27. mars 2006

rachel whiteread


Rachel Whiteread - Untitled (One hundred spaces)

- a thing is a hole in a thing it is not

24. mars 2006

be prepared


sorry Kant, but you'll have to wait, i'm entering a weekend dedicated to serious Benhabib reading! by the way - what are you're view on feminism mr. K?

23. mars 2006

kant'en

There can be no rule according to which anyone is forced to recognize anything as beautiful.

The judgement of taste is based on the feelings of pleasure but also claims universal validity – yet judgement of taste cannot be proven since they do not rest on concepts or rules.

To Kant pleasure can be communicable only if it is based on a state of mind that is universally communicable. Since this judgement isn’t connected to concept, it must connected to ‘cognition in general’ as opposed to a particular cognitive state of mind - .

The judgement takes the form of a conceptual judgement, since we speak of beauty as if it were a property of things and say ‘the thing is beautiful’.

Kant read through the glasses of D.W.Crawford
I’m not sure that this has led me any further in my search for knowledge:
- What does he mean by subjective universality?
- How can anything be communicable without being based on concepts?

contemporary aesthetics

There seems to be no way around it. Working with contemporary aesthetic theory one has to consider Kant – seriously…
I therefore plan to spend some of my spare time in this guys strange company. Hoping that he might inspire me in my ongoing reflection on the concept of art.

But now comes judgement, which in the order of our cognitive faculties forms a middle term between understanding and reason. Has it also got independent a priori principles? If so, are they constitutive, or are they merely regulative, thus indicating no special realm? And do they give a rule a priori to the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, as the middle term between the faculties of cognition and desire, just as understanding prescribes laws apriori for the former and reason for the latter? This is the topic to which the present Critique is devoted.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION 1790

14. mars 2006

Helle Helle


Men vi kunne lide de samme gode gamle rettene med sovs. Vi kunne også lide at ligge på sofaen, især mig. Dertil kom vores fælles glæde ved bagerbrød og ugeblader hver torsdag. Vores mor havde givet os smag for den slags, torsdag havde altid været ugens højdepunkt. Den tradition havde skabt en talemåde iblandt os:
- Ved du hva? Sagde den ene.
- Nej, og jeg vil selv læse det, sagde den anden.
Vi læste også Tove Ditlevsen og Knuth Becker og Pearl S. Buck. På skolen i Næstved var der en, der sagde til mig, at den slags ikke var riktig litteratur. Han hed Hans, og havde gået et år på universitetet. Jeg tillagde ikke hans udtalelser nogen særlig værdi. Hvis han var så stor en litterat, ville han vel ikke uddanne sig til ergoterapeut.

2. mars 2006

Ian McEwan


I’ve spent quite a few hours in company with bad books lately, and started reading Saturday with not too great expectations. Now, after having finished it in a couple of days, I am still amazed. McEwan’s medical knowledge on the human brain is certainly impressive, but what makes it all breathtaking to me is his way of combining politics, natural sciences and arts in his negotiation on the meaning of life. Saturday puts the private man on the public scene in a brilliant way; the intimacy of lovers and families is connected to war and peace on a grand scale. Love and war, echoing the magnificent novels of the nineteenth century, compressed to the happenings of a day in the life of Henry Perowne. And this ‘compression’ - a life in a day - leads us on to another great English author – to Virginia Woolf. It is also possible to see Saturday as a comment on her novel Mrs. Dalloway. We find similarities in the dinner party preparations, the city walking, insanity and war, in how both authors show us the singular life and the larger world as interconnected – both fragile and exposed to threats.