Police Adjective" and Attunement to the Significance of Things

Close-Up, 2018

The article considers Corneliu Porumboiu's 2008 Police, Adjective (one of the most important films of the New Romanian Cinema) as a dramatization of Peter Wollen's influential 1969 adaptation of Charles Sanders Peirce's trichotomy of signs -iconic, indexical and symbolic signs -to the field of film theory.

Film-Philosophy, 2012

Kolman, Vojtěch. “Wittgenstein and die Meistersinger: The Aesthetic Road to a Sceptical Solution of the Sceptical Paradox”. Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 57, no. 1 (2020): 44–63. DOI: http://doi.org/10.33134/eeja.28, 2020

Starting with Wittgenstein’s remark about his allegedly frequent visits to the performance of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the paper presents Wagner’s opera – being explicitly an opera about rules and rule-following – as a possible stimulus for the later Wittgenstein’s thinking about language. Besides Wittgenstein’s systematic interests in parallels between music and language, the paper draws on the choice of terminology (such as the comparison of rules to rails) and on Wittgenstein’s own examples of rule-following. More speculatively, the phrasing as well as the solution to what Kripke called Wittgenstein’s sceptical paradox is used as a point of comparison that brings Wittgenstein’s aesthetic innuendos closer not only to mainstream philosophy of language, but due to the antithetical structure of Kripke’s argument also to the broader philosophical and aesthetical tradition, with a particular focus on the great philosophical systems of German idealism.

Film-Philosophy, 2013

Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding, ed. Garry Hagberg (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 3-29

In this essay I argue the extent to which meaning and judgment in aesthetics figures in Wittgenstein’s later conception of language, particularly in his conception of how philosophy might go about explaining the ordinary functioning of language. Following a review of some biographical and textual matters concerning Wittgenstein’s life with music, I outline the connection among (1) Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical clarity or perspicuity, (2) our attempts to give clarity to our aesthetic experiences by wording them, and (3) the clarifying experience of the dawning of an aspect, which Wittgenstein pictures as the perception of an internal relation. By examining Wittgenstein’s use of “internal relation” from the Tractatus to his later writings, I come to challenge the still prevalent understanding of Wittgenstein’s appeals to grammar as an appeal to something given (e.g., to a set of grammatical rules). Instead, as I argue, Wittgensteinian appeals to grammatical criteria should be understood as modeled by the form of justification found in our conversations about art.

British Journal of Aesthetics, 2005

A critical, comprehensive study of the book Wittgenstein, Aesthetics and Philosophy, ed. Peter B. Lewis (2004). I set the discussion of the book against the backdrop of the peculiar nature, context and interpretational challenges pertaining to the corpus of Wittgenstein's lectures on aesthetics, which he delivered in Cambridge in the 1930s.

The new aestheticism, 2018

The alignments of T. W. Adorno to the protracted, difficult process of coming to terms with a broken Marxist inheritance and of Martin Heidegger to the Nazi politics of rethinking the human might seem to leave them at opposite non-communicating poles of political difference. 1 Their views on aesthetics seem similarly starkly opposed, in terms both of judgements and of the place of aesthetics within the philosophical pantheon. Aesthetic theory for Adorno marks out a domain of experience relatively immune from the impact of the banalisation of evil, indicated by Hannah Arendt to be distinctive of the latter part of the twentieth century. 2 Heidegger conversely seeks to build the movement of presentation and withdrawal of art in artworks into a central place in his dangerous affirmations of a fatal twentieth-century and specifically German destiny. 3 With his mythologising hope for a distinctively German word for holiness, spoken by that distinctively German poet Hoelderlin, Heidegger displaces aesthetics as analysis of sensibility and judgement, with universal scope, in favour of affirming a transformative power of poetic naming within a quite specific linguistic register: German. The differences between Adorno and Heidegger, then, concerning politics and language, aesthetic analysis and its philosophical significance are clear cut. This essay will however suggest that taking their positions as two halves of a divided exposition, rather than as competing accounts of art, gives a clue to the paradoxes of the relation between art and politics, which have caused much perplexity in the twentieth century. While Adorno and Heidegger give different philosophical responses to these paradoxes, they are in agreement about the importance of an analysis of artworks in assessing what philosophy can contribute to an understanding of epochal change and world crisis. 4 This epochal change and world crisis Adorno analyses in conjunction with Horkheimer, in 1944, as an irresolvable dialectic of enlightenment, Heidegger in terms of a dangerous domination of human endeavour by technology. 5 Adorno goes on to read Heidegger critically in Jargon of Authenticity: On German Ideology (1964) and in the even more demanding Negative Dialectics (1966), from which the former text was separated off. 6 The proposal here is to read Adorno and Heidegger as presenting two

Pre-proofs of essay forthcoming in (ed.) Garry Hagberg, Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding (London: Palgrave Macmillan), 2017.

1974

The subjects of the three separate, but related essays in this dissertation are art in general, one particular art fora, and one individual work of art. The first essay, a continuous piece of sustained abstraction, primarily concerns the field of aesthetics, while the second, more concrete essay is drawn from material conceived as a book on the theory of the narrative film. The third essay, focusing on the field of cinema studies (an analytical description of "Notorious "), constitutes an example of the concreteness and precision which writing about film should achieve to be adequate to the complexity and unity of the great classic narrative films. Although all three essays reflect the same view of the nature of art, each one addresses a particular audience and a particular field and does not refer explicitly to either of the other essays. (JN)