Leo Luks

This paper provides an analysis of the paradoxical definition of art as the silence of the world, as presented in Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature. The definition is analysed phenomenologically, by treating the world as the universal horizon of all experiences. The paper presents two possible interpretations of Blanchot’s statement. First, a possibility is considered that, according to Blanchot, in genuine artistic experience the mundane everyday life falls silent, and an autonomous fictional world opens up. The paper argues that while Blanchot does oppose art to everyday life, this interpretation is insufficient. Firstly, because on the basis of the phenomenological premise, all possible worlds fall within the universal world-horizon, and secondly, the function Blanchot attributes to art is considerably more radical, as when he speaks about the directedness of art outside of all possible worlds. While such an aim may seem impossible from the viewpoint of the phenomenological premise, the second part of the paper demonstrates that it can indeed be meaningfully interpreted on the basis of Martin Heidegger’s transcendent approach to the world. According to this interpretation, while the phenomenological premise prevents all discussion of places and experiences outside the world, a liminal experience can nevertheless be discussed. If this is true, it is not an entity within the world which opens up, but rather the world-horizon itself in the form of an anxious silence.

Artiklis käsitletakse nihilistliku kirjandusloome võimalusi eesti luule näitel. Nihilismi ei mõisteta artiklis väärtusprobleemina, vaid ontoloogilise probleemina. Nihilistlikku kirjandusloomet käsitletakse taotlusena tuua sõnasse teine, eimiski. Artikli teoreetiline raamistik toetub põhiliselt Gianni Vattimo languse ontoloogia kontseptsioonile, aga ka Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heideggeri ja Maurice Blanchot' töödele. Samuti analüüsitakse artikli teoreetilises osas eimiski väljendamise võimalusi eesti keeles, tuginedes Uku Masingu ning Jaan Kaplinski mõttekäikudele. Luuletajatest käsitletakse artiklis enim Jaan Oksa ja Juhan Liivi. Analüüsi käigus tuuakse esile järgmised eimiskiga seotud poeetilised figuurid: ootus ja luhtumus, langus ja loojak, hullus, surm. Analüüsi tulemusena selgub, et nihilistlik loome on eesti luules tugevalt esindatud, kuid ei filosoofias ega luules pole võimalik saavutada otsest juurdepääsu eimiskile, tuleb piirduda aimamisega, vihjamisega. The paper discusses the possibilities for creating nihilistic literary works, using Estonian poetry as an example. The paper regards nihilism as an ontological problem, and not as a problem of values. Nihilistic literary creativity will be treated as an attempt to introduce nothingness. The theoretical framework is provided by Gianni Vattimo's ontology of decline, as well as by the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot. The paper also analyzes, relying on the ideas put forward by Uku Masing and Jaan Kaplinski, the possibilities of expressing nothingness in the Estonian language. As to Estonian poets, the paper will focus on the works of Juhan Liiv and Jaan Oks. The analysis of their works highlights the following poetic figures related to nothingness: anticipation and failure, decay and decline, madness, death. The analysis will demonstrate that nihilism is strongly present in Estonian poetry. However, since neither philosophy nor poetry has direct access to nothingness, one must remain content with presentiments and allusions

This article is a Heideggerian inquiry into the possibility of ontological experience, that is, the possibility of experiencing the ontological difference, something wholly distinct from beings. Heidegger, as we know, articulated this as the question of Being. It is a paradoxical question that cannot, at first sight, be answered phenomenologically : if any conscious experience presupposes the constitution of an intentional object in the act of experience, there must be something in any experience. In this article, I set out to defend the position that ontological experience is possible and central to the human existence. This view rests on the Heideggerian notion of the affective grounds of all thinking, the attunement of any experience by moods. I will argue that: 1) any thinking is attuned by moods; 2) ontological experience occurs in certain negative moods. 3) ontological experience is possible only through failure, a malfunction in the fulfilment of meaning; 4) ontological experience is possible in art rather than in science.

In this paper, I will attempt to demonstrate that post-metaphysical philosophy should cease its attempts to imitate the formal rules of science and rather intensify its dialogue with art, especially literature. I will draw on the philosophy of Gianni Vattimo, according to whom we should accept nihilism and admit that no theoretical narrative is true in the sense of corresponding to reality. Acceptance of nihilism amounts to the acceptance of radical contingency, where no line of argument is everlasting. As philosophical thinking is weakened in this manner, and as it lets go of the presumption of its own validity, a new era will arrive in the dialogue between philosophy and literature by their fusion. Keywords: nihilism, hermeneutics, literature, nothingness, postmodern

In the article “The Fusion of Philosophy and Literature in Nihilist Thought” I argued that post-metaphysical philosophy should intensify its dialogue with literature to the point of their eventual fusion. In this paper I will start from the conclusions of my previous article and will highlight two possible lines of this fusion:1) The disappearance of the boundary between reality and fiction. Once we let go of the correspondence theory of truth, as Vattimo recommends, we will arrive at the principled possibility of the truthfulness of any and all narratives. Nihilist thought is characterised by a weakened sense of reality, a renouncement of common sense and naturalism. This condition, described by Nietzsche, where making a distinction between the real world and tall tales is impossible in principle, has several far-reaching epistemological and ethical consequences.2) In its fusion with literature, nihilist thought seeks for a language to articulate the nothing, to represent the unrepresentable. In the paper I will analyse this pursuit by way of the concepts of postmodernity, the space of literature, and anxiety. I will draw on the views of Maurice Blanchot, Roland Barthes and Jean-François Lyotard.By fusing with literature, nihilist philosophy can continue in a situation where it has nothing to say.Keywords: nihilism, hermeneutics, fictionality, nothingness, postmodern

This article aims toward a phenomenological interpretation of the unmediated experience of reading Sven Kivisildnik’s poetry. As the basic theoretical thesis of the article, I assert that there is always an inherent negativity in the feeling of the sublime, since this feeling is caused by unrepresentable experience. Likewise, I claim that this negativity is not merely a lack in aesthetic representation, but that it has deep ontological meaning in itself. I make connections between the inherent negativity in the feeling of the sublime and the concept of failure of linguistic utterance worked out by Jaan Undusk, Jaak Tomberg and Jüri Lipping. I come to the conclusion that the „no” in the feeling of sublimity is given to us in unmediated form. The practical (or applied) intention of this article is to show that the dominant sociocentric interpretation of Kivisildnik’s poetry is one-sided and limiting. From the theoretical positions I have worked out, I outline the fundamental motifs of Kivisildnik’s poetry, and by means of examples drawn from the text, demonstrate how the „no” of the sublime is found there. I come to the conclusion that the dominant direction in Kivisildnik’s poetry is destruction. The article consists of an introduction, five sections, and a summary. In the first section („Approaches”), I briefly introduce the phenomenological approach. My position is that the work is always created during the act of reading, as the outcome of the union of text and reader. However, I leave the reader as subject open to definition, leaving it to drift as it were, since I am sceptical about the possibility of defining the subject. I do not claim that the sublime is the only possible conceptual framework for understanding poetry; rather, I consider the sublime as one proper theoretical metaphor for conceptualizing personal experience of reading. In the second section of the article („Defining poetry”), I make use of Rein Raud’s distinctions to provide a preliminary definition of poetry, as located between cognition-centred, grammar-centred, and sociocentric approaches. Due to my phenomenological leanings, I am inclined toward the cognition-centred approach. Next, I discuss the difference between poetry and prose, using Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of the two slopes of literature. In the rest of the article I focus on the second of these slopes, the one that reaches outward from the world of literature – that is, on poetry. The third section („The Dissolution of the Sublime in Failure”), I rebound from the positions of Undusk, Tomberg, and Lipping, according to whom utterance is unavoidably failure, and that the main goal of the aesthetic text is a drive toward silence. I connect the experience of hearing the silence within utterance with the concept of the sublime, using as bridging concepts Immanuel Kant’s classic definition of the sublime and the subsequent development of this idea by Jean-François Lyotard. According to Lyotard, the general purpose o modern art is striving toward negative representation, that is, toward the avoidance of representation. In the fourth section („Ontological Excursus: The Sublime (No)Thing?”), I use Rodolphe Gasché’s arguments to critique Lyotard’s fundamental ontological position, according to which the universe of the phrase is all-encompassing (and contains silence), and something is always happening. According to Gasché’s interpretation – with which I concur, there is within the sublime of non-representability the possibility of non-being as the final phrase. I go on to deepen the latter possibility using Martin Heidegger’s discussion of the unmediated experience of no-thing in anxiety. In order to emphasize the processuality of this possibility, in the following line of reasoning I abandon the concept of no-thing in favour of the more ambiguous „no”. The fifth section („Poetry’s ways of „no”-ing”), I distinguish between three possible types of no-ing poetry, without pretending to any comprehensiveness in this list: metaphysical poetry; poetry that is undergoing weakening or decline, and the poetry of destruction. I then discuss the poetry of Kivisildnik in the framework of this typology, and come to the conclusion that for Kivisildnik, what dominates is the poetry of destruction. In the sixth section, („Great viperous lines...”), I briefly consider the three key motifs of Kivisildnik’s sublime poetry of destruction: terror, abortion, and Estonia as an empty signifier. In the concluding section I demonstrate that the question raised by postmodern art – what is art? is also relevant to Kivisildnik’s poetry. I examine four stylistic figures through which Kivisildnik’s poetry falls into essential uncertainty: mechanicalness, the dispersal of authorship, the turning-into-itself of poetry, and the text’s transmissions into emptiness.