.  Vincent writes to Theo: “Now about Dr. Gachet. I went to see him the day before yesterday, I did not find him in…. I think we must not count on Dr. Gachet at all. First of all, he is sicker than I am, I think, or shall we say just as much, so that’s that. Now when one blind man leads another blind man, don’t they both fall into the ditch?” (Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 294 Letter 648). 75.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 147. 76. Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’Esprit, 86. 77.  Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 127. 78. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 4–5. 79. Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 5. 80. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 182. 81.  Émile Bernard, “A Conversation with Cézanne (Mercure de France),” in Conversations with Cézanne, ed. Michael Doran (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 163. 82.  Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 522 Letter 21. 83. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 524 Letter 21. It is remarkable that Merleau-Ponty’s dispute with Sartre’s theory of art and literature precisely centered on the ability of a painting to express anguish. The painting under discussion was Tintoretto’s Golgotha (1565–1567). Sartre argued that “painting was mute” and only prose words can speak. Merleau-Ponty replied: “Writers must not underestimate the painter’s labor and study, that effort which is so like an effort of thought and which allows us to speak of a language of paintings.” (Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 55). It is evident that Van Gogh and Merleau-Ponty are on the same side of this argument regarding the ability of painting to express anguish. The full statement of Sartre’s position is found in Jean-Paul Sartre, Literature and Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1991), 7–37.

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 84. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 534–44 Letter 10.  85. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 495 Letter 10.  86. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 495 Letter 248.  87. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters I, 495 Letter 248.  88. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 496 Letter 8.  89. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 496 Letter 8.  90. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 497 Letter 8.   91.  Gaston Bachelard, “The Phenomenology of Roundness,” in The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 232–41.  92. Jean-Luc Nancy, “In Heaven and on Earth,” in Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 72.  93. Merleau-Ponty speaks of Van Gogh and “the perspective of the insect.” I am not sure if Merleau-Ponty had this text from Van Gogh in mind. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954–1955), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 46.  94. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 497 Letter 8. I owe this expression, “star-bridge,” to my friend, Kit Staton, psychoanalyst, who coined it to capture Van Gogh’s thought about the meaning of death and the afterlife. Also this list of roundness is Kit’s: “faces, eyes, breasts, smiles, humans huddling around fires for warmth and nourishment, shapes of early huts and tents, sun and moon.”  95. Van Gogh, The Complete Letters III, 497 Letter 8.   96.  In his courses on Nature in which Merleau-Ponty is commenting on the relation between art and philosophy in the thought of Schelling, he said: “There is still a difference between philosophy and art: the philosopher looks to express the world, the artist seeks to create it…. Philosophy does not sublimate itself in art. There is simply a possible relation between the experience of the artist and the experience of the philosopher, insofar as the experience of the artist is open, an ekstasis.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, ed. Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 46.  97. Jenny Slatman, L’Expression au-delà de la Represéntation: Sur L’aesthesis et L’esthétique chez Merleau-Ponty (Paris: Peeters Vrin, 2003), 227.  98. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 149.  99. Artaud, Van Gogh, 73–74. “Rien que peintre, van Gogh, et pas plus…. ses tournesols d’or bronzé sont peints; ils sont peints comme des tournesols et rien de plus, mais pour comprendre un tournesol en nature, it faut maintenant en revenir à van Gogh” (translated in Hammacher, “Van Gogh Words,” 30). 100. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 456. The reference is drawn from Saint-Exupéry’s Flight to Arras (Pilot de guerre) and its context of risk and sacrifice in war. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Pilot de guerre (Paris: Editions De La Maison Francaise, 1942). 101.  Will Grohmann, Paul Klee (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1954), 274.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Artaud, Antonin. Van Gogh le suicidé de la société. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Bachelard, Gaston. “The Phenomenology of Roundness.” In The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas, 234–41. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Balzac, Honoré, Marc Eigeldinger, and Max Milner. Le chef-d’oeuvre inconnu. Paris: Flammarion, 1981. Bell, Julian. Van Gogh: A Power Seething. Boston: New Harvest, 2015. Blanchot, Maurice. “La Folie par excellence.” In Karl Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, Swedenborg-Hölderlin, étude psychiatrique comparative, translated by Hélène Naef, M. L. Solms-Naef, and M. Solms, 9–32. Paris: Ed. De Minuit, 1953. Bernard, Émile. “A Conversation with Cézanne (Mercure de France).” In Conversations with Cézanne, edited by Michael Doran, 161–64. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Cézanne, Paul. The Letters of Paul Cézanne. Edited by Alex Danchev. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013. Faille, J. B. de la., ed. The Works of Vincent Van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings. Amsterdam, Holland: Reynal & Company, Meulenhoff International, 1970. Gasquet, Joachim. Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations. Translated by Christopher Pemberton. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991. Grohmann, Will. Paul Klee. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1954. Hammacher, A. M. “Van Gogh and the Words.” In The Works of Vincent Van Gogh: His Paintings and Drawings (catalogue raisonné). Edited by J. B. de la Faille. Amsterdam, Holland: Reynal & Company, Meulenhoff International, 1970. Jaspers, Karl. Strindberg and Van Gogh: An Attempt at a Pathographic Analysis with Reference to Parallel Cases of Swedenborg and Hölderlin. Translated by Oskar Brunow and David Woloshin. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1977. Klee, Paul. The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898–1918. Edited by Felix Klee. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1964. Malraux, André. “The Museum Without Walls.” In The Voices of Silence, translated by Gilbert Stuart, 13–130. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978. Ménasé, Stéphanie. “Merleau-Ponty: une écriture élaborée? Lecture génétique de L’Oeil et l’Esprit,” Rue Descartes, No. 50, “L’Écriture des philosophies” (November 2005): 100–19. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen A. Johnson, translated by Michael B. Smith, 59–75. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998. Originally published in Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Le doute de Cézanne.” In Sens et Non-Sens, 15–44. Paris: Les Éditions Nagel, 1948. ———. Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949–1952. Translated by Talia Welsh. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. ———. “Eye and Mind.” In The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, edited by Galen Johnson, translated by Michael B. Smith, 121–49. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994.

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———. “The Indirect Language.” In The Prose of the World, edited by Claude LeFort, translated by John O’Neill, 47–113. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence.” In Signs, translated by Richard McCleary, 39–83. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France (1954– 1955). Translated by Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010. ———. L’Oeil et l’Esprit. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1964. ———. Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Edited by Dominique Séglard, translated by Robert Vallier. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003. ———. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962. ———. Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. Signes. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1960. ———. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith, eds. Van Gogh: The Life. New York: Random House, 2012. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “In Heaven and on Earth.” In Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas, 69–100. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Prendeville, Brenden. “Varying the Self: Bacon’s Versions of van Gogh.” Oxford Art Journal 27/1 (2004): 25–42. Rewald, John. Post-Impressionism from Van Gogh to Gauguin. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956. Rilke, Rainer Maria. Letters on Cézanne. Edited by Clara Rilke. Translated by Joel Agee. New York: Fromm International Publishing Company, 1985. Rishel, Joseph J., Katherine Sachs, George T. M. Shackelford, Lauren Soth, Judy Sund, Roland Dorn, George S. Keyes. Van Gogh Face to Face: The Portraits. Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2000. Saint-Exupéry, Antoine de. Pilot de guerre. Paris: Editions De La Maison Francaise, 1942. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Literature and Existentialism. Translated by Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press, 1991. Slatman, Jenny. L’Expression au-delà de la Represéntation: Sur L’aesthesis et L’esthétique chez Merleau-Ponty. Paris: Peeters Vrin, 2003. Steele, Marcia, and Elizabeth Steele. “Methods for Making Repetitions.” In Van Gogh: Repetitions, edited by Eliza A. Rathbone, William H. Robinson, Elizabeth Steele, and Marcia Steele. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Volume I. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1978.



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———. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Volume II. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. ———. The Complete Letters of Vincent Van Gogh. Volume III. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1978. ———. Vincent Van Gogh, Painted with Words: The Letters to Émile Bernard. Edited by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten, and Nienke Bakker. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2007. ———. Vincent Van Gogh Letters to Emile Bernard. Edited by Douglas Lord. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Van Gogh, Vincent, V. W. Van Gogh, and René Huyghe. Musée de l’Orangerie, janvier—mars, 1947. Paris: Presses artistiques, 1947. Van Tilborgh, Louis, and Teio Meedendorp. “The Life and Death of Vincent Van Gogh.” Burlington Magazine 155, 1324 (July 2013) 456–62.

Chapter 9

Van Gogh in Tragic Portraiture Jaspers, Bataille, Heidegger David P. Nichols

No one familiar with the life and work of Vincent van Gogh would be surprised to find that philosophers characterize him, with considerable frequency, as a tragic painter. Among those philosophers who do interpret him as a tragic figure, we can even find some common ground about what that means. In the following chapter I will trace one such thread through the interpretations of Karl Jaspers, Georges Bataille, and Martin Heidegger. I am interested in how these philosophers describe a tragic cycle at work in human history whereby great artists, Van Gogh included, play an effective role in the rejuvenation of the appearances, only to have those world-transforming accomplishments eventually eclipsed by future creative works. More specifically, Jaspers, Bataille, and Heidegger maintain that in order to effectively contribute to this tragic cycle of meaning, the artist must obtain a special ontological intimacy with the world that eludes us most of the time. For each of these philosophers, the intimacy also requires an experience of absence, the crisis of which facilitates the arrival of another presence of being. After explaining this motif among the three philosophers, I will turn to Van Gogh for the purpose of demonstrating that he had his own peculiar way of making the tragic cycle transparent. His paintings alert us, by way of both their images and stylistic factors, to what I call a “poverty of the appearances.” Peasant life had been a central motif for Van Gogh’s paintings from the earliest days of his troubled career as an artist. The theme of poverty gradually widened in his work, to the point where it no longer remained limited to direct studies of the peasant’s mode of existence. This new poverty consists of a heightened awareness of an emptiness inherent within recycled images—an awareness that exposes the image as image and opens us to the regenerative power of transcendence at work in each epochal showing of the appearances. 185

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THE PHILOSOPHERS OF TRAGIC VISION In Strindberg and Van Gogh (1922), Jaspers offers a pathological profile of Van Gogh that connects the mental decline of the artist with a peculiar opportunity for transcendence.1 Jaspers essentially argues that Van Gogh’s schizophrenia—which was, more likely, temporal lobe epilepsy—pushed him to the edge of his boundary situation. The Grenzsituation is for Jaspers an estranged reality typically dominated by struggle, suffering, guilt, or death, yet an opportunity all the same to be authentic about one’s own existence. Van Gogh’s repeated attacks, hallucinations, and passionate fits sometimes open him to bursts of transcendence, which Jaspers likens to soaring ecstasy, prophetic vision, or intense clarity: “Never had the landscape seemed so touching, so sensitive,” quotes Jaspers.2 Van Gogh is struck by the radiance of that same sun that scorches him—a cipher that, at least for Jaspers, symbolizes the infinite background of being that dooms to failure every particular configuration of truth.3 In Tragedy Is Not Enough, the final portion of Von der Warheit (1947), he offers similar descriptions for tragedy as a purification of knowledge. This much is common to all interpretations: in tragedy we experience fundamental reality made plain, as things break wide open in shipwreck. In tragedy we transcend misery and terror and so move toward essential reality.4

For Jaspers, no matter how devastating may be the collapse of the assumed truths governing an era, the wide open break of transcendence offers a source of consolation, a wellspring for new beginnings. He recognizes just such a trust in transcendence for Van Gogh, by noting that he expressed the need to console through his art, and that he looked to participate in the first budding of a “new style.”5 Van Gogh had to find his own way of letting that transcendence show itself through paint. In his letters he conveys a strong sense of enchantment with the world, but in a manner that draws him into the simplicity of its shining.6 He tends to resist direct symbolization of the supernatural, imaginative, or otherworldly, observes Jaspers, instead pouring his energy “into the formulation of the simplest things in this world,” for instance, sunflowers, a bowl of irises, or a blade of grass.7 Although he abandons his original desire to paint Christ, saints, and angels, his religious impulse, forged long before in the crucible of the Calvinist parsonage of Zundert, surfaces with equal strength in the simplicity of objects and scenery.8 But what is so strange about all of this is the fact that this compelling reality is fantastically effective. He has an urge for reality which causes him to recoil



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from mere imaginative painting—no matter how much he might feel drawn to it—and from mythical subjects. He simply wants to paint present actuality; in return he conceives this presence as a mythos; by emphasizing the reality he sees it transcendentally.9

Van Gogh enters the tragic cycle through sacrifice: by his willingness to surrender the long-recycled mythical furniture, he allows the world to pulsate with renewed mythical power. This interpretation by Jaspers, unmistakably phenomenological, attributes to Van Gogh the ability to penetrate the appearances toward the givenness that brings those appearances into language. Jaspers reiterates this interpretive motif with two brief remarks about Van Gogh in the third volume of his Philosophy (1932).10 In the first instance, Jaspers argues that myth enables its ciphers to convey transcendence where merely empirical descriptions would fail. “To Van Gogh,” he writes, “the landscape, things, people in their factual presence have a mythical quality at the same time; hence the unique power of his paintings.”11 In the second instance, Jaspers discusses how some great artists—notably Aeschylus, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Rembrandt—choose to fuse myth with their present circumstances and empirical realities. Not so Van Gogh, however, “who dropped all myths, confined himself totally to reality, and thus lent transcendence a voice which of necessity is infinitely poorer, but is true for our time.”12 In this latter reference to Van Gogh, the elimination of overtly mythical elements helps his paintings convey transcendence, whereas in the former, the empirical reality speaks to us with its own mythical sheen. These are not contradictory points, but the makings of a consistently tragic formula attributable to Van Gogh. By offering us a “poorer” voice for transcendence, stripped of story-telling imagery, his paintings summon us to an ontological source, from which the appearances can speak to us anew, not only in some raw empirical manner, but always as imparted through the next cache of cipher possibilities. The description of Van Gogh lending a voice that is “infinitely poorer” suggests that there is more to poverty in his paintings than attempts to romanticize peasant life. The description of these infinitely poorer efforts being “true for our time” may be an acknowledgment of a nihilism besetting our grounding myths, so that, ironically, the decay of our longstanding ciphers now provides us with an avenue back to transcendence. Although Jaspers does not elaborate much on it, it remains no less a crucial insight— that Van Gogh shows us a certain poverty about the appearances themselves. Bataille develops a pathological account of Van Gogh that presses the possibilities of tragic heroism, with attention focused on the bodily dimension of ecstasy and rebellion. In the first of two essays, his “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” 1930, he describes the

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severed ear incident as the culmination of a solar obsession.13 He offers other documented cases of mental illness where fixation on a light source leads to “Oedipal enucleation,” the gouging of one or more eyes, or at least the substituted excision of a relatively unimportant body part.14 Examples of auto-mutilation were more common in ancient rites of human sacrifice, he explains, but remain with us in rituals ranging from circumcision to Shiite self-flagellation. What interests Bataille most about these instances is “the necessity of throwing oneself or something of oneself out of oneself.”15 Here he explains the ecstatic situation of human existence—my standing out from myself in order to stand within a world—by means of the symbolism of vomiting rather than consumption alone. After all, there is something about Vincent, not only about the hanging-together of the appearances, which does not “fit.” This picture of sacrifice may constitute a direct reversal of the Aristotelian model for the tragic drama, where the great error (hamartia) of the hero serves as the kernel from which the whole self-destructive plot germinates. Instead, Bataille likens his imagery of vomiting to “the disgorging of a force that threatens to consume,” hence an act of purification not so different from exorcism.16 Nor is the disgorging simply the means for historical reconstruction—the stone that the builders rejected—but also a kenosis, in which case the perpetual emptying of human existence stems from a deeper nothingness. In the excision of the ear, and especially the frame of mind necessary for its decision, Van Gogh illustrates a Promethean rebellion rare for the modern age. Bataille reminds us that Prometheus’ punishment for stealing fire was the relentless cycle of the eagle picking at his liver. He identifies the eagle with the ability to gaze at the sun, the pecking at the liver as the threat of consumption, and the disgorging of Prometheus’ liver as “the sacrifice of a god.”17 The imagery of consumption illustrates the dangers of homogeneity, whereby society foists upon us the stifling constraints of its uniform order. Creativity instead requires a decisive break with the crowd, by way of the conviction that the artist bears, erupting from within, for some heterogenous and seemingly absurd possibility. Van Gogh experienced this creative freedom that even Zeus could not take away from Prometheus. In “Van Gogh as Prometheus” (1937), Bataille echoes Jaspers’ interest in the highly personal dimension of Van Gogh’s paintings.18 This is precisely what makes Van Gogh so exceptional, that his art never really belonged to the crowd-think of the museum or of art criticism. “Vincent Van Gogh belongs not to art history, but to the bloody myth of our existence as humans. He is of that rare company who, in a world spellbound by stability, by sleep, suddenly reached the terrible ‘boiling point’….”19 In the primitive act of sending the ear to the brothel, Van Gogh not only attempts to remove an affliction, but also charges into the



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madness of the same liberation that swells with creative force—a primordial savagery and “mythical delirium.”20 In both essays, Bataille allows the sun to double as a source for transcendence and concealment, truth and madness, illumination and destruction. Van Gogh is the “Icarian being” seeking fire from the gods, who stares at “the sun in all its glory,” not just metaphorically, but possibly at long intervals from his window.21 The wilted sunflower demonstrates the destructive power of the sun, as does the diptych of empty chairs for Gauguin and Van Gogh. The diptych juxtaposes fire to unlit pipe, humiliation served and humiliation received, but in these comparisons also points to the welling up of a Promethean rage. Bataille’s second essay sharpens the positive and negative sides, largely by metaphors of distance. The sun appears to us, accordingly, at a safe stretch from its actual cataclysm; meanwhile the supposed terra firma of immutable laws and foundations likewise hides “the incandescence of lava” flowing in the depths of human existence.22 For Van Gogh the illusion of safety collapsed, the foundations shook, and the lava within him burst forth with world-creating intensity. “Van Gogh, who decided by 1882 that it was better to be Prometheus than Jupiter, tore from within himself rather than an ear, nothing less than a SUN.”23 The “ecstasy” brought him beyond the established order of this sun, to revel in the shining, and to respond with the dawning of yet another illuminative axis. This makes for a generous assessment, especially given Van Gogh’s reluctance to acknowledge having ever reached the goal. But at least Bataille locates a tragic confrontation, a Promethean struggle, whereby great artists like Van Gogh can make an existential decision that results in another reversal, in the arts, for everyday life, and for human history. In Heidegger’s case, the connection between Van Gogh and tragedy affords more than one answer. His interest in Van Gogh shifted over the years in a manner that paralleled his changing conception of the tragic. The first tragic impression that Heidegger acknowledges about Van Gogh centered on the importance of the artist’s existential decision to create or else be absorbed into the crowd. Karl Löwith explains how his mentor had once shared a favorite passage with him from Van Gogh’s letters. “For years,” Heidegger wrote me in 1923, “a saying of van Gogh’s has obsessed me: ‘I feel with all my power that the history of man is like that of wheat: if one is not planted in the earth to flourish, come what may, one will be ground up for bread.’ Woe to him who is not pulverized.”24

Heidegger went on to explain that in an era of radical disintegration and regression, a Destruktion, it becomes all the more necessary to have conviction

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for “the one thing that matters” rather than make desperate attempts to “save culture” from being eroded. Löwith’s account reveals the seed of what for Heidegger would come full bloom in the mid-1930s—a tragic heroism associated with the role of the artist. Yet already in 1923 he recognized in Van Gogh’s letters not only the need for authentic decision-making by the artist, but also the potential for that authenticity to confront a swelling nihilistic tide with constructive possibilities. In the 1930s, Heidegger incorporates Van Gogh’s Old Shoes with Laces (1886) masterpiece into the same lectures wherein he develops the theme of a tragic confrontation. (See Figure 1.) In the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics lectures he describes an Auseinandersetzung, or setting-againsteach-other, of creators and their world.25 In Greek terms, this is a polemos between two oppositional forces: on the one side, dikē, the overwhelming sway of beings, which compels us to fit into an ordered world structure; on the other hand, technē, the creative exercise of knowledge in the midst of the overwhelming, which crashes against its reigning semblance for purposes of reshaping it.26 For the creators to have a successful impact, they must be able to wrest beings from their current fittingness, by capturing what is extraordinary about the way that beings show themselves—by making what has been unseen appear before us.27 The brief mention of Van Gogh’s Shoes seems to illustrate the painter’s ability to pluck out the simplest phenomenon—a pair of peasant’s shoes—and to use it to place us in the world differently. A painting by Van Gogh: a pair of sturdy peasant shoes, nothing else. The picture really represents nothing. Yet you are alone at once with what is there, as if you yourself were heading homeward from the field on a late autumn evening, tired, with your hoe, as the last potato fires smolder out.28

The painting is only one among five examples which Heidegger lists, all rather quickly, for the sake of raising questions about the “is” and “is not” of our experiences. Still, interpretive snippet though it may be, it comes across as unmistakably confrontational—about the shoes and “you yourself.” Ultimately that confrontation brings us up against what the phenomena are, as opposed to what they are not. By the time of “The Origin of the Work of Art” (1937), Heidegger’s approach to art had shifted dramatically with respect to the Auseinandersetzung.29 Instead of depicting it as a violent struggle of creators against their world, a tragic strife, he gives the conflict over to the work of the artwork itself. The artwork opens a “world,” which means that it holds together a particular semblance of the appearances, a dwelling space, a belonging. The



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“earth” of the artwork explains how it stands within its world, by way of a withdrawal into the stone, paints, or other materials from which the artwork emerges. The essay first introduces the terms for the sake of explaining what happens in Van Gogh’s Shoes, and more specifically, how the painting sheds light on the meaning of equipment. “World and earth exist for her,” the imagined wearer of the shoes, “and for those who are with her in her mode of being.”30 Here the earth of the peasant’s shoes, as equipment, consists of what the peasant brings into the world through them, which must nonetheless include a mysterious self-sheltering of her own being, with all of its fragility and freedom. This contrasts with the belonging of the shoes to the peasant’s work world, which secures for her a place by way of the equipment’s reliability. In addition to reworking the tragic confrontation, Heidegger now esteems the artwork for “letting a being be as it is” instead of prescribing a wresting of beings from their former semblance.31 Art is truth setting itself to work in the artwork, thereby facilitating the Urstreit or “primal conflict” of truth as concealing and clearing, earth and world, with no more explanatory recourse to the violent struggle of an artist-hero.32 When Heidegger revisits tragedy in his 1942 lecture series, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” he depicts the poet as a creator who allows that which is uncanny (unheimlich) about beings to surface on its own accord: the poet’s primary responsibility becomes the clearing of a space for another revelatory arrival of Being, a “homecoming.”33 These three philosophers clearly differ with respect to the tragic themes that they bring to bear on Van Gogh’s life and work. Yet all three interpretations stem from the impression that Van Gogh somehow exemplified what is tragic about the creative power of art to rework its world. What made him heroic was his ability to take a stand within an existential crisis, one where a primary negation opens between the artist and the reigning world semblance into which he cannot fit. The artist must choose to sacrifice the sleepy compliance to the phenomena that most of us find comfort in. If Van Gogh’s creativity does contribute to the ruin of the current semblance, he should expect the same wheel to one day turn on his own contribution. The tragic cycle would not be possible at all for art were it not for the artist’s capacity to forge an extraordinary closeness with the appearances, which Jaspers associates with the boundary situation, Bataille with savage rebellion, and Heidegger with a preparatory clearing. This closeness requires an experience of absence, not only presence: a shadow of emptiness falls over the appearances, the old meanings having lost their hold on us. This emptiness that invites us to another shining is precisely what I wish to trace in Van Gogh under the heading of “poverty.” By taking Jaspers’ language of the “infinitely poorer” artistic voice of Van Gogh as my inspiration, I

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aim to uncover a strategy in Van Gogh for exposing the appearances in their impoverishment. Although this “poverty of the appearances,” as I will call it, does not always parallel the interpretations of Jaspers, Bataille, or Heidegger, it does nonetheless resemble their basic insights about a tragic turning prompted by the artist. THE ARTIST OF TRAGIC VISION The lifestyle of the peasant was for Van Gogh more than simply an unexplored subject demanding overdue attention, commensurate with the ordinary life scenes captured by Impressionism and similar art styles of the era. In the simplicity of the peasant’s rugged existence Van Gogh found an answer to what it means to dwell intimately with one’s environment. There is a poverty of the appearances themselves in these paintings—in all of his paintings, really—that anticipates transcendence; it prepares us for a renewal of human life and the arts. In the early paintings he tends to explore poverty by directly encountering peasant life, so that the “great treasure” of poverty, as he calls it, emerges from the peasant’s everyday existence situated within his or her world of work.34 When he describes the poverty existentially, he does so in terms of a primitive manner of being, the flame of which we must keep lit for just the critical moment. Even in the politest circles and the best surroundings and circumstances one should retain something of the original character of a Robinson Crusoe or of primitive man, for otherwise one cannot be rooted in oneself, and one must never let the fire in one’s soul die, for the time will inevitably come when it will be needed.35

As Van Gogh later sought to reinvent himself in France, poverty becomes equally important for the ways in which it informs the stylistic qualities from which all of his images surface, regardless of whether the painting actually depicts peasant life. We see through the images to the self-showing of the phenomena, the way that beings hang together, and the assumptive dispositions that color their semblance. In this ontological thinness we catch a glimpse into the tragic cycle of Van Gogh’s work, whereby the opportunity arises for the reigning semblance of appearances to give way to yet another order. It makes no sense to speak of tragedy without identifying a fundamental crisis at stake for human existence. In Van Gogh’s letters this crisis often assumes the language of the Christian Gospels, especially the parables of Jesus, filled as they are with apocalyptic imagery and messianic hope. He describes



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Christ as the artist without statues, paintings, or books—the master of the “art of life-creation” and the exemplar of “pure creative force.” This is the art that Van Gogh waits for—sows the ground for—even with the development of his own style. In his view, no impressionist worth his salt would claim to have actually attained this lived art; instead it was enough for Van Gogh to aspire to the role of the Baptist, herald of a new age.36 The revolution that he sought in painting would have to arrive just as it had for every former turning of artistic style, as the gift from a world within which the artist dwelt with the deepest awareness. The creative force of the artist happens in the opportune moment, with monkish persistence, in eager anticipation for future possibilities, and not as some people persist in thinking, that “life is flat and runs from birth to death.”37 The great challenge comes from trying to live fully engrained in one’s own work world, in the fullness of its moment, as does the peasant, or better yet, the ox.38 Not surprisingly the image of Christ continued to haunt Van Gogh long after he had forsaken the dogmatic particulars of his father’s religion. The self-described “artistic neurosis” with the Christ figure aggravated him to the point of scraping away the savior’s image from one of his paintings, and in another instance, knifing it out.39 In the biography, Van Gogh: The Life, co-authors Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith go so far as to describe the severing of the ear episode as at least partially derived from a longstanding infatuation with the Garden of Gethsemane in which Peter cuts off the ear of the high priest’s servant.40 Had Van Gogh not, after all, handed his packaged ear at the brothel door with his own grisly Eucharistic words, “Remember me”? Whatever the case, the Christ-neurosis exemplifies all too perfectly that existential crisis that Van Gogh knew in his perpetual shortcomings as a creator. “At the height of artistic life,” he says, “there is, and remains, and returns time and again, a hankering after real life—ideal and unattainable.”41 It would not be overreaching to say that Van Gogh strove in his paintings for something akin to incarnation—to place us in the world the right way, all over again. In fact his astonishingly thick layering of paints, almost gelato in appearance, often had a flesh-like quality about it. The paints could never be tangible enough for him it seems: he could not resist on occasion mixing into them the grass, sand, and grit taken from his studied landscapes. The “hankering after real life” that Van Gogh speaks of is not expressive of that representational distance so often assumed in traditional aesthetics, as though the artist’s natural place were to be set adrift from an objective world. It is rather an expression of our fate as the inhabitants of an already painted world—that for all of our painting (or repainting) something about the Real necessarily eludes us.

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Van Gogh painted with the sacrificial abandon of the tragic hero; he staked his entire being on the possibility of another reception of the appearances. So, at Saint-Rémy, when the hope to inaugurate the new style within his own lifetime dimmed, he looked to death for the promise of an artist’s immortality. Here lies the genius of his Starry Night, that in the shortness of life we have that diachronic experience of time whereby we are dwarfed by a passing river of luminaries—great bursts of energy—around which whole epochs swirl and eddy. (See Figure 4.) He makes us pause for a holy stillness beneath the beauty of death’s darkness, the chapel pointing at center, almost an antennae for transcendence. The chapel and its decidedly Germanic steeple belong to Van Gogh’s own village pastiche of Europe North and South, a life trajectory from Zundert to Saint-Rémy. The cypress, which he called “funereal”—staple of the Mediterranean cemetery, symbol of mourning, evergreen and therefore immortal—towers in the foreground, its strokes of smoldering flame unfurling upwards, like some bridge beckoning us to share his amor fati.42 He smuggles the vanishing point directly behind it. Meanwhile the simple village homes, although huddled beneath a canvas two-thirds night sky, are not exactly asleep to their surroundings. It would be more apt, given the illumined windows of nearly every domicile in the valley, to ascribe to them a peaceful wakefulness that mirrors the flaring horizon. The fact that the church with steeple mimics the natural contours of the pointy cypress tells us that the solitary communal life of the poor village has, at its nucleus, its own peculiar realization of the “eternity” of time that otherwise surpasses it. The general poverty of the vale makes this allegiance possible, by way of the humble proportions of the village and its cloister of buildings, as well as its capacity to open itself to that swelling inverted river. Most of the paintings that convey a strong sense of time do so in a manner that makes poverty preparatory for transcendence. Van Gogh’s earlier masterpiece, The Potato Eaters (1885), does this at the same time that it illustrates his pietistic influences. In the darkness, over a plate of potatoes, the peasants share what amounts to a communion meal of their own. At one high corner of the painting the hands of a clock indicate an eleventh hour. Upon closer inspection, the numbers on the clock face are scrambled, as though their time was not the stuff of measurement but of parousia. Next to the clock hangs a print of the crucifixion, with the men who are crucified on either side—a fitting display of agony lingering over the heads of those dining. Van Gogh deliberately painted the peasants “the color of a very dusty potato, unpeeled of course.”43 It was imperative to him that one paint peasant life as wholly wedded to its surroundings, grounded in its distinct existence. The communion which the potato eaters share extends to the soil that they plow; it brings the fruit of the ground into their midst.



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Conversely, the apocalyptic imagery in Van Gogh’s paintings often points to alienation from the ground. The earliest examples may be his images of weavers taken from his observations in Nuenen of the Netherlands in 1884. This critique of the Industrial Revolution features workers more or less imprisoned in the oversized but cramped machinery of the industrial loom, the mechanization of their former handicraft having separated them from the world now barely visible through their windows. In the Weaver at His Loom (1884), for which woven threads cascade down a machine, the viewer can still make out, beneath the grim face of its operator, through the darkened window, a windmill in the distance, the gentle reminder of that intermediate step between dependence on and manipulation of nature. Van Gogh reveals his initial inspiration in a letter sent to his brother four years prior, in which he reflects on the differences pertaining to miners and weavers. The comparison is remarkably reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Dionysian and Apollonian principles: the miners are the profound thinkers, from “the abyss,” whereas the weavers are daydreamers and sleepwalkers with “the faraway look.”44 This bifurcation of life lived either at or apart from its roots stayed with Van Gogh late into his career, at least as long as Saint-Rémy, 1889, when he painted his Olive Trees series. The trees almost fall over in the way that they point the viewer toward the horizon, sometimes exposing roots, and in one case chasing the setting sun. Similarly, in the recently discovered Sunset at Montmajour (1888), the trees lean toward an abandoned monastery while the setting sun, no longer visible, has fled the painting in the opposite direction. Yet for all of this indictment of the modern age, on account of its dehumanization, instability, and abandonment, still we need not call his images hopeless. The same uprooting that impoverishes us makes possible, by way of its very chaos, a simplifying return to origins, like a tree falling to its own life-supporting ground. The biblical axiom that “whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap” sums up much of Van Gogh’s paintings—not as an overarching moral principle, but as an explanation for historical transitions of human existence, including the way that we give and receive the appearances.45 The sower and the reaper are among his most privileged images, mirrors of each other, and the poles of a tragic fertility cycle of death and life. They are not the book ends of a linear progression, but rather, in the case of the reaper (which he explores first), the perpetuity of death “as the great book of nature speaks of it,” and in the case of the sower, whom he finally depicts haloed by the sun, the touch of eternity radiating in his momentous act.46 Van Gogh’s profession is equally a reworking of ground for the sake of rejuvenating life, his own brushstrokes furrows of the soil. “I am plowing on my canvases as they do on their fields.”47

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If such a plowing applies to the appearances, we ought to be capable of recognizing something about their past lingering with us in the present. Van Gogh’s cryptic expressions of nostalgia are telling for exactly this reason. He writes of the “fatherland” that he sees all around him despite being far from home.48 He instructs his brother to look for “your country” in every influential factor that he breathes from his surroundings.49 More importantly, he develops the symbolism of North and South to account for his journey into the revelatory origin of the appearances. The trek that began in the North, beneath the melancholy overcast of modern life, gradually drew him in the direction of the Mediterranean, exposing him to the vibrant source of European existence, its South, which he painted in the colors and sun of France. Another example of plowing in Van Gogh’s paintings is the frequent production of so-called “copies” in his work. He reworked Millet’s The Sower (1850) twenty-one times alone. Far from the practice exercises of an amateur, they are better understood as adaptive translations of previous masterpieces into a current contextual framework. Jaspers compares Van Gogh’s copies to Hölderlin’s translations of Greek literature, which aimed at capturing essential ancient messages through distinctly German, unabashedly interpretive reverberations.50 Van Gogh’s visual translations remind us that we are the heirs of images, but also that every experience of the image requires us to stamp what we inherit into a present mold. One of these copies, The Raising of Lazarus (1890), boldly recasts a print of Rembrandt by the same name. Van Gogh excludes all of the characters from Rembrandt’s scene, with the exception of Lazarus and his two sisters. The removal of Christ, with the curious exception of the ledge that Rembrandt had perched him on, causes the women, peasantlike in appearance, to look like the miracle workers. Lazarus’ newly assigned red hair leaves no reasonable doubt that the artist has left a self-portrait in the wake of his mental breakdown in Arles. The weary visage of the raised Lazarus, in the midst of a blindingly yellow sun, offers a tragic appraisal of his situation: Why could you not just let me die? It would be shortsighted, however, to limit the significance of this moment to Van Gogh’s own recovery when it applies just as well to a cyclical revitalization in the arts over which he had long agonized. The latest resuscitation of art comes from the call of the peasants, whose feminine call to nature, contrary to the dominating forces of modernity, can still awaken us to the light of transcendence. In order that we might heed the call, Van Gogh advances a healthy mistrust of the privileged structures that hold the appearances together. For instance, the Japanese “floating world” or Ukiyo-e technique that he first pursued in Arles had a deliberately forced way of presenting flat images and bright uniform patches of color over less permanent backgrounds. The Ukiyo-e label suggests an affinity to the creation myth of the Kojiki where the Japanese



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deities grant solidity to floating islands.51 Everything about this stylistic influence questions solidity, including its characteristic bird’s-eye view, which lifts the viewer’s perspective slightly above normal eye level. It is exactly the opposite of an attempted God’s-eye view, instead sacrificing any Archimedean point, God or human, for the passing nowhere of some random sparrow’s flight. Many Ukiyo-e masterpieces set everyday scenes, with human beings aimlessly adrift, against uniformly gold horizons. Van Gogh obsessed over “Japan,” equated it to the “South,” and styled himself as a Zen monk meditating on a single blade of grass, so that he could forge a path to the originality of the world itself. Of course he had already learned from the masters of Impressionism and Pointillism the value of requiring the viewer to take responsibility for any solidity of the images. In the end, he made it difficult for us to do even that. Roots and Tree Trunks (1890) robs the viewer of any foothold whatsoever, as the proximity to the exposed roots and their eroded soil affords neither ground nor horizon from which to begin our focus. (See Figure 6.) With all of the instability pertaining to our vantage point, assumed solidity, and so on, he manages to dissemble the appearances, to impoverish them before us and for the sake of their radiant source. Another factor in the poverty of the appearances is what philosophers in phenomenological and existentialist camps would soon call “mood.” Van Gogh capitalized on the impressionists’ efforts to present us with a filtered world, to make atmosphere out of attitude. He characterizes his own paintings as so many attempts to display a “corner of nature seen through a temperament.”52 It does not follow however that Van Gogh weights subjectivity any more than world in the making of these filtered results. In his last years he pushes the effects of mood increasingly into the horizon of the painting, often at the expense of human subjects. In place of potato eaters he paints potato fields; instead of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane he delivers its olive trees; the sower at last acquiesces to a wheat field with crows. (See Figure 2.) He allows each setting to tell its own story, as if to show that the appearances, in the way that they hang together, already whisper to us from their joints. He praises some of his contemporaries for doing the same, such as Corot, in whose landscapes one can “feel Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles and sometimes the Gospels as well, but so discreetly and always taking account of all the modern feelings that all of us share.”53 Some of these paintings even exhibit mood by way of the absence of expected figures, as in the case of Van Gogh’s Chair (1888) and Gauguin’s Chair (1888), which when viewed together say plenty about the emptiness of their relationship. Jaspers grasps the significance of these moods when he comments that for Van Gogh the empirical reality gives itself mythically, because of “the significance conferred on it by transcendence.”54 The reason Van Gogh leads us into that

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zone where the empirical reality gives itself mythically is so that the transcendence can convey the extraordinary yet again. The presence of the sun in Van Gogh’s late paintings explains a great deal about transcendence in the tragic cycle. The poverty of the appearances lets in light. This extends to the entire project of his colorism because the brilliance of contrasting colors requires rays of transcendence every bit as much as it does temperament. Van Gogh’s Promethean cycle links new growth and late harvest with its ontological source for a historical wheel of appearances. The departure from and return to the sun bears some resemblance to that tragic formula running through much of Hölderlin whereby heroes disobey the gods in order to better serve them.55 The return is most evident when Van Gogh gives us the return of the sun to itself, as in the golden wheat fields ready for harvest or the sunflowers, which he identifies with gratitude.56 Where we find fire in Van Gogh’s late paintings, we also find fennel. In the fennel, we always find the signs of fire. In Arles he welcomed Gauguin to a yellow house, not to mention a bedroom with sunflowers. “I want to paint men and women with a touch of the eternal, whose symbol was once the halo, which we try to convey by the very radiance and vibrancy of our colouring.”57 In The Sower (1888), the sun doubles as nimbus behind the shadowy farmer, while a tree completes the cycle by reaching back toward the fountain of light. (See Figure 5.) A similar halo effect applies to less obvious cases, so that bright solid colors, yellow in particular, become the new gold leaf in Van Gogh’s repertoire, the medium for the very shining of the appearances. As such they point to a reception of the appearances whereby they give themselves as appearances, and in that thinness also surrender a timely glance into their greatest secret, their transcendent source. In these many examples of Van Gogh’s life and art we witness tragic vision. Jaspers, Bataille, and Heidegger have good cause to identify, albeit each in his own way, a primal conflict between the artist and his world, worked out in a tragic cycle that ushers forth new possibilities for being. I wanted to show that Van Gogh’s dominant grouping of ciphers—that of peasant life—could provide its own window into the tragic. It was already a possibility flirted with in Jaspers’ description of the “infinitely poorer” voice of transcendence, Bataille’s account of savagery, and Heidegger’s peasant at walk. It needed to be extended to the making and remaking of the image, in the kenotic emptying and apocalyptic uprooting of the appearances. By the “poverty of the appearances” I had in mind a perceptual awareness that facilitates an experience of transcendence, so as to allow beings to show themselves differently and to fit together differently for a world. Van Gogh’s sense of the tragic rises from his existential crisis as an aspiring artist in search of the “new style,” so that he might herald a new beginning for art, which is to say also for life.



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The crisis and its opportune moment only intensify for him the more madness becomes a threat. Great works of art tell us something important about the meaning of art itself. Likewise, in Van Gogh’s images of sowing and reaping, the communion of potato eaters, the nostalgia for the “South” and “Japan,” the “copies” of famous artworks, the floating world, environmental mood, colorism and sun—in his whole tragic arsenal for distillation and return—we come up against the original revelatory source of the shining that takes place through the image. NOTES  1. Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, trans. Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977).  2. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 161.  3. Karl Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, trans. Harald A. T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch (Boston: Archon Books, 1969), 78.  4. Jaspers, Tragedy Is Not Enough, 80.  5. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 170, 174.  6. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 165.  7. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 182.  8. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 175.  9. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 10.  Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 3, trans. E. B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). 11. Jaspers, Philosophy, 116–17. 12. Jaspers, Philosophy, 172. 13.  Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” in Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 14.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation,” 67. 15.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation,” 67. 16.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation,” 70. 17.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation,” 70. 18.  Georges Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” in Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing, trans. Annette Michelson, October 36 (Spring 1986). 19.  Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” 60. 20.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation,” 70. 21.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation,” 62, 70. Perhaps Bataille drew inspiration for his ocular conclusions from Jaspers’ observation that “after the first crisis” for Van Gogh, “his eye is quite sensitive.” Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 161. Bataille does reference Strindberg and Van Gogh in his endnotes, but not Jaspers’ specific mention of the eye.

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22.  Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” 59. 23.  Bataille, “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” 59. 24.  Karl Löwith, “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 170 25. Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 47, 110. 26. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 140, 160, 176. 27. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 172. 28. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 37–38. 29.  Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). 30.  Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 34. 31.  Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 31. 32.  Martin Heidegger, “Origin of the Work,” 39, 55. 33.  Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 119–20. 34.  Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh, ed. Ronald de Leeuw (New York: Penguin, 1996), 54. 35.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 54. 36.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 371, 494. 37.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 370. 38.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 365. 39.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 368. 40.  Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, Van Gogh: The Life (London: Random House, 2011), 704. 41.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 354. 42.  Judy Sund, Van Gogh (New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002), 260. 43.  Qtd. in Sund, Van Gogh, 98. 44.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 79. 45.  The Holy Bible, The Authorized King James Version (New York: American Bible Society, 1980), Galatians 6:7. 46.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 456. 47.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 466. 48.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 66. 49.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 71–72. 50. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 171. 51.  Haruo Shirane, “The Kojiki,” in Traditional Japanese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 23–25. 52.  Qtd. in Sund, Van Gogh, 95. 53.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 472. 54. Jaspers, Philosophy, 116. 55.  The examples for this principle in Hölderlin are numerous, and an explanation of its caesura would extend the scope of this chapter. Here is only one example of disobeying the gods to better serve them, from the essay “Remarks on Antigone”: “It is a



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great resource of the secretly working soul that at the highest state of consciousness it evades consciousness and that, before the present god actually seizes it, the soul confronts him with bold, frequently even blasphemic word and thus maintains the sacred living potential of the spirit.” See Friedrich Hölderlin, “Remarks on Antigone,” in Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, ed. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 111. 56.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 480. 57.  Van Gogh, The Letters, 394.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bataille, Georges. “Van Gogh as Prometheus.” In Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing, translated by Annette Michelson. October 36 (Spring 1986): 58–60. ———. “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh.” In Georges Bataille: Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, edited by Allan Stoekl, 61–72. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, 17–87. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. ———. Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister.” Translated by William McNeill and Julia Davis. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996. ———. Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Remarks on Antigone.” In Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory. Edited by Thomas Pfau, 109–16. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. The Holy Bible, The Authorized King James Version. New York: American Bible Society, 1980. Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy, Vol. 3. Translated by E. B. Ashton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. ———. Strindberg and Van Gogh. Translated by Oskar Grunow and David Woloshin. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. ———. Tragedy Is Not Enough. Translated by Harald A. T. Reiche, Harry T. Moore, and Karl W. Deutsch. Boston: Archon Books, 1969. Löwith, Karl. “The Political Implications of Heidegger’s Existentialism.” In The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin, 167–85. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993. Naifeh, Steven, and Gregory White Smith. Van Gogh: The Life. London: Random House, 2011. Sund, Judy. Van Gogh. New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2002. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Edited by Ronald de Leeuw. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Chapter 10

Prometheus Dismembered Bataille on Van Gogh, or The Window in the Bataille Restaurant James Luchte I will begin my address with a minor coincidence. Window in the Bataille Restaurant, sketched with pencil in Paris in 1887, shows us a typical Van Gogh scenario, a table with a chair, setting in front of a window, which not only reveals the (framed) world outside, but also lets the soft light into the space of the restaurant. (See Figure 7.) We can see Van Gogh’s hat and coat hanging on the wall by the window. We can also see two men below outside on the street. In general, the painting is quite dark, except for the intensity of the window and the motes of light or dust that it channels onto the chair and table and the one who stands where he stands, in the position of the artist. Yet, this does not in itself disclose the coincidence. That it is a window in namely the Bataille restaurant is where the coincidence comes into view since today I came to talk with you upon the theme of light in Bataille’s interpretation of Van Gogh—yet, at the same time, there is a painting by Van Gogh with a central motif of light, and in reference to the name of Bataille. Of course, to give any real significance to such a coincidence, even if it is one, is, one would usually argue, merely faulty logic, fueled by superstitious thinking, by the fatalism of synchronicity. The Bataille Restaurant in fact has nothing to do with Georges Bataille, the philosopher whose work I am considering today. He neither was connected to it in any family or financial sense, nor does he mention the sketch in his writings on Van Gogh. Nevertheless, it could still be the title of my address as it contains within itself as a title poetically the theme of the address, which is light in the art of Van Gogh, and as is understood from the perspective of Bataille. It could be argued that it is the poetic license of example, motif, or symbol chosen to orient the discussion, the title of an artwork already indexed to the thematic and name of the interpreter under consideration. The strength 203

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of such a title, as a formal indication, is its ability to disclose the truth of the matter at hand, as it is with the artwork in Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.”1 But, this, it will be countered, is the manner of thinking of the artist, mystic or lunatic. Yet, each of these types could be attributed to Van Gogh or perhaps to any creative being. His religious mission to bring light to the poor, to the people, is the thinking of the magician, of the sorcerer who can guide the destiny of the world: the way of thinking of the artist. His obsessive alcohol-fueled painting binges were guided by his wish to give a new sensibility to the people, to give light to those trapped in the factories or the coal mines. But, such a symbolic mission inevitably becomes political, and has become political with the emergence of the labor and socialist, communist movements at the turn of the last century and in the decades leading to the Bataille of my address, in his own confrontation with the dark captivity of a world on the brink of fascism. Van Gogh himself never became overtly political, but spoke of such matters in his letters to his brother Theo. Instead, he engaged in intense periods of artistic activity—at one point living with Gauguin—punctuated by bouts of madness, during which he remained creative, even when institutionalized. Much of the chaos in his life was related to his abuse of alcohol, specifically absinthe, which diminishes appetite and promotes dissociation from the everyday world. It is Bataille who takes poetic license in his attempts to make Van Gogh political, calling him Prometheus (and despite Eric Michaud’s objections, in his “Van Gogh, or The Insufficiency of Sacrifice,” which beg the question by considering Prometheus only in his heroic aspect), the Titan god who stole fire from the gods and gave it to the creatures he himself had created.2 For this transgression, we will recall, Prometheus is sentenced by Zeus to be chained to a rock and each day to have his liver devoured by a vulture. At night, the liver would grow back, only to have the bird return the next day, and forever. The democratic dimension of Van Gogh’s work has become standard in any consideration of his significance. Bataille invites us to consider Van Gogh, wearing the mask of Prometheus, on two occasions, in 1930 and 1937, with his “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh” and “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” respectively.3 In each instance, the text is preceded by a rupture with Breton: the castigation of “M. Bataille” in the Second Surrealist Manifesto, who, it is prophesied, would eventually submit to Hegel; and the dissolution of Contre-Attaque amid the occult conjuration of the secret society Acephalae.4



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In the former instance (1930), Bataille sets against Bretonian purity, and that which he considered feigned madness, a deathly erotic vision of catastrophe, of an indigestible sacred. In the latter moment (1937), Bataille and his cohorts seek to bring about their vision of an existential war against fascism, one whose weapons are not those of the Icarian sublimations or sublations of Breton, but of the Promethean desublimation (exposure, subversion, and erosion) of vast and myriad homogeneities. Prometheus accepts his punishment and does not seek redemption. For Bataille, there is no Prometheus Unbound in the ways of Aeschylus and Shelley. God is dead. There remains only hegemony and resistance. Hegemony is the profane homogeneity of the restricted economy, while resistance is the sacred heterogeneity of the general economy. Van Gogh brought light to the people, but he also experienced the dismemberment of flesh, self-sacrifice, prophecy (“keep this, it will be important one day”), and the overwhelming slippage of death. With the dismemberment of the god, the sacrifice of Prometheus, the freedom of creation and the power to cast light upon the fragile truth of the world is given to all human beings, without exception. But, each must take the risk of his or her own license, thereby achieving sovereignty. Bataille wallows in filth for a reason: filth is outside of fascism and totalitarian consciousness—it is the seed of resistance in its very abjection. Icarus loves the sun too much, seeks to emulate Helios, the watcher of all, the god of surveillance, of the total state machine. Breton, who lives in an invisible house (Nadja), is bewitched with Hegel, who claims to have thought the panoptic thoughts of god before creation. Bataille hides in the shadows, in the pseudonym, the text with no face, debauched, useless for the purposes of fascism. Van Gogh also abides amid these shadows, equally useless or even harmful to the purposes of aggressive idealization. He swills among the heterogeneous, sacred economy, the tragic community. His self-mutilation, an event, a dismemberment of self, is a breach, sacred, a laceration of the unquestioned “time-line,” the so-called history. The Promethean aspect emerges, in the first instance, with paintings of stars and sunflowers, of the marvel of the cosmos in its intimacy. In the second instance, Van Gogh, not mentioned in the Surrealist Manifestos (and this is surely one of the reasons Bataille chose Van Gogh as his patron artist), captures and transfigures the sun, the celestial lights, into the earth, as a shamanic gift for the people.5 Light dances across life, caresses the leaves, fields of wheat eclipse the stars. His Promethean transgression against Zeus is an incitement toward an

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explosion, a flame illuminating an anarchic openness. The awakening to the celestial marvelous of Saint-Rémy is surmounted by the diabolic conjuration of light from darkness, a remembrance of the birth of the sky from the earth. Life dances upon the earth, flesh is enlightened, darkness is imbued with light, awakened in the people amid Van Gogh’s sacred anarchism. THE STATE AND REVOLUTION Breton predicts that Bataille will succumb to Hegel, and to the discipline inherent in post-Leninist left-wing organizations. Bataille did not fit into Breton’s world—instead he remains as Diogenes, who seeks an honest man, but, in this case, finds a surrealist. In fact, Bataille was very aware of his own relationship to Hegel. Indeed, his own philosophy of non-knowledge emerged through his resistance to Hegel’s economy of absolute knowledge. Moreover, this resistance to the Absolute is carried over into the political domain in three essays from around 1933, which is the year of the ascension of Hitler: “The Problem of the State,” “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” and “The Notion of Expenditure.”6 These essays, as a group, serve as a response to Breton, and as an attack upon fascism, communism, and Americanism, which were for Bataille, variations of the same statist homogenizing operations of the military, the government, the material economy and the church (propaganda ministry). Each of these is dominated by a restricted economy of power. Bataille unearths, through his non-knowledge, that which exceeds absolute knowledge, and from the perspective of a sovereign discourse, recontextualizes absolute knowledge as a restricted economy within a broader, general economy. This is the outside of Hegel’s state, outside the polis of Plato—the homogeneous order has been established, but the poets are still there, outside, in the dimension of heterogeneity, playing at the margins of philosophy. And yet, perhaps the poets are better placed in the modern world as they have not yet been sent outside the city walls. This being-inside the site of the homogenizing operations, within the total state machine, can serve as the place of the event, of the activity which exceeds or challenges the mechanisms of power, surveillance, interdiction, judgment, incarceration—all the features of the protocol of absolute knowledge, absolute power. (Edward Snowden.) Non-knowledge, the power of thought not restricted by the state, occurs in the general economy, in the resistance to power, dissolution of the self in intoxication, eroticism, and in the myriad other detours before death.



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Or—in the dissolution of the state or some of its aspects—the state which is the indicator for the homogenizing operations of the military, government, corporations, and the church (which now could be expanded to include the culture industry as such, entertainment as religion). That which must occur for Bataille are ungovernable Promethean de-sublimations of homogeneity, a Great Night (which could be a cultural era such as the counterculture of the 1960s, or the French Revolution), characterized by an exposure of a regime of power: to delimit it, to describe it, to attempt to change it, and either attempt to take control of it (which is the necessary illusion of democratic governments, as if they can control the vast array of power and surveillance networks and mechanisms) or subvert the regimes of power until they suffer collapse and eventual erosion, back into the general economy which will manifest ever new forms of life and expressive existence. Two examples of such desublimation come from the world of literature, perhaps the domain in which the self is least at risk from such experiments. Yet, that is said with an air of finality, as if nothing could any longer be shocking—we have arrived, we are free, no one could be threatened for what they write… But, it was not that long ago when Allen Ginsberg, our first example, had to go to court to defend Howl (1955) from charges of obscenity.7 In winning the obscenity case, Ginsberg, the Jewish, communist, homosexual poet of the Beat generation, liberated us to the state we now take for granted, and which is always under threat. Soon after the Ginsberg case, censorship laws, having been exposed in the trial, were struck down, subverted, and have to a great extent eroded in their previous forms. Henry Miller, for instance, was banned until Ginsberg prevailed, and Ginsberg himself was called as a character witness for the obscenity trial of William Burroughs, for Naked Lunch.8 Censorship remains a vital terrain of battle, and it goes without saying that there are enormous challenges to free expression from restrictions on the internet, mass surveillance, and intellectual property laws, not to mention the capitalist economy in the publishing and art industries. My second example comes from Bataille himself. His stunning short novel Story of the Eye can be, to this day, a shocking read.9 By exposing the perversities and eccentricities of the characters, he shatters the naivete of a homogenized consciousness, and as with Lacan’s notion of the mirror stage, the Eye becomes indelibly marked upon the character of the world. Bataille sought to subvert the rigid Roman Catholic codes, norms, and sensibilities by conjuring forth a world of innocently violent and perverse eroticism, terror, joy, humiliation, and murder. However, since he published Story of the Eye in a limited run under the pseudonym Lord Auch, he was never called in to account for his alleged crimes like his hero De Sade. The book remained in the shadows, in the underground, and has remained ever since, in most places.

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Films of his books are being made, he is becoming one of the greats—but what kind of culture would ever regard Story of the Eye as “normal”? A brief comparison between these two examples may shed light upon the best strategy for subverting a regime of power. Ginsberg wanted to liberate his words and, by implication, liberate the cultural, political, and personal acts which he describes. His words were allowed, as they were judged to be a legitimate form of art, with redeeming value. Some of the acts have begun to gain traction as well, such as equality and marijuana legalization, and this manner of change works to modify the homogeneous order, by local subversions or legislative transformations. The homogeneity remains, but ceaselessly works to coopt (the list is long) or destroy an ascending heterogeneity, such as Malcolm X. Bataille, on the other hand, was, as he said, debauched. One suspects that his interest in Van Gogh lies mainly in the fact that he not only cut off his ear, but also went insane. But, such a suspicion, while not altogether wrong, would be unfair as Bataille is seeking to change the world, as Marx called on philosophers to do in the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach.10 But, his method of meditation calls on those with ears to hear to remain in the shadows cultivating one’s vice, to be free as that which is indigestible, incorporable, ungovernable, one which is sovereign and secret. It is thus in Blue of Noon (1957), written allegedly during the Spanish Civil War, that Bataille focused almost exclusively upon the debauched character Dirty.11 While an activist is present, this is certainly not The Just Assassins by Albert Camus.12 There is a sense in Bataille that the activist is engaging in some circus down the road, to which he decided not to go. It is simply not important, at least not as important as a debauched woman urinating on the chair in which she sits. Both of the main characters are drunk, one possibly near death, and there is nearly a taste of the unhygienic sexual chemistry of the protagonists. Bataille does not want to get anyone’s hope up—indeed, that is the problem, for Bataille. As the necessity of going down detours is the lot of mortal beings—detours on the way to death, there is always a group or organization or charismatic person who would be happy for you to sacrifice your life for a fantasy—religion, nation, revolution, and so on. Over time, industries have been set up to process all of the detours, which now have been established as the various types of life expenditure, life industries. We are produced by these industries, by the hospital, the school, the military, religion, family, culture—we are a house of cards in which the cards are made out of commodities—homogeneous established units of life. Bataille does not want to build anything up, not to store the grain or accumulate capital and savings—he wants to expend resources in a flood of communal hedonism, the desire for which would destroy the forms of homogeneity that curtailed the desires of the community and its right to enjoy the fruits



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of its labor. Not to prepare, like the revolutionists and the religious fanatics, for the great event, but to enjoy the world in the innocence of its givenness. The great event never comes; what does come, that is the battle. It is the festival, as a social paradigm of desublimation, to which Bataille wishes us to descend. We would still be conscious, still use tools, and still reproduce our existence, but with the gift and not the commodity as the form of social relation, the sacred economy of expenditure for all will be the motive of economic activity. It is in this way that Bataille and Van Gogh share the same hopes for human beings, all human beings, and each acknowledge the necessity that light be restored to the life of the people. Van Gogh sought to give light to the people and to show them that anyone could be creative and that every life, every station is aesthetically of worth. Bataille sought to show us that we are freer than we even suspect and that all things and situations will undergo transformation or destruction. As for the strength of my title, perhaps we saw all of this through the window in Bataille’s restaurant, which in the original French means a “restorative” of one’s health and vigor. APPENDIX icepoem #010 by Dic Edwards Vincent i can imagine that picture on the platform at The Hague Autumn 1883 leaving Sien with her baby boy on his knee baby looking into the eyes of the colour god for love and Sien broken who had given her body to him stripped to the pitch of death the pallor of hunger just like the miners of The Borinage The Black Earth Country and The Common Grave blackened by the haunting slag and the children looming to be saved and The Potato Eaters by the hard pressed lamplight eating with the very hands that dug the dirt to get the crop for he had said earlier in Paris how beauty is found among the rough hands of workers rather than the slick

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nudes for sowing and reaping is not just work but allegorised life and death/ Paris where he had stepped out to the Luxembourg to admire the Millets and the Corots but recalling the Amsterdam docks with the drenched ground and timber piles and the golden sky of the rising sun captured in the forlorn puddles/ and then back to the low country and his first palette with its ochre-red yellow brown cobalt and Prussian blue Naples yellow Sienna and black and white when Christ became the supreme artist shacking up with Sien the whore pregnant with a second bastard Sien ragged muse for a beggar with an act Sien whose beauty rose from the scorn poured on her which he was too lost to contest until he had to go away from the misery and the bleakness and to the South! and i can imagine him leaving the train at Arles armed with his urgent pungent impressions of the Dutch countryside come to pursue a notional Japan a land of magnificent colour a land of heat in the South French Vincent who had bantered with Bernard contrasting the “good fucker” Courbet to voyeur Degas and quoting Ziem the Barbizon painter who said how a man becomes ambitious the moment he can’t get a hard-on and how to him Vincent he was indifferent on the matter protesting that his ambition could not be so subservient this Vincent who had cried for the poor in the North where hard-ons were utilitarian when what mattered was not to be able to draw a hand but its gesture to smell the wind as the digger glances up the life so critical of those doomed by the dark not the boozy brotheling nights with Lautrec and the slip into the waters of absinthe/stepping off the train at Arles and



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into the SNOW and ice but he would go out into the white fields for one day the sun would come and i can picture him out there in the white of his loneliness the loneliness always there and among l’Arlésienne who hated intruders especially him weird him finding the blooming almond in the ice which he painted and his brushstrokes the line of nature and the moving water and the stark grass and the bridge on the canal and the thatched cottages surrounded by the reeds waving wildly in the lunatic mistral and the stars above the Rhone and the café at night coloured more than in the day and he painted the old arthritic olive groves and the rocks grain scalloped and veined like the grain of old olive roots and the cypresses like thick dark lightening conductors grounding the energy of the sky everything swept up in a current of energy everything he sees made of the same plasma the moon coming out of eclipse and the stars blazing the sky heaving like the ocean and the cypresses moving with it and the gravity of great sunlight effects the warm colours of the South the beautiful contrast of red and green and orange of sunflowers and lilac and i can picture him with Gaugin painting with Gaugin and him painting Gaugin and Gaugin painting him and pressing on Gaugin beseeching Gaugin supplicant to Gaugin afraid Gaugin may leave him and i can picture them when the rain came the constant rain and the night drinking and now the impossibility of working like this and the anger and threats and the descent into madness and the explosion of personalities and that cold wet December day when Vincent took the razor to his head/and i can picture him committed at Saint Rémy de Provence where the screams of

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the mad echoed down the stone corridors him painting the view through the bars painting landscapes and nature for your soul he would say is alive in the blue of the skies and the blade of springing grass and he painted grass here in the South and fields and irises and sunflowers and fields and grass and always landscapes but no people and he had turned away from the people and into himself in search of colours the colours of heat and here in the South he abandoned people for the warm colours of the South and i can picture him walking from the Auberge to the Chateau d’Avers and i can picture him staggering bent from the shot that lodged in him though fired point blank it should have passed right through him unless it wasn’t and he was shot from a distance murdered and i can picture him at his funeral the bright yellow of the cornfields and wheatfields the deep blue of the church at Auvers and the red of the poppies and the purple of the irises and though the people had returned mourners from Paris bringing yellow flowers yet i cannot picture that flaming soul thawing with its soul heat the ice around the people of the North13 NOTES 1.  Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” trans. Albert Hofstadter, in Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). 2. Eric Michaud, “Van Gogh, or The Insufficiency of Sacrifice,” October 49 (Summer 1989): 25–39. 3.  Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 61–72. Georges Bataille. “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” October 36 (Spring 1986): 58–60.



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  4.  André Breton, “Second Manifesto of Surrealism,” in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 117–94. Georges Bataille and André Breton, Contre-attaque: Union de lutte des intellectuels révolutionnaires: les cahiers et les autres documents, octobre 1935–mai 1936 (Paris: Ypsilon, 2013).  5. André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969).   6.  Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 137–60. Georges Bataille, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–29.  7. Allen Ginsberg, Howl (and Other Poems) (Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2015).   8.  William S. Burroughs and James Grauerholz, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 2001).  9. Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. J. Neugroschel (London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1979). 10.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998). 11.  Georges Bataille, Blue of Noon, trans. Harry Matthews (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012). 12.  Albert Camus, The Just Assassins, trans. Stuart Gilbert and Justin O’Brien, in Caligula, and Three Other Plays (New York: Vintage, 1962). 13.  The poem “Vincent” is from a larger collection, still in progress, called icepoems, written by poet and playwright Dic Edwards, who teaches at University of Wales Trinity Saint David.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bataille, Georges. Blue of Noon. Translated by Harry Matthews. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012. ———. “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh.” In Visions of Excess, edited by Allan Stoekl, 61–72. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. ———. Story of the Eye. Translated by J. Neugroschel. London: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1979. ———. “Van Gogh as Prometheus.” In Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing, translated by Annette Michelson. October 36 (Spring 1986): 58–60. Bataille, Georges, and André Breton. Contre-attaque: Union de lutte des intellectuels révolutionnaires: les cahiers et les autres documents, octobre 1935–mai 1936. Paris: Ypsilon, 2013.

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Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. ———. “Second Manifesto of Surrealism.” Translated by Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. In Manifestoes of Surrealism, 117–94. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969. Burroughs, William S., and James Grauerholz. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove Press, 2001. Camus, Albert. The Just Assassins. Translated by Stuart Gilbert and Justin O’Brien. In Caligula, and Three Other Plays, 233–302. New York: Vintage, 1962. Ginsberg, Allen. Howl (and Other Poems). Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2015. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Translated by Albert Hofstadter. In Poetry, Language, Thought, 17–87. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Kirkpatrick, David. “Bataille and the Writing of Sacrifice.” Paper presented at MSA 7 Seminar: Modernist Excess, Chicago, November 6, 2005. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The German Ideology, Including Theses on Feuerbach and Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1998. Michaud, Eric. “Van Gogh, or The Insufficiency of Sacrifice.” October 49 (Summer 1989): 25–39.

Chapter 11

Van Gogh’s Dark Illuminations The End of Art or the Art of the End Alina N. Feld

Art as the self-representation of consciousness of the times, the Zeitgeist, is a prime locus of investigation of pre-philosophical as well as philosophical self-understanding, as indeed is proposed by the Heidegger-Jaspers argument over the import of Van Gogh’s painting as a sign of the times. The materiality of the world represented in Van Gogh’s art is illumined from within and operates its own transfiguration in a paradoxical movement of immanence cum transcendence. This essay considers Van Gogh through the eyes of Karl Jaspers, Heidegger, Derrida, and Thomas Altizer, towards an articulation of the theological relevance of his art in late modernity. The various perspectives are considered against the background of Schelling’s theology of God’s dark nature.1 In the aftermath of the death of God theology, as well as in response to our deepening consciousness and our anguished times, traditional theodicy is radically inappropriate. The relevance of classical theologies is being questioned and reconsidered while contemporary theologies articulate a God that suffers and dies, is love rather than being, weak or impotent rather than sovereign, possible rather than actual, mother rather than father, thus a God in our image and likeness. As Thomas Altizer observes, Van Gogh’s paintings evoke the abysmal nature of Schelling’s God, and, simultaneously, our late modern dark consciousness. PATHOS AND ART Karl Jaspers compellingly argued that exceptional personalities like that of Van Gogh open for us a deep source of existence for the space of an instant, as if the hidden depths were suddenly unearthed.2 Jaspers correlated 215

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creativity and pathology in his General Psychopathology (1913), then continued this research in his pathography of Van Gogh.3 Indeed, some of Van Gogh’s paintings vibrate with an intensity that brings with it a radical interrogation, a call addressed to our existence, thus provoking our own transformation. Malady and art emerge together as ciphers of profound mystery, limit situations whose essential nature is a coincidentia oppositorum: creative and destructive, revelatory and concealing, potentially selfilluminating. Jaspers brings his own historical time under judgment: in an age when the self is shattered and experience of God is the privilege of the sick, madness becomes the condition of authentic Existenz. Revealing here are Jaspers’ reflections on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as initiators of a new philosophical attitude and a new type of thought, determining the philosophical situation of the twentieth century. The problem Jaspers identifies as defining the Western tradition is the forsaking of the other-than-reason, the nonrational, in all of its forms:4 it is Being itself that is by the arrogance of reason reduced to matter, primordial fact, impulse, or accident.5 Against this background, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche provoked a radical transformation in Western consciousness by their relentless questioning from the depths of existence in search of genuine truth. The ambiguity and plenitude of existence and truth can be adequately articulated only through indirect communication and masks by engaging in the task of infinite interpretation. Indirect or nomadic discourse includes les voix du silence of art.6 Faith and will replace thought; they are both grounded in the depth of personal existence: the faith of the martyrs and the will to life in a world in which God is dead. Jaspers’ observations on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can arguably be extended to Van Gogh. He emphasizes their exceptional and melancholic destinies, their loneliness, their lack of worldly fulfillment, their failure. He observes in both thinkers a physical-developmental retardation or a lack of vitality, and signs of insanity. Any diagnosis would be inappropriate due to their exceptional natures defying classification, for “with them a new form of human reality appears in history.”7 Jaspers reflects: It is as though their very being, experiencing the abandonment of the age to the end, shattered, and, in the shattering itself, manifested a truth which otherwise would never have come to expression. If they won an unheard-of mastery over their own selves, they also were condemned to a world-less loneliness.… [They] are irreplaceable as having dared to be shipwrecked. We orient ourselves by them. Through them we have intimations of something we could never have perceived without such sacrifices, of something that seems essential which even today we cannot adequately grasp. It is as if the Truth itself spoke, bringing an unrest into the depths of our consciousness of being.8



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The shattering of their being manifests a hidden unexpressed and inexpressible truth; the sacrifice makes visible something essential, difficult or impossible to articulate, that stirs the depths of our consciousness. Indeed, the consciousness of our age has been indelibly marked by the pathos of the morbid psyche of creator-revealers such as Van Gogh. Their psychic malady makes visible the metaphysical other: the otherness of reason and Being. Jaspers gives witness from the perspective of a clinical psychiatrist to the Schellingian metaphysical intuition and mythological construction. Schelling refers to human madness as a trace of primordial divine otherness, the ungrounded abysmal nought. For both Schelling and Jaspers, being and reason are rooted in their respective others as their ultimate ground; this otherness though is the ground for freedom and creativity. As the ground of freedom and creativity, madness must continually be conquered but never eliminated. TRUTH AND THE NOTHING OF ART As Jaspers speculates about the relevance of psychic pathology for art, constructing the pathography of Van Gogh, Heidegger illustrates his theory of art as alethic with one of Van Gogh’s paintings. In his essay “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing,” Derrida fulfills a task: he has been asked to write a discourse on Heidegger’s and Meyer’s elaborations on Van Gogh’s nature morte of 1886, Old Shoes with Laces.9 (See Figure 1.) He explains: “They’ve put a picture (but which one exactly?) and two texts under my nose. I’ve just read, for the first time, The Still Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and Van Gogh. And reread once again Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes.”10 Derrida plays out the imagined “quarrel over restitution” between Heidegger and Meyer Schapiro over the identity of the shoe-wearer, a dispute over attribution, a fight over old shoes, toward the enormity of the problem of the origin of art.11 While in 1935 Heidegger identifies the shoes en passant as belonging to a peasant and even a peasant woman,12 Schapiro accuses Heidegger of an “error and a projection if not deception and perjury” and in 1968 “restitutes” them to a city dweller, the painter himself.13 Derrida refers to this debate over time as a restitution trial, a desire for attribution as a desire for appropriation, a dispute between parti pris of the rooted and the sedentary versus the uprooted emigrant, “a question of feet and of many other things.”14 Suddenly, the painted old shoes emerge as a holy relic or an icon to be venerated, an object known in all traditions—of contemplation and mutual gazing, seeing and being seen by the god, the savior, the saint, the holy one, Christ or the Buddha. Derrida plays upon the double

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meaning of regarder as concern or looking in conjunction with the ontologically transformative gaze involved in traditional icon veneration: And these shoes concern them (les regardent: literally “look at them”). They concern us [ils nous regardent = literally, “look at us”]. Their detachment is obvious. Unlaced, abandoned, detached from the subject (wearer, holder or owner, or even author-signatory) and detached/untied in themselves (the laces are untied).... They concern us/look at us, mouth agape, that is, mute, making or letting us chatter on dumbstruck before those who make them speak ... and who in reality are made to speak by them.15

Like an icon, the painted shoes gaze at us, provoke us, and concern us. Simultaneously, the shoe represents (again, regarde as either concerns or looks) “walking ... closest to the ground, the lowest degree, the most subjective or underlying level of what’s called culture or the institution,” the sole being lower than the foot.16 It demands an analysis of la syntaxe du point and du pas—ambiguously, the “syntax of point [none] and step [not].”17 In other words, an analysis of negation and nothing made visible, suggested by Van Gogh’s painted shoes. That may explain, Derrida muses, how Heidegger’s analysis of the origin of the work of art, a “discourse on place and truth” in its excessive ambition could find its best enactment in Van Gogh’s old shoes.18 Heidegger’s “Origin,” in reflecting on a “famous picture by Van Gogh” whose essence opens onto the abyss, is an essay on foundation and the ground, the groundless ground, which leads to a thinking of the abyss, of the mise en abîme, and of “a more originary thingliness.”19 Thus Heidegger’s essay on the origin of art is about “essence of truth, the truth of essence, and the abyss (Abgrund) which plays itself out there like a “veiled” destiny (fatum) which transfixes being.”20 And Derrida repeats Heidegger’s question and answer: “What more is there, what is there that’s so important, to see in this painting?” The reply: Nothing, “nothing that we didn’t know already.”21 The painting is about or of ghosts—an “army of ghosts are demanding their shoes”—of “the bottomless memory of a dispossession, an expropriation, a despoilment.”22 Derrida points to “a certain analogy between Heidegger and Van Gogh… a certain community of pathos.”23 This pathos can explain the identification of the shoes with Van Gogh himself, so that the “shoes are no longer attached to Van Gogh, they are Vincent himself, who is undetachable from himself: a parousia,”24 and thus the title of the picture could represent a postmodern and post-Christian eucharistic transubstantiation: Hoc est corpus meum. The painted old shoes are transubstantiated into the sacrificial body and being of the artist who kenotically emptied himself into the painting of the shoes.



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Van Gogh gives himself, gives himself to be seen, makes the sacrificial offering of his flesh in giving his shoes to be seen. And Gauguin… would confirm it: he has in front of him the “vision of the resurrected Christ,” the vision of a Jesus preaching goodness and humility.25

The transfiguration and haloing of the painted shoes occur as the shoes represent anti-mimetically Van Gogh’s face.26 Thus the painting, Old Shoes with Laces, becomes—to use a paraphrase of Joyce’s title, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a “Portrait of the Artist as an Old Thing,” an iconoclastic icon, radically negating individual face, eye, and I. Schapiro, who interprets the painting as one of Van Gogh’s many self-portraits, sees the face of Van Gogh in “his” shoes: a self-portrait whose most significant feature is the representation or presence of absence, hence, according to Derrida, literally a haunting and a ghost story, a spectral analysis. “But then what about the haunting of these shoes?”27 “Are they a ghost (a piece of ghost, a phantom member)? In that case are they the ghost of Van Gogh?”28 The dispute over the lawful owner of the shoes can be extended ad infinitum. Derrida invites us to be alerted to the fact that the abandoned shoes become the “anonymous, lightened voided support [but so much the heavier for being abandoned to its opaque inertia] of an absent subject whose name returns to haunt the open form.”29 Here the seemingly maximal opposition between Heidegger’s and Schapiro’s ideologies and projections appears as a correspondence, consonance, or resemblance. The painter is a peasant at work, while the shoes are haunting, ghosting, phantom members and relics. Indeed, they could have been worn, and worn out, by a peasant woman, man, city-dweller, Van Gogh himself. The thinking of nothingness and the presence of absence are evoked, provoked by the haunting shoes, ghosts, phantom members and relics: Van Gogh (alias J. C.) rendered himself in his shoes. Reminders of the Buddha’s footprints, they are vestigial traces of the absent one, by extension, of absence and nothing. Simultaneously, though, they are carriers and holders of human life in its infinite complexity and density, its totality, since no possibility could be excluded. The wearer of the shoes could have been anybody—or everybody—as Joyce at the end of Finnegan’s Wake exclaims: “Here Comes Everybody!” The empty worn-out shoes play the role of a receptacle of the imaginal per se, and because there is no limit to imagining the life that walked in these shoes, in order to avoid infinite regression, God must be postulated as the first final cause in an Aristotelian or scholastic series: ancient, huge, clunky, and hallowed by a golden light. Van Gogh’s shoes must also be postulated as God’s shoes or an icon of God himself. In the end, the quarrel over restitution, attribution, appropriation of an old pair of shoes must be forgotten. The painting of the old shoes is an icon

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of an absence, not that of the hypothetical wearer, but the nothing of art, as formulated by Heidegger as a nonrepresentational theory of art. Applied to art, Heidegger’s alethic truth as disclosure, unconcealedness emerges in opposition to classical theories of truth as correspondence or coherence. Tom Rockmore’s remarks on the shift away from representational art are relevant here.30 He cites Heidegger, “what is at work in the work: the disclosure of the particular being in its Being, the happening of truth,” and clarifies his statement. Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting not because it is an adequate image, a correct representation of useful equipment, but because the revelation of the being of shoes is let appear, unconcealed.31 Heidegger’s nonrepresentational theory naturally leads to an abandonment of any claims of referentiality or utility extrinsic to art, thus to a form of aesthetic nihilism as developed by Antonin Artaud. In fact, Derrida quotes Artaud, for whom Van Gogh is a “formidable musician,” calling us to listen to painting, its voice of silence, its “occult strangeness,” its otherness.32 Art “renders” nothing, and renders useless both hermeneutics and ciphers. Thus Artaud, quoted by Derrida: ‘No, there is no ghost in Van Gogh’s pictures, no drama, no subject, and I shall say even no object, for what is the motif itself? ‘If not something like the iron shadow of the motet of an unutterable antique music, like the leitmotiv of a theme despairing of its own subject. ‘It is naked nature and pure sight such as it reveals itself when one knows how to get close enough to it […].33

Artaud’s aesthetic nihilism verges on the apophatic, or the Kantian sublime. Plenitude of experience, whether of God or a pair of old shoes, is ultimately inexpressible. Furthermore, beyond the nothing of the absent wearer of the shoes and beyond the nothing of art, there is a different nothing at work that is unconcealed in Van Gogh’s painting. The relation between presence and absence evokes “a certain thinking, a certain experience of nothingness (of the nonexistent).”34 This experience is haunting, Heidegger names it unheimlichkeit: “the question of being, of its being-on-the-way, inasmuch as it passes via nothing.”35 Van Gogh’s shoes let the void be heard, “nothingness is there without being there.”36 Van Gogh’s painting calls forth unfamiliar senses and lets the void be heard, the nothing of being, or lets the more originary beginning, be seen. Derrida’s “Restitutions,” at its end, pointed back to the beginning, opening up to infinite possibilities of interpretation all contained in Heidegger’s alethic theory of truth of art, the nothing-ground of being, and Artaud’s nihilism. It reads as a playful paraphrase of the opening scenes in Beckett’s



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Waiting for Godot, in which Estragon, taking off his boots and looking inside, also sees “nothing,” nothing concrete to justify his wound, a nothing encompassing all possibilities of meaning:37 —You don’t have to render anything. Just bet on the trap as others swear on the Bible. There will have been something to bet. It gives to be rendered. To be put back on/put off. Ca vient de partir. Ca revient de partir. Ca vient de repartir.38

Van Gogh’s Old Shoes with Laces emerges in its iconic dimension: it is an icon, an artificial image, whose natural image is invisible, uncircumscribable, or nothing. It is a holy or false relic—whether of Van Gogh himself, or of the peasant woman venerated and canonized by Van Gogh’s artistic devotion. Like a shroud of Turin, it points toward the absent, the dead, and in doing that, paradoxically becomes a proof of life eternal.39 Do we encounter the end of art here and now as Hegel envisioned it? If art finds its culmination in Christian art and the Romantic stage is the grand finale of artistic evolution, Hegel conceives the end of art occurring in a postChristian and post-Hegelian age in which art will conform to the new spirit of the times. He believes it is in this vanishing that humanity would recognize itself and reach self-consciousness.40 Clearly, that would be the art of an absent God, a God whose absence becomes present. It would be an age and art of the eclipse of the spirit, of complete materiality and materialism. This appears to be an avant la lettre articulation of the postmodern houseof-cards cascade of endings—of God, self, history, book—the loss of origin and nomadic thought.41 Jean Baudrillard endorses a similar insight in a discourse of paradoxical reversals and laments the paradoxical actualization of our fundamental metaphors, an embodiment or materialization of our philosophical and theological ideals through which our cherished ideals are lost, annihilated, negated.42 For Hegel, this mise en abîme constitutes a necessary if pathetic stage in the dialectic of the spirit in process of self-manifestation. In Hegelian perspective, it is a stage toward full actualization, but one that is deeply demanding for human consciousness, called to extend its horizon, deepen self-awareness, and undertake the abysmal and pathetic journey with heightened lucidity. As Jaspers observed, true artists, such as Van Gogh, embodied and expressed this initiation into the mysterium magnum—even if in the process they were sacrificed. Their sacrifice was archetypal, hence both Christic and Promethean. Bataille explains Van Gogh’s Promethean destiny.43 Van Gogh’s ear becomes Prometheus’ liver, and automutilation becomes a figura for the self-sacrifice of the god, of an Icarian being who dared to seek the fire of the heavens for the sake of the mortals.

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There is in fact no reason to separate Van Gogh’s ear or Gaston F.’s finger from Prometheus’s famous liver. If one accepts the interpretation that identifies the purveying eagle (the aetos Prometheus of the Greeks) with the god who stole fire from the wheel of the sun, then the tearing out of the liver presents a theme in conformity with the various legends of the “sacrifice of the god” […]. The eagle-god who is confused with the sun by the ancients, the eagle who alone among all beings can contemplate while staring at “the sun in all its glory,” the Icarian being who goes to seek the fire of the heavens, is however, nothing other than an automutilator, a Vincent Van Gogh, a Gaston F.44

Bataille’s automutilation motif seems significantly different to a Hegelian apotheosis and a different approach to understanding ecstasis. However, Hegel’s Good Friday pathos is a necessary stage, resurrection presupposes crucifixion, and descensus ad inferos is a sine qua non condition of the ascent to the stars. Automutilation or self-sacrifice? The self-inflicted pain gives body to a deeper inner pathos, a body without which the pathos remains mute and non-transcendable. It makes it visible, palpable, translates suffering into pain, embodies it, aestheticizes it, converts it into metaphor. Van Gogh’s automutilation constitutes the final act of his ongoing self-sacrifice transmogrified into his art and life without remainder. Thus both Promethean and Christian, Van Gogh’s kenotic sacrifice has fired up our consciousness. The Christian ground of his intended kenosis opened up towards a deeper and more encompassing concept of God, one that was adumbrated in Schelling’s divine nought, Heidegger’s more originary beginning, Altizer’s death of God, a God of an apocalyptic theology of end times. His art enacts this other theology. The end of art as representation does not mean the end of art tout court, rather the end of a modern vision of the self and God and the plunge into the tohu bohu of a new world. APOCALYPTIC SELF-PORTRAITS Like Derrida, the death-of-God theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer envisions Van Gogh’s paintings as modern icons and holy relics. He singles out Van Gogh as a “God-obsessed painter,” the artist who most authentically embodies the spirit of our times in his final breakdown, insanity, and suicide.45 He understands Van Gogh as a unique saint, humble and passionate, whose passion led to madness, self-mutilation, and suicide as well as to the greatest self-portraits since Rembrandt. Given that the eyes are most compelling in Van Gogh’s portraits, Altizer initiates a sui generis hermeneutics of the eyes in painting. Against a background of a Hegelian dialectical aesthetics, Altizer sketches a profile or map of the evolution of Western consciousness in visual art from its



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pre-Christian beginnings to late modernity in which consciousness is visibly present, represented, or incarnated in the eyes. Giotto, Rembrandt, and Van Gogh are identified as defining moments of the unfolding history of Western consciousness. For Van Gogh, who once said he preferred painting eyes to painting cathedrals, the eyes represent cathedrals of a new world, a “new totality uniting the sacred and the profane, or eternity and the here and now, of flesh and Spirit,” nature and grace. Thus, grace is incarnated in the depths of the body itself, visible in Van Gogh’s eyes, “eyes which embody a deepest but also transfiguring abyss.”46 Altizer imagines the odyssey of Van Gogh’s eyes circumscribed by two paintings: a self-portrait—his last self-portrait—and a landscape—his final landscape, Wheatfield with Crows, both essentially inscapes, thus both self-portraits, representations of states of consciousness, ciphers of our latemodern condition. (See Figure 2 and Figure 8.) Altizer refers to Van Gogh’s final self-portrait as that of a “new face of death, an embodied death universal and unique simultaneously.”47 Here, the eyes are both center and periphery, thus enclosing the viewer within their vision, by which this face of death becomes our own, and death is being transfigured and present as life itself. An anticipation of quantum physics, as well as a mise en abîme of the Byzantine tradition of icon contemplation, Van Gogh’s self-portrait gradually dissolves the boundary between the observer and the observed, subject and object. The subject ceases to be an individual subject and its perishing releases a new totality and a new world, one that is encountered in his last painting, Wheatfield with Crows. This work embodies “our purest modern image of God” as “a totality that is unnamable as God.”48 Altizer writes: I believe that he has given us a unique icon of God, an absolutely alien God who is nevertheless a totally present God—a presence demanding a truly new seeing—and doing so by incorporating an icon dissolving every boundary between the sacred and the profane, and every boundary between center and circumference, or here and there.49

In the absence of traditional iconography and in the presence of overwhelming darkness, Wheatfield with Crows appears as a strange icon of the absence or emptiness of God, evoking God’s “total presence as that very darkness.”50 In a Schellingian reading of this insight, the overwhelming darkness represents the primordial anger or the past of the God of love and light, that lives in the present as past.51 According to Schelling who engages in a translation of Jacob Boehme’s wild and obscure intuitions into philosophical concepts, God’s primordial nature is a dark nature, a primordial power of negation and nothingness that initiates God’s birth. God’s self-genesis and creation are thus movements and operations both ex deo and ex nihilo, out of the

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divine nought. Altizer reflects on visual art more generally as an “epiphany of the sacred,” a privileged event of awakening for contemporary consciousness, since he argues that the modern condition is defined by a negative relation to the sacred.52 In a compact, laconic argument he contends that for contemporary consciousness “abyss and chaos” are the only genuine epiphanies of the sacred, while “disfiguring and dissolution” are its “inevitable vehicle”: Is a uniquely modern condition one in which it is simply impossible to see the sacred, and is deep seeing for us inevitably and necessarily a purely profane seeing, or one in which the sacred can actually appear only as chaos or abyss? There can be little doubt that abyss and chaos are more fully manifest in our art than in any previous art, but can this be a genuine epiphany of the sacred for us? One in which a deep disfiguring or a deep dissolution is the inevitable vehicle of the sacred?53

If modern art is an epiphany of the sacred, it achieves this through an iconoclastic dissolution and disfiguring of all traditional sacred images. Altizer observes that Wheatfield with Crows is an image of crucifixion and resurrection simultaneously.54 He identifies Giotto and Van Gogh as the painters of the coalescence of crucifixion and resurrection as well as of the magnum arcanum of Christianity, the actual union of the humanity and the divinity of Christ. He explains, visual art is a form and cipher of the incarnation of the spirit into flesh, thus also making possible an experience of synesthesia, familiar to the great mystics, in which seeing as the spiritual sense par excellence calls forth tactility, where touch reaches deeply into the soul. Altizer explains that while Van Gogh was a preacher of the Gospel, he distanced himself from ecclesiastical Christianity, and like Nietzsche before him, he dreamt of bringing about a new religion whose iconography he created.55 Wheatfield with Crows introduces this new iconography in which the “ecstatic light of this field is inseparable from the dark abyss of these heavens,” thus reversing traditional iconography.56 Though human face and eyes are absent, Altizer suggests that the crows visually morph into eyes whose darkness evokes death as “ecstatically present.” The eyes with which we see are the eyes of Van Gogh, the eyes contemplating his suicide, thus once more, as in his last self-portrait, they incorporate the viewer into his own death.57 According to Altizer, in order to create the unorthodox iconography corresponding to his new religion, Van Gogh’s art enacts a coalescence of traditional Byzantine iconography as manifested iconophilia, and iconoclasm, of the sacred and the profane, light and darkness. The reversal of the imaginary or imago mundi present in Van Gogh’s painting, Altizer argues, echoes en abîme the revolution in art provoked by the birth of Christianity, as well as being its final scene or moment. Altizer argues that Van Gogh’s negation of



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the Christian God is a Hegelian negation that transcends and preserves what it negates, thus not a dissolution, but a reversal of God and of every icon of God. In the “holy chaos” of this disquieting icon, however, darkness becomes indistinguishable from light. Our gaze embraces it; we participate in the transfiguration of darkness and in a dawning joy inseparable from it. Altizer affirms with Schelling the correspondence of identity between the abyss of consciousness and God’s abysmal depths: paraphrasing Meister Eckhart, the eye or I with which we see into the abyss is the eye of the divine abyss itself. If the crows are ciphers of the eyes of God, seeing into our own, then, as in a Schellingian theogonic hermeneutic, Altizer proclaims the wheat field itself a cipher of the body of God whose glory is inseparable from the dark abysmal sky that is its ground. Thus in Van Gogh’s painting a reflection en abîme has occurred, provoking a vertiginous reversal: while in traditional iconography God’s eye is absolute light, here it is absolute darkness. With a radical Boehmean-Schellingian and Hegelian gesture, Altizer’s dialectic moves deeper: the absolute darkness is not univocal, nor final stasis, it is rather ecstatically transfigured into light, thus justifying apocalyptic celebration. In this last Van Gogh painting, God’s groundless ground, its dark and wrathful nature, are made visible. Wheatfield with Crows is a genuine eschatological revelation or apocalypsis of God—a Boehmean-Schellingian God—thus an occasion for ultimate joy. In this vein, Altizer can name this darkness as a joyous darkness, calling forth a Yes-saying to the deepest and most ultimate No, the divine nought, negation and ground of revelation of the God of love and dazzling light, the light of darkness itself: “If thereby we consume the dead or dying God, that consumption is resurrection itself, a resurrection which is Yes and only Yes.”58 As a revelation at the end of time, God appears in its fullness, one that must include its body and dark nature transfigured into light as a perfect coincidentia oppositorum. God’s pathetic self-revelation, concealed from the beginning of time, makes known God’s abysmal nature in and as the chaos and depths, the last moment of self-emptying of transcendence into immanence. The totality of God, with its primordial meontic beginning, has revealed itself without remainder. In Wheatfield with Crows the Eye of God reverses the eye of absolute light of the Godhead into an eye of darkness. One could argue from a Schellingian perspective that the principle of negation of the Godhead, or God’s dark unruly nature, that emerged with the birth of modernity in Schelling’s theogony and creatio ex deo et ex nihilo, is consummated in Van Gogh, the first painter to envision the absolute darkness of the Godhead itself. Altizer discovers in Van Gogh’s self-portraits a new center of consciousness, dissolving or reversing a center of consciousness of three thousand years of historical evolution

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visible in art, one that began with the birth of Greek sculpture. In Greek sculpture the individual emerges as deity and humanity, light and body, face and body, soul and body. In the fourth-century portraiture this unity ends while the eyes emerge as holders of inner life. Since art expresses truth, the truth of consciousness, Altizer can follow the transformation of the eye in painting as a cipher of the I. The human eye has been gradually dislocated from the center to the periphery, transformed from a human eye to a “chaotic or abstract eye” in modernity.59 If in Rembrandt’s self-portraits the eye or I whose depths Meister Eckhart knew as the depths of Godhead is veiled, in Van Gogh the modern eye or I becomes the Eye of God and these depths are released.60 Furthermore, according to Altizer, Van Gogh also radically reversed traditional iconography. Giotto and Van Gogh belong together in representing two major revolutionary moments in Byzantine iconography. In the Scrovegni frescoes, Giotto’s Christ is simultaneously fully human and fully divine. This is a revolutionary Christ that ends a traditional iconographic hieratic representation of the Byzantine Christ of glory: the epiphany of Christ does not occur in Heaven as it does in Byzantine and Romanesque painting but rather on earth. Altizer remarks the dialectic of continuity and transformation, tradition and innovation in the aesthetic expression of Christ, between Giotto and Van Gogh: Christ becomes increasingly human, until he disappears from our imaginative horizon. With this disappearing in late modernity, a process of progressive incarnation has been completed. With profound intuition, Altizer understands Wheatfield with Crows as a self-portrait, the most disturbing tremendum et fascinans of Van Gogh’s selfportraits, in which the human eye is completely absent as the interior I has vanished. What is present is the immediacy of totality viewed through the Eye of God. This then is both a self-portrait and an iconoclastic icon in which the dissolution of the image of God releases images symbolic of totality. The eyes of Van Gogh are the eyes of a truly new totality, one, it is true, made possible by a long tradition of art and one released only by the ending or fulfillment of that tradition, and if these eyes are finally the Eye of God, that had been latently if not actually true throughout this tradition, yet only now is the Eye of God totality itself in Western art, just as only now is an absolute light only manifest as absolute darkness.61

As an iconoclastic icon, Wheatfield with Crows brings to an end every other icon of God.62 It is the first image of the absolute darkness of God while his eyes are eyes without any center, without any face: Face as face is now wholly absent, or is present only as the depths of abyss itself, and if it is the eyes of this abyss which are the eyes of Van Gogh, these are eyes



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which truly are the Eye of God, and an eye which is manifest as such only with the dissolution of every other eye of ‘I.’63

In this painting of the end times, absolute transcendence—which the poet William Blake knew as Satan—has completely reversed itself, that transcendence which with the advent of Christianity could be known as inseparable from absolute immanence of God. Although transcendence cum immanence is the essential Christian kerygma, Altizer maintains that with modernity God’s transcendence appears empty and alien, thus calling forth its own reversal. Both in Van Gogh’s art and in Altizer’s death of God theology, the reversal of transcendence occurs and is not a cause for lamentation but for celebration. According to Altizer’s theological hermeneutic, creation is the first self-kenotic act of the transcendent God while crucifixion cum resurrection is the beginning of the final descent into the world and immanence. Incarnation of transcendence and its reflection in human consciousness continued ever since being fulfilled apocalyptically in late modernity when transcendence and immanence became completely one: it is accomplished, finished, an eschatological parousia. As a great mystery of the coincidentia oppositorum of abysmal darkness and absolute light, it releases ecstatic joy. This joy is holy because the abysmal darkness is the darkness of God itself, the otherness of God, a more “originary” meontic nature of God, without which life, light, and love, freedom and creativity would not be possible. This dark nature of God is being revealed to late modern consciousness. While Byzantine iconography represents the metaphysics of light of Parmenidean ontotheology, Van Gogh’s new icons, attuned to the spirit of our times, visually articulate a sui generis Schellingian meontology. Altizer sees the latter as an equally joyous enactment in accord with the Christian original kerygma preserved in the epic tradition from Dante to Joyce that envisioned the voyage through hell as a condition sine qua non for the ascent toward God. The mysterion concealed from the beginning of the world is disclosed in Wheatfield with Crows through the embodiment of darkness and the grace of seeing it through Van Gogh’s eyes as a joyous celebration of God’s total self-revelation at the end of time. The complex symbolism of the crows confirms and deepens this theological hermeneutics of the painting by carrying through the weighty ambivalence of the black bird in religious and alchemical traditions. Corvus, raven or crow, has functioned as solar being, blackened by the sun, messenger of God, portent both of life and of death, cipher both of the devil and of Christ, of putrefaction and chaos, or the nigredo phase in alchemy, sign of the beginning of the oeuvre. An apocalyptic presence, herald of the end, it is simultaneously a cause of the joy of the beginning of the work and the new creation.64

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Since here God reveals himself fully, God’s dark nature dialectically appears in a paradoxical mode as brilliant and joyous abysmal darkness. In our age, the God of love and light can be real only through the ordeal of the negation of the divine attributes affirmed by ontotheology, the absolutes and superlatives of power and knowledge, articulated by the scholastics—a fulfillment of the crucifixion. The God that dies refers both to the disquieting revelation of God at the end of time, the eclipse of God during the reign of God’s other, as well as to the Godhead’s self-kenosis without remainder. NOTES   1.  I would like to acknowledge Lissa McCullough’s important contribution to the critical revision and recasting of the present essay.   2.  This first section on Karl Jaspers is a revised and condensed version of a section in chapter 8 of Alina N. Feld, Melancholy and the Otherness of God (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011), 151–68.  3. Karl Jaspers, Strindberg und Van Gogh: Versuch einer pathographischen Analyse unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Hölderlin (Berlin: Springer, 1926).  4. “The great history of Western philosophy from Parmenides and Heraclitus through Hegel can be seen as a thoroughgoing and completed unity.... We question whether the truth of philosophizing has been grasped or even if it can be grasped in this tradition.” Karl Jaspers, “Origin of the Contemporary Philosophical Situation: The Historical Meaning of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche,” in Reason and Existence, trans. William Earle (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997), 22–23.   5.  Jaspers, “Contemporary Philosophical Situation,” 19–20.  6. For les voix du silence, see Andre Malraux, Les Voix du silence (Paris: Gallimard, 1951) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence,” in La Prose du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1969).   7.  Jaspers, “Contemporary Philosophical Situation,” 37–38.   8.  Jaspers, “Contemporary Philosophical Situation,” 37–38.  9. Jacques Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [pointure],” in The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 10.  Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 262. 11.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 262–63. 12.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 259. 13.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 259–60. Derrida refers to Meyer Schapiro, “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A note on Heidegger and van Gogh,” in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: Braziller, 1994), 135–42.



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14.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 260. 15.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 261–2. 16.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 264. 17.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 264. 18.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 263, 266. 19.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 290–1. 20.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 306. 21.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 328. 22.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 329. 23.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 368. 24.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 369. 25.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 369. 26.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 370. 27.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 266. 28.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 373. 29.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 265. 30.  See chapter 7, “On the Theory and Practice of Aesthetic Representation in the Twentieth Century,” in Tom Rockmore, Art and Truth after Plato (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013), 232–73. 31. Rockmore, Art and Truth, 249. 32.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 381. 33.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 381. 34.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 378. 35.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 379. 36.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 379. 37.  Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (New York: Grove, 1956), 8: “Vladimir: [Estragon with a supreme effort succeeds in pulling off his boot. He peers inside it, feels about inside it, turns it upside down, shakes it, looks on the ground to see if anything has fallen out, finds nothing, feels inside it again, staring sightlessly before him] Well? Estragon: Nothing.” 38.  Derrida, “Restitutions of the Truth,” 382. 39. See Marie-Jose Mondzain, “Ghost Story,” in Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary, trans. Rico Franses (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 192–209. 40.  Tom Rockmore, Art and Truth, 183–93. 41.  Mark Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 42.  Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime, trans. Chris Turner (London and New York: Verso, 1996). 43.  Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” in Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 70. 44.  Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation,” 70. 45.  Thomas J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 71–82, quote on 78.

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46.  Thomas J. J. Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” in Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., ed. Babette E. Babich (Boston and London: Kluwer, 2002), 393–402. 47.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 393. 48. Altizer, Living the Death, 78, 71, respectively. 49. Altizer, Living the Death, 71. 50. Altizer, Living the Death, 79. 51.  F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000). 52. Thomas Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). 53. Altizer, Living the Death, 78. 54. Altizer, Living the Death, 78. 55.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 394. 56.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 394. 57.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 359. 58. Altizer, Living the Death, 79. 59.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 400. 60.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 400. 61.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 400–1. 62.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 402. 63.  Altizer, “Van Gogh’s Eyes,” 401. 64.  C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniuctionis, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 510–11, 521: Corvus (crow or raven) or caput corvi (raven’s head) is the traditional name for the nigredo (nox, melancholia, etc.). (510) In Christian tradition the raven is an allegory of the devil. (511) The raven is thus an allegory of Christ, or of the Host. (footnote 174; 511) …the alchemists called nigredo melancholia, “a black blacker than black,” night, an affliction of the soul, confusion, etc., or, more pointedly, the “black raven.” (521)

BIBLIOGRAPHY Altizer, Thomas J. J. Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoire. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. ———. “Van Gogh’s Eyes.” In Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh’s Eyes, and God: Essays in Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., ed. Babette E. Babich, 393–402. Boston: Kluwer, 2002. Bataille, Georges. “Van Gogh as Prometheus.” In Georges Bataille: Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Un-Knowing, translated by Annette Michelson. October 36 (Spring 1986): 58–60.



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———. “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh.” In Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927–1939, translated by Allan Stoekl, 61–72. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime. Translated by Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 1996. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts. New York: Grove, 1956. Derrida, Jacques. “Restitutions of the Truth in Pointing [pointure].” In The Truth in Painting, translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod, 255–382. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Feld, Alina N. Melancholy and the Otherness of God. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings, translated by Albert Hofstadter, 139–212. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Jaspers, Karl. Strindberg und Van Gogh: Versuch einer pathographischen Analyse unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Hölderlin. Berlin: Springer, 1926. Jung, C. G. Mysterium Coniunctionis. Translated by R. F. C Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Malraux, Andre. Les Voix du silence. Paris: Gallimard, 1951. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Le langage indirect et les voix du silence.” In La Prose du monde, 66–160. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Mondzain, Marie-Jose. Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Translated by Rico Franses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Rockmore, Tom. Art and Truth after Plato. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. Schapiro, Meyer. Vincent Van Gogh. New York: Abrams, 1983. ———. “The Still Life as a Personal Object—A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 135–42. New York: Braziller, 1994. ———. “Further Notes on Van Gogh.” In Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, 143–51. New York: Braziller, 1994. Schelling, F. W. J. The Ages of the World. Translated by Jason M. Wirth. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Taylor, Mark. Erring: A Postmodern A/theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, edited by Mark Roskill. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008.

Chapter 12

Van Gogh and the Absence of the Work Remnants of a Hermeneutic Itinerary Stephen H. Watson Complicated by competing philosophical itineraries, the history of Van Gogh’s reception remained overdetermined by lingering (perhaps still neo-Kantian) antinomies in twentieth-century aesthetics, divided between philosophical interpretation and scientific explanation. On the one hand, it is claimed (a semantic claim), lacking demonstrable or universal predicates, that the work of art can be articulated only through the definite horizon or tradition of a specific art world; on the other hand, the history of recent great art reveals itself only in singular gestures that disrupt and transform such requisites. Alternately (now based on a faculty of symbolic expression), artistic expression articulates a cultural symbolic form that contrasts with the ineffability or primitive anonymity of particular expression and shares its internal progressive and objective determination. As late as 1920, Cassirer had claimed regarding this progressive determination, that “painting presupposes the objective laws of perspective, architecture the laws of statics.”1 Of course, perspective still governs the depths of much of modern painting from the Impressionists onward and, as Hubert Damisch has seen, one can question whether it ever simply disappears.2 Cézanne is credited with the decisive fracture of this classical space. Cézanne’s painting is often taken as singular break, but also often enough, precisely as one involving an artistic and theoretical accomplishment that demonstrates an alternate solution to the problem of classical perspective and its projection of a unified space. Early on (beginning with Apollinaire), this breakthrough had been paired with non-Euclidean geometry. More recently still, and no less formal than Cassirer’s claim, Damisch himself, in accord with reemerging formalist trends in recent philosophy, could invoke Cézanne (or Klee), following Badiou, as exemplifying, “the 233

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epistemological conjuncture inaugurated by Cantor’s research” concerning the mathematical infinite.3 Van Gogh, on the other hand, is often claimed to provide a disruption to such artistic or theoretical pretensions. Here Van Gogh becomes exemplary not simply for a personal artistic achievement, but a break that propels and is inextricably presupposed in any such achievement, one inherently linked to the breakthroughs of a distinct and “excessive” singularity—and in the extreme, even the “demonic” requisites (or “saintliness”) of a personality that verges upon madness.4 To use Adorno’s term, Van Gogh’s life was a “catastrophe”; to use Bataille’s, a “sacrificial mutilation” not simply personal but historical.5 Indeed Artaud claimed that it was society that had suicided Van Gogh.6 Paired often enough with the likes of Hölderlin, Kierkegaard, or Nietzsche, it was Jaspers, nonetheless, especially in his 1922 Strindberg and Van Gogh, turning from his background in psychiatry to philosophy, who first sought to theorize this complicated break. Jaspers conceptualized the “limit situations” and the “depths” of the spiritual possibilities these thinkers exemplified. At the same time he saved Van Gogh from ‘desingularization’ or reduction beneath scientific (or psychiatric) explanation. Van Gogh’s art was not simply a tragic or schizophrenic venture that revealed the fate of the irrational; indeed Jaspers found such demonic impulses in the seemingly most rational of philosophers, in Kant, or scientists, in the personality of his mentor, Weber.7 Not without repeating Weber’s own encounter with Van Gogh, whom the former saw as a “difficult, but most moving” of modern painters, Jaspers saw the latter as an artistic path beyond the relativity of Weber’s iron cage, based on the metaphysical venture he found in the extensions of Kant’s transcendental Ideas.8 In this, however, Jaspers adds another “antinomy,” also perhaps spurred by Weber’s account of our disenchantment (Entzauberung) with respect to transcendental authority—not to speak of the contemporary remainder of myth. Van Gogh is unlike previous artists, for instance, Michelangelo, Shakespeare or Rembrandt, who tied their art of immanent transcendence to the world of a cult, Jaspers claimed. Van Gogh “dropped all myths, confined himself totality to reality, and thus lent transcendence a voice which of necessity is infinitely poorer, but also true for our time.”9 As Jaspers had noted in his encounter with Bultmann, the attempt to ‘demythologize’ or dissolve myth was always ambiguous—and so perhaps was his own rendering of Van Gogh.10 At the same time he claimed, “To Van Gogh, the landscape, things, people in their factual presence have a mythical quality at the same time; hence the unique powers of his paintings.”11 His work remained in this regard a “cipher” of transcendence, one in which “reality is simultaneously mythical.”12



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Jaspers had been struck early by Van Gogh’s work. After having first encountered it in a 1911 Bremen exhibit, he theorized about it thereafter, beginning with his work on General Psychopathology (1913).13 As he wrote in a letter to his wife, Gertrude, that year (December 26, 1911): “Van Gogh is a phenomenon before which I could do no more than to ask, where the basis of the mental affliction begins behind all that beauty?”14 Nor was Jaspers alone in a long itinerary of psychiatrists struck by its significance. The importance of Van Gogh’s experience of the beautiful at its limits would be later reaffirmed even by Lacan—albeit not with reference to Jaspers, whose phenomenological investments he mostly disparages, but with reference to Heidegger’s “dazzling” account.15 Jaspers was also struck by the distance between Van Gogh’s insight and the comparative spiritual shallowness and, theoretically, the value relativity of contemporary the society: hence Van Gogh’s philosophical relevance. And his more openly philosophical interpretation in 1922 would have great impact on twentieth-century philosophy, beginning not least of all with an impact upon Heidegger himself that was considerable. In a now famous 1922 letter, admitting acquaintance with Van Gogh’s letters but not his paintings at the time, Heidegger commended Jaspers’ account for its advance against a “free floating conception of consciousness.”16 Nonetheless, Heidegger requested further methodological and ontological clarity concerning both its account of the subject/object dichotomy and its account of limit experience. Indeed he questioned the ontic category of schizophrenia itself. Heidegger had formulated most of this philosophical criticism in his 1919 lectures that defended a pretheoretical (and prescientific) account of phenomenology from both Jasper’s Psychology of Worldviews and from Weber’s charges regarding irrationalism.17 Heidegger would later take up Van Gogh in “The Origin of the Work of Art” where he became something of painting’s painter in accord with that other traditional “mad” poet, Hölderlin, whom just previously Heidegger proclaimed the poet of poets and poetry.18 Yet Being and Time already openly acknowledges the importance of Jaspers’ account of the limit situation and that of death in particular.19 Whatever else we have to say about the relation between Heidegger and Jaspers, what is indisputable is that the names of Kierkegaard, Hölderlin, and Van Gogh would structure both of their theoretical narratives in the coming decades, overdetermining the itinerary in their wake. The claim concerning Jaspers’ importance in this regard would be reanimated, explicitly or not, in philosophical aesthetics time and again after him. It is well known, for example, that Sartre had assisted in a French translation of Jaspers’ General Psychopathology and had explored the sociological implication (and bad faith) of madness as early as his 1939 short story, “The Room.”20 Even though someone like Lacan may have passed pejorative

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judgment on Jaspers’ phenomenological Verstehen for psychiatry, it still remained the case that throughout, as Michel Foucault put it, It was Jaspers who showed that understanding may be extended beyond the frontiers of the normal and that intersubjective understanding may reach the pathological world in its essence.21

Foucault’s History of Madness, written devoid of explicit reference to Jaspers, and instead “beneath the sun of the great Nietzschean quest,” would seek to grasp this “essence” transforming its limit experience via Nietzsche, Artaud, and Bataille.22 He delineated madness variously, including as a “tragic consciousness” and a “dialectical experience” between reason and unreason, one that always accompanies the oeuvre of history.23 “The great oeuvre of history of the world is indelibly accompanied by the absence of an oeuvre, which renews itself at every instant, but which runs unaltered in its inevitable void the length of history.”24 At a number of points, in addition to Nietzsche and Artaud (and Hölderlin), Van Gogh is included among the tragic saints who in the modern world exemplify art’s “unworking” of the apparent stability of the work of history. Maurice Blanchot’s 1951 essay, “Madness par excellence,” stood in the background of this claim. This essay introduced the French translation of Jasper’s work on Strindberg and Van Gogh (1953).25 Blanchot’s influential writing of the 1950s had already emphasized the question of the absence and exteriority of the work (as well as its unworking [désoeurvrement]) in his thoughts on literature. The work inherently contains this play of absence and presence, pure beginning and impossibility, achievement and disappearance: Yes we can understand that the work is pure beginning, the first and last moment when being presents itself by way of the jeopardized freedom which makes us exclude it imperiously, without, however, again including it in the appearance of beings. But this exigency, which makes the work declare being in the unique moment of rupture—“those very words: it is,” the point at which work brilliantly illuminates even while receiving its consuming burst of light—we must comprehend and feel that this point renders the work impossible, because it never permits arrival at the work. It is a region anterior to the beginning where nothing is made of being, and in which nothing is accomplished. It is the depth of being’s inertia (désoeuvrement).26

To write is incessantly to return to the interminable “murmur” at the heart of language that “one has to silence if one wants, at last, to be heard.”27 The silence or absence in its midst is never exhausted. But Blanchot turned to surrealism for its account just as much as Jaspers (or Heidegger) had turned to Kierkegaard.28 Citing Breton, he notes, one must “trust in the murmur’s



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inexhaustibility”—to which Blanchot adds, “Van Gogh works incessantly.”29 Here he appeals to an experience, even a delirium that answers neither to the real nor the imaginary but to the unworking and emancipation of life itself.30 Blanchot’s own interpretation nonetheless still echoes Jaspers: Demonic existence—this tendency of existence to surpass itself eternally, to assert itself relentlessly with regard to the absolute, in dread and ravishment— must be considered apart from psychosis. But everything happens as if the demonic, which in the healthy man is muted, repressed by the concern of a goal, succeeded at the beginning of these illnesses in coming to light, accomplishing a breakthough.31

The work’s presence subjects it to the communicable and to the necessities and foibles of habitual reading. Here however is where Jaspers and Blanchot divide over the significance of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard linked the demonic as “anxiety about the good” both to “inclusive reserve” and, as “lost freedom” or “expansiveness, to a compulsion to communicate, “the unfreely disclosed.”32 Jaspers criticized Kierkegaard’s account of the demonic confession to be insufficiently communicative before the requisites of human dialogue; Blanchot regarded this account to be still ethical, insufficient in light of the work’s ultimate indecipherablity.33 Further, in a text written in 1950, Blanchot invoked Van Gogh in arguing against Malraux’s more Hegelian defense of the institution or tradition of “the museum without walls.”34 Malraux had argued that the museum was not an empirical place but an institution that articulates the perduring history of the human artistic achievement from the prehistoric to the culture (and multiculture) of the present. While Van Gogh’s art is fully dependent upon this history, as has become evident, Blanchot argues that it ultimately escapes Malraux’s vision. On the one hand, it is this institution of the museum that ultimately liberates Van Gogh. Van Gogh is mad; his paintings are a superior lucidity and consciousness. The artist is never dependent on his time, or on his personal history, no more than his paintings depend on the common vision. We now understand why, from his birth to his death, he has been represented to us within the sole existence of the museum: this is because he is free only in the Museum, because his freedom is to belong to art that belongs only to itself, although art is always, when it is creative, that which transmutes existence into power, subordination into sovereignty, and death itself into a power of life.35

Still, in accord with his conception of the work’s absence, Blanchot questions the lingering humanist classicism of Malraux’s museum.36 Malraux had conceptualized the museum without walls as a repetition of the same,

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an eternity that art’s metamorphoses reveals everywhere and whenever, and which, moreover reveals the endless possibilities of man’s expressive freedom. Blanchot responds by insisting upon the excess or absence that belies such presence. In the end the work of art both belies and escapes humanism. “But the work is its own absence: because of this it is in perpetual becoming, never complete, always done and undone.”37 Canvas and stone deteriorate, language is ceaselessly, diacritically transformed, never fully becoming simply actualized or dematerialized. Instead of enduring eternity, the museum rightly understood is this “absence realized.”38 Not only Foucault became captivated by Blanchot’s account of the literary, importing it into his analysis of the philosophy of madness. But philosophers before him, like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty (or Derrida or Deleuze after him), sought to elaborate their own positions in relation to Blanchot. Against others affected by surrealism, Sartre sought to defend the universal singular of existentialist realism: reinstituting his realist commitments to the primacy of the literal in our experience, he railed against Blanchot’s “wasted effort” on behalf of the fantastic.39 Merleau-Ponty, on the other hand, a number of times favorably invoked Blanchot and the potential within the surrealist account of automatic writing. Indeed, he regarded surrealism as one of the “constants” of our time.40 While in this respect he anticipated later defenses of literature over against the politics of engagement, for instance, Tel Quelian, he invoked the literary in a different effort, aimed at amending phenomenology. For example, Merleau-Ponty’s unpublished but contemporaneous Prose of the World also cited Blanchot’s article’s discussion of Malraux’s “coherent deformation” as part of his own attempt to grapple with Malraux.41 MerleauPonty had originally attempted to understand the foundations of language through the “limit situations” of a primordial or existential cogito whose vision stood at the foundations of all meaning.42 Later he revises this account through reference to surrealism. Indeed, Blanchot’s surrealism is invoked not simply for its impact upon literature or philosophical aesthetics, but ultimately even philosophy itself. The expressive capacity of language, its “sursignification,” is understood as emerging from an operant or structural history that critically exceeds and transforms its empirical origins to expressively articulate the world anew.43 Here he echoes not only Blanchot, but Bachelard’s account of the surrational that occurs less through return to origins than extension, continuously surmounting theoretical obstacles. Indeed, the extensions of Merleau-Ponty’s sur-signification are similarly claimed capable of “saving rationality.”44 Unlike what he, too, regarded as the blinders of Malraux’s Hegelianism, Merleau-Ponty invokes an excess that escapes tradition: “On the surface, a culture’s tradition is orderly and monotonous: underneath there are chaos



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and tumult, and even the break from tradition is no more a liberation than docility.”45 Taken by itself each work “is an abortive effort (un effort avorté) to say something which still remains to be said.”46 It emerges from a “shadowy zone (zone d’ombre)” that escapes the monotones (and the museum) of Hegel’s philosophy and is presupposed in all rationality.47 “The cruel idol of the Hegelain l’en-soi-pour soi is precisely the definition of death.”48 MerleauPonty also demures from Malraux’s claim concerning the “demonic pleasure” exhibited in the destructive individuality of modern art.49 And he too will not endorse Malraux’s humanistic individualism. Not surprisingly, he appeals instead to the métier of Cézanne and Klee as counterexamples.50 In his early writings Merleau-Ponty claimed that Cézanne denied the oppositions of nature versus composition, primitivism as opposed to tradition: “Cézanne’s painting denies neither science nor tradition.”51 In this respect Merleau-Ponty appealed to the “perpetual conversation” (l’intretien perpétual) and even “joy of dialogue” inherent in each work.52 While such characterizations seem to bring us proximate to classical hermeneuts like Jaspers’ (or Gadamer’s) emphases on communication or dialogue, we instead encounter echoes of Blanchot’s notion of the work’s absence, where this very infinity (and the “infinite conversation” regarding the work) still invokes unfulfillment and impossibility. For Merleau-Ponty, the work remains internally unfinished, incomplete, and “excessive”—but in the same way the world is.53 Like modern thought generally, the question of modern painting is less about humanist theses on individualism than “knowing how one can communicate without the aid of a preestablished nature upon which all men’s senses open.”54 It was this very “lure (éclat) of the sensible,” in Foucault’s characterization, “the delirium of the real,” that became “the moment that (Nietzsche and Van Gogh) retreated into madness.”55 Still, for Merleau-Ponty, the exploration of the sensible was anything but simply silent or delirious. The opening upon the sensible is precisely what for Merleau-Ponty remains intraversible and unsurpassed for thought. Modeled upon Kant’s third Kritik, the exploration of the meanings of its preconceptual experience remained a constant throughout his work.56 But (unlike Kant’s analytic, he claimed) this opening could no longer be accessed classically: by means of a reflective analysis, a dominating synthesis, or even simple phenomenological description. Here while Jaspers had claimed that Van Gogh’s late paintings were the work of a madman,57 as Galen Johnson has noted, for Merleau-Ponty they become exemplary for both modern painting and modern rationality and its exploration of the world.58 Referring to one of the final paintings, Merleau-Ponty states: “Van Gogh’s “going further” (l’aller plus loin) at the moment he paints The Crows no longer indicates some reality toward which one must go.”59 (See

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Figure 2.) Reality itself, as he will put it later, lies always “further on.” Beyond (or before) representation, noema, Sinn or indication (Bedutung), rather than expressive individualism, Van Gogh’s work is not even the expression of an interior life. Instead that life that has become “a means of understanding and making understood (moyen de comprendre et de faire comprendre), of offering something to be seen.”60 This echoes antirepresentationalist claims concerning Van Gogh’s art often repeated. Before Merleau-Ponty, Artaud had claimed that there are no hallucinations in Van Gogh’s paintings: only nature pure and simple. The sunflowers are “sunflowers pure and simple”—a judgment Derrida claimed in which “Heidegger is not far off.”61 (See Figure 3.) Or, as Lyotard after him would put it: “What the picture shows is the world in the process of becoming.”62 But Merleau-Ponty would ultimately claim this task for philosophy itself, beyond representationalism, beyond what he calls classicism and the premature guarantees of possessing the object in advance. Instead, each philosopher emerges from the “labyrinth” of interpretation to express the silence anew, if only to interpret the meaning of this little word dire (“to say”)—or later, as he would later add, voir (“to see”).63 Here the abortive effort to say the things anew appeal to a language beyond the antinomies of signification, in which “one can speak neither of a destruction nor a conservation of silence.”64 As Merleau-Ponty cited Blanchot, “Rimbaud transcends speech and ends by writing more.”65 Yet even this admittedly abortive effort presupposes the very silence of language itself: one each philosophy only ever attempts to say anew; indeed this is both Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of Blanchot’s account of the tendency of existence to surpass itself and the silence at the heart of language; both are at stake in his final efforts to inventively explore the philosophical implications of our “fleshly” being-in-the-world. Here the flesh “names” an event in excess of all idealism: neither substance nor atom it is instead that element or abode (again the shadowy zone presupposed by all philosophy) through which the embodied inherence of consciousness in the world or the adherence and “reversibility” of sense and concept became articulatable.66 As such, in refusing the notion of a concept that would surpass “finite sensoriality,” the flesh itself articulated the intelligible within the abode and the “caesura” of the sensible.67 Lacan (again not without echoing Jaspers) would appropriately perhaps speak of Merleau-Ponty’s later texts here as “attaining a beauty that is also its limit.”68 But this, in any case, was not how Foucault had valorized Blanchot’s account of the work with respect to madness. After all, at stake was not simply the “going further” or “tendency of existence to surpass itself” by which Blanchot had characterized Jaspers’ “demonic existence” and which “must



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be considered separately from psychosis.”69 Instead the “going beyond” at the heart of the work became valorized in terms of madness itself as an inevitable exclusion at the heart of the rational, one that only becomes explicitly in the modern world—and which it, in turn, condemns. Madness becomes crucial to the modern world of these oeuvres that explode into madness.70 Madness itself is “the absolute rupture of the oeuvre,” at the limits of sense and nonsense. For that reason it matters little when the voice of madness first whispered within Nietzsche’s pride or Van Gogh’s humility. There is only madness as the last instant of the oeuvre—for the oeuvre indefinitely repels madness to its outer limits. Where there is an oeuvre, there is no madness; and yet madness is contemporaneous (contemporaine) with the oeuvre, as it is the harbinger of the time of its truth.71

Hence the previously avoided but now privileged of contemporary works linked to madness: an oeuvre that seems to sink into the world and reveals there its nonsense now “ultimately engages with the time of the world, mastering it and taking the lead.”72 And its revelation is by no means ambiguous: Henceforth and through the mediation of madness, it is the world that becomes guilty (for the first time in the history of the West) in relation to the oeuvre: it is now arranged by the oeuvre, constrained to speak its language, and obliged to take part in a process of recognition and reparation, to find an explanation for this unreason, and explain (rendre raison) itself before it.73

How is this possible? Foucault later further explained that both madness and work are linked to the exterior: (M)adness outlines an empty form from where the work comes, in other words, the place where it never ceases to be absent, where it will never be found because it had never been located there to begin with. There, in that pale region, in that essential hiding place, the twin-like incompatibility of the work and of madness becomes unveiled; this is the blind spot of the possibility of each to become the other and of their mutual exclusion.”74

Hence the absence of those works linked essentially to madness. What they share in common is this absence itself, their exteriority with respect to any determinate semantic or cultural code—their transgression of the universal, to still speak Kierkegaardian. We might question this valorization, one that Blanchot claims, for all its force, consigns the work to the antinomies in the analysis of “current ideology.”75 In the first place we might question Foucault’s claim concerning the

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“contemporaneity” of madness and the work. The time of the work, after all, is not the time of simultaneity or the instant. To use Foucault’s Hölderlinian term, even as “limit experience” it involves a “caesura” and hence a delay or a dispersion that equally “aborts” such simultaneity, a matter that affects not only its attachment to time but the venture of truth. As caesura, after all, it involves a rhythmics that neither simply escapes the time of the world nor lords over it.76 In assigning (and reducing) the truth of the work to the “arraignment” of its time (and our task as its exegetes,77 Foucault had sided with Artaud, for whom Van Gogh had been suicided by society. Nonetheless he still echoed Jaspers who was also struck by the depths of Van Gogh’s insight over against the trivial spirituality of the mundane world. Indeed Foucault would be joined by Deleuze and Guattari, whose Capitalism and Schizophrenia equally began with an endorsement of the “wonderful pages” of Jaspers’ analysis of the relationship between schizophrenia and society.78 We might counterpose to this synchronism or “contemporaneous” dialectic of madness and work the conceptions of non-linear time and alternate dialectics (or non-dialectics) ventured by thinkers paired with Foucault above: in the case at hand, either Merleau-Ponty or Blanchot.79 Neither case results in what Foucault termed the anthropological “homo dialecticus” that links time to return but to dispersion and surpassing without return.80 Blanchot reminded us that Foucault himself ultimately rejected any “uniform model of temporalization.”81 We might accordingly say of time what Blanchot insisted about truth and reason in Foucault. “What is certain, at least, is that Foucault is not calling into question reason itself, but rather the danger of certain rationalities or rationalizations.”82 Reason itself is plural: beyond totality, it remains, demonstrative, explanatory, interpretive, expressive, “dialectical,” and so forth. Hence the inevitable issue of Déraison, as perhaps Kant’s account of transcendental illusion had insisted.83 Long after all “madness” might be cured, the question of Déraison will remain. Against the uniform model of temporalization, Blanchot developed what he called a non-dialectical account of time thought of as the absence or the outside that threatens the work: “in impossibility time changes direction, no longer offering itself out of the future as what gathers by going beyond; time here is rather the dispersion of a present that, even while being passage does not pass, never fixes itself in a present, refers to no past and goes towards no future, the incessant.”84 The work’s absence remains aleatory and lies between reason and unreason, “calling the work to its own unworking.”85 What is true of time may even be true of dialectic: here, too, it may be necessary to deny the attempt to univocally embrace uniformity at the expense of alternates. Recall that Foucault himself at one point had claimed that the simultaneity of reason and unreason was originally constituted as a dialectical expe-



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rience. Later he demurred, claiming, for example, that “‘Dialectic’ is a way of evading the always open and hazardous reality of conflict by reducing it to a Hegelian skeleton, and ‘semiology’ is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue.”86 Foucault’s account of reason and madness’s “contemporaneity” or “dialectic” itself doubtless similarly calls forth alternatives. Notwithstanding what he acknowledged as “the abortive effort” of the work, Merleau-Ponty admonishes us not to underestimate “the painter’s labour and study (le travail, l’étude).”87 Art may be no more reducible to a Dionysian Augenblick (the “last instant,” to use Foucault’s expression) than it can become intelligible as the Spinozistic expression of a synchronic epistemic or semiological structure.88 Hence its coherent deformation, or Stiftung to use Husserl’s term, an event “beyond the contingencies from which it arose.”89 In accord with the rhythmics of its caesura, the experience or risk (experiri) of time is not simply distentio but extension and venture. And the “adventure” of the dialectic at stake, “the rationality in the contingent,” is similarly not to be underestimated: its ancestry is linked more to Schlegel’s fragment than to the grande oeuvre of History and the rational closure of Hegel’s systematics.90 To cite Blanchot’s characterization of the fragment’s “ruin” of the work, “interrupted, it goes on.”91 Hence the endless (and endlessly incomplete) task of interpretation. While in the classical account of science, Bachelard argued truth is “almost always confused with monotonous recourse to the certitudes of memory,” Merleau-Ponty claims that with regard to tradition Husserl’s Stiftung is better thought precisely as “the power to forget origins.”92 Irreducible to the mythic odyssey of return it ventures beyond the Foucauldian antinomies of “tradition and oblivion.”93 Tradition itself becomes underdetermined and subject to the multiple: tradition(s).94 The claim is assertoric for Merleau-Ponty. Against the death of the Hegelian museum, the l’en soi-pour soi: “This interpretive effort (tentative d’interpretation)” is what we call an author’s “work and life (son oeuvre et sa vie).”95 As Schlegel and Merleau-Ponty both claimed, the fragmentary character of expression is always ironic, a step beyond the empirical or received conventions of the literal; but one that involves a critical difference.96 Both the philosopher and the schizophrenic’s world are unfinished, ceaseless: their works abortive. The schizophrenic and the philosopher each knocks himself out against the paradoxes of existence. As a result each consumes his energy in amazement and, we may say, fails to recapture completely to the same extent. The schizophrenic is ruled by his failure which expresses itself in only a few enigmatic phases. What we call the philosopher’s failure (l’échec du philosophe) leaves behind him a whole furrow of expressive acts which enables us to rediscover our situation.97

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But it is not simply difference and repetition that is at stake nor even the ability to “forget origins.” The “furrow” or métier of the philosopher’s discourse is ploddingly temporal, sequential, an iteration and transformation: a rationality that emerges only “step by step” through the exploration of the heuristics of its own time.98 It also seemingly involves remnants of the hermeneut’s Verstehen. “We have moved from the realm of causes to the realm of reasons and from a temporality that accumulates change to a temporality which understands them (qui les comprend).”99 We may doubt the simple distinction between reasons and causes, the “causes” of schizophrenia and its phenomenology, explanation versus interpretation, perhaps. It may not be as tidy as the old hermeneuts had hoped in saving one spectacle of experience from the others’ incursion. Nor, as has been seen, having pluralized the rational, are we entitled to simply subsume any of the various forms of rationality beneath the others. The point is that we confront a complicated event, one no less complicated by the historical incursion of Verstehen itself. This word, in any case, closer to Jaspers’ invocation of Verstehen for psychiatry than to Merleau-Ponty, outlines a lingering issue that I can only begin to parse by concluding. In fact the complications attending the event at hand were evident from initial responses to Foucault’s work. Georges Canguilhem already characterized Foucault’s History of Madness as having articulated such a logic of the event, though he linked it less to the death of man than the “exhaustion” of the Cogito, an event instead linking reason to the Cogito’s alternatives.100 The director of his thesis, he also had misgivings about its totalizing claim regarding the inherent exclusions of psychiatry; even though psychiatry were not a science, it might still be on its way to becoming one.101 And clearly psychiatry is closer to becoming a science in the requisite sense than it was fifty years ago. What characterizes such scientific maturity in this context, as Bachelard already noted, is having overcome previous obstacles to achieve a status unintelligible to previous doctrines. We have noted Merleau-Ponty’s proximity to this account of the rational in the search for a sur-signification that critically goes beyond received interpretation. Merleau-Ponty’s “going beyond” still appealed to a “metaphysical significance” deployed in the ever recurrent failure of philosophy’s decipherment of the world; it involved equally thereby an expressive step beyond all positivism.102 In this, as Blanchot said of the philosophical discourse of MerleauPonty’s “transgressive” interrogation, it ever responds to l’Autre.103 But madness, too, Blanchot thought, has this same “interrogative” structure, the expression of a word “incongruent with itself”: accordingly, we can always ask of Hölderlin (or Van Gogh), “Is he mad?”104 At the same time, Blanchot wondered why psychoanalysts, confronted with the absence of time’s fulfill-



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ment continue to remain proximate to scientific accounts and noted that even phenomenology encounters the aleatory in the question of time.105 Even the appeal to an infinite conversation that might save the rational took place only by a sequence of interruptions, he noted.106 Yet he doubted that the experience of madness could be completely explained by psychiatry—as did many others cited here. Again, we may not be able to divvy up the remainder by simple neoKantian appeals to Verstehen or Erklären.107 As Lacoue-Labarthe once noted with respect to the late works of Hölderlin, the equation of madness with the absence of the work (or alternately the privilege of genius) itself betrays a certain mythic investment.108 This remains proximate to Jaspers’ Van Gogh, where this mythic investment is read in conjunction with the denial or disenchantment of myth, so that “He simply wants to paint present actuality; in return he conceives this presence as a mythos; by emphasizing the reality he sees it transcendentally.”109 We are reminded of Bataille’s assertion that claims regarding the absence of myth are themselves mythic.110 LacoueLabarthe suggested that this mythic investment was still present in both Heidegger’s Hölderlin (and his Van Gogh). Again, Jaspers’ Van Gogh, for whom reality is simultaneously mythical, is not far off. It is precisely for this reason that Adorno too would find Heidegger’s Kierkegaardian investments in the demonic itself mythic: “the obliteration of subjectivity in mythic content.”111 Later, writing a very different archaeology of knowledge, Foucault would realize that madness is not a privileged moment in the arraignment of reason—any more than psychiatry is a science in the sense that physics is. Strictly taken (the itinerary from Jaspers to Foucault included), by comparison to physics, it might be claimed, we operate still in a prescientific age.112 Jaspers’ attempts to combine psychiatry and phenomenology in the interpretation of Van Gogh attests to this at the outset—as much as Foucault’s attempts to appeal to Blanchot’s surrealism did in the end: in all this, to use Kant’s terms, we lack determinate concepts. Inter alia, this is why Derrida could suggest, vis-à-vis Heidegger’s interpretation, but also retrospectively, granted this hermeneutic itinerary, that there is a mise en ab'me at work in Van Gogh’s art.113 Having come this far perhaps we should not deny it. Derrida sought “restitution” against charges concerning Heidegger’s own interpretations of Van Gogh. But he acknowledged their “ridiculousness,” taken literally, and demanded that we analyze both Heidegger’s choice of Van Gogh for a discourse on art and “the limits, of the exemplary model for such a discourse as ‘The Origin of the Work of Art.’”114 Such limits, devoid of determinate concepts, might seem only to reinstate the antinomies of explanation from which we began. If so, to again use Kant’s terms, the antinomies at stake would need to be regarded as less mathematical

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and subject to simple resolution (or happy ending) than dynamic and heterogeneous. An itinerary this multiple doubtless resists resolution, yet without necessarily succumbing to “unhappy” consciousness. In Van Gogh’s case, this speaks less to any of these analyses being simply true (or false) than to acknowledge their status; to use Canguilhem’s term, the logic of the event disperses their various rational tasks in the antinomies, the absence, and the historical caesura in its midst: an event that complicates both the plurality of conceptual standpoints as much as it does the cultural divide between history and science. This caesura continually complicated the hermeneutic itinerary (and the temptations of positivist diagnoses) linked to what Blanchot called “the incomparable name” and perhaps even what Bataille called the “sacrifice” of “Van Gogh’s oeuvre.” As Foucault realized, the work and madness go in different directions: “where there is an oeuvre there is no madness.”115 But at stake, as has become evident, was an art that was neither singular nor universal, nor one that reduced to a symptom readily captured by explanation. As an expression it remained, bewilderlingly, neither the instantiation of nor absence of its time, neither simply hallucination nor truth, neither ultimately saved nor condemned by the museum—and ultimately, as a result, neither readily subject to nor able to escape the need for interpretation. In the end perhaps, always divided between event and meaning, between sense and signification, this is why what was at stake was less an antinomy than precisely this problem of interpretation concerning the work of art—one affecting both its presence and absence in multiple permutations: sensible event, intelligible content, metaphysical myth, rational implication, even speculative Begriff. Indeed, all of this, Foucault would wager, has been overdetermined by Hegel throughout. But also Foucault warned us against naive attempts to escape Hegel and the dialectic.116 Surely we confront a similar problem here. Like Aufhebung the speculative word, par excellence, that had made a science of logic possible, Hegel reminded us that, aesthetics too has its own wunderbare Wört: “‘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 of the signification (Bedeutung), the thought, the universal underlying the thing.”117 Still none of this can be readily applied; Hegel’s “dialectical machinery (Rädenwerk)”—his term—has been bracketed.118 As Van Gogh’s art exemplifies, the work of art reinstitutes the caesura of the speculative in the very moment that it reduces readily neither to Sinn nor Bedeutung. Beyond the speculative proposition (including its positivist inversions), it instead continually challenges the task and the métier of interpretation anew.



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NOTES  1. Ernst Cassirer, Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, trans. William Curtis Swabey and Marie Taylor (Chicago: Open Court, 1923), 456.   2.  See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).  3. Hubert Damisch, “Equals Infinity,” trans. R. H. Olorenshaw, 20th Century Studies 15/16 (1976): 68.  4. The suggestion that “it would be tempting to elaborate on this comparison between van Gogh and Cézanne as two models of saintliness for the modern artist,” made with reference to Weber, can be found, for example, in Nathalie Neinrich, The Glory of Van Gogh, trans. Paul Leduc Browne (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 145n56.  5. See Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 149. Georges Bataille, “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, trans. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 70.   6.  See Antonin Artaud, “Van Gogh, The Man Suicided by Society,” trans. Helen Weaver, in Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 483–512.   7.  For further discussion of this point, see for example, Joshua Derman, “Philosophy Beyond the Bounds of Reason: The Influence of Max Weber in the Development of Karl Jasper’s Existenzphilosophie, 1909–1932,” in Max Weber Matters, ed. Marisol Lopez Menendez (London: Ashgate, 2012), 65ff. Also see Ernst Moritz Marnasse, “Jaspers’ Relation to Max Weber,” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. P. Schlipp (LaSalle: Open Court, 1981), 382–85.   8.  For an account of Weber’s own 1911 reaction to Van Gogh, see Marianne Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975), 501. “He and Marianne now quickly adjusted to the master works of Monet and Manet, Degas, Renoir, and all the rest, and after that they turned to Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh.… They found Van Gogh difficult, but the most moving” (Weber, Max Weber, 500).  9. Karl Jaspers, Philosophy, Vol. 3, trans. E.B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 172. 10.  See Karl Jaspers and Rudolf Bultmann, “Myth and Religion,” in Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion Without Myth (New York: Noonday Press, 1966), 15–16. “Mythical thinking is not a thing of the past, but characterizes man in any epoch.… To speak of ‘demythologization’ is almost blasphemous. Such a depreciation of myth is not enlightenment, but sham enlightenment.” Jaspers argues that the rational and mythical modes of awareness are only “the foreground of a never-ending process of existential clarification and comprehension” (Jaspers, “Myth and Religion,” 47). 11. Jaspers, Philosophy, 117.

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12. Jaspers, Philosophy, 116. 13.  Karl Jaspers, General Psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and Marion W. Hamilton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 14.  Karl to Gertrude Jaspers, December 26, 1911, cited in Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 312n12. 15.  See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1969), trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992), 297. The issue for Lacan is not obviously Verstehen but mesconnaissnce. 16. The letter from Heidegger to Jaspers was written June 27, 1922. Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920–1963), trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (New York: Humanities Press, 2003), 33–36. 17.  See Martin Heidegger, “Remarks on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1920),” in Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, ed. John van Buren (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 71–103. Also see the lectures from this time on the idea of worldview, the problem of value, and the idea of the university collected in Martin Heidegger, Towards the Definition of Philosophy, trans. Ted Sadler (New York: Continuum, 2000). 18.  On Heidegger’s discussion of Hölderlin as the poet of poets and poetry, see the analysis of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Fort (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 60ff. 19.  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 249nvi. 20.  Jean-Paul Sartre, The Room, in The Wall and Other Stories, trans. Lloyd Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1969), 18–40. 21. Michel Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, trans. Alan Sheridan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 43. For Jaspers’ methodological commitments to phenomenological Verstehen, see Jaspers, General Psychopathology, 26ff. 22.  Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (Nodon: Routledge, 2006), xxx. 23. Foucault, History of Madness, 27, 169. 24. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxi. 25.  Maurice Blanchot, “La Folie par excellence,” in Karl Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, Swedenborg-Hölderlin, étude psychiatrique comparative, trans. Hélène Naef, M. L. Solms-Naef, and M. Solms (Paris: Ed. De Minuit, 1953), 9–32. 26.  Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 46. 27.  Maurice Blanchot, “Madness par excellence,” in The Blanchot Reader, trans. Ann Smock (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 48. 28.  For further discussion of Jaspers’ reliance on Kierkegaard see, for example, István Czakó, “Karl Jaspers: A Great Awakener’s Way to Philosophy of Existence,” in Kierkegaard and Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 9 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 155–98. While later Heidegger would diminish Kierkegaard’s influence, characterizing him as a “religious thinker,” devoid of ontological implications, most scholars find this dubi-



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ous. For an alternate reading see, for example, John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 82–83. 29.  Blanchot, “Madness par excellence,” 181. 30.  Czakó, “Karl Jaspers,” 420ff. 31.  Blanchot, “Madness par excellence,” 116. 32. See Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reider Thomte and Albert Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 123. 33.  Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 11. Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Spring-Verlag, 1990), 376. 34.  Maurice Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time,” in Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 12–40. 35.  Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time,” 30. 36. Derek Allan defends Malraux against such charges. But he also cites Malraux’s claim that “even the art of a Van Gogh or Rimbaud… stands for unity against the chaos of a mere, given reality” and that the fundamental achievement of art is “to deny man’s nothingness.” Derek Allan, Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux’s Theory of Art (New York: Rodopi, 2009), 82–83. 37.  Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time,” 38. 38.  Blanchot, “The Museum, Art, and Time,” 38. 39.  Jean-Paul Sartre, “Abinadab or The Fantastic Considered as a Language,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Collier Books, 1955), 65, 76. 40.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 234. 41.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 60. 42. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Douglas A. Landes (New York: Routlege, 2012), 426. 43. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 144. 44.  For further discussion of this issue, see my “Notes on Bachelard and MerleauPonty: Between Phenomenology and Poetics,” in Phenomenology, Institution and History: Writings After Merleau-Ponty II (London: Continuum, 2009), 78–97. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 24. 45. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 98, 108. 46. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 99. 47. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 108. 48. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 109. 49. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 54. 50. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 55. 51. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense, H. Dreyfus and P. Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 17. 52. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 86, 72. 53. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 56. 54. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 56. 55. Foucault, History of Madness, 351.

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56.  See my “Beyond the Speaking of Things: Merleau-Ponty’s Reconstruction of Phenomenology and the Models of the Third Critique,” Philosophy Today 52 (2008): 124–34. 57.  Karl Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, trans. Okar Grunow and David Woloshin (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977), 177. 58.  See Galen Johnson’s analysis in this collection. 59. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 65. 60. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 58. 61.  Jacques Derrida, “To Unsense the Subjectile,” in The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, ed. Jacques Derrida and Paul Thenenin, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 90. Here Derrida cites Artaud. 62. Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 24. 63. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 96, 102. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. C. Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 186. 64.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 154. 65. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 146. 66. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 147. 67.  For further discussion of this caesura of sensibility, see Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” 166ff. 68. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton: 1981), 71. 69.  Merleau-Ponty, “Madness par excellence,” 117. 70. Foucault, History of Madness, 536. 71. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. 72. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. 73. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. 74.  Michel Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of Work,” trans. Peter Stastny and Denis Sengel, Critical Inquiry 21/2 (1995): 296–97. 75.  Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 420. 76. Foucault, History of Madness, xxxii. 77. Foucault, History of Madness, 537. 78.  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 33–34. 79. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 45. 80.  Foucault, “Madness, the Absence of Work,” 292. 81.  Maurice Blanchot, “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him,” in Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, Foucault/Blanchot, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 72. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 199–200. 82. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 90.



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  83.  Cf. my “Regulations: Kant and Derrida at the End of Metaphysics,” in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).  84. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 45.  85. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 420.  86. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 114–15.  87. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 61.  88. Foucault, History of Madness, 537, xxxii.  89. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 105.  90. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, In Praise of Philosophy, trans. J. Wild and J. Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963), 55.  91. Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 59.  92. Gaston Bachelard, “Surrationalism,” in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 4, trans. Julien Levy, ed. Franklin Rosemont (Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989), 112. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 68.  93. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 130.   94.  Cf. my “Traditionis Traditio,” in Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 21–84.  95. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 96.  96. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 30.  97. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 104.  98. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 85, 99.  99. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 105. 100.  Georges Canguilhem, “Sur l’Historie de la folie en tant qu’evénement,” in Histoire de la folie à l âge classique de Michel Foucault: regards critique 1961–2011, ed. Phillipe Artieres et al. (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2011), 265–71. Also see Georges Canguilhem, “The Death of Man or Exhaustion of the Cogito?,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, trans. Catherine Porter, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 74–94. 101.  See the discussion of James Miller, The Passion of Michel Foucault (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 103. 102. Merleau-Ponty, Prose of the World, 38. 103. Maurice Blanchot, Le “Discours Philosophique” L’Arc (Merleau-Ponty) (Paris: Librairie Duponchelle, 1990), 2. 104.  Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans. Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 45. 105. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 251. 106. Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, 79. 107.  This is a different claim than Jaspers’ regarding methodological pluralism. Jaspers’ pluralism remained Kantian, in the end, regulative and based in “practical necessity.” See Jaspers, General Psychopathology, 36f. Hence emerges the unity of

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methods postulated in his account. Returning to Foucault’s move from Jaspers to Nietzsche for the analysis of madness, we are also reminded of his analysis of Kantian anthropology in the early sixties, skeptical of such unities. As his thesis on Kant’s Anthropology concludes, the trajectory of the Kantian question “Was ist der Mensch?” in the field of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both challenges and disarms it: “der Übermensch.” See Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology, trans. Robert Nigro and Kate Briggs (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008), 124. 108. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Introduction,” in Hymnes, élégies et autres poemes, Friedrich Hölderlin, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Armel Guerne (Paris: Flammarion, 1983), 8–9. This had not prevented Lacoue-Labarthe himself from invoking this investment: “Proportion is thus needed, as Hölderlin’s poems ceaselessly repeat because Hölderlin, pressed by madness, knew his poems drew their fragile possibility from this source.” See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 25. 109. Jaspers, Strindberg and Van Gogh, 176. 110.  See Georges Bataille, The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism (London: Verso, 1994). 111.  Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 57. 112.  Michel Serres, “Géométrie de la folie,” in Histoire de la folie à l âge classique de Michel Foucault: regards critique 1961–2011, ed. Phillipe Artieres et al. (Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2011), 107. As Foucault realized, beyond the privilege granted madness in the history of thought, or precisely because of it, the status of psychiatry’s normalization as discipline still must be confronted. 113. Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 342. 114. Derrida, Truth in Painting, 292, 368. 115. Foucault, History of Madness, 577. 116. Foucault, Archeology of Knowledge, 235f. 117.  G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 128–29. 118. The term “dialectical machinery” emerges in Hegel’s analysis of Shakespeare. See Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II, 1229.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic. Translated by Robert HullotKentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Allan, Derek. Art and the Human Adventure: André Malraux’s Theory of Art. New York: Rodopi, 2009.



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Artaud, Antonin. “Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society.” In Selected Writings, translated by Helen Weaver, 485–512, edited by Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976. Bachelard, Gaston. “Surrationalism.” In Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 4. Translated by Julien Levy, 112–14. Edited by Franklin Rosemont. Chicago: Black Swan Press, 1989. Bataille, Georges. The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. London: Verso, 1994. ———. “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939, translated by Allan Stoekl, 61–72. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Blanchot, Maurice. Le “Discours Philosophique” L’Arc (Merleau-Ponty). Paris: Librairie Duponchelle, 1990. ———. Faux Pas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. The Infinite Conversation. Translated by Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. “La Folie par excellence.” In Karl Jaspers, Strindberg et Van Gogh, Swedenborg-Hölderlin, étude psychiatrique comparative, translated by Hélène Naef, M. L. Solms-Naef, and M. Solms, 9–32. Paris: Ed. De Minuit, 1953. ———. “Madness par excellence.” In The Blanchot Reader, edited by Michael Holland, translated by Ann Smock, 110–28. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. “The Museum, Art, and Time.” In Friendship, translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, 12–40. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. The Space of Literature. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. ———. The Step Not Beyond. Translated by Lycette Nelson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. ———. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Blanchot, Maurice, and Michel Foucault. “Michel Foucault as I Imagine Him.” In Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot: Foucault/Blanchot, translated by Jeffrey Mehlman, 61–109. New York: Zone Books, 1987. Canguilhem, Georges. “The Death of Man or Exhaustion of the Cogito?” In The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, translated by Catherine Porter, 74–94. Edited by Gary Gutting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. “Sur l’Historie de la folie en tant qu’evénement.” In Histoire de la folie à l âge classique de Michel Foucault: regards critique 1961–2011, edited by Phillipe Artieres et al., 265–71. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2011. Caputo, John. Radical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Cassirer, Ernst. Substance and Function and Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Translated by William Curtis Swabey and Marie Taylor. Chicago: Open Court, 1923. Czakó, István. “Karl Jaspers: A Great Awakener’s Way to Philosophy of Existence.” In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, edited by Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 9, 155–98. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011.

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Damisch, Hubert. “Equals Infinity.” Translated by R. H. Olorenshaw. 20th Century Studies 15/16 (1976): 56–81. ———. The Origin of Perspective. Translated by John Goodman. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994. Derman, Joshua. “Philosophy Beyond the Bounds of Reason: The Influence of Max Weber in the Development of Karl Jaspers’ Existenzphilosophie, 1909–1932.” In Max Weber Matters, edited by Marisol Lopez Menendez, 55–71. London: Ashgate, 2012. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. Lane. New York: Viking Press, 1977. Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. “To Unsense the Subjectile.” In The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud. Translated by Mary Ann Caws. Edited by Jacques Derrida and Paul Thenenin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972. ———. History of Madness. Translated by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa. Nodon: Routledge, 2006. ———. Introduction to Kant’s Anthropology. Translated by Robert Nigro and Kate Briggs. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. ———. Mental Illness and Psychology. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. ———. “Truth and Power.” In Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, 109–33. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. ———. “Madness, the Absence of Work.” Translated by Peter Stastny and Denis Sengel. Critical Inquiry 21/2 (1995): 290–98. Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. I. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. ———. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Vol. II. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row, 1962. ———. “Remarks on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews (1920).” In Supplements: From the Earliest Essays to Being and Time and Beyond, edited by John van Buren, 71–103. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. ———. Towards the Definition of Philosophy. Translated by Ted Sadler. New York: Continuum, 2000. Heidegger, Martin, and Karl Jaspers. The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence (1920– 1963). Translated by Gary E. Aylesworth. New York: Humanities Press, 2003. Hölderlin, Friedrich, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Theodor W. Adorno. Hymnes, élégies et autres poemes. Translated by Armel Guerne. Paris: Flammarion, 1983. Jaspers, Karl. General Psychopathology. Translated by J. Hoenig and Marion W. Hamilton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963.



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———. Philosophy, Vol. 3. Translated by E.B. Ashton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971). ———. Strindberg and Van Gogh. Translated by Okar Grunow and David Woloshin. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1977. ———. Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. Berlin: Spring-Verlag, 1990. Jaspers, Karl, and Rudolf Bultmann. “Myth and Religion.” In Myth and Christianity: An Inquiry into the Possibility of Religion Without Myth, translated by Norbert Guterman, 3–56. New York: Noonday Press, 1966. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety. Translated by Reider Thomte and Albert Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Kirkbright, Suzanne. Karl Jaspers: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004 Lacan, Jacques. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1969). Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: Norton, 1992. ———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton: 1981. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry. Translated by Jeff Fort. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. ———. Poetry as Experience. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Antony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Marnasse, Ernst Moritz. “Jaspers Relation to Max Weber.” In The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, edited by P. Schlipp. LaSalle: Open Court, 1981. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Eye and Mind.” Translated by C. Dallery. In The Primacy of Perception. Edited by James Edie, 159–90. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. In Praise of Philosophy. Translated by J. Wild and J. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1963. ———. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Douglas A. Landes. New York: Routlege, 2012. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Prose of the World. Translated by John O’Neill. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. ———. Signs. Translated by Richard C. McCleary. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964. ———. The Visible and the Invisible. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Miller, James. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Neinrich, Nathalie. The Glory of Van Gogh. Translated by Paul Leduc Browne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Abinadab or The Fantastic Considered as a Language.” In Literary and Philosophical Essays, translated by Annette Michelson, 60–77. New York: Collier Books, 1955. ———. “The Room.” In The Wall and Other Stories, translated by Lloyd Alexander, 18–40. New York: New Directions, 1969.

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Serres, Michel. “Géométrie de la folie.” In Histoire de la folie à l âge classique de Michel Foucault: regards critique 1961–2011, edited by Phillipe Artieres et al., 87–108. Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2011. Watson, Stephen H. “Beyond the Speaking of Things: Merleau-Ponty’s Reconstruction of Phenomenology and the Models of the Third Critique.” Philosophy Today 52 (2008): 124–34. ———. “Notes on Bachelard and Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Poetics.” In Phenomenology, Institution and History: Writings After Merleau-Ponty II, 78–97. London: Continuum, 2009. ———. “Regulations: Kant and Derrida at the End of Metaphysics.” In Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, edited by John Sallis, 71–86. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. ———. “Traditionis Traditio.” In Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought, edited by Stephen H. Watson, 21–84. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1975.

Index

Page references for figures are italicized. absence, 7, 15, 16, 43, 48, 185, 191, 197, 219–20, 223, 226, 228, 236–37, 239, 241–42, 246; abyss, 110, 195, 215, 218, 221, 224–27; alienation, 51; apophatic, 220; concealment, 68, 95n32, 139, 144, 189m 191; darkness, 20n70, 194, 215, 223, 225, 227–28; de–sublimation, 207, 209; disruption, 234; emptiness, 16, 34, 50, 140, 153n16, 185, 191, 197, 219, 220–21, 223, 225; ex nihilo, 223–24; holy chaos, 225; kenosis, 188, 218, 222, 228; niet, nooit, nimmer, 39n18; nihilism, 187, 190, 220–21; nonbeing, 13, 50, 70, 225, 227; nothingness, 8, 56, 148, 188, 190, 219–21, 223; shadowy zone, 239–40; silence or the ineffable, 45, 48–51, 60n22, 60–61n29, 220, 221, 236, 240; vestigial trace, 219. See also madness Adorno, Theodor, 93n12, 234, 245 Altizer, Thomas, 13, 20n70, 215, 222– 28. See also Eye of God Artaud, Antonin, 10–11, 12–13, 44, 48–49, 52, 54, 56–57, 111, 160,

169–70, 174, 179n69, 180n99, 220, 234, 236, 240, 242, 250n61 Bachelard, Gaston, 173, 238, 243, 244, 249n44 Bataille, Georges, 5–6, 10, 15, 20n70, 185, 187–89, 191–92, 198, 199n21, 203–9, 221–22, 234, 236, 245, 246; auto–mutilation, 5–6, 188, 199n21, 205, 221–22. See also sun, Icarus Bernard, Emile, 38n5, 165, 171–72, 177n40, 177–78n45, 210; “Christ in the Garden of Olives,” 171; Madeleine in the Wood of Love, 172 Blanchot, Maurice, 115n34, 167, 236– 39, 240–43, 244–45, 246 Borinage, 25–26, 31, 33, 195, 204, 209 Breton, André, 204–6, 236–37 Buddhism: The Buddha, 217, 219; Zen Buddhism, 2, 197 caesura, 14, 46, 240, 242, 246, 250n67 Cézanne, Paul, 3–4, 76, 90, 102–5, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167–68, 169, 170, 171, 177n40, 177n41, 177–78n45,

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Index

178n51, 233–34, 239, 247n4; “The Apples of Cézanne,” 97, 102–5, 113n16 Christ, 33, 186, 192–93, 210, 217, 219, 221–22, 224, 226–27, 230n64 consolation, 24, 32, 33, 37, 138 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 9–10, 15, 57, 97–102, 105–11, 112n1, 113n10, 113n15, 114n27, 114–15n33, 119, 217–20, 222, 240, 245, 250n61; parergon, 10, 107, 112n1 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 15, 137–38, 152n1, Dürer, Albrecht, 69, 71, 79n22 ear, severed, 5, 15, 24, 100, 188, 193, 205, 208, 221 exhibitions, Van Gogh: Amsterdam 1930, 7; Bremen 1911, 4, 235; Musée de l’Orangerie 1946–1947, 11, 159; Van Gogh Face to Face 2000, 177n42 Eye of God, 13, 16, 225–27; God’s eye view, 197 flesh, 84, 92–93n7, 172–74, 193, 205–6, 219, 223–24, 240; incarnation, 193, 224 Foucault, Michel, 12–13, 14, 20n70, 43–58, 58–59n1, 59n11, 60n22, 60n24, 236, 239–46, 251–52n107; confinement, 45, 48–49, 51, 52, 60n22; oeuvre, 13, 43, 44, 46, 49, 52, 53, 56, 236, 241, 246. See also madness Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 93n12, 125 Gauguin, Paul, 3, 5–6, 9, 11, 76, 161, 165, 198, 204 Giacometti, Alberto, 159, 164 Giotto, 223–24, 226 God, 13, 16, 87, 122–23, 125–26, 223, 225, 227–28; apotheosis, 222; theodicy, 215. See also Eye of God

halo, 195, 198, 219 Hegel, G. W. F., 2, 64, 205, 206, 221–22, 228n4, 238–39, 243, 246, 252n118 Heidegger, Martin, 6–7, 10, 14, 43, 57, 63–79, 81–88, 90, 92, 93n14, 94n19, 95n32, 97–102, 104–12, 113n10, 117–27, 139, 141–45, 148–52, 153n19, 154n25, 154n43, 156n70, 156n75, 185, 189–92, 198, 203–4, 215, 217–20, 235–36, 245, 248n17; being–in–the–world, 122, 124, 143; event, 63–67, 69, 70, 74–75, 151; the work of art, 63–64, 66, 67, 69, 71, 72, 74–76, 77n5, 78n10, 99 , 191; world and earth, strife, rift, 8, 15, 67–69, 71–73, 75, 79n22, 81, 83–84, 86–87, 93n12, 93n14, 126, 142–44, 148–49, 190–91 heterogeneity, 6, 16, 46, 188, 205–6, 208, 245–46; as dismemberment, 205 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 72, 196, 198, 200–201n55, 234, 235, 236, 242, 245, 252n108 homogeneity, 6, 16, 109, 188, 205–8 Husserl, Edmund, 162, 243 immanence, 12, 15, 139, 141–42, 144–45, 151–52, 153n19, 154n25, 156n72, 225; immanent transcendence, 138–39, 141–44, 151–152, 156n70, 234; horizontal transcendence, 139; ontological intimacy, 185, 192; pure immanence, 156n72 Jaspers, Karl, 4–5, 7, 10, 14, 23–37, 38n5, 38–39n13, 40n39, 81, 87, 88–90, 94n19, 121, 139–42, 144–47, 150, 154n43, 154n46, 156n70, 156n72, 167–69, 171, 173, 185–87, 188, 191–92, 196, 197, 198, 199n21, 215–17, 221, 223, 228n2, 234–37, 239, 240, 242, 245, 247n10, 248n21,

Index 259



248–49n28, 251–52n107; ciphers, 5, 14, 24–25, 33, 37, 140–41, 144–45, 153n16, 186–87, 198, 216, 220, 224, 226, 234–36; encounter with Bultmann, 234, 247n10; influence by Weber, 234–35. See also limit situation; misdiagnosis, Van Gogh, schizophrenia, Jaspers’ analysis Kant, Immanuel, 107, 121, 220, 239, 242, 245–46, 251–52n107 Kierkegaard, Soren, 14, 33, 216, 235, 236–37, 241, 245, 248–49n28 Klee, Paul, 159, 161, 164, 165, 169, 170, 174, 233–34, 239 Lacan, Jacques, 207, 235–36, 240 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 245, 252n108 limit situation (Grenzsituation), 4, 154n46, 155n47, 186, 191, 216, 234–36, 238, 241–42 Löwith, Karl, 7, 189–90 madness, 1, 11–14, 24, 43–61, 88, 124, 170, 189, 199, 205, 216–17, 222, 234, 235–37, 239–42, 244–46 Malraux, André, 163, 176n30, 237–39, 249n36 materiality of art, 55, 60n29, 64, 67–68, 73, 75, 81–87, 92–93n7, 94n19, 138, 148, 150, 190–91, 193; drawing with the brush, 82, 90–91; drunkenness of the sensible, 57; imitating the material, 91 Matisse, Henri, 165 mental illness, 1, 4, 24, 28–30, 34, 49–51, 56, 58, 60n24, 88–89, 124, 167, 170, 186, 196, 217, 222; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 12, 20n70, 159–74, 179n83, 180n93, 180n96, 238–40, 242, 243–44, 49n44, 250n56; dehisience, 160; event, 173–74; going further/going beyond,

159–74; reversibility, 161. See also Heidegger, event misdiagnosis, Van Gogh, 4, 24, 29; schizophrenia, Jaspers’ analysis, 4, 14, 24, 29, 33, 34, 81, 87, 145, 167– 68, 234–35, 242–44; temporal lobe epilepsy, 4, 29, 34, 167, 170, 186; trauma, Van Gogh, 25–28. See also ear, severed; Saint Rémy asylum Millet, Jean-Francoiş, 161; The Sower, 196 mimesis, 9, 10, 15, 99, 145, 219 mood, 86, 88, 89, 121, 197 myth, 1, 5, 10, 11, 77n5, 86, 94n19, 103, 141, 147–48, 160, 186–87, 197– 98, 217, 234, 245, 247n10; myth of the given, 139; mythical delirium, 189 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12–13, 30–31, 40n39, 44, 48–49, 53, 54, 55, 59n11, 107, 120, 125–26, 170, 195, 216, 224, 236, 239, 241, 251–52n107; God is dead, 205, 216 North and South, 26, 196, 197, 210–12 paintings, Van Gogh: Branch of an Almond Tree in Bloom, 169; The Church at Auvers, 163, 168; Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church at Nuenen, 163; Gauguin’s Chair, 189, 197; Hanged–Man’s House in Auvers, 169; The House of Dr. Gachet in Auvers, 169; Irises, 159, 168; Landscape with Setting Sun, 166; L’Arlésienne, 159, 169; Old Shoes with Laces, 6–10, 14, 63, 75–76, 83, 91, 98–104, 109–10, 113n15, 117–20, 129, 138, 146, 148–50, 155n59, 155n63, 190–91, 217, 218–21; Olive Trees, 90–91, 195, 197; Portrait of the Artist, 136, 223; Portrait of Dr. Gachet, 159, 168, 175n8; The Potato Eaters,

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165–66, 194, 199, 209; The Raising of Lazarus, 33, 37, 196; Roots and Tree Trunks, 134, 197; Self– Portrait on the Road to Tarascon, 164; Sorrow, 163; The Sower, 133, 195–97, 199; Starry Night, 132, 168, 194; Sunflowers, 131, 146; Sunset at Montmajour, 195; Van Gogh’s Chair, 163, 189, 197; Weaver at his Loom, 195; Wheatfield with Crows, 12, 13, 130, 159, 197, 223–27, 239; Wheatfield with Reaper, 28, 195, 199; Window in the Bataille Restaurant, 15, 135, 203; Worn Out: At Eternity’s Gate, 163. See also peasants, peasant boots peasants, 8, 9, 23, 87, 98, 171–72, 185, 192–94, 196, 198, 204; peasant boots, 63, 83, 86, 98–101, 104, 109– 10, 117–19, 149, 191, 217, 219, 221 Plato, 68, 122 Prometheus, 6, 15, 16, 188–89, 198, 204–7, 221–22 Rembrandt. See van Rijn, Rembrandt Rilke, Rainer Maria, 3–4, 161, 166, 170–71 Saint Rémy asylum, 6, 25, 29, 33, 167– 68, 170, 179n72, 194, 195, 211 Sartre, 179n83, 235, 238 Schapiro, Meyer, 9–10, 15, 63, 77n1, 79n35, 92, 97–106, 110–11, 113n16, 114n25, 119, 155n63, 217, 219, 228n13 Schelling, Friedrich, 180n96, 215, 217, 223, 225, 227 strangeness (Unheimlichkeit), 2, 10, 17, 148, 152, 191, 220 suicide, 10, 11, 14, 24, 35–37, 160, 175n6, 212, 222, 234

sun, 5, 6, 11, 138, 147, 162, 165, 166, 186, 189, 195, 196, 198, 210, 222; Icarus, 189, 205, 221, 236; SUN, 189 sunflowers, 5, 146, 168, 174, 186, 198, 205, 240; wilted sunflower, 189 time: apocalyptic, 7, 195, 198–99, 225, 227; homo dialecticus, 242; kairological 3, 193–94, 198, 218, 227, 243; linear and non–linear, 205, 242; of the work, 241; Zeitgeist, 221 tragedy, 6, 7, 10, 13, 15–16, 24, 48–49, 50, 51, 169, 185–99, 205, 234, 236; amor fati, 14, 24, 30–31, 194; tragic madness, 47–48. See also Prometheus transcendence, 4, 5, 10, 11–12, 15, 94n17, 118, 124, 138, 139–45, 147–48, 150–52, 154n25, 154n43, 156n72, 186–87, 192, 194, 196– 98, 225, 227, 234, 245; vertical transcendence, 139 Van Gogh, Vincent: authenticity 7, 11, 25, 31, 88, 186, 190; Japanism, 196–97, 199, 210; new style, 186, 198; religious influences, 25–27, 37, 38n7, 38n14, 39n16, 40n42, 87, 122–23, 126, 172–73, 186, 193–94, 204, 224 Van Gogh, Theo, 24–25, 27, 28, 38n7, 87, 91–92, 123, 124, 126, 160, 161, 169, 172, 176n26, 179n72, 179n74, 195, 196, 204 Van Rijn, Rembrandt, 87, 126–27, 141, 161, 164, 172, 187, 196, 222–23, 226, 234; The Raising of Lazarus, 196 yellow, 164, 196, 212 The Yellow House, 5, 9, 198

About the Contributors

Pauline E. Erickson received her Baccalaureate in The Netherlands with a specialization in literature and foreign languages. She worked as an editor and translator for two publishing companies in Holland before joining the staff of The Netherlands Embassy in Washington, DC (until 1969). Together with her husband Stephen Erickson she has directed conferences for Liberty Fund, Inc., on Early Netherlands Art, Italian Renaissance Art, and Culture and Identity. She works closely with her husband on various projects related to contemporary culture. Stephen A. Erickson is Professor of Philosophy and the “E. Wilson Lyon” Professor of Humanities at Pomona College. He received his PhD from Yale University. Erickson is the author of The (Coming) Age of Thresholding (1999), Human Presence: At the Boundaries of Meaning (1984), and Language and Being (1970), and as well as over eighty articles in journals such as The Review of Metaphysics, Man and World, Philosophy Today, The Harvard Review of Philosophy, The International Philosophical Quarterly, and Existenz. His twenty-four-lecture series Philosophy as a Guide to Living is part of “The Great Courses” program. In lectures throughout the US, Europe, South America, and Asia, Erickson has reflected on contemporary culture and its relation to spiritual life. Alina N. Feld is author of Melancholy and the Otherness of God: A Study of the Hermeneutics of Depression (2011). She completed her doctorate in Philosophy of Religion at Boston University. Presently affiliated with General Theological Seminary and Hofstra University, she has also taught at Willamette University, Long Island University, St. John’s University, and Boston 261

262

About the Contributors

University. Her research interests include existentialism and existential philosophies of life, the theological turn in phenomenology, contemporary hermeneutical theologies, and eastern and western traditions of mysticism. Rebecca Longtin Hansen is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She completed her PhD dissertation on the transformation of the sensible in Dilthey’s aesthetics and Heidegger’s philosophy of art at Emory University. She is currently working on a project about embodiment and art in Merleau-Ponty and Nancy. Galen A. Johnson is Jane C. Ebbs Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rhode Island. He has been General Secretary (Executive Director) of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle (2005–2015), and has been a recent recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and American Philosophical Society (APS). He is author of The Retrieval of the Beautiful: Thinking Through Merleau-Ponty’s Aesthetics (2010) and editor of The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting (1993, 1998). His co-edited book, Merleau-Ponty’s Poets and Poetics, is forthcoming from Fordham University Press. His current research interests include the art and writings of Paul Klee and a study of the sublime and the baroque in Merleau-Ponty’s late writings. Christian Lotz is Professor of Philosophy at Michigan State University. His book publications include the following: The Art of Gerhard Richter: Hermeneutics, Images, Meaning (2015): The Capitalist Schema, Time, Money, and the Culture of Abstraction (2014): Christian Lotz zu Marx, Das Maschinenfragment (2014): From Affectivity to Subjectivity, Revisiting Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology (2008): and Vom Leib zum Selbst, Kritische Analysen zu Husserl und Heidegger (2005). His current research interests are in classical German phenomenology, critical theory, Marx, aesthetics, and contemporary European political philosophy. James Luchte is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, School of the Humanities, China. His scholarly publications include Mortal Thought: Hölderlin and Philosophy (2016), Early Greek Thought: Before the Dawn (2011), The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche (translator, 2010), Pythagoras and the Doctrine of Transmigration: Wandering Souls (2009), Heidegger’s Early Philosophy: The Phenomenology of Ecstatic Temporality (2008), Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: Before Sunrise (editor, 2008), and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (2007).



About the Contributors 263

David P. Nichols is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Saginaw Valley State University, where he teaches existentialism, Greek philosophy, and religious studies. He completed his PhD in Philosophy of Religion at Boston University. He recently served as Vice President of the Karl Jaspers Society of North America. His research interests center on philosophy of art and tragic visions of human existence. This includes various articles on Greek tragedy and the appropriation of tragic themes in continental philosophy. K. Malcolm Richards is Associate Professor and Chair of Liberal Arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He is an artist, experimental musician, critic, curator, art historian, and theoretician specializing in the work of Jacques Derrida. His other areas of expertise include nineteenth-century art and aesthetics, contemporary art, French theory, and film history. His publications include Derrida Reframed: A Guide for the Visual Arts Student (2008) and “Eve’s Dropping/Eavesdropping,” in The Writings of Michael Fried (2000). Joseph J. Tanke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. Tanke is the author of Jacques Rancière: An Introduction—Philosophy, Politics, Aesthetics (2011) and Foucault’s Philosophy of Art: A Genealogy of Modernity (2009), and the co-editor (with Colin McQuillan) of The Bloomsbury Anthology of Aesthetics. Dr. Tanke is completing a new monograph on aesthetics and its relevance for discussions of contemporary art and culture. He is also interested in the application of historical-ontological methodology to the field of pain research. Ingvild Torsen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway. She works in aesthetics and post-Kantian philosophy and has a special interest in Heidegger’s philosophy of art and its relationship to his German predecessors. Her work includes publications in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism and British Journal of Aesthetics. Gregory J. Walters is Professor of Philosophy, Faculty of Human Sciences and Philosophy, Saint Paul University/Université Saint-Paul, Ottawa, Canada. He has published many articles about human rights and the challenges of technology, including issues pertaining to biotechnology and living in nuclear and information ages. He was an editor for Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity (2012), Karl Jaspers Historic Actuality in View of Fundamental Problems of Mankind (2008), Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy: Expositions & Interpretations (2008), Racial and Ethnic Relations in America (2000), and The Tasks of Truth: Essays on Karl Jaspers’s Idea of the University (1996).

264

About the Contributors

Dr. Walters held the Gordon F. Henderson Chair in Human Rights, University of Ottawa (2008), and was funded by the Canadian Foreign Affairs Department & Austrian-Canadian Studies Association (2006) for lectures at the Hörsaal des Instituts für Pathologie am LKH-Universitätsklinikum (Graz), the Institut für Philosophie at Karl-Franzens Universität Graz, and the Universities at Klagenfurt and Salzburg. Stephen H. Watson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and has published over forty articles on a variety of figures and topics in continental philosophy. He has published ten books, including Crescent Moon over the Rational: Philosophical Interpretations of Paul Klee (2009), In the Shadow of Phenomenology: Writings After Merleau-Ponty I (2009), Phenomenology, Institution and History: Writings After Merleau-Ponty II (2009), Tradition(s) I: Refiguring Community and Virtue in Classical German Thought (1997), Tradition(s) II: Hermeneutics, Ethics and the Dispensation of the Good (2002), and Extensions: Essays on Interpretation, Rationality and the Closure of Modernism (1992).