Title Participants Abstract "Arts and politics: what has ontology to do with it ?" "Arthur Cools, Jan Bierhanzl" "Introduction to the issue Arts, Ontology and Politics. This text gives a survey of the articles included in the special issue Arts, Ontology and Politics and of the challenges that these articles have to deal with in approaching the central them." "Secularisering als uittrede van het sacrale uit de religie" "Arthur Cools" "In deze bijdrage plaats ik een kanttekening Bij Webers klassieke seculariseringsthese. Ik meen dat er aanwijzingen zijn om te verdedigen dat het proces van desacralisering, die door de seculariseringsthese wordt besproken, niet noodzakelijk het verdwijnen van het sacrale uit het maatschappelijke leven impliceert maar eerder een verschuiving van het sacrale naar een domein dat zich losmaakt van de religie en de religieuze praktijk. In deze optiek verschijnt met de secularisering een niet-religieuze opvatting van (en een subjectieve gebondenheid aan) het heilige. Het is belangrijk deze scheiding van religie en het heilige in de context van de seculariseringsthese te thematiseren niet alleen om de terugkeer van het heilige in de conditie van de moderniteit te begrijpen, maar ook om de disparate verschijningswijze van het heilige in het individuele leven van de hedendaagse cultuur (tot en met het onvermogen om het als zodanig te benoemen) te beschrijven." "Hagi Kenaan: Photography and Its Shadow" "Arthur Cools" "This is a review article of the book of Hagi Kenaan: Photography and Its Shadow (Stanford, 2020)." "Getuigenis en engagement. Over het onderscheid tussen fictie en non-fictie in literaire verhalen" "Arthur Cools" "Testimony and Engagement: Towards a Re-assessment of the Distinction between Fiction and Non-Fiction in Literary Narratives This article approaches the cognitive value of literary works from the perspective of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. This examination takes as a starting point the philosophy of Peter Lamarque who bases the distinction between fiction and non-fiction on the intention of the author. I question this position from the perspective of the reader’s experience of a literary text. I argue that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction plays a major role in our appreciation of literary works, but that the intention of the author is not sufficient to account for it. In order to assess the relevance of the distinction between fiction and non-fiction in the reader’s experience of literary narratives, I introduce the notions of testimony and engagement. Testimony narratives are considered to be non-fiction, narratives of engagement are not. In analyzing some aspects of the stories If This Is a Man (Primo Levi), Nausea (Jean-Paul Sartre) and Identitti (Mithu Sanyal), I show that testimony and engagement are both involved, however in different ways, in the reader’s appreciation of these stories." "The idea of tolerance and the perspective of the individual" "Arthur Cools" "This contribution to the issue 70 years Minima Moralia considers the question how critical theory is possible starting from Adorno's methodological device that ""critical theory lingers not only with a bad conscience ... in the sphere of the individual"". On the basis of this device, Adorno's own criticism of the idea of tolerance in the aphorism ""Mélange"" (§ 66) is assessed from a contemporary perspective." "The anarchy of literature" "Arthur Cools" "In this contribution to the volume Levinas and Literature, I intend to analyse Levinas's understanding of literature as implied in his approach to the appearance of meaning. I will do so by means of what I call the deformalization of narrative. In the first part, I will explain how the deformalization of time changes the conditions of narration and I will show how this is present in Levinas’s writings. In the second part, I will present Levinas’s concept of illeity as the most radical outcome of the deformalization of narrative and I will discuss its implications for the art of narration, before returning, in the final part, to the opening question concerning the concept of literature in Levinas’s philosophy, which is based, as I will argue, upon an anarchical and insoluble ambivalence." "Phenomenology and the transformation of the modern novel" "Arthur Cools" "This article examines in what way and to what extent phenomenological philosophy has given rise to a new understanding of the modern novel and to a transformation of its narrative techniques. The starting point for this examination is the claim, made by Merleau-Ponty in “Metaphysics and the Novel”, according to which, in phenomenological philosophy, the task of philosophy is inextricably bound to that of literature. I examine this claim in two ways. First, I situate it historically with regard to the modern novel’s characteristic realism. Then, I show how the phenomenological attitude – formulated by Husserl as a methodological device in distinction with the natural attitude – transforms the novel’s narrative technics. Sartre’s first novel, La Nausée, constitutes an exemplary case to assess this transformation. Combining these two ways, I argue that the claim made by Merleau-Ponty is paradoxical: on the one hand, the intrinsic connection between phenomenological philosophy and literature promotes the cognitive value of the modern novel, but on the other hand, it breaks with the conventions of the novel form and initiates a fragmented writing." "Aesthetic of estrangement. The epochal significance of Friedrich Hölderlin in the critical work of Maurice Blanchot" "Arthur Cools, Sebastian Müngersdorff" "Hölderlin is an important (not to say decisive) and recurrent reference in the critical work of Maurice Blanchot from his early literary article on Hölderlin in 1946 up to his later fragmentary writing in The Writing of the Disaster (L’Écriture du désastre, 1980). Hölderlin’s name is mentioned especially in connection with the epochal transformation of the sacred and the effects of this transformation on the poetic task, the literary work and the experience of writing. According to Blanchot, Hölderlin’s famous expression “Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit?” summarizes what is at stake in the epochal transformation of the sacred and expands the horizon of the experience of writing in modern times. The presence of Hölderlin in Blanchot’s work has been examined in relation to Heidegger’s interpretation of Hölderlin by Leslie Hill (1997) and in relation to the refiguration of the sacred in France in the 20th century by Kevin Hart (2004). In this contribution, we intend to examine how and to what extent Blanchot re-inscribes Hölderlin in an aesthetic of estrangement. Estrangement is to be understood in a strong sense here: not only as an experience of being separated or disconnected (from a home, oneself, the other, the stranger, the gods) but also as an experience of being upset by something that divides, remains inaccessible, does not speak. We argue that in this perspective a line of thought can be retraced from the epochal transformation of the sacred (that Blanchot describes as a process of interiorization) to the discovery of what Blanchot calls “the outside” and to the exigency of fragmentary writing. By articulating this line of thought, we expect to gain better insight into the historical conditions and the formal features of an aesthetic of estrangement that follows from it." "(Misguided) self-transcendence and the imagination of sacrifice" "Arthur Cools" "Wozu Dichter in dürftiger Zeit ? Le neutre et la question du sacré: Blanchot à partir de Hölderlin" "Arthur Cools"