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Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995)). Krell therefore endeavours to produce a response to Derrida based on his own more positive reading of Heidegger. Krell and Michael Naas read each other's works in typescript, and there is much favourable cross-reference. Like Krell, Naas, a highly respected philosopher, is particularly interested in responding to the Heideggerian aspect of Derrida's work (including 'world', the relation to death, and Walten).
2015
Critical Curiosity: Surrealism and the History and Legacy of its Method Dr Donna Roberts (Independent Scholar), Helsinki These days, largely due to the writings of Michel Foucault, “curiosity” has become a term seemingly loaded with epistemological edginess. The term is so ubiquitous that it can be found anywhere from publicity for Ripley’s Believe it or Not! museum to the website of the Welcome Collection; a term that is used, basically, with the hope of inciting a certain form of passing interest. However, thanks to a host of scholars who have developed a rich history of this term, we know that curiosity is understood to have played a crucial cognitive role from Aristotelian natural philosophy through to the most current scientific method. It is arguable, however, that a critical awareness of these two strands of curiosity – relating to the appeal (and taxonomical intrigue) of rarity and its incitement of the cognitive drive – was developed considerably earlier than recent discourse might suggest, that is, within the surrealist milieu in the first half of the twentieth century. Foucault’s familiarity with the work of André Breton, Georges Bataille, and Roger Caillois suggests a fairly linear legacy from the varieties of surrealist method and analysis through to contemporary discourse on curiosity. Breton utilized curiosity in terms of the marvelous, as a means to challenging dominant ideas about the proper objects of knowledge; Bataille drew on his scholastic training to develop an aggressively affective visual method that exploited the monstrous appeal and vice of curiosity in a critique of European cultural and philosophical idealism; while Caillois turned his attention to curiosities of nature as a means of exploring disturbing continuities between human and non-human behaviour. The exhibitions and periodicals organized within the surrealist milieu have long been interpreted as creative and provocative forms of cabinets of curiosity, utilizing the surrealist method of juxtaposition to produce lyrical and unsettling relationships that question orthodoxies concerning the order of things. The combining of heteroclite images, objects and texts was developed according to key critical intentions: a de-centering of European civilization, an assault on the idea of a dispassionate aesthetic, and a reconfiguring of the marvelous as part of a refusal of the reductions of positivist science. With a view to contributing to the historiographical interests of the conference, this paper will examine how the surrealists elevated the notion of curiosity into a radical form of enquiry that would become key to the movement’s broad political, historical, ethnographic, and cultural critique. Given that the coherency of the surrealist programme and its abiding political commitments provided structure and critical force to its engagement with curiosity as both a boundless cognitive drive and a potentially subversive property of material culture, I will ask whether, in lacking such a coherent programme, much of the contemporary engagement in curiosity (thinking of yet another stuffed animal) risks coming across as an uncritical, nostalgic, fetishistic, sublimating, and overly-aestheticised indulgence in artefacts and the pat elaborations of the ‘boundary-breaking’ rhetoric of inter-disciplinarity.
Tableaux de Man Ray et Objets des Iles at the Galerie Surréaliste (1926)
Oceanic Art (Paris, 2013)
This is my eleventh exhibition at the Parcours des Mondes and each year affords a fine opportunity to step back and reflect. The 34 objects in front of me serve as a window into the year that has passed and as a testament to the hard work, luck, ingenuity and battles they took to acquire. They also reflect, hopefully, a maturing state of mind. More and more, I am trying to take sufficient time with each piece, understanding and enjoying its beauty, researching its ethnographic function, and locating its collection history. As a field collector, provenance was just whatever cultural information I was able to scribble down while in the village, sweat pouring off my forehead, into my little brown notebooks. Now, establishing proper provenance is of the utmost importance and requires true detective work in research libraries or by tapping at my computer beseeching academics, dealers and collectors for information on items they owned or knew about. As such, I am in debt to many people for their kind support. Colleagues such as Anthony Meyer, Todd Barlin, Chris Boylan, Michel Thieme and Loed van Bussel have been especially helpful. have gone well out of their way to give assistance. The last four were kind enough to contribute short essays in the present catalog. These essays are attempts to give a bit more information and context to objects that, while having the beauty to stand alone, should not have to.
Lingua Romana, 2018
The often scandalous and outrageous actions, paintings, and literary oeuvres the surrealists produced and presented to the public were mostly directed against the society of their fathers—more precisely, the social values and morals of the bourgeoisie, which, in the eyes of the surrealists, had provoked the terrors of World War I. In their opinion, society had to change, to undergo a radical transformation, in order to prevent such an event from happening ever again. Only through absolute freedom could society metamorphose into something transcending the past terrors. During the 1920s the surrealists lived their dream, experimenting with literature, art, politics, and philosophy. Everything seemed possible. Then, during the 1930s, the theories defended by the group seemed to fail. Unrest and political tension defined Europe. The surrealists had to watch in horror the development of something a little too familiar: the terrors of another World War that lurked on the horizon. In that respect, the last surrealist show in Paris, the Exposition internationale du surréalisme that took place in January 1938, reflected the anxiety of a group of artists caught between the terror of the past war and of the one that had yet to come.