Dialogue and Universalism

Grzegorz Musiał’s late work is exemplary of the Modernist coupling of desire and death, which German Ritz linked to the way that homosexual sensibility has been encoded in Polish literary Modernism. This reading of Musiał is paradoxical at heart, as the writer’s literary output must also be ridden with tensions, because his clinging to a bygone aesthetic in order to render homosexual desire seems quaint in an era in which the idea of gay emancipation is widespread. Musiał’s literary alter ego, who is realized as a fictional character and as the speaker in his poems, is a hybrid of an erudite homosexual male equipped with the classical sensibility and a devout Catholic, whose appreciation and outright enjoyment of church ritual is almost camp. Musiał attempts to pit this literary dummy against the usually younger homosexual men who, like a mob of the living dead, populate the underground world of night clubs and anonymous sex.

This essay discusses certain problems raised by Edmund Husserl’s conception of meaning with regard to the analysis of aesthetic experience. By referring to Jacques Derrida’s critique of phenomenological idealism I show that the metaphor of “stratification”, adopted by Husserl in his “Ideas” to a problem of discursive expression, if applied to the analysis of a work of art i.e. painting, allows to avoid the objection of “metaphysics of presence” commonly raised towards the phenomenological method.To present the major issue from the perspective of artistic practice, I interpret Honore de Balzac’s short story “Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu”. In conclusion I show that aesthetic consciousness establishes an affective and receptive dimension that is no longer logocentric. This is the main reason why modern phenomenology should focus on the problem of aesthetic experience.

The paper concerns a form of experiencing time which is specific for haiku poetry. Haiku is an expression of the momentary glimpse of time. Haiku poetry treats the moment uninstrumentally, neither as a result of the past nor as a transition to future deeds. Seen this way, the moment arises on the stream of time as a unique, existential experience. It is my attempt to explain the phenomenon of this experience of “now” as I explore the metaphors of “background”, “figure” and “composition”.

In order to fully render the “ideal of female beauty”, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was planning a picture which he never executed as an individual canvass. Its aim was to show Venus as seen from various perspectives. It was to be achieved through the use of a number of mirrors surrounding Venus in a complete circle. This project implies that the idea standing behind Rossetti’s art was to reveal the woman as the creator both of herself, being a reflection of a concept created beforehand in her mind, as well as a creator of her own image, being a reflection of this “enhanced” her, in the mirrors. At the same time an infinite number of reflections, raises the power of feminine creation to a universal level and becomes a metaphor of her being the patron goddess of art as well. Thus a “universal” space where all different ladies “meet” is created. In his early paintings, Rossetti employs a combination of different “moments of perspective” that make pictorial space “universal”. His late works become separate “mirror perspectives” of Venus. As a collection, they constitute this set of images unattainable in one picture and extend this “universal space” onto the physical space surrounding them. Also, the manner in which these paintings are executed creates an impression of a “reflection” of the eyesight of each heroine outside of the canvass, returning back into the picture. Thus a new quality is given to the connection of the pictorial space within the frames and that surrounding it.

The changes in the subject matter of philosophical aesthetics are accompanied today by changes in evaluation, degradation of the traditional notion of beauty and also rejection of the old rigid division between beauty and ugliness, causing the dissolution of the category divides—in the process anti-value often becomes a value understood as a formal criteria. In the artistic critique the rejection of absolutism in favor of pluralism and diversity is accompanied by the functioning of the old categories in their new meanings. One form of such anti-values is represented by the phenomenon of camp. As a specific kind of a paradox-figure, camp unveils the relation between aesthetization and anaesthetization.The new aesthetics is a dual figure, demanding examination of its two contrary aspects: aesthetical and anaesthetical. Camp’s rejection of the existing hierarchy of values, its admiration of what is not obviously ugly rather than of what is definitely not beautiful, brings this phenomenon close to Wolfgang Welch’s trend of anaesthetics. In many ways camp appears to be a theoretical model of modern identity as well as a specific type of a sophisticated aesthetic game.