musical understandings and other essays on the philosophy of music by davies, stephen

Book Reviews

davies, stephen. Musical Understandings and OtherEssays on the Philosophy of Music. Oxford Uni-versity Press, 2011, 221 pp., $75.00 cloth.

This volume collects Stephen Davies’s essays on thephilosophy of music, originally published since 2001in eight different edited volumes and seven journalarticles, brought together here with one previouslyunpublished chapter. Readers familiar with Davies’swork will find the author ruminating on many ofhis favorite topics, such as the ontology of musicalworks, the authenticity of performances, musical un-derstanding, and, of course, music’s emotional ex-pressivity. Despite the many finesses provided in theindividual chapters to these and other related top-ics, a fair general observation might be that since hisprevious collection of music-related essays (Themesin the Philosophy of Music, Oxford University Press,2003), Davies has primarily concentrated on elab-orating his earlier positions rather than on break-ing entirely new philosophical ground. For example,emotional expressivity is explained in these pageswith reference to the same basic ingredients thatreaders of the author’s previous work should remem-ber: emphasis on similarities of appearance betweenmusic and human bodily movement, opposition tohypothetical personae in the music, and belief inemotional contagion from music to listener, amongthe more prominent ones.

In the centerpiece chapter of the book, “Musi-cal Understandings,” Davies’s discussion concerninglisteners’ musical understanding is focused on theirability to detect repeated occurrences of similar mu-sical items (for example, themes), appreciate androughly predict the course of the music, detect per-formance errors, and carry out other such tasks thatdo not necessitate expert musical knowledge. Indeed,in Davies’s writing on musical understanding, “rec-ognizing repeats” tends to assume a similarly pivotalrole as “recalling the gait or carriage of the humanbody” has done in his theorizing on musical expres-sivity. The result of such an emphasis is that Davies

largely comes to judge experienced listeners’ musi-cal competence by their ability to appropriately re-fer to bits of heard music using “folk-musicological”terms and by their ability to entertain correct propo-sitions concerning the relationships of the items re-ferred to. Consequently, it is taken to be possiblefor a listener to attain even high levels of musicalunderstanding without possessing music-theoreticalconcepts (for a critical discussion of this view, seemy “Levels and Kinds of Listeners’ Musical Under-standing,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 48 [2008]:315–337). Perhaps a bit carelessly, Davies also claimsthat all that he has said about the listener should ap-ply to the performer as well, in the latter’s capacityas a listener (p. 105). This slightly overlooks the veryreal possibility that musicians might enhance theirunderstanding of what they hear their co-performersplay by learning to apply music-theoretical knowl-edge to it (for example, through the recognition ofpitches by name and function in a tonal context).

Nevertheless, Davies’s main discussion of per-formers’ musical understanding concerns what theyshould understand in order to achieve appropriateperformance interpretations of musical works. Muchof the material in this section is not particularlysurprising: we are told that the performer shouldknow what instrumentation practices are required,she should know the notational rules, she should suf-ficiently follow the composer’s instructions to makethe work recognizable, and so on. Reading Davies’stext here, as in some other parts of the present col-lection, might nonetheless leave the reader a bit un-certain about the theoretical goals the author hasin mind. At times, the text reads as a kind of fairlyneutral music appreciation package, targeted to non-musicians hoping to peek behind the scenes to seewhat kinds of knowledge may go into a musical per-formance. At other times, however, Davies also of-fers his own aesthetic ideals as if the goal were topropagate a specific kind of music-making practiceor to guide aspiring performers. For instance, we readthat in a concert, the “first piece should energize the

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70:3 Summer 2012c© 2012 The American Society for Aesthetics

316 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

audience” (p. 115), and that a performer “would dowell to recognize her boundaries and to pursue onlythose interpretations she has the ability to realizesuccessfully” (p. 114). These claims sound like an in-strumental teacher’s practical pieces of advice, but isit not wholly conceivable that another teacher mightencourage a student to begin a concert program witha different dynamic trajectory in mind, or to pursuemore daring interpretations involving risks of fail-ure? Normative statements of aesthetic preferencemight usefully illuminate existing practices when ar-ticulated from the authoritative position of an estab-lished performer, but as presented without argumentin a philosopher’s text they only raise questions.

For Davies, musical performance is primarily per-formance of written musical works. Accordingly, hecounts among the league of philosophers for whommusical ontology, too, is primarily concerned withmusical works as we know them from Western artmusic of the common practice period. In the presentvolume, one of the key chapters in this regard is “Mu-sical Colors and Timbral Sonicism.” Here, Daviesargues against Julian Dodd’s (Works of Music: AnEssay in Ontology, Oxford University Press, 2007)timbral sonicism, according to which a work’s norma-tive properties comprise only acoustic properties butno performance-means properties. In brief, whereasDodd takes musical timbre to be a property of sound,Davies takes it to be a property of the musical in-strument from which the sound issues. The signifi-cance of this to the discussion of musical works isthat in counting timbre among the constitutive prop-erties of a work, one should accept a performanceas an instance of this work simply based on how itsounds, whereas Davies would require that it has ac-tually been produced by the appropriate instrumentsas designated by the composer (and not, say, by asynthesizer).

In arguing against Dodd’s “abstract metaphysicsin the formalist mode,” Davies characterizes his ownapproach as “the adoption of a metaphysics that is ap-propriately informed by relevant data from social andmusical history” (p. 174). Hence, he allows musicalworks to assume a certain degree of cultural flexibil-ity, suggesting that “the ontological nature of musicalworks is mutable, being responsive to changes in thesocio-musical environment” (p. 174). It is relevant toremember that any such approach nevertheless re-quires judgment concerning which sociocultural phe-nomena are relevant enough to feed into the onto-logical nature of the entities in question. Davies, onhis part, dismisses contemporary “disembodied” lis-tening of music via CDs or MP3 files as “an artifactof contemporary culture” (p. 167) that consequentlycannot help substantiate Dodd’s timbral sonicism. Itshould be clear that the overall position of lettingsocial history inform ontology might here equally

well have recommended the conclusion that thesechanges in the listening habits have actually affectedthe nature of musical works in potentially relaxingthe requirements for “faithful” instrumental produc-tion.

Once we open the door to socially informed musi-cal ontology, I doubt that there is only one directionto take. For instance, one might plausibly adopt anapproach in which the musical work’s nature wouldnot only be determined by the normative proper-ties it has vis-a-vis a properly formed performance,but rather by the broader variety of humanly signif-icant activities that it supports. These might include,as equally relevant aspects of the work’s existence,forms of rehearsal in which musicians may be deal-ing with the work in an “inappropriate” instrumen-tation and pitch content (as when the opera singercertainly believes herself to be dealing with the workdespite the fact that her accompaniment consists inthe repetiteur’s piano reduction). These might alsoinclude the ever more salient forms of global musi-cal hybridization in which perhaps even a majorityof musical works do not anymore quite exemplifythe kinds of requirements for correct performancethat the argument between Davies and Dodd is con-cerned with. In a wider perspective, it now seemsonly one choice among other possible ones that theproject of socioculturally informed ontology of musicwould be grounded in the cultural experience of theconcertgoer or the critic whose main contact with thework is in hearing fully formed live performances of200-year-old works and judging such performancesfor their faithfulness to the score or the authenticityof the performance means.

There would not be much point in merely argu-ing that playing the traditional game of musical on-tology within the safe rink of classical music fromthe concertgoer perspective has lost some of its rel-evance in the contemporary world. The acuity of aphilosophical analysis should not be judged by thecontemporary social relevance of the phenomenonanalyzed. The point that I would hope to make,though, is that in the beginning of twenty-first cen-tury it has surely become increasingly difficult toplay the game of musical ontology without conced-ing, as Davies appropriately does, the reliance ofthis project on socioculturally contingent decisions.If so, the game may easily come to present the out-ward appearance of a classificatory project in whichshifting musical practices suggest drawing conceptualdistinctions between kinds of items that correspondto distinct cultural attitudes or behaviors. But nowwe may also remember that musicologists have tra-ditionally presented classificatory schemes concern-ing types of musical works, discussed the rigidityof composers’ performance directions, and offeredtheir well-informed opinions concerning differences

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between what is a new work and what is an arrange-ment or transcription of a previously existing one.The question that is not easy to answer on the ba-sis of Davies’s treatment of similar matters is what,if anything, is gained by talking about the “nature”of musical works in discussions that could well becouched in terms of what conceptual distinctions suit-ably reflect the practical distinctions drawn in a givenmusical culture, at a given time. In the absence of aclear methodological difference, I would challengeDavies to articulate what, if anything, differentiateshis approach from sociohistorically informed musi-cology. Surely it is not just the rhetorical trick bag ofa professional philosopher that elevates what couldbroadly be characterized as musicological ponder-ings to a metaphysics?

Davies is one of the philosophers of music who hasbeen willing to let empirical considerations inform histheorizing. Especially references to music psychologyare frequently found in these essays. This is certainlya healthy and laudable feature in Davies’s work, butit may also give rise to questions about argumentativestrategy, not quite unlike the ones asked above withreference to the relationship between the philosophyof music and musicology. For instance, Davies’s con-clusions concerning the range of emotional types thatmusic is capable of expressing (p. 11) or the mentalrepresentation of melodies (pp. 155–159) are reallynot so far from what one would learn in the actualempirical literature that he is quoting. This may leadone to wonder how the philosopher’s contributionmight be expected to build on what the psychologyof music already has to offer. The distinction betweenthese two disciplines cannot merely lie in the fact thatphilosophers should be “interested in what is inter-subjective, and thereby generalizable or even univer-salizable, about our connection to music” (p. 139),because such interests can also be pursued in an em-pirical fashion.

Another danger for the philosopher of music, how-ever, is in taking psychological theories for grantedwithout the psychologist’s obligation to subject themto empirically based evaluation with respect to thetheoretical alternatives available. Davies’s argumentagainst Dodd’s timbral sonicism, for instance, ap-pears to rely on an acceptance of recent musicalapplications of Gibsonian ecological psychology aswarranting the conclusion that “we generally expe-rience not the qualities of the sound we are sensingbut the physical properties of its source” (p. 171).What is here provided as a conclusion backed by em-pirical research, however, comes alarmingly close tohow one might phrase the main theoretical premiseof ecological psychology. Furthermore, how are weto understand such appeals to a form of psychol-ogy generally taken to oppose the information-processing views of mainstream cognitive psychology

when the author elsewhere takes for granted a tradi-tional information-processing approach, replete withits stored representations, rules, frames, and gram-mars (p. 155)? Such problems should not be so muchtaken as specific to the essays reviewed herein butrather more generally as challenges to future workin the area. Given an approach relying on empiri-cal research, the philosophy of music cannot regainits distinction against the maturing science of mu-sic psychology except by articulating its views withincoherently expressed theories of the human mind.However the remaining problems are to be resolved,Davies surely has to be taken into account as one ofthe philosophers willing to negotiate the relationshipof his discipline to the empirical sciences of music.

ERKKI HUOVINENSchool of MusicUniversity of Minnesota

pippin, robert. Hollywood Westerns and AmericanMyth: The Importance of Howard Hawks andJohn Ford for Political Philosophy. Yale Univer-sity Press, 2011, 208 pp., 14 color + 52 b&w illus.,$35.00 cloth, $23.00 paper.

The American Western has not fared well in the cul-tural criticism of the last decades. For many, it has be-come exhibit number one of all that is unattractive inAmerica’s political tradition: its violence, its racism,and its sexism. Robert Pippin’s compelling new bookmakes a strong case against such dismissals, as partof a larger argument for the importance of film topolitical philosophy generally. If political philosophyis about the conditions of legitimate political author-ity, its reflections must engage the shared politicalexperiences that shape what communities will acceptor reject as relevant to them and binding on them.Pippin speaks of this as their “political psychology”and claims that grasping this psychology means at-tending to our chief cultural artifacts: our great liter-ature, and, for Americans, our great films. But whythe Western? Because alongside, or perhaps in oppo-sition to, the reactionary elements, the great Westernsraise basic questions about who Americans are as apeople. So we ignore the Western at the cost of ignor-ing ourselves. By contrast, Pippin argues for using theWestern as a resource for the ongoing self-reflectionthat is a condition of vibrant political community.

A central term of Pippin’s is ‘myth,’ which he usesboth functionally and thematically. As Northrop Fryeemployed the term, myths are recurring narrativetypes that are the bearers of a culture’s experience;what some see as its trucking in stereotypes and theformulaic is really the Western’s serving that role.


The thematic elements pertain to what myths areabout, typically the founding or refounding of po-litical communities, in Pippin’s view. Andre Bazinonce argued that the Western is about law and polit-ical authority, especially the problems posed by theAmerican Civil War, which it raises to the status ofmyth: the Civil War as our Trojan War, the migrationwest as our Odyssey. Pippin puts this in the languageof ‘foundings’: the Civil War itself was the refoundingof the constitutional order, a new birth of freedom, inthe words of Lincoln. And the westward expansionthat followed founded our “modern bourgeois, lawabiding, property owning, market economy” (p. 20).The one gave us our modern legal culture, the otherour modern capitalist economy; both were productsof America’s bloodiest conflict. America fell apart in1860, and it can sometimes seem as if it never “putitself back together again,” he writes (p. 63). The clas-sical Western draws focus to this fact, he continues,sometimes to the point of implying that the Civil Waritself was a failure.

This is the framework with which he developsthe three extended readings of films that constitutethe bulk of his book: two films by John Ford, TheSearchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot LibertyValance (1962), and Red River (1948) by HowardHawks. Of these, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valancemost clearly develops the theme of founding in itsclassic form, the founding of a city, where that found-ing is linked with a primal murder that provides atragic undertone to the story. Cities and murder havebeen linked since the time of Cain, the first founderof cities; they are linked in a film that Pippin mighthave said much more about, High Noon (Zinnemann,1952), whose marshal, Will Kane, must depart at theend much like James Stewart’s Ranse Stoddard in theFord film. The other two films are less about found-ings than transitions, and Pippin folds them underthe theme of founding the new, post–Civil War eco-nomic order. Here, the problem is one of politicalpsychology as he has defined it, specifically the shift,hence, shock, involved in moving from an older ethicof macho male individualism to a newer, more co-operative ethic of commerce, invariably conceivedas more feminine. John Wayne’s function in each ofthese films is to represent the earlier, doomed ethic.In each of these films, he is posed against and ul-timately replaced by a more feminine figure: JamesStewart in Liberty Valance, Montgomery Clift in RedRiver, and, if a bit less dramatically, Jeffrey Hunter inThe Searchers. As Pippin reads them, though, thesetales are not simple ones of progress. Certainly Lib-erty Valance is anything but, and Pippin is quite harshin posing the question of whether the new forms ofauthority exemplified in Red River by the triumph ofClift over Wayne are just more hidden and efficientforms of ruthlessness.

Of the three major films discussed, I foundPippin’s treatment of The Searchers far and away themost interesting. His account of Liberty Valance ben-efits enormously by placing it in relation to the otherfilms and to the larger project of the Western, butotherwise it does not add significantly to the existingliterature. My appreciation of his Red River chapteris no doubt hampered by my low opinion of the film,probably a product of the fact that I have never seenit on a large screen. The Searchers is the cinema’sMoby Dick, and Pippin’s discussion does justice toits greatness. His remarks on the central questionposed by the story—John Wayne’s character Ethan’sultimate intentions with respect to Natalie Wood’scharacter Debbie—are the best that I have seen inpart because they evidence a deep understanding ofthe interactions between event and character. Evenmore interesting, perhaps, is the attention on JohnWayne himself, whose figure looms over Pippin’s en-tire book. For all the Western’s thematic richness, itis hard to imagine it becoming what it was withoutthe presence of John Wayne, whose career coincidedwith the dominance of the genre. Pippin, like most,structures his discussion around directors, but if everthere was a case for the dominance of an actor in agenre it is this, and it is fitting that Wayne achievedhis greatest performance playing an enigma. Waynewas regarded by many in the Hollywood communityas one of the stupidest men they had ever met, butthis did not prevent him from becoming an actor ofgreat nuance and intelligence of the type that Pippindetails in the darker moments of The Searchers.

Pippin is right to stay away from any schematicjudgments on the Western. More than any other ma-jor genre, the Western is best approached as the siteof an argument; this is undoubtedly why people whotruly care about these films can come to such aston-ishingly different judgments about whether they areprogressive or reactionary. By contrast, the great warfilms seem to have a thematic flatness to them. Thatsaid, Pippin might be faulted for staying a bit toofar away from some of the issues that others haveregarded as central, and obnoxious, about the West-ern. One of these is the issue of gender, surprisingbecause the contrast of masculine and feminine is sopresent in much of his analysis. Pippin is at his beston this issue in the discussion of Stagecoach (Ford,1939) that preludes the book as a whole, exploring thekey bond between John Wayne’s Ringo and ClaireTrevor’s Dallas. He is weakest in trying to defendthe feminine intervention in the silly ending of RedRiver, an ending that almost everyone involved inthe film was unhappy with. Attention to the femalecharacters, especially in Liberty Valance, might havebrought out another element in the tragic undertoneto these films, which is the element of grief. VeraMiles’s character Hallie’s grief all but frames that

Book Reviews 319

film; like Antigone, she arrives to conduct a properburial, but, also like Antigone, her fate at the end is tobe sacrificed for the larger purpose of politics. A sadfeature of American politics is its general inability todeal with grief; this is the starting point, I think, inaddressing the post–Civil War era, which is the con-cern of the classic Western. This avoidance of grief isenacted in the Western’s infantalization of its femalecharacters, as in the case of Hallie, who, alone of themajor characters, and for some inexplicable reason,has never learned to read.

The other issue needing more addressing is vio-lence, specifically violence as the condition of po-litical community. For Pippin, the question of com-munity is never far from the Western’s concerns,starting with its enactment in Stagecoach, where peo-ple of vastly different backgrounds, orientations, andinclinations must figure out how to get along to-gether. Pippin states: “can such a collection of people,without much common tradition or history, withoutmuch of what had been seen as the social condi-tions of nationhood, become in some way or othera unity capable of something greater than the sum ofits parts?” (p. 4). This is one way of posing the ques-tion of American democracy, and it was certainly thequestion posed after the Civil War. How do Northand South, black and white, European Americansand Native Americans learn to live together? The an-swer, of course, is that they did so only incompletely, afact that the Western well enacts. African Americanswere basically returned to a state of quasi-slaveryconjoined with political invisibility; hence, the dom-inant form of cinema simply ignores them. NativeAmericans were slaughtered: the racist element ofthe art form; but equally importantly, this served theessential function that others played in the twenti-eth century: the object of common hatred, the threatof which would serve to transcend all other politicaldifferences. Attention to this theme in the Westernonly buttresses the claims that Pippin makes for it,most importantly their ability to problematize thevery things they portray. In Stagecoach, the commu-nity lasts only as long as the group is under attack;when the threat goes away, the individuals in the com-munity all go their separate ways. In Liberty Valanceand The Searchers, the bonds are created by a com-mon threat; with the end of the threat, the bondsunravel.

The ambiguity of the Western itself makes for acertain instability in Pippin’s argument. He insiststhat the Western presents “in the mythical form”dimensions of an American self-understanding, orpolitical psychology, that discussions of legitimacymust engage. At other times, he claims that thegreatest Westerns exemplify an ironic “mythologicalmodernism,” that is, a debunking of the traditionalmyths that reveals their “growing irrelevance” to our

political self-image. But surely these pull in differentdirections: the Western’s myths as revealing who weare, the Western’s myths as irrelevant to who we arebecoming. For me, this occasions the hope that Pippinwill develop his views at greater length and thorough-ness than he does so here. This book began as a setof lectures, with the usual strengths and weaknesses.It speaks to the reader in a confident and straight-forward tone, but there are a bit too many claims,some of them large ones, than can be developed in aspace like this. What we really have is an entirely newprogram for linking political philosophy in popularculture, of which this is an exciting first step.

CHEYNEY RYANDepartment of PoliticsUniversity of Oxford

carroll, noel and john gibson, eds. Narrative, Emo-tion, and Insight. Pennsylvania State UniversityPress, 2011, 198 pp., $64.95 cloth.

This book is a collection of nine essays inspired by aconference of the same name, held at the Free Libraryof Philadelphia in 2006. The focus is on narrative andhow the answers to questions about fiction, partic-ularly those related to insight and emotion, changewhen asked of narrative instead. The differences aremost obvious and gratifying in John Gibson’s andDerek Matravers’s respective papers, though the con-clusions reached may be the result of the authors’ per-spicacity rather than the switch in focus. All the es-says are nonetheless original and thought-provokingcontributions to the philosophical literature onnarrative.

Gibson’s introduction defines the subject of thecollection, the everyday understanding of narrativeas the representation or presentation of stories, andprovides a convenient summary of each paper. This isfollowed by the late Peter Goldie’s essay, “Life, Fic-tion, and Narrative,” which identifies narratives asstories that are coherent, meaningful, and emotion-ally important. His aim is to assess the value of think-ing about our lives through narrative by comparingthe dangers with the benefits. The former are the“fictionalizing tendencies” (p. 8) of narrative: plot-ting our lives, finding agency where there is none, thedesire for closure, and regarding our own characterin terms of genre. Goldie’s presentation of the psy-chological benefits is regrettably restricted to a sin-gle paragraph, where he notes that narratives helpus deal with contingency and the bleakness of a sci-entific world without meaning. There is no explicitconclusion, but the implication is that as long as weare aware of the fictionalizing tendencies, narrativethinking serves a useful function.


The next two essays both address an issue in phi-losophy of film: the question of whether a workof film can be a work of philosophy. Berys Gaut’s“Telling Stories” examines the complexity of thenarrative structure of Memento (Christopher Nolan,2000), and discriminates between narrative (what ispresented) and narration (how it is presented), remi-niscent of the content–form dichotomy. He highlightsthe significance of the Easter Egg on the DVD, aspecial feature that allows viewers to watch the filmscenes in chronological order. While complex narra-tive structures are common to the art form, the EasterEgg is unique to Memento. Gaut claims that the nar-rative in both versions is the same (it is the samestory), and that the differences in the artistic proper-ties are thus differences in the narration. By drawingattention to this distinction, he shows how the filmforces us into the situation of the protagonist, whohas anterograde amnesia, and augments the viewer’simaginative identification. Gaut’s main point is thatthe film not only asserts three claims about the world,but also provides experiential or narrative confirma-tion of the unreliability of memory, the tendency tofictionalize (to use Goldie’s term), and the necessityof memory for understanding. This evidence demon-strates how “narration can position viewers both cog-nitively and emotionally, and how doing so can teachthem things of some importance about the actualworld” (p. 42). Noel Carroll’s essay, “PhilosophicalInsight, Emotion, and Popular Fiction,” advances thecase for Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) doingphilosophy. He provides a compelling critique of thefilm and then examines three general objections toits doing philosophy: the no-argument argument, thebanality argument, and the excessive elaboration ar-gument. While Carroll sees off each in turn, his con-clusion, that Sunset Boulevard can do popular phi-losophy, is disappointing. There seems little doubtthat film can do popular philosophy and even conti-nental philosophy, as Stephen Mulhall has noted ofBlade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) with reference toNietzsche and Heidegger (On Film [Routledge,2002], pp. 41–49). The more interesting question iswhether film can do analytic philosophy, and Gautseems to have indicated the direction future inquirymight take.

Gibson begins “Thick Narratives” by identifyingliterary content with ethical significance, and thenreframes the familiar moralist–autonomist questionof whether a moral defect can be an aesthetic defectas the puzzle of why we value morally vicious worksof literature (for example, T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semiticpoetry). He distinguishes between a story and a nar-rative, associating the former with content and thelatter with form, the significance being that the storycan be transformed by the way it is narrated. Theterm ‘thick narrative’ draws on Gilbert Ryle’s con-

ception of thick and thin descriptions, and thick nar-ratives “have as their goal the articulation of a kindof content that is clearly ethical, but that has very lit-tle to do with the specification of duties, obligations,or methods for determining the moral worth of pos-sible courses of action” (p. 76). A further distinctionis made between ethical life and moral philosophy,where the latter prescribes courses of action and theformer describes human cultural practices. By beingethical rather than moral, thick narratives can pro-vide an insight into ethical values without promotinga particular morality. Gibson thus not only answersthe initial question in his paper but also shows thatthe question of the value of literature is more pro-found than the current debate suggests.

The next four essays are all concerned with mean-ing in human life, and the first two deal with self-narratives. In “Narrative, Emotions, and Autonomy,”Amy Mullin defines meta-affective skills as thosethat enable us to recognize our own emotional re-sponses and reflect upon the guidance they pro-vide. The paper complements Gibson’s by develop-ing his conception of thick narratives (though Mullindoes not employ the term). She argues that narra-tives increase our personal autonomy by refining ourmeta-affective skills and that the features of narra-tives most likely to do this are thick, are focusedon purposiveness and emotion in characters, andinvolve imaginings that have the potential to influ-ence action in readers. The rest of the essay demon-strates the operation of this theory by referenceto three novels. In “Narrative Rehearsal, Expres-sion, and Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied II,’” RichardEldridge examines six options for achieving “con-tinuing, self-determining orientation for human sub-jects in post-Kantian modernity” (p. 116). He favorsHolderlin’s lyrical embodiment of modulation andexplores the similarities with Goethe’s poetology be-fore examining three theories of artistic expression inorder to determine how literature can probe and re-solve problematic emotions. Eldridge maintains thatWordsworth integrates all three of these and offershis own definition of art as a focus for thought, emo-tion, and the imagination. He then presents a detailedliterary analysis of the poem in the title, which drawson Theodor Adorno’s interpretation and demon-strates how it provides a continuing, self-determiningorientation by facilitating the full exercise of humanattention and expression.

Aaron Smuts turns to the art form of song in“Rubber Ring,” asking why we listen to sad songswhen they appear to make us feel worse. He be-gins by establishing a paradigm for song, describes asad song as one intended to arouse sadness in listen-ers, and identifies a feature of sad songs as typicallypossessing thin narratives (in Gibson’s terminology).This characteristic accounts for the popularity of the

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genre, as it facilitates the personalization of contentby a very wide audience. Smuts argues convincinglythat the experience of listening to these songs hasconstitutive value and that we do not seek cathar-sis but an intensification of the painful emotion inorder to better understand what is significant to us.Susan Feagin examines “Discovery Plots in Tragedy,”classifying the subcategory in terms of its two cru-cial features: plots with unusual circumstances andthe protagonist as the key to unlocking the mystery.These two elements allow tragedies with discoveryplots to be relevant not just to their unique time andplace, but also to a general audience. Feagin providesan in-depth analysis of discovery (“enlightenment”in Arthur Miller’s terms [p. 170]) in tragedy, the va-rieties of unusual circumstances in discovery plots,and the essential role of the protagonist. This is fol-lowed by a detailed critique of Scorched by WajdiMouawad. Feagin maintains that the play serves asconfirmation of “the meaningfulness of tragic discov-ery” (p. 171) as opposed to the absurd freedom andradical contingency proposed by Sartre and other ex-istentialist philosophers. Unfortunately, this contrastis not developed further.

Derek Matravers offers a fresh look at an old prob-lem in “Imagination, Fiction, and Documentary.” Hebegins with the familiar distinction between imagi-nation (or imaginary belief) and belief, the sense inwhich I am not motivated to assist the protagonist ina fictional film or call for an ambulance when he iswounded. This is not, Matravers maintains, becauseI am watching fiction, but because the film is a repre-sentation. The imagination is employed in both typesof representations, fictional and documentary, and Iam no more motivated to assist a fictional protago-nist than I am to assist a real person in distress on atelevised news broadcast. This is because there is noconfrontation relation: I am in the presence of neitherthe protagonist nor the people in the news. Matraversnotes that representation relations may motivate in adifferent way. Reading George Orwell’s 1984 causesme to oppose totalitarianism rather than assist Win-ston Smith, and this is the result of the novel beinga representation rather than a fiction. The choice isnot therefore between imagination or belief becausethere are actually two questions at stake. The firstis whether I have an imaginative engagement witha narrative, be it 1984 or William Prescott’s Historyof the Conquest of Peru; the second is whether thatnarrative is fictional or not. This dual distinction ishighly significant and casts doubt on some of the pre-vious work of Colin Radford, Kendall Walton, AaronMeskin, Jonathan Weinberg, and Gregory Currie.Like Gibson, Matravers provides a penetrating per-spective on a contemporary debate in philosophy.

As a final observation, it is interesting to note theextent to which so many essays in this collection rely

upon a critical analysis of a specific narrative in sup-port of either inductive or deductive argument. Thefeature may, however, be a result of similarity in stylesrather than the shared subject matter. In conclusion,the book is a rewarding read that will be useful tothose working in philosophy of the self, personalitypsychology, and ethics in addition to aesthetics andphilosophy of art.

RAFE McGREGORDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of York

thomson, iain d. Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity.Cambridge University Press, 2011, xix + 245 pp.,6 b&w illus., $27.99 paper.

Out in the high desert of New Mexico, the coyoterefuses to acknowledge our attempts to draw lines inthe sand and happily traverses our borders withouta care in the world for human territorial claims. Asa self-professed philosophical coyote, Iain Thomsonlikewise resists any attempt to place him on eitherside of the analytic–continental divide, preferring in-stead to steal back and forth between these rivalcamps, much to the chagrin of the dogmatic (an-alytic) and ideological (continental) border guards.Had Thomson been writing books like this thirtyyears ago, I suspect that we philosophers would allbe a bit more coyote-like than we are today. Al-though Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity is not thefirst clearly written, accessible study of Heidegger,or even Heidegger’s philosophy of art, it is certainlyabout the best.

That said, Thomson’s book goes well beyond Hei-degger’s philosophy of art, veering off into regionsof popular culture that have typically been ignored,if not outright disdained, by the “old guard” ofHeidegger scholarship. For example, in the volu-minous footnotes, which read like exuberantly di-gressive scholia, references can be found to Cherand Celan, Jay-Z and Joyce. Thomson’s interests arewide-ranging and infectious, and, to his credit, namesare not simply dropped as self-aggrandizing demon-strations of pop-cultural “hipness,” but instead to il-lustrate how significant philosophical issues play outbefore our eyes and ears in mainstream North Amer-ican life. Indeed, Thomson’s hermeneutical prowessenables him to shuttle back and forth between high-brow philosophy and lowbrow culture (Nietzsche andcomic books, for instance) without treating his sub-ject matter with either unwanted reverence or con-descension, as a good coyote should.

The book is organized into seven chapters, the fi-nal four of which are somewhat disparate in content


and based on earlier published articles. The secondand third chapters, however, make up the central coreof the book and will be of greatest interest to thoseworking on Heidegger and his notoriously difficultphilosophy of art. To begin with, however, Thomsonsituates his discussion of Heidegger’s philosophy ofart within the broader horizon of Heidegger’s cri-tique of ontotheology, the “two-chambered heart ofWestern metaphysics” (p. 7). Building on the themesof his first book, Heidegger on Ontotheology: Tech-nology and the Politics of Education (Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2005), Thomson explains that ontothe-ology is the interpretive key to understanding howmetaphysics, by determining what it means for any-thing to be, is able to “ground” an age, accountingfor how the world (including ourselves) becomes in-telligible. This is Heidegger’s “ontological holism”thesis. However, because our basic sense of reality,of what “is-ness” is, undergoes change, Heideggeris also advancing a thesis Thomson calls “ontologi-cal historicity.” But since the various ontotheologiesundergirding the different periods of Western meta-physics sustain and preserve a historical community’sunderstanding of “what and how entities are” (p. 9),this change is not a constant flux. Accordingly, Hei-degger is also committed to the “ontological epochal-ity” thesis, which Thomson glosses as the view that“humanity’s changing sense of reality congeals intoa series of relatively distinct and unified historical‘epochs’” (p. 8), like the pre-Socratic or medieval pe-riods of Western history. The catch, of course, is thatfrom within any one of these “constellations of intel-ligibility” (p. 9), we are blind to other ways in whichreality can be revealed to us. Being as such is the inex-haustible “source” of all intelligibility, but in any oneepoch, the metaphysics of the age will “hold back”access to different possibilities of understanding ourworld and ourselves.

So what exactly is “ontotheology,” and how doesit work behind the scenes to organize metaphysicsinto a series of ontohistorical epochs? Very basically,ontotheology renders our world intelligible by ar-ticulating an ontology, as Thales did, specifying thecommon element of all things, and also a theology, asAnaximander did, positing an ultimate source, andmost perfect expression, of everything that is. SincePlato, who combined both ontological and theo-logical viewpoints in his theory of forms, West-ern metaphysicians up to and including Nietzschehave been busy formulating different ontotheo-logical interpretations of being, even after meta-physics officially became problematic in the wakeof Kant’s critical philosophy. For instance, despitehis full-throated complaints about Platonism, Nietz-sche himself was busy unwittingly furnishing an on-tological interpretation of what beings are (will-to-power), and how they achieve their highest,

thus theological, expression and justification (eter-nal recurrence). As Thomson rightly notes,Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche is both reductiveand insightful, but it is the significance that Heideg-ger assigns to Nietzsche’s ontotheological interpre-tation of being as eternally recurring will-to-powerthat becomes so central to his understanding of ourlate-modern epoch.

The problem, for Heidegger, is that if all entitiesare reduced to “mere forces coming together andbreaking apart with no end beyond this continualself-overcoming” (p. 19), then Nietzsche’s ontotheo-logical interpretation of being will dangerously trans-form our relationship to all entities, including humanbeings. In our late-modern age, the subject–object di-chotomy of the early modern period is taken over bythis technological determination of reality, accordingto which all things and people are viewed as “stand-ing reserve,” mere resources deployed for continualexploitation and optimization. While Thomson laysout this rather familiar story with great clarity and in-sight, it is his discussion of Heidegger’s theory of art,the great “saving power” for our destitute age, whichparticularly marks Heidegger, Art, and Postmoder-nity as such a significant contribution to Heideggerscholarship.

According to Thomson, Heidegger’s understand-ing of art is “populist but with revolutionary aspira-tions” (p. 42). Great artworks do their work in thebackground of our world, “selectively reinforcing anhistorical community’s implicit sense of what is andwhat matters” (p. 43). Consequently, the communitywill begin to make sense of itself, its implicit ontol-ogy and ethics, in response to the work of art. If thisseems grandiose, Heidegger certainly does not thinkthat all artworks perform this sort of function. Whilethe Greek temple was “world-disclosing” in this way,other sorts of artworks, like van Gogh paintings, areimportant because they help us to see how art itselfworks, or could work, once we have freed ourselvesfrom the grip of modern aesthetics.

Heidegger’s critique of aesthetics is generally notwell understood, but Thomson is an exceptionalguide through the thickets of some very dense texts,especially “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Ac-cording to Thomson, the aesthetic approach viewsartworks as special sorts of objects, which have thecapacity to intensify our subjective, “lived experi-ences.” Artworks are also understood as the innerexpressions of the artists who created them. Butwhat is so wrong with this? Does this not definehow we moderns encounter artworks in museums,galleries, and concert halls? Heidegger’s take is thatthe aesthetic approach is harmful because it bothreflects and reinforces the subjectivism of modernlife, according to which “the integral entwinement ofself and world” (p. 53) is covered over. Aesthetics,

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therefore, is itself an artifact, and an intensifier, ofour post-Cartesian experience of objects that havebeen split off from our inner selves. It is for this rea-son that Heidegger tries to show us how this aestheticexperience can be, as Thomson shows, transcendedfrom within.

While other scholars (Hubert Dreyfus, for in-stance) have focused on Heidegger’s discussion ofthe Greek temple in “Origin,” Thomson makes apersuasive case that the phenomenological interpre-tation of van Gogh’s 1886 painting, A Pair of Shoes,is the more important section of this text preciselybecause it performs, before our eyes, the imma-nent transcendence of aesthetic experience. Indeed,Thomson spells out in great detail how Heidegger’sinterpretation of the painting “shows us its mean-ing is neither located entirely in the object standingover against us nor simply projected by our subjec-tivity onto an inherently meaningless work; instead,the work’s meaning must be inconspicuously accom-plished in our own implicitly dynamic engagementwith the work” (p. 98). While I cannot do justice toThomson’s lengthy analysis here, his interpretationdoes help resolve some long-standing controversieswithin Heidegger scholarship (about what Heideggermeant by “the nothing,” for instance), while also de-flating the charges leveled against Heidegger himselfby Meyer Schapiro.

This famous confrontation between philosopherand art historian began when Schapiro chargedHeidegger not only with mixing together several dif-ferent van Gogh paintings, but more importantly, at-tributing to a female farmer a pair of shoes that ac-tually belonged to van Gogh himself. According toSchapiro, this amateurish blunder opened the way forHeidegger to engage in some politically tainted freeassociations, self-deceptively projecting them backonto the canvas, and thus unwittingly backslidinginto the very aesthetic viewpoint he was attempt-ing to overcome. While Thomson (mostly) concedesSchapiro’s factual claims about A Pair of Shoes, heeffectively argues that these seemingly devastatingerrors do not undermine Heidegger’s phenomeno-logical interpretation of the painting. What is crucial,according to Thomson, is noticing how the “dynamic‘nothing’ in the background of the painting” helpsus to encounter the “earth/world struggle implicit inthe work” in order, finally, to gain a sense of “what afarmer’s inconspicuous use of shoes as equipment islike” (p. 118). But even if the shoes belonged to vanGogh, as Schapiro claimed (and to which Derrida fa-mously objected), Thomson argues that the paintingcould in that case have helped us to see “what it islike to walk in the shoes of a painter like van Gogh”(p. 119), devoted as he was to revealing the hiddenpoetry in all things.

Whether or not Thomson’s reading ultimately con-vinces others, it will certainly be impossible for fu-

ture Heidegger scholars to ignore. The same proba-bly cannot be said for the remaining sections of thebook. This is not a put-down so much as an acknowl-edgment that the chapters on U2 and postmodernityor the postmodern comic book are interesting andengaging set pieces, but play like relief scenes to themuch more demanding earlier chapters.

Thomson takes up the theme of postmodernity,however, not to belatedly litigate the academic cul-ture wars of the 1990s, but to help us see what agenuinely Heideggerian post-modernity would looklike. Our great challenge and danger in the late-modern era is to free ourselves from the “techno-logical enframing” of both entities and ourselves asmeaningless resources and instead find glimpses ofnew possibilities of meaning that forever exceed ourconceptual grasp and control. This is why art, espe-cially poetry, was so important to the later Heidegger:just as the meaning of a great work of art cannot beexhausted by even our strongest interpretations, sotoo can we be attuned, by our reflections upon artand poetry, to see that all entities are likewise richin meaning, despite the increasingly narrow descrip-tions and prescriptions furnished by our late-modernontotheology. “In this way,” Thomson concludes, “wecan learn to approach all things with care, humility,patience, gratitude, and perhaps, I have suggested,even awe, reverence, and love” (p. 212).

While I would have preferred Thomson to forgeahead chronologically and address Heidegger’s lateressays on art and poetry, I can appreciate why hechose this different tack, given that Julian Youngstructured his 2001 book, Heidegger’s Philosophy ofArt (Cambridge University Press, 2001), in roughlythis way. So while Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernitydoes not quite feel like a unity in its second half, per-haps this small complaint is unduly conventional, andfor that very reason, somewhat un-Heideggerian. Asit stands, this book should rival Young’s as the bestwork yet on Heidegger’s philosophy of art, with afew added chapters thrown in to ensure that it resistseasy summary, offering greater riches than its titlesuggests.

JONATHAN SALEM-WISEMANDepartment of PhilosophyHumber College

porter, james i. The Origins of Aesthetic Thoughtin Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experi-ence. Cambridge University Press, 2010, 607 + xviipp., $145.00 cloth.

Aesthetics is not an exclusively modern subject,James Porter says; nor is art, understood as a cate-gory comprising distinct forms. Only a skewed read-ing of Greek and Roman antiquity permits such


misimpressions. Equating ancient art theory with theworks of Plato and Aristotle and their successors hasencouraged scholars to consider ancient art formsseparately, as those philosophers did, when in fact arich tradition used common materialistic vocabular-ies for disparate arts.

The main claim in this book (henceforth Origins)concerns that vocabulary of matter. Letting Plato andAristotle speak for antiquity has made the wholeancient world’s discourse about art seem formalist.But another line of thinking was always at work de-spite their titanic influence: an orientation toward artthat Porter sometimes calls “empiricist,” occasionally“phenomenalist” or “sensualist,” and reliably “mate-rialist” (pp. 5, 7, 60).

Later authors, Hellenistic and imperial (Roman),developed theories of art at odds with those rootedin fourth-century Athenian philosophy. Porter iden-tifies the sensualism in late-ancient aesthetics, theattention to poetic euphony, the quest to charac-terize the sublime. But Origins is not mainly inter-ested in later ancient reactions against Plato andAristotle; it makes them the reacting thinkers,anomalous in the materialistic–aesthetic tradition, a“derailing moment” in ancient aesthetics rather thanits beginning (p. 10). Porter hopes to lay the founda-tion for his coming volume about later antiquity byfinding its antecedents before Platonic–Aristotelianformalism.

Trying to see back past fourth-century philos-ophy to aesthetic ideas of the fifth century (forexample, the Sophists) and even further into ar-chaic Greece (pre-Socratic philosophers, Pindar, Si-monides) is made difficult by both the relative silenceof those early times and the later hubbub, the powerof the figures through whom we know about thosefirst thinkers. One needs to (1) bring new questionsto known texts, as Porter does (for instance) whenreinterpreting pre-Socratic materialism; (2) recon-struct lost ideas out of later allusions, as he does withhints in Aristophanes and Aristotle; and (3) com-bine fragmentary evidence to reconstitute forgottenmovements, as Porter does puzzling over strange ar-chaic poems written without a single sigma.

The result can be hard work to read; I imaginewhat effort it took to write, learning everything nec-essary for such a book, and digesting the debatesand histories into a volume so coherent. It was wellworth the trouble. Porter has opened new possibil-ities to view, and anyone accustomed to the simplevision of ancient art theory, framed by Platonic andAristotelian concerns and terms, will have to contendwith Origins. The book shares certain ambitions withThe Birth of Tragedy, which likewise peeked aroundthe colossal Greek philosophies to glimpse what arthad been before them and how art had been seen.No coincidence there, for Porter knows and appreci-ates Nietzsche’s effect on classical scholarship. His

major studies, Nietzsche and the Philology of theFuture (Standford University Press, 2000) and TheInvention of Dionysus (Stanford University Press,2000), brought scholarly expertise to the assessmentof Nietzsche’s writings on antiquity. But insteadof taking interpretive leaps, Porter builds his casewith learned detail; where Nietzsche posits divinelynamed creative impulses, Porter envisions a humanintellectual tradition, scientific in its way and secular(p. 11).

The most compelling parts of Origins are thosethat come at aesthetics perpendicularly, from exam-ples that seem to lie outside the theory of art. Forexample, Porter argues that ancient attention to thesounds constituting poetry is informed by material-ist and atomist philosophies (pp. 213–239). The stoi-cheion, the fundamental element of material real-ity, reappears when critics posit ultimate constituentsof poetic sound: letter, phoneme. Language itself isbuilt on matter (p. 225). Here philosophical mate-rialism becomes materialist aesthetics, says Porter,and he makes a case that will overcome most initialskepticism.

Those fascinating lipogrammatic odes, the po-ems written without sigma, receive sizable discussion(pp. 371–401). Porter’s case is circumstantial when heexplores what the “s” meant in sung archaic poetry,but he does appear to have drawn back the curtain ona debate concerning poetry’s sounds, and in particu-lar the sounds as they engaged with the poem’s sense.Thanks to his detective work and skillful storytelling,we can reexperience a very early debate over song’srelationship with instrumental music.

The philosophers are treated less successfully: thepre-Socratics because Porter forces them to be ma-terialists at all times, Plato and Aristotle becausehe needs them to have been foils and enemies toan elaborated materialism. Moreover, this is a spe-cial kind of materialism, one that is also empiricistand sensualist. But a philosopher like Anaximeneshas to deny most reports from the senses in or-der to claim that all objects are air (p. 144). SurelyAristotle is more the empiricist. Origins even triesto give the god of Xenophanes “a kind of corporeal-ity” (p. 164), though Xenophanes had pictured god’sacting by mental power alone.

Histories of lost traditions need villains, and asthe twin snakes in this aesthetic Eden, Plato andAristotle come in for the hardest treatment. Porterputs them in the position of rejecting and repress-ing currents of thought “and even full-dress theo-ries of art” that preceded them (p. 59). So he hasPlato object to paintings as such (p. 89) despite evi-dence that he was ambivalent (see Nancy Demand);he reads Hippias Major 297e–298a as a “clue” to“pre-existing counterviews” (p. 107), when it makessufficient sense as a description of what people ordi-narily find beautiful.

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Of course, Plato does attack the arts and their sen-sual charms. Let him play the villain. But Porter putsAristotle in the same camp, at the expense of hisreading of Aristotle. Thus, to make the treatise OnTragedy the trace of a repressed tradition, he classi-fies it as non-Aristotelian (pp. 110–112). On Tragedycalls music mimetic of character and says action intragedy is harder to imitate than a character’s suffer-ing, but pace Porter, Aristotle says both those thingstoo. It weakens this book’s case that it finds its desiredfirst aesthetic theory only by misstating Aristotle’sthought as an enemy of healthy sensualism.

De Anima suffers especially. Porter rightly seizeson the Poetics, calling plot the soul of tragedy, andrightly turns to De Anima to see what status Aristotlegrants to the soul vis-a-vis the body (p. 112). Butonce there, and despite Aristotle’s many efforts tointegrate the soul with the living body, even callingit inseparable from body, Porter focuses on the loneremark to the contrary, regarding the active intellect’spossible capacity to separate from the body. NowAristotle can occupy Plato’s Manichean territory, andthe materialist aesthetics that this book championscan pose as the return of healthy sensuality.

The richest subtheme in Origins involves instancesof one ancient art form’s comments about another:poetry on architecture, drama on rhetoric, and soon (p. 188). Porter dwells on a magnificent example:Aristophanes’s writing about tragedy. Scholars usu-ally emphasize the political side of Aristophanes’scritique of tragedy: “Aristophanes the conservative.”Porter commendably looks for more. In the Frogshe sees signs of a lost conception of syllabic weightand texture, poetry understood as hammered to-gether as if from building materials (pp. 262–275).The lesser-known treasure Thesmophoriazusae con-tributes more woodworking metaphors for poeticcomposition (p. 270).

Now, Aristophanes did famously mix street humorwith arcane philosophy, and Porter is correct to seehis comedies as evidence for pre-Socratic intellec-tual culture. And his specific readings are fresh andhighly significant. The problem lies in what Originsomits, above all mimesis. The Frogs makes that wordmean “counterfeit,” as other plays do: Dionysus ispracticing deceptive imitation and spends half theplay escaping from the enervating magic of mime-sis. Meanwhile, lines 148–156 in Thesmophoriazusae(written when Plato was sixteen) identify dramaturgywith mimesis, distinguish both from what is natu-ral, and conflate the imitative tasks of author andactor. These are three central claims from that for-malist text Republic 3. If Porter’s favorite passagesin Aristophanes imply aesthetic materialism alreadyin the air before him, these other passages ought tomean that theorists before Aristophanes were speak-ing of mimesis. Then what Origins calls “formalism,”

broadly speaking what Plato gave to art theory, wasalive and influential before Plato began writing.

In this respect, and despite itself, Origins againresembles The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche wants tomake Socrates the end of Dionysian tragedy, but heconcedes an anti-Dionysian force already at workbefore Socrates (see Section 14). And Porter blamesPlato for an effect on aesthetic thought that seems tohave existed in an earlier generation.

Another Nietzschean inheritance follows fromNietzsche’s associating Greek sculpture with “theApollinian,” which he equates with love for the sur-face and look of a thing. His influence might ex-plain Porter’s inclination to gloss mass as surface, aswhen reading Xenophanes (p. 163) and Posidippus(p. 486). Sculpture seen as surface draws attention toits own muteness (thus p. 466), but Jean-Pierre Ver-nant and others have demonstrated the opposite con-ception of statuary at work in Greek practices. A stelewould be washed and symbolically clothed as if thegrave marker were the dead person; mourners buriedsculptures when they did not have the bodies, as re-placement figurines for the dead. Or think of cursetablets. The supplicant wrote a curse on a lead stripand buried it near a tomb, so that the freshly deadspirit could deliver the message to chthonic powers.This gravestone is a mailbox from hell, a channel be-tween realms, not a body appreciated as surface.

Greek tragedy remarks on this communicativeeffect of sculpture. Statues of young women keepMenelaus wretchedly connected with his farawaywife (Aeschylus, Agamemnon). Admetus plans tohave an effigy made of Alcestis after she dies andto sleep with it, to keep something of her above-ground (Euripides, Alcestis). A warrior’s widow com-forts herself with his wax likeness; the gods bring itto life, the sculpture thus ferrying Protesilaus’s shadeback home (Euripides, Protesilaus [lost]).

For all his invaluable attention to art forms’ ref-erences to one another, Porter leaves out tragedy onsculpture, though that is possibly the most commonexample. Is this because tragedy reads sculpture asmagically communicative, not mutely concrete? Theuncharacteristic omission suggests how tenaciouslyPorter holds to his vision of pre-philosophical aes-thetics and artistic surface; it also points to his maindeparture from The Birth of Tragedy, that whereNietzsche brought religion back into aestheticsPorter banishes it again. Aesthetic materialism is eas-ier to see for those who shut out the religious prac-tices that make objects of appreciation more thansurfaces.

Sculptural surfaces raise the question (as the sigmaand stoicheion did) of just what, or how much, Portermeans by “matter.” This is the deepest tangle inOrigins and one its argument trips over despitePorter’s impressive talents. The book promises to


chart a single all-important difference, materialismversus formalism, but subsequent discussions allymaterialism with sensualism, empiricism, atomism,the surface, the detail, and so on (for example, pp.247, 257). Porter wisely resists reifying matter andform into definite opposites (pp. 70–71), knowingthat giving sharp artificial definitions to such wordscan trivialize an argument. But Origins goes far inthe other direction. Porter cites modern figures whodistinguish materialism from empiricism (pp. 43, 245)but does not heed their cautions. In the end, what hediscovers looks less like a theory or a tradition andmore like several traditions in tandem. The materi-alists and phenomenalists and others unite as thosewho are not Platonists or Aristotelians. Are they the-orists at all, or has Porter simply given voice to avariety of ordinary responses to art? In that case itwas not quite aesthetics that the Athenian philoso-phers trounced with their theories, but more like aprecondition for aesthetics, the stuff out of whichone might make aesthetics. It still matters to knowthat those sentiments existed before philosophers ofart came along, but it does not change my sense oftheir contribution as much; they are not so obviouslyrepressors, and the tradition before them not quiteready to be reclaimed as theory.

NICKOLAS PAPPASDepartment of PhilosophyCity College and the Graduate CenterCity University of New York

carel, havi and greg tuck, eds. New Takes in Film-Philosophy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011,xii + 259 pp., $95.00 cloth, $32.00 paper.

New Takes in Film-Philosophy collects fourteen orig-inal essays by both philosophers and film theorists.The essays are organized into three parts: “DeepFocus—Approaches to Film-Philosophy,” “Wide An-gles—The Boundaries of Film-Philosophy,” and“Director’s Cut—Readings in Film-Philosophy.” Per-haps needless to say, all of the essays explore, in someway, an intersection of film and philosophy. The term‘film-philosophy’ is meant, I take it, to pick out a par-ticular kind of junction between film and philosophy,but beyond that it is not entirely clear to me, evenafter reading this book, what film-philosophy is.

The phrase ‘film-philosophy’ originated as the ti-tle of the online journal Film-Philosophy, which is“interested in the ways in which films develop andcontribute to philosophical discussion” (www.film-philosophy.com). Five of the book’s contributors, in-cluding the coeditors, are members of the journal’seditorial board. Given this description of the jour-nal’s aims, I expected a collection of essays engaged

in the sort of project Murray Smith and ThomasWartenberg have called ‘film-as-philosophy,’ and, tobe sure, many essays here are interested in the no-tion that cinema might be a medium through whichphilosophy can be done.

However, the editors, Carel and Tuck (andcontributing Film-Philosophy board members likeRobert Sinnerbrink and John Mullarkey), suggestthat film-philosophy is something broader and moreambitious than the film-as-philosophy enterprise. Atthe same time, Carel and Tuck admit that film-philosophy is not “a well-defined field of enquiry orone that has broad agreement amongst its practition-ers on what exactly it is and what it should be doing”(p. 1).

Yet they are clear about what film-philosophy isnot interested in: the philosophy of film. On theirview, in work on the philosophy of film, “film isclearly positioned as the junior partner. Film hereis the object of study and as such is reduced to athing placed under a preexisting and fully-developedphilosophical gaze, rather than seen as a more trou-bling site of thought and experience in its own right”(p. 2). I suspect this hasty dismissal will rub many whoare interested in the philosophy of film the wrongway, not least because this account of the philoso-phy of film is neither elaborated nor substantiated. Ialso doubt it is accurate, but that is another matter.Moreover, Carel and Tuck’s explicitly drawn con-trast of film-philosophy and the philosophy of filmis confusing because there is at least one chapter,coauthored by Amy Coplan and Derek Matravers,that seems correctly categorized as an instance of thelatter.

For Carel and Tuck, “the conjunction [of film andphilosophy] is less a boundary . . . but [sic] a momentof expansion in which a field of thought becomesmapped and nourished by both traditions” (p. 2).Furthermore, “the boundary is not so much crossed,as expanded, broadened so as to become a terrainof its own” (p. 2). In sum, Carel and Tuck write, “Tokeep open the possibility of mutual transformationwhile offering a coherent yet nonexcluding notionof what this new terrain may yield, we describe thisdomain as film-philosophy” (p. 2).

This description of film-philosophy sounds in-spired, but it is rather vague. What is meant by “mu-tual transformation” here? What is a “coherent yetnonexcluding notion?” And did we not just, two para-graphs earlier, exclude the philosophy of film? Per-haps Carel and Tuck’s gloss of film-philosophy is clearto those who are already familiar with the enterprise,but it is not much help to the uninitiated. Their ex-planation of what the essays in the collection havein common is no more illuminating. “What unitesthese contributions,” write Carel and Tuck, “is a de-sire to map out a practice, a variety of ways of doing

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film-philosophy that is mutually informative to bothphilosophy and film studies” (p. 3). Unfortunately,the key idea here, “practice,” remains nebulous.What is the practice of film-philosophy?

My biggest grievance with the book is that it lacksa substantive introductory essay that might have ad-dressed these matters. As written, the introductionis under six pages, three of which are devoted tooutlining the book’s chapters. This is a real missedopportunity to engage curious film theorists andphilosophers, let alone interested nonacademics, byoffering a more sustained consideration of how film-philosophy might be roughly characterized, if notstrictly defined.

I was also surprised that the editors did not men-tion the book’s title: New Takes in Film-Philosophy.For those inside the film-philosophy circle, it may beobvious why these essays represent “new takes,” butfor those who are not, an explanation would havebeen helpful. In fact, one form a characterizationof film-philosophy could have taken in a longer in-troduction is that of a history of film-philosophy:a history that addresses the question of what film-philosophy is now via a discussion of what the(albeit short) history of film-philosophy has been andin what sense the present essays are “new takes.”

The introduction aside, my uncertainty aboutwhat film-philosophy is stems from the diversityof the essays themselves. Some participate in thefilm-as-philosophy project, others in the philosophy-through-film enterprise, and, as I mentioned, at leastone engages in the philosophy of film. Still others“read” films through the ideas of particular philoso-phers. Indeed, the topics are so varied that I oftenwondered not only about what made them all in-stances of film-philosophy, but also about the book’soverall organizational strategy.

Part I, “Approaches to Film-Philosophy,” includesessays by Thomas Wartenberg, Robert Sinnerbrink,and John Mullarkey that, as the title suggests, takedifferent approaches to the conjoining of film andphilosophy. However, Part I also includes two essayswhose focus on particular philosophers makes themseem related to one another yet out of place in thissection: one is an essay by Andrew Klevan on Stan-ley Cavell’s film criticism, and the other is an essayby Hamish Ford that “applies” Theodor Adorno’swork to various films. These essays, along with GregTuck’s discussion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in PartII, might have formed the basis of an additional sec-tion devoted to individual philosophers.

Part III, “Readings in Film-Philosophy,” has themost internal coherence of the three sections. It com-prises essays on specific films that, the authors argue,somehow engage in and contribute to philosophy. Itis in this section that film-philosophy bears the mostresemblance to film-as-philosophy.

Part II, “The Boundaries of Film-Philosophy,” isthe least clearly organized, perhaps because film-philosophy is never sufficiently characterized foran exploration of its boundaries to mean much.Two of the essays, Stephen Mulhall’s on Wanted(Bekmambetov, 2008) and Catherine Constable’s onCrash (Cronenberg, 1993) and Jean Baudrillard, ap-pear to belong in Part III. And, as I mentioned, Tuck’sessay could have been part of an additional sectionalong with the essays by Klevan and Ford. The oddessay out in Part II, and the book as a whole, is alsothe one I find most interesting and will discuss be-low: Amy Coplan and Derek Matravers’s “Film, Lit-erature, and Non-Cognitive Affect.” More generally,the highlights are, in order of appearance, the es-says by Wartenberg, Klevan, Coplan and Matravers,Sobchack, and Baggini. With an eye to my audienceand limitations of space, I will only discuss the essaysby Wartenberg and Coplan and Matravers in detailhere, but the other essays I list are all worthwhile fordifferent reasons.

Wartenberg offers a concise overview of the de-bate about film-as-philosophy or, what he has calledin his own work, ‘cinematic philosophy.’ Not to bela-bor the point, but the varied use of terms is intrigu-ing, as is Wartenberg’s introductory statement, “I be-lieve [‘cinematic philosophy’] to be a neutral wayin which to indicate the sort of phenomenon that isalso called ‘film-philosophy’ (see this volume), ‘film-as-philosophy’ (Smith and Wartenberg, 2006), and‘filmosophy’ (Frampton, 2006)” (p. 9). One wonderswhy Wartenberg does not assent to using the term‘film-philosophy’ and why he describes ‘cinematicphilosophy’ as neutral, but because such questionsare not his main concern they remain unanswered.

Reasonably enough, Wartenberg’s central task isto defend the position he has taken in the film-as-philosophy debate, which he calls the “moderateprocinematic philosophy position (MPCP)” (p. 16).I doubt this essay will change the minds of anyonewho has been following the debate up to this point,but it provides an accessible point of entry for any-one who is new to it. I do have one qualm about themanner in which Wartenberg defends himself: he de-scribes two other major figures in the debate, MurraySmith and Paisley Livingston, as holding a positionhe calls “the extreme anticinematic philosophy posi-tion (EACP)” (p. 11). My worry is that this is not anaccurate characterization of either of their positions.

It is true that Smith expresses skepticism aboutthe possibility that popular, narrative films can beinstances of philosophy, but he has remained agnos-tic about this possibility with regard to nonnarra-tive films. Because one of the most compelling argu-ments (made by Wartenberg himself, as well as NoelCarroll) in favor of the possibility of cinematic phi-losophy involves experimental films that putatively


philosophize the nature of the medium, I do not seewhy Smith’s position should be described as “ex-treme.” Furthermore, Livingston has explicitly advo-cated a deflationary account of cinematic philosophywith reference to the work of Ingmar Bergman in his2009 book Cinema, Philosophy, Bergman: On Filmas Philosophy (Oxford University Press). It is sur-prising that Wartenberg does not reference this bookand also puts Livingston in the EACP camp.

“Film, Literature, and Non-Cognitive Affect”takes the form of an argument by Coplan and a replyby Matravers. Coplan’s argument is that the natureof film makes it particularly well suited (better suitedthan literature) to elicit noncognitive affective re-sponses, including “emotional contagion, moods, andautomatic affective reflexes” (p. 119). Coplan con-tends that literature is outmatched in ability to gener-ate such responses because, whereas film can engen-der direct sensory engagement, literature demandsour cognitive engagement. Matravers contends thatCoplan’s argument “depends on the claim that if animagined proposition plays a role in the generationof the emotion (or emotion-like state) this cannot bea case of noncognitive affect” (p. 127). He replies thatit is possible that an imagined proposition could it-self generate a noncognitive affective state, “in whichthe proposition plays no further part” (p. 128). How-ever, whatever one makes of Matravers’s counter-argument, it seems to me that his reply somewhatmisses Coplan’s larger point, which is that filmmak-ers have many more tools in their toolboxes to actdirectly on our senses (for example, the soundscape).She could accept Matravers’s counterargument with-out sacrificing this part of her argument.

As Coplan notes, her project is too big for a shortessay, and I was disappointed that her argument andMatravers’s reply were not two different chapters.Whether this was their decision or the editors’, I donot know. But it strikes me as an illuminating indi-cation of the philosophy of film’s place within film-philosophy that this was the only space afforded tothe former (whether the chapter was conceived ascoauthored or not). In closing, I will hazard a spec-ulation that there is a larger underlying issue here:the editors and Film-Philosophy board members likeSinnerbrink suggest, respectively, that the analyticand continental divide is increasingly “seen as irrele-vant” and “dubious” (pp. 2, 31). But given the tenorof the editors’ discussion of the philosophy of film,a subject that has largely been taken up by philoso-phers working in the analytic tradition, I wonder ifthe divide is more ingrained than they realize.

TED NANNICELLIDepartment of Screen and Media StudiesUniversity of Waikato

rokem, freddie. Philosophers and Thespians: Re-thinking Performance. Stanford University Press,2010, xii + 248 pp., 3 b&w illus., $60.00 cloth, $21.95paper.

Although the exploration of philosophy in theaterdates back to antiquity, practitioners and philoso-phers have created an unfortunate rift between artand theory in contemporary theater practice. In aneffort to explore the complex relationship betweentheater and philosophy, Freddie Rokem, whose pre-vious book focuses on theatrical representations ofhistorical events post-World War II, explores spe-cific interactions between philosophers and theaterpractitioners before World War II in Philosophersand Thespians: Rethinking Performance. With a focuson Plato’s Symposium, Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyran-nus, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Friedrich Nietzsche,August Strindberg, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin,and Franz Kafka, Rokem offers diverse snapshotsin the first section of Philosophers and Thespianson historical “Encounters” between theater and phi-losophy. The second half of the book, “Constella-tions,” focuses on the evidence of these discoursesapproaching World War II and Rokem’s support ofBenjamin’s Denkbilder model as the prototype formodern, philosophical exploration through theatri-cal storytelling. Rokem’s analysis ultimately servesto assemble and analyze a collection of historical in-teractions between theater and philosophy in orderto contextualize further discussion on the contempo-rary significance of the relationship between philos-ophy and theater.

The varying and often contradictory interactionsbetween philosophy and theater in Rokem’s bookhighlight the complexities and challenges of defin-ing the methods of understanding identity and thetheoretical borders between theater and philosophy.Rokem approaches these complexities through care-fully selected case studies: explorations of specificexamples that raise rather than answer questions.Given this approach, one finds it easier to accept thelack of solidly defined conclusions and occasionallyconvoluted detours in his discussion. Although thesweeping onslaught of fascinating texts and intertextscreates a thorny network to maneuver, Rokem’s deftinquiry and creative interpretation leave the readerwanting more.

Rokem begins his “Encounters” section with anexploration of the philosophical and theatrical dis-courses in Plato’s Symposium, Sophocles’s Oedi-pus Tyrannus, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. AlthoughRokem offers a variety of cross-references and per-spectives within and between these texts, he beginshis analysis of the interplay between theater and phi-losophy by exploring the competition between thetwo. The competitive context in Plato’s Symposium

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underlines the stamina and intellectual superiority ofSocrates over the comic playwright Aristophanes andthe tragic playwright Agathon. As competition insin-uates a distinction between winner and loser, this in-tellectual competition implies philosophy’s superior-ity over theater. To Rokem, this supposed dichotomybetween philosophy and theater is actually a reflec-tion of Socrates’s facilitation of philosophy throughtheatrical means. He interprets Socrates’s intellectualvictory to represent philosophy as a comprehensiveunderstanding of, rather than an oppositional forceto, both comedy and tragedy.

One of Rokem’s most clearly developed analy-ses suggests an intriguing “leg narrative” whereinhe applies both the human ontological riddle of thesphinx from Oedipus Tyrannus as well as Aristo-phanes’s tale of Eros in Plato’s Symposium. The rid-dle of the sphinx proves Oedipus’s wisdom (some-what ironically, given the ignorance of his situation)through his ability to identify. Aristophanes’s storyof Eros presents the ontological myth of humans(and philosophy and theater, as Rokem suggests) astwo-legged halves of a whole four-legged creature,forever searching for their other halves to becomecomplete.

Rokem continues his analysis by investigating thebilateral facilitations between theater and philoso-phy in Oedipus Tyrannus and Hamlet. As Oedipusseeks to solve the riddle of the sphinx, he exercisesphilosophical tactics to serve Sophocles’s theatri-cal narrative (philosophy facilitates theater). Con-versely, Hamlet employs a theatrical production inhis philosophical search to extract the truth fromClaudius, which also drives theatrical action (theaterfacilitates philosophy). Rokem further incorporatestheater and philosophy by using the intellectual spatsbetween Hamlet and Polonius to illustrate the in-tellectual theatricality of the play. He also extendshis previous lens of competitive interplay to addressmadness as a theatrical presentation of identity inHamlet, a concept commonly explored philosophi-cally. Rokem abruptly applies his interpretation ofmadness and performance to the relationship be-tween Nietzsche and Strindberg to analyze the po-tentially detrimental effects of theater’s intrusion onphilosophy and vice versa.

Rokem mines the crowning jewel of his “En-counters” from an interaction between Brecht andBenjamin discussing Kafka’s short story “The NextVillage.” The troubled yet unavoidable relationshipbetween theater and philosophy enters here in a dis-course on the paralyzing fears relating to exile andthe essential differences between the philosophies ofthese two men. Rokem chooses these two men asessential to the shift toward a modern, performativephilosophy leading up to and induced by the secondWorld War.

“The Next Village” is an extremely short story toldfrom the perspective of a person who stands in aweof the brevity of life by realizing that it may not besufficient even for a short journey to the next vil-lage. At the start of their discussion of “The NextVillage,” Brecht outright rejects the “depth” of thestory as useless and pulls the essence of the story fromits concept of the “rider”: a traveler who is necessar-ily and permanently changed by his journey. Rokemlinks Brecht’s interpretation of this story to his the-ory of Epic Theater and Verfremdung by introducingthe necessity of dividing the subject and the journeyinto their smallest, essential parts, thereby “alienat-ing” the parts from each other and the subject fromthe audience. This makes reaching the next village inKafka’s story impossible since the infinite division ofthe subject and the journey makes the fulfillment ofeach of the parts impossible. In contrast to Brecht,Benjamin looks to the narrator (the performer) ofKafka’s story for the essence of his interpretation,in which he holds that the essential measure of lifeis memory. According to Benjamin, memory trav-els at an impossible and infinite speed through life,allowing it to exist in never-ending, elusive threads,forever influencing the present, especially when writ-ten down, told, or otherwise performed. Rokem linksBenjamin’s analysis to the future solidification of hisideas about various contexts of history as outlined inhis “On the Concept of History” and later in the bookanalyzes Benjamin’s assertion that performance (the-ater) is essential for an understanding of identity andhistory (philosophy).

Rokem brilliantly analyzes a Brechtian “circle aes-thetic” by analyzing Brecht’s use of the Copernicanmodel of the universe in Life of Galileo and Brecht’sown staging of Mother Courage. For the latter, Brechtcreates a stage of two rotating concentric circles in or-der to simultaneously create a surplus of movementand lack of physical progress, much like setting hisactors on a treadmill. The circle serves as a modelfor the journey presented in Kafka’s story and theexile of Brecht and Benjamin: beginning at a singu-lar point (home), moving away from that point (ex-ile), and returning to the beginning point (a changedhome). Rokem presents Brecht and Benjamin’s dis-cussion of exile as a perpetual journey and expoundson Benjamin’s perceptions of the Angelus Novus: thepresent as a perpetual, tragically removed reflectionof history.

Rokem’s “Constellations” section directly refer-ences Benjamin’s eponymous idea of the choreog-raphy between historical events and present experi-ence. Rokem likens Benjamin’s idea of the presentas a “constellation” of experiences and historical un-derstandings with a modern conception of theateras a constellation of philosophical ideas and pre-sentations. Ultimately, Rokem lands on Benjamin’s


self-conscious storytelling, or Denkbilder (literally“thought-pictures”), as a model for modern philo-sophical understanding. Referencing the discussionof journey and exile in the previous chapter, Rokemapplies the idea of automotive travel in order to illus-trate Benjamin’s conception of caesura: a catastropheor stop between historical events and present expe-riences. By indicating car accidents as a man-madeexample of caesura, Rokem begins to raise severalquestions about human responsibility and the possi-bilities of reaching philosophical and theatrical un-derstanding in a dangerous, unsure, postwar world.Rokem also uses the term caesura to indicate themoment of disconnect between the journey or ex-ile or history and the moment of telling the story orperformance or present experience. He suggests thatthis moment of caesura indicates the clash of theaterand philosophy that becomes necessary for an under-standing of disciplines after the ideological shifts ofthe second World War.

One potential drawback of Rokem’s analysis ishis focus on a particular breed of thespians andphilosophers. The majority of his “thespians” areplaywrights, directors, and acting theorists. Likewise,many of his “philosophers” are also artists or art-theater theorists. Because of this, Rokem’s analysis ofthe relationship between philosophy and theater in-dicates interactions between a particular group of in-terdisciplinary individuals rather than a broad, inher-ent relationship between the two disciplines. WhileRokem’s book suffers in this way from a limited scopebecause of his choice of materials, his reader can ben-efit from his limited focus by viewing his book lessas a complete analysis of the relationship betweenphilosophy and theater and more as a suggestion fora philosophical understanding of the theater in themodern (and postmodern) world.

Although Rokem’s approach is elusive at timesand fails to provide many answers about the mul-tifaceted relationship between philosophy and the-ater, his discursive approach accomplishes his goalof developing an inquiry and making innovative in-terdisciplinary connections that open doors to futurediscussion.

Given his implication that a performative phi-losophy is a model for exploration of the self,Rokem alludes to larger questions by urgently ex-ploring and projecting beyond Benjamin’s concep-tion of Denkbilder: what is our relationship with thepast, how does that shape our understanding of thepresent, and to what extent is our performative nar-rative a promise for action in the future?

BRENNA NICELYDepartment of TheaterUniversity of Central Florida

derrida, jacques. Athens, Still Remains: The Pho-tographs of Jean-Francois Bonhomme. Trans.Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. FordhamUniversity Press, 2010, 73 pp., 34 b&w illus., $17.00paper.

On a Wednesday, the third of July 1996, JacquesDerrida was returning to Athens after a visit tothe nearby Artemis sanctuary in Brauron. Sometimearound noon the following oracular thought suddenlystruck him: “nous nous devons a la mort” (“we oweourselves to death”). Derrida was already carrying aset of photographs of Athens, taken over a period offifteen years by Jean-Francois Bonhomme, on whichhe had promised to “write something for the publi-cation of these photographs” (p. 1). The conjunctionof sun, noon, Bonhomme’s photographs of Athens,and this sentence that had just come out of nowhereall provoked the occasion for an essay originally pub-lished in 1996 and reissued in 2009, from which thiscareful English translation of 2010 is derived.

“We owe ourselves to death”: any precise exege-sis of the French or its presumed English equivalentquite naturally induces the typical Derridean syn-tactical derive. Of equal importance, these particu-lar circumstances evoke the memory of philosophyproper, at least with reference to the archetype ofSocrates, since, as Derrida tells us, the previous dayhad been spent swimming under Cape Sounion, andit is a known tradition that Socrates’s day of exe-cution had been held up until an Athenian cult shipreturning from Delos in honor of the god Apollo sentthe critical signal for its imminent arrival in Athens,and therefore for Socrates’s execution, by passingDerrida’s particular swimming hole. “Philosophy,” inshort, was experiencing at that very moment “delay,”the delayed execution and hence death of philosophy,of the Philosopher, when the ship rounded the cape.Obviously a mode of thinking that has made topicalthe themes of differance, deference and delay cannotresist leaping straight into this seductive caesura.

“Delay” is also presumably at the core of the actof the art of photography proper, at least prior tonewer technologies of digitality, as its “delay mecha-nism” opens the space of a time between the originalclick and the final product. “Photography,” whichDerrida insists is quintessentially “Greek,” can thusbe translated as a kind of “writing [γραϕη] of light[��ως],” a “writing” that carries the event of aion:“the interval full of duration, an incessant space oftime, and this is sometimes called eternity” (p. 19).It is these two features, the writing of light and theaion, that, according to Derrida, are characteristicof “Athens.” Reflecting on them is reflecting on theoeuvre of the photographer Bonhomme, the subjectmatter of which is presumably this same “Athens.”

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Such then are the varied elements driving Der-rida to this essay. He intends to project his “perspec-tives” in aphoristic and serial form (in a “series ofaphorisms,” pp. 1, 3), but his ambitions are piquedby the challenge: “who will ever have photographeda sentence?” (p. 4). Thus, the short text is orga-nized into twenty brief sections knowingly called“stills,” with continuous references to Bonhomme’sphotographs, of which there are thirty-four moder-ately adequate reproductions. “Still” XV, by far thelongest, provides a rambling account of Derrida’s in-terpretation of Bonhomme’s camera as a mode ofrecording at least three Athens: the fabled Athensof the past with its columns and statues and funerarystones, the present Athens of markets and stalls andobsolescing technology, and the Athens to come thatis already a thing of the “past.” Precisely in thesetime-constellations the photograph renders disuse,haunting, a comparative tabulation of technical ob-jects, as “defunct signs of culture” (p. 41). In short,Bonhomme has unfolded nothing less than a perpet-ual “mourning” for Athens, in advance (p. 27).

Framing this longish essay are two rather shorter“stills” (XIV, XVI) concerned with the story ofSocrates as he awaits execution. What fascinates Der-rida is Socrates’s apparent success in being able topredict the precise moment of his own death. Draw-ing on Plato’s Crito and Phaedo, Derrida fancies him-self for once as a kind of photographer as well. Hewould like to take a photo of that critical momentwhen Socrates awakens from a dream to announcethat a beautiful woman had appeared to him to fore-tell the exact moment of his death. For Derrida,Socrates had been caught up in the aporia of thelong delay between the cult ship setting out for De-los and its unpredictable return due to the elements.With this telling of his dream, and Derrida’s “photo”of it, Socrates captures a unique freedom through hiscapacity to know ahead of everyone else the momentof his own death.

What makes this “delay” so important for philos-ophy, and for Derrida, is the “aion” it carries, withinwhich Plato’s Socrates is enabled to articulate his fi-nal, and some would say most historically influential,Socratic–Platonic defense of the vocation of philos-ophy proper. Its ultimate lesson is that philosophyis primarily about the “exercise, care, or practice ofdeath” (p. 31); in fact, the original Phaedo text thatDerrida utilizes is even more radical in its insistencethat philosophy is a vocation only fully satisfied indeath, given that “life” keeps attaching us to dread-ful bodily interruptions to our more eternal affairwith the Ideas. Since Derrida’s entire rumination onAthens has floated in and out of concern for obso-lescence, haunting, mourning, and death proper, weare presumably on the verge of receiving Derrida’s

own wisdom on the subject, properly equipped as heis with Bonhomme’s fifteen-year saunter through theubiquity of Athenian transiency.

Derrida stops short of temptingly available op-tions, ancient or modern, whether Socratic or Hei-deggerian. He proposes, so he claims, an alterna-tive reading. Certainly not Heidegger’s “being-for-death” but also not “poor Socrates” with his “ethico-Socratic virtue” of Schuldigsein (pp. 59, 63). Derrida’sunique sentence (“we owe ourselves to death / nousnous devons a la mort”), the same one that came“out of nowhere” like a fate or tukhe, promises forDerrida a very different reading. Or to put it froma slightly different angle, the French language (this“stranger” Derrida adores, pp. 61, 63) intimates anentirely different non-Greek, non-German solution.In the grammatical relation between the first “nous”(or subject pronoun) and the second “nous” (the re-flexive pronoun) of the sentence, Derrida is happy toweave his own unique reversal by which the second,reflective pronoun with its attachment to “death” isconsidered first in order to free the first pronoun fromattachment. Hence the first “nous” can be taken as“an innocent living being who forever knows noth-ing of death” and is thus “infinite” (p. 63). After all,“death” is “nothing” and so how can this innocent“nous,” this innocent “we,” owe anything to “noth-ing and to no one” (p. 61)?

In other words, it turns out that Derrida’s sentenceis actually meant as a “denunciation,” a denuncia-tion in “honor of life” (p. 65). The particularities ofthe French language and the particularities of Der-rida’s insistence on the randomness of the arrival ofthis sentence into his own mind at this given specificmoment on his way back to “Athens” free the au-thor to provide his Greek friends with a special gift.The sentence itself is “a desperate taste of eternity”(p. 57) that allows Derrida to tell his friends his pecu-liar Good Tidings: this “we” (thanks to Derrida’s con-volutions with French grammar and syntax) is free,infinite; so: “let’s be infinite, eternally” (p. 63). Theobsolescence that Bonhomme’s photos mournfullypromise is instead the finitude of the sun that the actof taking those photos exploits.

However salutary these reflections, they cannot befinally satisfying. There is room for mourning here,but it is a discrete mourning confined to a thinkerwho has perhaps made his pilgrimages to Greece fartoo late in his own creative life, as Derrida himselfacknowledges: “Why did I wait so long to go there,to give myself over to Greece?” (p. 17). ActuallyDerrida never does “give himself over” to the Hel-lenic, at least in this essay. No Greek or, for thatmatter, genuine Hellenist could conceive, as Der-rida advocates in these Good Tidings, a sun that hasbeen relegated to mere finitude. Even Socrates–Plato


acknowledged the permanence of the concrete sunas an enduring copy of the true sun of the Good.Derrida’s sun, by contrast, overwhelms him on thatfatal day of the third of July (“there blazed a sunlike no other I have ever known,” p. 57). Unlikethe “we” (the French “nous”), Derrida’s sun “itselfis finite” and “its light might one day come to anend,” so “let’s leave finitude to the sun,” which is tosay that “there is death. . . only for what regards thesun” (p. 65). It is a curious conclusion for someonewho was born, after all, under the Mediterranean sunof Algiers. It needs only to recall another Algerian-born Francophone author, Albert Camus, with hispaeans to the Mediterranean sun to appreciate thegallically neutered Dionysianism that Derrida is herefoisting.

There is in fact another relation to ��ως that Greekthinkers, particularly of the pre-Socratic period, ex-pressed. The Parmenidean searcher for knowledgewas known as �ως (a slight diacritical change), the“man of light,” the mortal in contrast to the immor-tal, who yet bore in himself the immortality of the sunand of “en-lightenment.” This tradition of the “manof light” has heavily impregnated esoteric thoughtin Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, asHenry Corbin has clearly demonstrated in his nu-merous studies into Hellenism and Sufism.

This tradition is quite alien to Derrida, whosediscomfort with much of the Hellenic tradition ofthought and culture is no secret. In previous writingsDerrida had little good to say about the paradig-matic achievement of the Greeks, particularly theAthenians, in their fashioning of the polis. The liter-ary doodlings comprising much of this essay suggestonly the slightest recognition of the relation betweenpolis and the versions of Athens that Bonhommehas caught. To be sure, Derrida wisely introduces theeternity that the Greek concept of aion intimated;his reflections on the relation between that eternityand the delay that the act of photography necessarilyentails (again, before digitality) are provocative, andhis thoughts on the different layers of the obsolescingof technological objects among the refuse of Athenscan be stylistically brilliant. But the deeper implica-tions of the endless unfoldings of “Athens” escapea thinker who himself remains a stranger to the mixof “Dionysianism, philosophy, photography” (p. 67)that the author of this essay apparently sponsors.

JOSEF CHYTRYCritical StudiesUniversity of California, Berkeleyand California College of the Arts

musical understandings and other essays on the philosophy of music by davies, stephen

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