Law and Art: Ethics, Aesthetics and Justice at the Tate Modern

There looks to be a terrific symposium at the Tate Modern on Tuesday March 23.  Here are the details:


Tuesday 23 March 2010, 10.00–18.00

This unique and enticing one day symposium brings together world-leading scholars to reflect on the relationship between law and art.

Speakers offer unique perspectives on the relationship between law and art. Some are philosophical while others discuss issues that arise in specific instances of this relationship: film, theatre, music, fine art, poetry and literature. Despite representing a wide range of philosophical orientations, disciplines and art forms, all speakers articulate some affinity between law and art while also strongly conveying the unease that characterise their engagement.

All speakers at this conference are contributors to Law and Art: Ethics, Aesthetics and Justice to be published by Routledge-Cavendish, Glasshouse Books, summer 2010.

Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£15 (£12 concessions), booking recommended
For tickets, call 020 7887 8888.

I've copied the detailed outline after the jump.




Law And Art - the tension.

This symposium will unearth a fascinating debate about the complementarity between art and law and their otherness from many perspectives. The relationship between art and law is troubling to say the least. In philosophical and historical terms, therefore all speakers rethink this uneasy yet pervasive and necessary relationship.

Law was classically defined as ars iuris, an art of law, which used the panoply of humanist disciplines, from philology to fine art, in the exercise of the legal role and the scholarly understanding of its texts. However, that tradition has fallen by the wayside over time, and particularly in the wake of modernism and the increased specialisation of legal expertise. Law and art now exist in a tense and uneasy relationship with each other.

One of the problematic contemporary aspects of this relationship is how its troubled nature becomes less and less visible in a legalised, representational and calculative world. That this world becomes more and more violent in the wake of more and more critical legalisation may hint at a deeper unfolding which is silenced by always-already legal responses to that violence. The contemporary legalised world and its legalising critical actors may be conceived itself to be a work of art that remains a sign which is not read.

During the symposium, speakers will offer short talks followed by a panel discussion and questions from the audience. We will publish short summaries of contributions here.



10:00

Welcome: Marko Daniel

10:05

Oren Ben-Dor: Introductory Remarks

10:15

Panel 1: Law Between Ethics and Aesthetics
Chaired by Panu Minkinnen



Krzysztof Ziarek: Poetic Justice: Art and the Measure of Morality
Much of the reflection on law and justice takes its cue from the notion of the subject as possessing rights and the capacity, given the proper freedom, to exercise them. Even the radical critiques of the notion of subjectivity have failed to introduce a significant change into the debates about justice. Perhaps the one notable difference is the emphasis on the idea of alterity and the notion that justice should be centred not on the subject but rather on the ‘radically other,’ and thus promote justice and rights of the other. In this essay, I take as the point of departure Heidegger’s thought of the fourfold, and in particular, its displacement of the human from the position of centrality to the role of a participant in a nexus of relations constitutive of the world. The primary determination of the human in this context is neither the notion of the subject nor that of the other’s alterity, but instead that of mortality and the perspective its opens onto being. Mortality becomes the measure of the place and relations of the mortals, always thought by Heidegger as a plural, within the world. Yet mortality reveals itself most strikingly in what Heidegger describes as ‘poetic dwelling’ in his essays such as ‘...Poetically Man Dwells...,’ ‘The Thing,’ or ‘On the Way to Language.’ For Heidegger, this poetic measure of the mortals’ dwelling discloses itself precisely in art, specifically in the poetic event of the world opened up in the artwork. In this context, justice would need to be approached from the perspective of the role of the mortals in the world, as justice of and for the world, and not simply for human beings. Justice, therefore, has everything to do with art’s poetic event of disclosure, that is, with the way in which the artwork, as Heidegger points out in The Origin of the Work of Art, suspends the usual ways of acting, perceiving, knowing, and valuing. Allowing us to experience the temporality of this suspension and displacement, the artwork opens up being as the historical-temporal event of finitude: the poetic measure of mortal dwelling. Justice then is always already ‘poetic’ justice, always ‘in question’ as a certain mode of being, free of power and dominance. Justice for beings, non-human and human, comes as part and parcel of the power-free, poetic way of world’s being.



Igor Stramignoni: Seizing Truths: Art, Politics, and Law
The work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has been described as ‘the most powerful alternative yet conceived in France to the various forms of postmodernism that arose after the collapse of the Marxist project’ (Hallward). Art interests Badiou in and of itself but, also, as both that which during the twentieth century took over philosophy and as that which philosophy, now increasingly de-sutured from art, must nevertheless imitate in order to make clear that, quite simply, there are truths, after all. Law, on the other hand, is for Badiou the ‘cipher of a finitude’ (le chiffre d’une finitude), part and parcel of a specific political machine that must continuously perform certain problematic exclusions if it is to keep the fiction of parliamentary democracy together. So how is the relationship between art and law, between the poet and the city, in Badiou’s oeuvre?



Ariella Atzmon: Judaism in the ‘No man’s Land’ between Law and Ethics
The Judaic prohibition of ‘the image’, recognized as the ‘triumph of intellectuality over sensuality’, results in a deficiency of ‘art’ and ‘science’, and implies a convoluted attitude towards ethics, morality and ‘The Law’. Heidegger’s approach, that hermeneutics is a ‘search into ontological and epochal thinking’ is alien to the Jewish tradition, which concentrates on immutable, preserved, textual knowledge. Hence, Judaism’s claim as representing the zenith of hermeneutics fails. Since hermeneutical awareness impacts on rhetorical and political styles, I argue that because, in Judaism, the people’s relationship to God is conceived both in legalistic terms and requiring strictly God-fearing obedience, this vitiates recourse to a vigilant ethical judgment.



Costas Douzinas: The blindness of law and the Insight of Justice
This talk reflects on the relationship between law, justice and regimes of visibility.



Adam Gearey: ‘I wish you well’: Aesthetics and Welfare
This paper uses Jean Luc Nancy’s understanding of being-with as a way of thinking about the possibilities of a philosophy of welfare. The paper is committed to poetry rather than either social theory or social science as an authentic philosophical resource. The paper begins with a consideration of Walt Whitman’s ‘To a Stranger’ and ‘Once I Passed through a Populous City’. These poems are approaches to ‘being with’- the circulation of meaning amongst bodies – the rooting of experience in reason, rhythms and sensuous responses to the world. Where does this take us? Being with might not lead to any direct political recuperation or institutional theory. However, it can point towards a notion of welfare as the open set of my encounters with others, with whom I am concerned and wish well. It also points towards one way in which we might think about institutionalised forms of welfare.



Panel discussion

12:00

Panel 2: Law, Art and Violence
Chaired by Ewa Ziarek



Oren Ben-Dor: The Sublime Origin of Violence and the Tragedy of Law
From now on, we will call ‘most thought-provoking’ what remains to be thought about always, because it is at the beginning, before all else. What is most thought provoking? How does it show itself in our thought-provoking time? Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking - not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking. (Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking)

I argue that the essential relationship between law and art can not be assimilated into ‘critical’ usefulness but rather forms a relationship of call and response that manifests as primordial strangeness. Art persists for the sake of guarding ineliminable strangeness that characterises the guardianship of be-ing. Reflections will traverse the notions of ‘hermeneutics’, ‘beginning’, ‘decision’ and lastly, the relationship between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’.
Resorting to critical thinking in law through engagement with ethics and aesthetics is inevitable, but at the same time does not yet respond to the call of be-ing, thus anticipating violence. Tragedy occurs as violence of be-ing when critical thinking silences the transcendence of strangeness which is itself characterised as a near/far movement – when, following Heidegger’s quote, what is most thought-provoking provokes only as impossibility to provoke.
We can hear an echo of this violence and tragedy in the very condition of political possibility encapsulated in art. It is this tragedy which is political in art rather than any opening of possibilities that anticipate useful audibility in ethics, politics and the law. Strangeness to anything legal, I would argue, embodies the ‘prophetic’ in art. The strangeness of the prophetic embodies a de-cision that originates in the mystery of be-ing, and which embodies the be-coming of be-ing. Law, in its essence as art always estranges legal being and becoming.



Richard Wilson: As the Osprey to the Fish: Shakespeare and the Force of Law
I think he’ll be to Rome.
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature. [Coriolanus, 4,7,33-5]

Shakespeare’s plots turn on the tension between justice and positive law which has become a focus for postmodern philosophy thanks to Derrida’s readings of the Weimar thinkers Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. In play after play the dramatist poses the same question as these theorists of ‘the state of emergency’: ‘How to distinguish between the force of law of a legitimate power and the allegedly originary violence that must have established this authority and that could not have authorized itself by any anterior legitimacy?’ [Derrida, ‘The Force of Law’]. This essay will therefore examine Shakespeare’s representation of the successor or post-war regime in a range of plays from A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Hamlet and The Tempest, and consider how this relates to debates in contemporary jurisprudence about the conflict between prerogative and ‘the voice of the recorded law’ [Measure for Measure], ‘the Norman Yoke’ and the rights of ‘Free Born Englishmen’.



Bernadette Buckley: Emergency Art: The Revolution will not be Curated!
This talk builds on my existing work on the relationship between art and terrorism—in particular on those artists who styles themselves as a artist-guerillas whose role it is, they believe, to subvert and challenge an essentially misguided ‘authority’. The aim of this talk is to explore and to critique what I am calling the ‘Emergency Art’ tradition.
‘Emergency Art’ falls into two categories. Firstly it refers to artworks, the creation of which necessarily constitutes some kind of legal or criminal offence e.g. Situationist ‘detournements’, works by Alexander Brener, Josh Mac Phee, Mark McGowan, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi, irational.org, graffiti artists from Banksy to Chairman Mao, CrimethInc, Baader-Meinhof etc. etc. Secondly, it refers to those situations in which artists’ work has resulted in state or police ‘actions’ in order to ‘protect’ the public - e.g. Critical Art Ensemble, Manga, Tierney Gearon, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Kienholz, Allen Ginsberg, ‘Degenerate Art’.
Overall, the talk will raise questions around the notion of ‘artistic merit’ when raised as a legal defence and will explore the related question as to whether or not the public needs to be protected from art and artists. Consequently, it will also raise issues arising from the ‘democratisation of art’, the notion of ‘unauthorised’ art and/or ‘art against authority’.



Panel discussion

13:15

Lunch

14:15

Panel 2: Creativity, Singularity and the Law
Chaired by Adam Gearey



Jaime Stapleton: Copyright Activism as Art: Aesthetics, Ideology and Ethics
This paper treads the well-worn path between art and law, that of copyright. But, rather than exploring the usual conflicts between art and copyright law, the paper examines the development of anti-copyright activism as an art form. In particular, the paper focuses on the political and economic paradigms that underpin the current wave of copyright activism. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of art in coalitions for copyright reform, and the ethical challenges this entails.



Zenon Bankowski: Beyond the Text of Law
When people view art objects in galleries, too often they rely on textual explanation, looking for the text in the catalogue to explain it and not letting the object explain itself. Some curators try to get people to engage the art object without text, to use their imagination to let the object speak to them and not be subsumed by the text. Lawyers face an analogous situation when they encounter events that need decision; too often they look to the text and do not experience the particularity of the situation by letting it speak for itself.
For law is a text-based discipline. That is both its strength and its weakness. It is its strength in that it enables decisions to be transparent and constrained by the text; it is its weakness in that decisions tend to be dominated by text, and situations are shoehorned into the text with stultifying results. The answer is always sought within the text, viewing the situations law encounters through the optic of the text and thus manipulating them rather than transforming them, and not letting the situation speak to the text and the law.
I aim to examine how the visual and movement arts help in promoting the ethical imagination and creativity needed at the moment when law and lawyers encounter these situations.



Thomas Irvine: Musical Performance and the Law Givers, Then and Now
In the opening to the ninth chapter of his Violin School of 1756, Leopold Mozart writes that appoggiaturas, notes left unwritten yet customarily added to join together and embellish melodies, are products of nature herself (the emphasis in bold is original). They are, in other words, matters of natural law. This is a key passage in a signal work about musical performance in the eighteenth century. It illuminates a tension at the heart of this conference, between the singularity of the event and the ethical responses to it, for, then as now, the presence of musical performance challenges the law-givers of music. In this paper I will ask what natural laws mean to musical performance, and reflect on how a historical discourse like Leopold’s might still resonate in the world of our own musical practice and theory.



Robin Lister: Reading Law and Literature: a Case for Conversation
Law’s functionality is uncontested, art’s sake a matter of endless argument. If art claims to see the world anew, accepting mystery and doubt, law claims to deal out order and finality, setting the world to rights. This talk argues that law’s and literature’s conversation tells another story about law’s melancholic, troubled human soul. The talk focuses on a literary case of law v art and a number of chapters in common law’s story of negligence. These stories show how law’s negative incapability leads it on a ‘frolic of its own’, towards a solipsistic discourse aloof from its human subjects, the masters it should serve. This tendency, encouraged by a consumerist childish dependency on the part of litigants and audiences, may be one shared by law and art.



Panel Discussion

15:45

Tea

16:15

Panel 4: Law, Justice and the Image
Chaired by Richard Wilson



Panu Minkkinen: Crucifixion as Armature: Francis Bacon seen through French eyes.
Francis Bacon seldom discussed his art in theoretical terms, and most British art critics and historians have respected the artist’s apparent disdain of high theorising by constraining themselves to descriptive analyses. But quite unlike their Anglophone counterparts, the French have regarded Bacon’s paintings as archetypal representations of modern art worthy of the most abstract generalisations and speculations, a perspective that Bacon, through his personal friendships with French intellectuals like Michel Leiris, in a somewhat contradictory fashion seemed to endorse. What does Bacon look like seen through French eyes?



Desmond Manderson: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation: indigenous people and the deferral of the rule of law
This essay examines two iconic documents, one Australian and one North American, each of which lay claim to being both works of art and of law. As such, they demonstrate exactly the ways in which aesthetic representations can provide crucial insights into legal concepts and legal history. In this case, the images provide a complex and ambiguous reading of the nature and implications of the rule of law in colonial societies. Working with these images, and simultaneously with contemporary legislative measures in the treatment of indigenous peoples, especially in Australia, the essay develops a critique of the rule of law as it has been applied or, indeed, not applied to, aboriginal people. These pictorial laws shed a dramatically new light on fundamental issues in the rule of law; while contemporary issues in law and law-making shed new light on these works of art.



Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos: Awnings of Justice: De Chirico and Repetition
In the final stage of his career, Giorgio de Chirico produced a long series of almost identical paintings that copied and only partly developed his successful early metaphysical period style. This was less of a performance and more of an income-generating exercise based on the high demand for his metaphysical paintings, especially the ones of the Piazza d’Italia. Whether this rather technical repetition can also be considered ‘art’ is certainly worth considering, despite a rather facile rejection by the relevant literature. Its relevance, however, for this volume is revealed if one compares the technique that is undoubtedly present even in this blind, made-to-order repetition and the technicality of legal ‘norm-applying’. Beginning with this parallelism, the text considers the edifice of the law as the repeating quotidian practice of judicial decisions. This is described as a way of evading the transcendental elements of judging and instead a way of returning to the safety of the normative repetition. In such an edifice, awnings of justice can be observed, artfully posited against the horizon of waiting, as windows capturing moments of transcendence. This connection between the edifice and the horizon is described here as the awnings of justice. The argument is substantiated through a discussion on Luhmann’s theory of art and of justice from a poststructural critical position, employing the thought of Derrida, Kierkegaard and Cacciari.



Alain Pottage and Tatiana Flessas: The new museum: aesthetic form, cultural politics and legal means
Museums articulate a set of tensions between art and law. The legislative warrant, architectural form, curatorial politics and public self-representation of the museum purport to resolve a set of tensions between art or culture and diverse regimes of legality: the legality implicit in anthropological, taxonomic and art-historical knowledge and the national and international politics of cultural identity and educative democracy. The tensions between art and legality remained latent in the era of nineteenth-century imperialism, when the universalizing pretensions of reflections on art, science and culture went unchallenged, secured by the reach of imperial power. In the post-colonial era these tensions have become singularly acute, and the question of ownership has emerged as a leading theme in debates about the role of the museum as an articulation of art and legality. What is in question is the authorial and authoritative status of the museum. Taking the new Acropolis Museum as an example, we explore some aspects of these debates.



Panel discussion

17:45

End



Speakers

Ariella Atzmon. Israeli born. Senior lecturer in the School of Education and the School of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. (Retired in 2002.) Graduate in Chemistry, postgraduate in Philosophy of Science and Political Science. Fields of research: rhetorical styles shaped by false images of science that prevail in liberal democracies and its interference with public opinion in the context of decision making. Particular topics of interest: hermeneutics, jurisprudence referring to the intricate nature of Jewish thought. Author of Multiple Amnesia: a poststructuralist gaze.

Zenon Bankowski is of Polish Descent. He was born in 1946 in Germany. Bought up in England, he studied in Scotland at the Universities in Dundee and Glasgow. He is currently Professor of Legal Theory at the Law School of Edinburgh University. His book Living Lawfully looks at the relations between Law and Love and the ethical life of Legal Institutions. He is currently looking at the place of the visual and movement arts in relation to Law and Legal Education. He has taken part in dance workshops, was a competitive athlete (a past winner of the Edinburgh 7 Hills race), and is a volunteer neighbourhood mediator.

Oren Ben-Dor is a Reader in the Philosophy of Law, School of Law, University of Southampton. He is the author of Constitutional Limits and the Public Sphere, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000, and Thinking About Law: In Silence with Heidegger, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2007. He is the editor of Law and Art: Justice, Ethics and Aesthetics, to be published by Routledge-Cavendish, Glasshouse in 2010.

Bernadette Buckley lectures in the Politics Department, Goldsmith College, London. Formerly a lecturer in Contemporary Art Theory & Practice at the International Centre for Culture & Heritage Studies, Newcastle University and Head of Education & Research at the John Hansard Gallery, University of Southampton. Bernadette is a Board Member of Tate Papers and the Journal for Museum Education as well as a member of Polarts, the ECPR Standing Groups for Politics and the Arts. Bernadette’s interest is in the relationship between art and war and/or art and terrorism. Her Interest in ‘Gallery Studies’ explores the relationship between ‘curating’ and ‘creating’ and investigates the ontology of curating from the perspective of the ‘event’. Bernadette is interested in the (de)differentiation between ‘contemporary art’, ‘heritage’, ‘education’ and other areas of practice. She has explored notions of (un)’education’ both in ‘artistic’ and in ‘gallery’ practices. Her recent publications include: ‘Mohammed is Absent, I am Performing’ in Iraq and the Destruction of Heritage, P. Stone, & J. Farchakh eds, HMP: London, 2008, and ‘Terrible Beauties’, in Art in the Age of Terrorism, G. Coulter-Smith, M. Owen and Paul Hoberton eds., New York, 2005.

Costas Douzinas LLB (Athens) LLM PhD (LSE) is Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the managing editor of Law and Critique: The International Journal of Critical Legal Thought, and managing director of the publishing house Birkbeck Law Press.

Tatiana Flessas teaches cultural property and heritage law at the London School of Economics. She is working on a major research project on the changing role of the museum.

Adam Gearey is a Reader in law in the School of Law at Birkbeck College. He is presently working on a book tentatively entitled Justice as Welfare to be published by Continuum next year.

Thomas Irvine is Lecturer in Music and Deputy Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of Southampton. He has published articles and essays on W.A. Mozart, Leopold Mozart, and theories of performance in the eighteenth century. Before becoming an academic music historian, he was a busy professional performer on both the modern and historical viola.

Robin Lister
After a previous incarnation as an editor and writer Robin Lister has lectured about law since 1992 and has been teaching a law and literature course for the past decade. He is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Bradford. His most recent publication is about the shifting relationship between property and identity in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English novel.

Professor Desmond Manderson holds the Canada Research Chair in Law and Discourse, Faculty of Law, McGill University. Prior to coming to McGill, he was foundation Director of the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence at the Faculty of Law at the University of Sydney. He is a managing editor of Law/Text/Culture, an international interdisciplinary journal that is committed to the developing of connections between aesthetics, law, and philosophy. Desmond’s books include Songs Without Music: Aesthetic Dimensions of Law and Justice, University of California Press, 2000; Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006 and Essays on Levinas and Law: A Mosaic, Macmillan, 2009.

Panu Minkkinen
Professor of Law at the University of Leicester and Adjunct Professor of Legal Theory at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He is former Deputy-Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2001-2004) and Director of the Finnish Institute in London (1999-2001). His publications include Thinking Without Desire: A First Philosophy of Law (Hart Publishing, Oxford, 1999) and Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law (Routledge- Cavendish, Glasshouse Books, 2009)

Alain Pottage teaches law and social theory at the LSE; his current research focuses on theories of ownership and the history of intellectual property.

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, LLB, LLM, PhD, is a Reader in Law, University of Westminster and Director of The Westminster International Law & Theory Centre. His research includes critical theory, phenomenology, autopoiesis, law and literature, gender studies, law and geography. His edited volume Law and the City (2007) and his monographs Absent Environments (2007) and Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (2009) are published by Routledge.

Dr Jaime Stapleton is an Associate Research Fellow of the School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London. He speaks regularly in the UK and Europe on issues relating to creative practice, law and political economy. He has worked as a consultant on economic, social and cultural impact assessment of copyright for the World Intellectual Property Organization, and on intellectual property reform as the Research Coordinator of the Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property for the Royal Society of Arts, London. He has a long standing interest in intellectual property history and served on the Editorial Board of Art and Humanities Research Council ‘Primary Sources in Copyright (1450-1900)’ project, based at Cambridge University. He is currently a core research participant in the AHRC network ‘Intermedia: New Media Art, Performativity and Authenticity’ based at Tate Modern, which examines issues relating to the acquisition and display of new media works in art museums.

Igor Stramignoni teaches in the Law Department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. His work on the history, ethics, and poetics of comparison combines insights from contemporary philosophy, anthropology, literature, and psychoanalysis, to examine key aspects of Western legal and political knowledge of the world.

Richard Wilson
Professor of Literature, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University. Richard was the 2006 International Globe Fellow. His books include, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, religion and resistance, (Manchester UP, 2004); Shakespeare in French Theory: King of Shadows (London: Routledge, 2006), and Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean authority (London: Harvester 1993). He has edited collections of essays on Julius Caesar and Christopher Marlowe, and co-edited volumes on New Historicism and Renaissance Drama, Theatre and Religion and Region, Religion and Patronage. He is currently completing Free Will: Essays on Shakespearean autonomy. Richard’s recent edited volume is Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (with Richard Meek and Jane Rickard, Manchester UP, 2008)

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek is Julian Park Professor of Comparative Literature and the Founding Director of Humanities Institute at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is the author of The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism (SUNY, 1995), An Ethics of Dissensus:Feminism, Postmodernity, and the Politics of Radical Democracy. (Stanford 2001); editor of Gombrowicz's Grimaces: Modernism, Gender, Nationality (SUNY, 1998); and co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva's Polis (SUNY 2005) and Time for the Humanities: Praxis and the Limits of Autonomy (Fordam UP 2008). She has published numerous articles on Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Agamaben, Foucault, Levinas, Fanon, feminist theory and literary modernism. Currently she is working on a book on feminist aesthetics.

Krzysztof Ziarek is Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He is the author of Inflected Language: Toward a Hermeneutics of Nearness (State University of New York Press, 1994), The Historicity of Experience: Modernity, the Avant-Garde, and the Event (Northwestern University Press), and The Force of Art (Stanford University Press, 2004). He has also published numerous essays on Coolidge, Stein, Stevens, Heidegger, Benjamin, Irigaray, and Levinas, and co-edited two collection of essays, Future Crossings: Literature Between Philosophy and Cultural Studies (Northwestern University Press) and Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford University Press, 2007). He is the author of two books of poetry in Polish, Zaimejlowane z Polski and Sad dostateczny.