À venir / Upcoming
EDUARDO RALICKAS
“From the ‘Death of Philosophy’ to the Life of the Mind: Lyotard and Fichte on the Art of Pragmatic Critique”
XII. Kongress der Internationalen Johann Gottlieb Fichte-Gesellschaft, Philosophie als Kunst: Imagination, Leben, System. Università degli Studi di Ferrara (Sept. 2025)
Abstract. Although Lyotard was a formidable interpreter of Kant and a highly diligent reader of key authors in the modern German tradition (Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger), his published writings make no substantial contribution to the study of Fichte. There is, moreover, little to no trace of Fichte in the extant Lyotard archives in Paris. Fichte’s writings, however, especially those that touch upon the art of philosophy, pose an important challenge to some of Lyotard’s main epistemological claims about the nature, scope, and power of philosophical discourse. In this comparative paper, I seek to explore Lyotard’s contention that philosophical discourse is a coy art form by confronting Lyotard’s meta-philosophical claims to Fichte’s ideas about the pragmatic nature of philosophical activity. Fichte and Lyotard are indeed similar in that they both foreground pragmatics as a major problem in philosophy. In addition, both are masters in the art of retorsion. But they differ radically in their understanding of the place of pragmatics in philosophical analysis. In Lyotard, pragmatics leads to the death of philosophy. In Fichte, it opens up a previously unfathomed vista onto the life of the mind.
Keywords: Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), Jean-François Lyotard (1924–1998), pragmatics, self-reference, history of philosophy, art, spirit.
Nouvelle parution / Recently published
EDUARDO RALICKAS
“From the Gestell to the Reprogestell: Notes on the Technological Continuum”
History of Photography
The Slide Lecture
ed. Tal-Or Ben-Choreen and Karla McManus
Abstract. In this article, I cast a retrospective glance at the technological continuum from which the art history slide lecture springs. I focus specifically on the copy apparatuses widely used to make transparencies for art-historical consumption, circa 1930 to the early 2000s. The ways in which these once prevalent technologies developed to frame and disseminate visual materials by means of light was instrumental in shaping the widespread illusion of epistemological transparency in the world’s art history classrooms. In reference to the work of Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) on technological determinism, I provide an illustrated chronology of slide reproduction technologies in which artworks ultimately appear as self-luminous technological “images,” or simulated entities that speak as if beyond history.
Keywords: copy stand technologies (genesis and evolution); slide projection; technological determinism; phenomenology; grey literature (photography); Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“Since the days of the great Heinrich Wölfflin, art-historians have tended to identify the object of their enquiry with those properties of a painting which a good slide preserves.”
Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (1987), p. 11.
Figure 2. A nineteenth-century reproduction camera and operator pictured in ‘La Photographie’, Le Magasin Pittoresque, ed. Édouard Charton, 32e année (1864), 92. Wood engraving by Dupré after a drawing by Jules Gagniet, 12.5 x 15.1 cm. Digital copy-stand photograph. Author’s collection. Notice how, in this early stage, the specialised operator is also a worldly portrait artist. By reinforcing the division of labour, the next generation of technological offerings further estranges the hand, eye, and mind, as technology takes further command over ‘average everyday’ dealings with the work of art by making the operator forgetful of the work’s worldly (and wordly) contexts.
This work is supported by an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada