Hagi Kenaan

This dissertation interrogates a predominant philosophical framework underlying the study of speech. In this the conceptualization of the phenomenon of speech on a systematic privileging of fact-depicting language which, in turn, is made possible by a particular philosophical attitude toward the question of facticity. In the philosophy of language, this attitude has been epitomized in tranditional semantics, but it has continued to govern the way philosophy thinks the phenomenon of language even after the 'pragmatic turn.' ;The first part of the dissertation is an attempt to explicate the philosophical attitude that implicitly grounds the thematization of speech in the pragmatic-linguistic tradition. What is fundamental to this attitude is an assertive reflective mode, a philosophical stance that takes its own reflective turn for granted, and thus also takes for granted the being of facts. I call this deeply rooted attitude "positivistic," despite the common contention that positivism is a matter of the past. ;The central chapters of the dissertation examine how the positivistic conception of facts is operative in the philosophical construction of the speech act with emphasis on the conventional presupposition that the basic unit of communication is a semantic unit. These chapters take the shape of an anatomy, followed by a critique, that points to a phenomenological possibility of breaking away from the semantic conception of language and the despotism of facts. I argue that the 'pragmatic turn' has already opened up such a possibility, but that the Anglo-American tradition that appropriated the 'turn' has resisted the radical implications of the pragmatic insight.

This paper is concerned with the implications of Husserl's phenomenological reformulation of the problem of error. Following Husserl, I argue that the phenomenon of error should not be understood as the accidental failure of a fully constituted cogito, but that it is itself constitutive of the cogito's formation. I thus show that the phenomenon of error plays a crucial role in our self-understanding as unified subjects of experience. In order to unpack this 'hermeneutical function' of error, I focus on three inter-related notions which are recurrently used by Husserl to refer to the central aspects of error apprehension: explosion (Explosion), replacement (Ersatz), and cancellation (Durchstreichung). My discussion, however, does not remain committed to the Husserlian framework as such. This is not only because Husserl's notion of explosion proves itself untenable, but because the Husserlian paradigm does not make room for a linguistic dimension intrinsic, in my view, to the realization of error. Hence, I proceed by reconstructing the Husserlian terms as tropes of realization, as narratological devices in the 'language game' of error. I argue that these hermeneutical devices are necessary for maintaining what Nietzsche would call the self's 'semblance of unity'. The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis for our thought and our consciousness in general? (Nietzsche, The Will to Power #490).

The article unpacks Deleuze’s understanding of the radical potential lying in Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity. It explains why Kierkegaard’s figure of the knight of faith is pertinent for our present age and traces the manner in which Deleuze reconstructs this figure for developing his own concept of becoming and, specifically, of ‘becoming nobody’. But why is Deleuze, a self-proclaimed philosopher of difference, attracted to the idea of ‘becoming imperceptible’? We answer this question by showing how the Kierkegaardian notion of interiority turns into a key concept within a new Deleuzian understanding of the political.

Is philosophy deaf to the sound of the personal voice? While philosophy is experienced at admiring, resenting, celebrating, and, at times, renouncing language, philosophers have rarely succeeded in being intimate with it. Hagi Kenaan argues that philosophy's concern with abstract forms of linguistic meaning and the objective, propositional nature of language has obscured the singular human voice. In this strikingly original work Kenaan explores the ethical and philosophical implications of recognizing and responding to the individual presence in language. In pursuing the philosophical possibility of listening to language as the embodiment of the human voice, Kenaan explores the phenomenological notion of the "personal." He defines the personal as the irresolvable tension that exists between the public character of language, necessary for intelligibility, and the ways in which we, as individuals, remain riveted to our words in a contingently singular manner. _The Present Personal_ fuses phenomenology and aesthetics and the traditions of Continental and Anglo-American philosophy, drawing on Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Kant, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger as well as literary works by Kafka, Kundera, and others. By asking new questions and charting fresh terrain, Kenaan does more than offer innovative investigations into the philosophy of language; _The Present Personal_, and its concern with the intimate and personal nature of language, uncovers the ethical depth of our experience with language. Kenaan begins with a discussion of Kierkegaard's existential critique of language and the ways in which the propositional structure of language does not allow the spoken to reflect the singularity of the self. He then compares two attempts to subvert the "hegemony of content": the pragmatic turn of J. L. Austin and the poetic path of Heidegger. Kenaan concludes by turning to Kant and discovering an analogy between the experience of meaning in language and the aesthetic experience of encountering beauty. Kenaan's reconceptualization of philosophy's approach to language frees the contingent singularity of language while, at the same time, permitting it to continue to dwell within the confines of content.

Philosophy's Moods is a collection of original essays interrogating the inseparable bond between mood and philosophical thinking. What is the relationship between mood and thinking in philosophy? In what sense are we always already philosophizing from within a mood? What kinds of mood are central for shaping the space of philosophy? What is the philosophical imprint of Aristotle's wonder, Kant's melancholy, Kierkegaard's anxiety or Nietzsche's shamelessness? Philosophy's Moods invites its readers to explore the above questions through diverse methodological perspectives. The collection includes fourteen contributions by internationally renowned scholars as well as younger and emerging voices. In pondering the place of the subjective and personal roots that thinking is typically called to overcome, the book challenges and articulates an alternative to a predominant tendency in philosophy to view the theoretical content and the affective side of thought as opposed to one another.

Photography and Its Shadow argues that the invention of photography marked a rupture in our relation to the world and what we see in it. The dominant theoretical and artistic paradigm for understanding the invention has been the tracing of shadows. But what photography really inaugurated was the shadow's disappearance—a disappearance that irreversibly changed our relationship to nature and the real, to time and to death. A way of negotiating impermanence, photography was marked from the start by an inherent contradiction. It conflated two incompatible configurations of the visible: an embodied human eye, deeply sensitive to nature, and a machine vision that aimed to reify the instant and wallow in images alone. Photography's history is replete with efforts to conceal the mystery of its paradoxical constitution. Born in the century of Nietzsche's "death of God," it long enacted the fraught subjectivity of its age. Anxious, haunted by a void, it used an array of strategies to take on ever-new identities. Challenging the hitherto most influential accounts of the practice and taking us from its origins to the present, Hagi Kenaan shows us how photography has been transformed over time, and how it transforms us.

This article offers a philosophical account of a range of urban phenomena that are integral to the visual fabric of the modern city and, at the same time, external to the visual order administered by the city’s rulers. Explaining why the common terms of “graffiti” and “street art” are too narrow for discussing the plurality of the illicit visual forms that populate the city’s space, I coin the alternative term “streetography” and aim at a new understanding of its visual efficacy. This is done by showing that the key for deciphering the streetograph’s unique visuality is its form of embeddedness in the street and, in a corollary manner, the form of visual experience—the kinds of viewing—that the street opens for the urban viewer.Streetographs always operate within the city’s given visual order and as such the question of their efficacy is addressed here in terms of the streetograph’s relationship to that hegemonic visual rule whose basic traits are also clarified. Developing an understanding of this relationship, the article thus addresses the following questions: What kind of resistance can streetographs provide to the kind of optics that governs the modern urban space? Can streetographs evoke an alternative kind of spectatorship that disrupts the sovereign’s imagination? And, more specifically, in an epoch in which streetographs are regularly absorbed into capitalist aesthetics—advertising, cinema, social media—how can they allow us to rethink the possibility of resisting the measure of a global capitalist visual system?

In this paper I return to one of the central points of contention in the renowned debate between John Searle and Jacques Derrida with the aim of rethinking the role of success and the place of failure in communication. What is the philosophical significance of Austin's decision to exclude from his investigation (in How to Do Things with Words) certain utterances that cannot qualify as successful? Examining the conflicting ways in which Searle and Derrida understand and respond to Austin, I try to flesh out Derrida's call to grant failure (or the negative) the important place it deserves in our understanding of speech. Yet, whereas for Derrida, the call to recognize failure as an internal and positive condition ultimately leads to a structural – albeit a deconstructive – critique of language's conditions of possibility, I focus instead on the implications which this insight may have for our understanding of the actuality of language. Consequently, I argue that while Derrida's critique subverts the hegemony of success, it ironically remains, like Searle, distant from and external to the actual reverberation of spoken language.

In “Todtnauberg,” the poem in which Paul Celan responded to his encounter with Martin Heidegger, the concept of hope becomes central. The paper focuses on the ways in which hope figures in between the poet and the philosopher, showing that their different understanding of the value of hope is indicative of a much deeper disagreement that calls for an investigation. This investigation is neither analytic nor purely conceptual, but requires us to develop a new way of listening to hope’s resonance, one that uncovers the presence of a chasm cutting through the space of language in which this mood becomes meaningful for the poet and the philosopher.

This paper seeks to articulate the significance of an intimate connection that exists between faces and images. It argues that the manner in which images face us – a picture's turning toward a viewer – is the primary condition of its meaningfulness. The article explicates the significance of an image's facing through a dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical understanding of the human face. The analogy I draw between Levinas's notion of the face and the facing of images runs against predominant readings of Levinas which emphasize the Levinasian ambivalence, not to say hostility, toward the visual, and the clear opposition he makes between the face's infinity and the finite and objectifying essence of images. My aim, however, is to show that there is an interesting sense in which Levinas's reflections on the human face offer, perhaps in spite of Levinas, a crucial prism for approaching pictures: I show that the Levinasian face can be understood in a manner that illuminates a dimension of alterity in pictures, one that remains uncontainable and, as such, questions the responsibility of the interpreter and opens up the ethical depth of the image. As a central case study, I turn to a series of provocative graffiti images, chimeric animal-human faces, which were created by Klone, a Tel Aviv-based street artist.

We are all familiar with the fact that moods change. But, what is the significance of this familiar fact? Is change merely a factual characteristic of moods or can it also offer us a lens for gaining a deeper understanding of mood’s essence?. The essay’s starting point is Heidegger’s treatment of moods and their manner of changing. Heidegger, I show, is interested in our ordinary shifts in mood as indicators of a fundamental existential structure that underlies the specificity of any particular mood. Yet, is the changing of moods only a means to reveal the inherent depth – the “always already”-- of our givenness to moods, or is it a dimension significant onto itself? Moving beyond Heidegger, I thus explain why change should be understood as the grounding condition of our being-in-a mood, and consequently, what it means to embrace the relationality and intrinsic plurality - the being singular-plural -- of a subjectivity of changing moods. In doing so, I am concerned with the implications that such an analysis carries for the ethical question regarding the freedom and responsibility we have in and over our moods.