Richter - Afterness: figures of following in modern thought and aesthetics

AFTERNESS

Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts

Afterness

FIGURES OF FOLLOWING IN MODERN THOUGHT AND AESTHETICS

GERHARD RICHTER

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53034-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richter, Gerhard, 1967

Afterness : figures of following in modern thought and aesthetics / Gerhard Richter.

p. cm.(Columbia themes in philosophy, social criticism, and the arts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15770-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-53034-7 (e-book)

1. Philosophy, Modern21st century. 2. TimePhilosophy. 3. Aesthetics. I. Title.

B805.R53 2011

190.9'051dc22

2011012670

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After philosophy comes philosophy. But it is altered by the after.

Jean-Franois Lyotard

Even the death of Christ was only his beginning.

Ernst Bloch

Only the How is repeatable. The pastexperienced as actual historicityis anything but the Over [das Vorbei].

Martin Heidegger

Modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier, in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure.

Paul de Man

Contents

As a recent doctoral student discussed with me how best to structure his dissertation, the contours of which were only beginning to take shape, he suggested writing an introduction followed by the individual chapters. Almost without hesitation, I replied by articulating a largely unspoken writerly strategy. To the great bafflement of my studentwho up to that point had never written a book-length textI advised against his plan, explaining that introductions almost always are written after the fact, in other words, last. What experienced writers knowthat introductions come first but almost always are composed as an afterthought to what already has been writtenbespeaks an irreducible belatedness in language and thought. That which introduces, points forward to, explains, and situates something that is not yet present always already will have been preceded by what it itself claims to precede. Hovering between proceeding and preceding, introductions are retroactively invented by what they tacitly claim to call into presence, an after in the guise of another temporality, another allegiance, another direction. It is no different with the present introduction, whose pages will have been written after the chapters that follow it had long since been completed.

Why start the book with this basic reflection on the relationship between the before and the after, between preceding and following? By commenting on the situatedness of the introduction in the wake of an after that actually is a before, and a before that is actually an after, we have already entered the terrain that this study wishes to delimit, interrogate, engage in, and contextualize in ever-shifting modulations, media, frames of reference, and conceptual registers.

After all, this book is concerned with a particular figure of modernity, that of following, coming after, having survived, outlived, or succeeded something or someone: what in broad terms I wish to call afterness. But what does it really mean for something to follow something else, either in language or as a concept? Can the after ever fully emancipate itself from its predecessor, or does it in fact remain in the latters ghostly and largely unacknowledged debt? The after is not merely a temporal dimension. A sustained reading of afterness has far-reaching implications for how we view the thought, aesthetic production, and ethico-political concerns of modernityfrom the afterness of Kants Copernican revolution in speculative thought (yielding, in his view, a genuinely critical philosophy after the phases of its dogmatic allegiances) to a postlapsarian Western culture famously said to come after Auschwitz. But our understanding of the after itself first must be understood. Interrogating this understanding without explaining away its irreducible difficulties and its resistances to understanding by pretending to know what the after is in advance of this or that particular manifestation is the task of this study.

Not a history of afterness in which one after is assumed simply to follow a previous after in a teleo-chronological succession of afters, this study instead is concerned with certain structural and conceptual features of afterness that traverse the spectral reverberations of any act of following. A useful way of conceptualizing the problem to which my investigation of afterness attempts to respond is to recall Walter Benjamins preoccupation with the concept of Nachleben (living on, living after, surviving, afterlife, or following) in modernity. Drawing on art historian Aby Warburgs coinage of the term Nachleben in the field of iconography and in the context of a revolutionary theory of the history of art and aesthetics, Benjamin was attracted to the idea that works, lives, languages, and media possess a historicity that cannot be reduced to the continuum of temporal unfolding preferred by the nineteenth-century German historicism associated with such proper names as Leopold von Ranke. As the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman reminds us, in Warburgs work, the term Nachleben refers to the survival (the continuity or afterlife and metamorphosis) of images and motifsas opposed to their renascence after extinction or, conversely, their replacement by innovations in image and motif. He continues: Almost every section of Warburgs Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek opens with a collection of documents related to artistic survivals, yielding a conception of Nachleben that must profoundly alter, if taken seriously, our understanding of what a historical phenomenon or fact is.

Although Warburgs introduction of concepts such as das Nachleben der Antike, or the afterlife of antiquity, as an art historical category would serve as a touchstone for art historians and theorists as heterogeneous as Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Benjamins later mobilization of Nachleben would effect an even more radical, enigmatic, and encompassing transformation of the philosophy of history and modernity. From Benjamins perspective, the concept of Nachleben inflects the fates of art, media, history, philosophy, and the ethico-political dimensions of modernity. He articulates these concerns in their most advanced formulations in the notes that comprise The Arcades Project. There, in the section on the theory of knowledge, Benjamin explains his conception:

Geschichtliches Verstehen ist grundstzlich als ein Nachleben des Verstandnen zu fassen und daher ist dasjenige was in der Analyse des Nachlebens der Werke, des Ruhmes erkannt wurde, als die Grundlage der Geschichte berhaupt zu betrachen.

[Historical understanding is to be grasped, fundamentally, as an afterlife of that which is understood; and what has been recognized in the analysis of the afterlife of works, in the analysis of fame, is therefore to be considered the foundation of history in general.]