The Art of Reconciliation : Photography and the Conception of Dialectics in Benjamin, Hegel, and Derrida

Dag Petersson offers a comprehensive critique of the philosophy that has dominated 200 years of modern thought, politics, economy, and culture. The basic question is this: why does dialectical metaphysics fail to keep what it promises? What is it about dialectics, that makes it fall into irreducibly distinct variations of itself, when all it promises is to synthesize, to reconcile and make whole what is fragmented and alien to itself? An undisciplined creativity intrinsic to completing reason comes to light through analyses of how dialectical systems begin. Every dialectical philosophy must account for its own birth, and it is at this point, when it also articulates its promise of universal synthesis, that the book discovers a desire for light-writing, or photography. Only the most immediate element - light - can mediate the necessary self-determination of thought at its origin. Light must begin to write. A philosophical critique of dialectics is therefore also a point of departure for a new aesthetic ontology of photography Front Matter....Pages i-xx Front Matter....Pages 1-1 Introduction to a Reality of Dreams....Pages 3-25 Image, Remembrance, Awakening: Toward a Dialectics of Intensity....Pages 26-48 Correspondences: Postal, Political, and Poetical....Pages 49-73 Water: The Revolutionary Element of Reflection and Likeness....Pages 74-93 Fantômes, or Death and the Metropolis: Reconciliation as a Shock of History....Pages 94-110 Categories of Language, Vision, and Music....Pages 111-127 Front Matter....Pages 129-129 The Forces of a Preface....Pages 131-162 Sacrifice: The Gift to Economy....Pages 163-195 Front Matter....Pages 197-197 Love and the Difference a Family Makes....Pages 199-231 A....Pages 232-268 Back Matter....Pages 269-315