Improvisation as Original Ethics: Exploring the Ethical in Heidegger and Gadamer from a Musical Perspective

Martin Heidegger famously claimed that ethics needed to become “original” again, but offered no detailed insight into what an “original ethics” might be. Several commentators, however, find evidence of such an original ethics in the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. In this paper I argue that an original ethics, as alluded to by Heidegger and taken up by Gadamer, depends upon a certain improvisational comportment, such that acting ethically involves spontaneously attending and responding to that which one encounters in factical existence. To substantiate this claim, I draw upon improvised musical performance as an exemplar, highlighting how the responsiveness at issue in musical improvisation is equally present in an original ethics, which is itself demonstrative of a practical, performative, and spontaneous engagement with the world. This account not only elucidates the improvisational character of ethics, it equally illuminates the nature of the ethical at issue in improvised musical performance

A Professional Conscience: On an Episode of Self-Accusation in Raymond Queneau's The Last Days

A course of action plays out in the margins of Raymond Queneau’s early novel that provides an object lesson in the peculiar phenomenon of self-accusation. The character assigned this unfortunate fate seems intent on pulling at the thread that will make him unravel, for reasons no one else can understand, driven by a conscience that will never be satisfied with the sacrifices made to appease it. The contradictions and tensions characteristic of the process of self-accusation will be approached here with Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment in mind, that form of existence which shows remarkable inventiveness in the pursuit of its own abasement

The Changeability of the World: Utopia and Critique

The utopian impulse is bound up with an act of critique. As the expression of “the longing for what is not yet,” utopia traces the contours of something other than what is given at present; it discloses the possibility that what is could be different, a possibility that would otherwise remain unacknowledged and occluded. Its projection thereby points to a gap in the existing order of things, it shows that within the latter’s present state “something is missing”, and it calls this state to account for this unrealized possibility. “The essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present”, Ernst Bloch says in the course of an exchange with Adorno on this tendency. However fantastic this projection is, its trajectory is guided by an antagonism in reality, which its passage then indicates in inverse form. And yet it is no less true that the possible world held out by utopian projection only ever appears at a remove from us, as though blocked off to us; we do not know how to access it, how to render it something actual, or even how to situate it in relation to where we ourselves are. It appears to us as a place that is, strictly speaking, nowhere. In this way it always carries the risk of leaving unchanged the present from which it has distinguished itself. It is for this reason that Louis Marin suggests that “Utopia is an ideological critique of ideology”; it is opaque to itself as a critical practice, the figure through which it is imparted is “blind”. This essay seeks to unfold a series of consequences that follow on from the double bind to which utopian critique is subject. It does so in relation to a particular context: the critical experiments characteristic of Brechtian pedagogy, its practical methods and social frameworks

Precarious Ascent: Trace and Terrain in René Daumal's Mount Analogue

Mount Analogue (1944) is René Daumal’s esoteric contribution to the mountain novel genre and the wider cultural phenomenon of “mountain reverence.” It records the fate of an expedition that has set out to scale the summits of a singular edifice, incomparably high, situated at the crossroads of the real and the imaginary. The topography of this uncharted terrain is paradoxical in the extreme, it subjects whoever tries to climb it to a series of unnerving, haphazard encounters, each of which complicate our classical models of space, action and orientation. For Daumal these paradoxes require nothing less than a new branch of knowledge, to which he gives the name alpinism (the novel is just as much a treatise on this art as a narrative of events). The article reconstructs the guiding principles of this method, their intersection with a series of related theoretical models, from Kant’s sublime to Derrida’s trace, as well as the specific aesthetic contexts across which Daumal’s euphoric engagement with the mountain is affirmed

Exploring Sonic Worlds: The significance of ‘instrumentality’

This paper develops the idea of ‘instrumentality’ to explore how the use of diverse tools or instruments involved in new music have the potential to (re)frame our engagement with the world. It will be argued that the choice of instrumental tools and how they are used in performance can not only enrich creative processes and outcomes for the artist but can also alter the audience’s relationship to the world by encouraging a conceptual engagement with one or more of its aspects. We are specifically interested in exploring this potential when interdisciplinary or intermedial approaches are taken to develop and realise new musical works. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s concepts of ‘revealing’ and ‘unconcealment’, and using contemporary work entitled Alluvial Gold as a case study, this paper interrogates the way in which new instrumental practices offer a renewed engagement with the world

Decorum and Insolence in Robert Walser’s Dialectic of Manners

Any show of civility, so Jacques Derrida suggests, is subject to an “internal contradiction”: to comport oneself towards the other with decorum “involves both rules and invention without rule. Its rule is that one knows the rule but is never bound by it. It is impolite to be merely polite, to be polite out of politeness” (‘Passions: An Oblique Offering’). Paradoxical as it may be, to act in conformity with the codes of conduct prescribed by politeness is to render these codes inoperative; their rule is upheld only by an action that surpasses, and thus in a certain sense contests, whatever it is that this rule otherwise stipulates. This means that an instance of play – “invention without rule” – is intrinsic to the principle of civility at stake here. Without it politeness remains ineffective. And yet, if this is so, what is there to stop the necessary transgression of the rule from converging with civility’s contrary: impoliteness, insolence, if not outright maleficence? This “internal contradiction” is ever-present in the fiction of Robert Walser and one reason for the unsettling light that falls upon even the simplest of circumstances presented by his work. Perhaps this light shines brightest in The Robber (1925), a novel in which politeness attains the status of a vocation, becoming the protagonist’s single concern. The remarkable compendium of actions and practices that his efforts result in lead to a singular code of civility (one that shares nothing whatsoever with what Walser disparages as mere “middle-of-the-road politeness”). This paper seeks to reconstruct the vicissitudes of this code – from the games of wit (Witz) it initiates, to the form of servility it cultivates, a servility so extreme it threatens to unfound the rule being submitted to – with a view to understanding the provocative equivocation between decorum and insolence on which this code rests

Autosociobiography: Annie Ernaux and the Collective Sensorium

“All that the world has impressed upon her and her contemporaries she will use to reconstitute a common time… By retrieving the memory of collective memory in an individual memory, she will capture the lived dimension of History... There is no ‘I’ in what she views as a sort of impersonal autobiography. There is only ‘one’ and ‘we’…” - Annie Ernaux, The Year