Forgetting Ourselves (3)

January 23, 2017 Frank Seeburger

At rare times, what we call art provides us with a moment when we can at last forget ourselves in just such a truly liberating way. At those rare moments, art catches us up short, and opens before us at just that moment the opportunity to forget ourselves and to “set ourselves free”—free from ourselves, and thereby free at last just to be ourselves. It does so, according to Celan, at those moments when we are so suddenly and unexpectedly struck by a work of art, or something at work in that work, that it “takes our breath away,” as we commonly yet accurately say. We encounter “breath-taking beauty,” as we also say.

Forgetting Ourselves (2)

January 16, 2017 Frank Seeburger

What we call “art” can sometimes offer a false feeling of forgetting oneself in the positive sense, the sense of setting oneself free of “the bondage of self.” That is so, at least, for some of what we commonly call “art.”

Forgetting Ourselves (1)

January 9, 2017 Frank Seeburger

“Those who have art before their eyes and on their minds [. . .] have forgotten themselves. Art draws away from the I. Art here demands a certain distance in a certain direction, on a certain path.”[1]

The poet Paul Celan made those remarks some fifty-six years ago in “The Meridian,” his acceptance speech for the Georg Büchner Prize for literature.

Trauma & Philosophy

Philosopher Frank Seeburger's reflections on trauma as it relates to contemporary philosophical issues, especially those of truth, temporality, sovereignty, representation, politics, and the nature of philosophy itself.