SKOTEINOS Marcus Steinweg 1. From the outset philosophy has caused anxiety. 2. What caused the anxiety was the lack of anxiety, philosophy’s courage, because philosophy is a movement full of risks. 3. It is a movement of love (philía, philein) requiring courage and resolve. 4. People have tried to subject it to ridicule. 5. People were scared of the philosopher as the dark one (skoteinós). 6. People mocked the philosopher because, instead of seeing what was close to hand, he only saw what was remote so that he would only fall into a well or continually stumble. 7. People accused him of seducing the youth of Athens and brought him to trial and, occasionally, they killed him. 8. I define philosophy as the courage not to evade the call of the great concepts: What is freedom, what is truth, what is justice, what is love, what is the human being? 9. And how do these questions stand in relation to art and philosophy? 10. I think that art and philosophy share this courage. 11. Art is an assertion of form in the opening toward formlessness; philosophy is the assertion of truth within the intransparency of instituted realities. 12. Art’s assertion of form, philosophy’s assertion of truth demand a confrontation with these realities without bending to them. 13. Art and philosophy exist only in autonomy and resistance to what is established. 14. The autonomy and resistance of art and philosophy cannot be scientifically proven; they must be asserted through works eluding the dictates of provability whilst constituting the autono- my of the artwork. 15. That work is autonomous which maintains a resistant autonomy vis-à-vis the imperatives of the Zeitgeist: the freedom of its form. 16. The formalism of freedom which art is releases the work from its history, from the domain of its real cultural as well as technical, historical, informational and economic determination. 17. The work relates to its determinants without conceding them a final authority over it, because it implies an assertion which ties it to the impossible, to its truth which does not belong to this domain (or only as its absolute limit). 18. Autonomy is the name for the work’s irreducibility, for the opposition of an assertion which overflies, surpasses its own conditions. 19. Through its autonomy, the work maintains its relation to the infinite. 20. The infinite is yet another name for the incommensurable. 21. In contact with it, there can be a certain autonomy for the artwork which liberates it from the clutches of its determinants.
Posted on: Tue, 20 May 2014 17:06:17 +0000
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