Abstract
This chapter argues that addressing Blumenberg’s relationship with modernity involves an exploration of his work on vision and visuality. In the first section, I show that Blumenberg’s depiction of the modern age as the epoch of geometrical optics strongly impacts on his conception of restricted rationality. In the second section, I bring together Blumenberg’s account of modern restricted rationality with Herder’s opposition between visuality and tactility. I then reframe this Herderian opposition in the context of Blumenbergian anthropology. In the third section, I argue that Blumenberg’s conception of visuality is to be put into dialogue with his monumental Work on Myth and, from this perspective, offer a reading of Kafka’s Der Bau, as a performance of Blumenberg’s conception of the very process of myth-building.
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Notes
- 1.
See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 1990), and Jonathan Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, 2000).
- 2.
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 2001), 31.
- 3.
Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture, ed. Jason Gaiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
- 4.
Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michel Levin (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), 53.
- 5.
Gilles Deleuze, Kant’s Critical Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tolimson and Barbara Haberjamm (London: The Athlone Press, 1984), 14.
- 6.
Louis Girard, L’argument ontologique chez Saint Anselme et chez Hegel, (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1995), 48. My own translation from the French.
- 7.
Ibid., 647.
- 8.
Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth …”, 52.
- 9.
Ibid., 53.
- 10.
See Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer”, in October, Vol. 45 (Summer, 1988), 3–35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/779041
- 11.
Ibidem.
- 12.
Tim Ingold, Lines. A Brief History (London-New York: Routledge, 2007).
- 13.
To speak in George Bataille’s terms: The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
- 14.
Jacques Derrida, “Penser à ne pas voir,” in Penser à ne pas voir. Écrits sur les arts du visible 1979–2004 (Paris: La Différence, 2013), 59.
- 15.
On the centrality of metaphors in the scientific discourse, see, for instance, Donna Haraway, Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors That Shapes Embryo (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004).
- 16.
See Daniel Whistler, “First Reflections on the Idea of a Speculative Pragmatics,” in Speculation, Heresy and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, ed. Matthew H. Farris and Joshua Ramey (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).
- 17.
Crary, Suspension of Perception, 300.
- 18.
See Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 152–156.
- 19.
Hans Blumenberg, Théorie de l’inconceptualité (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2017), 11. My translation from the French.
- 20.
Ibid., 11.
- 21.
Jacques Lacan, Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978), p. 333.
- 22.
On modern cosmology as the age of abstract objectivity, see Didier Debaise, Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible, trans. Michael Halewoord, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
- 23.
See, for instance, Jeffrey Andrew Barash, “The Rhetoric of Culture. Hans Blumenberg, Ernst Cassirer and the Legacy of Herder,” in Rethinking Culture and Cultural Analysis, ed. Joaquim Braga and Christian Möckel, (Berlin: Logos Verlag, 1992), 23–32.
- 24.
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 2.
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ibid., 7.
- 27.
Ibid., 15.
- 28.
Ibid., 22.
- 29.
Ibid., 87.
- 30.
Ibid., 21.
- 31.
Marion Schumm, À propos de Hans Blumenberg, in Cahiers philosophiques 123 (2010), 91. My translation from the French.
- 32.
Ibid., 91.
- 33.
Ibid.
- 34.
Hans Blumenberg, The Genesis of the Copernican World, trans. Robert. M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987), 3.
- 35.
David Lapoujade, Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants (Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2014), 281.
- 36.
Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, 247.
- 37.
Ibid., 246. See also the following quotation: “Freud had told that story years before, had he not? ‘Man’s erect posture,’ he had written, could in and of itself be seen to ‘represent the beginning of the momentous process of cultural evolution.’ The very move to the vertical, he reasoned, is a reorientation away from the animal senses of sniffing and pawing. Sight alone, enlarging the scope of attention, allows for a diversion of focus. Sight alone displaces excited humanoid attention away from its partner’s genitals and onto ‘the shape of the body as a whole’. Sight alone opens the possibility of a distanced, formal pleasure to which Freud was content to give the name beauty; this passage from the sexual to the visual he christened sublimation. ‘Sight alone’ was very much the province of gestalt psychology, which in those years was running fullback for Freud’s fancy speculative passing plays in this matter of a psychohistory of the senses. The animal can see, the psychologists wrote, but only man can ‘behold.’ Its connection to the ground always ties the animal’s seeing to touching, its vision predicated on the horizontal, on the physical intersection of viewer and viewed. Man’s upright posture, they argued, brings with it the possibility of distance, of contemplation, of domination.”
- 38.
Ibid., 319.
- 39.
He continues, “As with the aesthetic object, part of the definition of significance is the way it emerges from the diffuse surrounding field of probabilities. History, like life, works against the tendency of a situation to be increasingly determined by probability, against the ‘death instinct’ as the point toward which the levelling-off process converges. The outcomes and artefacts of history impress us as notions that one wouldn’t have believed any brain capable of. Pregnance is resistance to factors that efface, that promote diffusion; resistance especially to time, which nevertheless is suspected of being able to produce pregnance through the process of aging.”
- 40.
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 43.
- 41.
Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, 163.
- 42.
The epigraph reads in full: “They could not put the determining principle at sufficient distance from themselves; the whole pantheon was only a means by which the determining forces could be kept at a distance from man’s earthly being, so that human lungs could have air. – Kafka to Max Brod, August 7, 1920.”
- 43.
Frank W. Stevenson, “Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise: Serres and Deleuze in Kafka’s ‘Burrow,’” in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30.1 (2004), 3–36.
- 44.
Franz Kafka, “The Burrow” in Kafka: The Complete Short Stories, trans. Martin Secker (London: Vintage Classics, 2005), 357: “Yes, the more thought of the door itself, the end of the domestic protection, brings such feelings with it, yet it is the labyrinth leading up to it that torments me most of all. Sometimes I dream that I have reconstructed it, transformed it completely, quickly, in a night, with a giant’s strength, nobody having noticed, and now it is impregnable; the nights in which such dreams come to me are the sweetest I know, tears of joy and deliverance still glisten on my beard when I awaken.”
- 45.
Ibid., 360: “No, I do not watch over my own sleep, as I imagined; rather it is I who sleep, while the destroyer watches.”
- 46.
Ibid., 350: “I am not as strong as many others, and my enemies are countless; it could well happen that in flying from one enemy I might run into the jaws of another.”
- 47.
Ibid., 364: “Now the truth of the matter – and one has no eye for that in times of great peril, and only by a great effort even in times when danger is threatening – is that in reality the burrow does provide a considerable degree of security, but by no means enough, for is one ever free from anxieties inside it?”
- 48.
Ibid., 359.
- 49.
Ibid., 358–9.
- 50.
Kafka, “The Burrow,” 366.
- 51.
Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962), 321–2.
- 52.
Verne P. Snyder, “Kafka’s Burrow: A Speculative Analysis,” in Twentieth-Century Literature 2 (Vol. 27, 1981), 113–26.
Bibliography
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Bataille, George. The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1991.
Blumenberg, Hans. The Genesis of the Copernican World. Translated by Robert. M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987.
Blumenberg, Hans. “Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation.” In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michel Levin. Berkley: University of California Press, 1993.
Blumenberg, Hans. Théorie de l’inconceptualité. Translated by Marc de Launey. Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2017.
Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.
Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: on Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990.
Crary, Jonathan. Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000.
Debaise, Didier. Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible. Translated by Michael Halewoord. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Translated by Hugh Tolimson and Barbara Haberjamm. London: Athlone Press, 1984.
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. London: Routledge, 2001.
Derrida, Jacques. “Penser à ne pas voir.” In Penser à ne pas voir. Écrits sur les arts du visible 1979–2004. Paris: La Différence, 2013.
Girard, Louis. L’argument ontologique chez Saint Anselme et chez Hegel. Amsterdam: Éditions Rodopi, 1995.
Haraway, Donna. Crystals, Fabrics and Fields: Metaphors That Shapes Embryo. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2004.
Herder, Johann Gottfried. Sculpture. Edited and translated by Jason Gaiger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Ingold, Tim. Lines. A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2007.
Kafka, Franz. “The Burrow.” In Kafka: The Complete Short Stories. Translated by Martin Secker. London: Vintage, 2005.
Lacan, Jacques. Le moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1978.
Lapoujade, David. Deleuze, les mouvements aberrants. Paris: Les éditions de Minuit, 2014.
Lyotard, Jean-François. Discourse, Figure. Translated by Anthony Hudek and Mary Lydon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.
Politzer, Heinz. Franz Kafka. Parable and Paradox. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962.
Schumm, Marion. “À propos de Hans Blumenberg.” Cahiers philosophiques, 123, (2010).
Snyder, Verne P. “Kafka’s Burrow: A Speculative Analysis.” Twentieth-Century Literature 27.2 (1981).
Stevenson, Frank W, “Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise: Serres and Deleuze in Kafka’s “Burrow.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30.1 (2004).
Whistler, Daniel, “First Reflections on the Idea of a Speculative Pragmatics.” In Speculation, Heresy and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, edited by Matthew H. Farris and Joshua Ramey. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.
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Petteni, O. (2020). The Ideal of Optics and the Opacity of Life: Blumenberg on Modernity and Myth. In: Bielik-Robson, A., Whistler, D. (eds) Interrogating Modernity. Political Philosophy and Public Purpose. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43016-0_9
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