Pathophanies of the Singular - A Hardly Exegetical Note on the Specificity Proper to The ‘Creative Act’ in Visual/Fine Arts

Proceedings of The "A So Disastrous Pathos", Contemporary Art Exhibition Catalogue, held at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint Mary the Virgin, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2016

Posted: 24 Feb 2020

See all articles by Dimitris Ginosatis

Dimitris Ginosatis

Athens School of Fine Arts, Department of Fine Arts (Athens-Greece)

Date Written: September 1, 2016

Abstract

How can discourse preserve and confer properness (Eigenlichkeit) without appropriating it? How can it retain something, at once singular and singularly untranslatable, that tends to slide away from the embrace of concepts and the outlines of words? Isn’t spoken or written communication always susceptible to leading to inevitable misunderstandings, all the more so since it takes as its theme so elusive a subject as the “creative act in visual/fine arts”? Doesn’t the problem begin with the very use of the words “creative act” in the singular, as though all particular, vastly diverse practices in visual/fine arts constituted a homogeneous set, marked by a common, universal qualitative identity that would differentiate them from other types of practices and creative acts? Isn’t this “singular” already erasing the plurality of these artistic practices in their idiomatic "singularitas"? What, thus, do we understand under that name? What does it designate? What does it stand for? Is there, indeed, anything to understand? How are we even aware that what is being talked about here exists in the first place? How are we sure that there is something whose meaning is revealed by the name “creative act”? Is it some individuated substance or object, a legitimate product of observation and understanding, of empirical experiencing and conscious thinking? Is it some transcendant entity, a product of intuition, of some empirically unsubstantiated belief or conviction, a sort of a "credo quia absurdum"? Is it rather a propagated “myth”, a culturally fabricated, filtered and transmitted abstractum –a regulative explanatory principle, as Gregory Bateson would say, (like “gravity,” “instinct,” “order,” “disorder” et cetera), an invention, a metaphor, an abstract name – modelled after the long-lived, traditional scheme of creational monotheism? This essay aims at addressing the above-listed questions on the basis of Heideggerian, Derridean, Deleuzian and Klossowskian themes and motifs.

Keywords: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Contemporary Art, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Pierre Klossowski

Suggested Citation

Ginosatis, Dimitris, Pathophanies of the Singular - A Hardly Exegetical Note on the Specificity Proper to The ‘Creative Act’ in Visual/Fine Arts (September 1, 2016). Proceedings of The "A So Disastrous Pathos", Contemporary Art Exhibition Catalogue, held at the Episcopal Cathedral of Saint Mary the Virgin, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2016, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2958447

Dimitris Ginosatis (Contact Author)

Athens School of Fine Arts, Department of Fine Arts (Athens-Greece) ( email )

42 Patision st. 106 82 Athens
256 Peiraios st. 182 33 Rentis
Athens, Attica 182 33
Greece
(+30) 210 4801229 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://www.digitalarts.asfa.gr/

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