Poetics of the Nameless Middle : Japan and the West in Philosophy and Music of the Twentieth Century

This study investigates the affinities between philosophy, aesthetics, and music of Japan and the West. The research is based on the structuralist notion (specifically, on that found in the narratology of Algirdas Julius Greimas), that the universal grammar functions as an abstract principle, underlying all kinds of discourse. The study thus aims to demonstrate how this grammar is manifested in philosophical, aesthetic, and musical texts and how the semiotic homogeneity of these texts can be explained on this basis. Totality and belongingness are the key philosophical concepts presented herein. As distinct from logocentrism manifested as substantializations of the world of ideas , god or mind, which was characteristic of previous Western paradigms, totality was defined as the coexistence of opposites. Thus Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dōgen, and Nishida often illustrated it by identifying fundamental polarities, such as being and nothing, seer and seen, truth and illusion, etc. Accordingly, totality was schematically presented as an all-encompassing middle of the semiotic square. Similar values can be found in aesthetics and arts. Instead of dialectic syntagms, differentiated unity is considered as paradigmatic and the study demonstrates how this is manifested in traditional Japanese and Heideggerian aesthetics, as well as in the aspects of music of Claude Debussy and Tōru Takemitsu.

Counter-figures : An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance: Paul Celan's Poetry and Poetics at the Limits of Figurality

Titled "An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance", the dissertation investigates what is here being called "Counter-figures": a term which has in this context a certain variety of applications. Any other-than-image or other-than-figure, anything that cannot be exhausted by figuration (and that is, more or less, anything at all, except perhaps the reproducible images and figures themselves) can be considered "counter-figurative" with regard to the formation of images and figures, ideas and schemas, "any graven image, or any likeness of any thing". Singularity and radical alterity, as well as temporality and its peculiar mode of uniqueness are key issues here, and an ethical dimension is implied by, or intertwined with, the aesthetic. In terms borrowed from Paul Celan's "Meridian" speech, poetry may "allow the most idiosyncratic quality of the Other, its time, to participate in the dialogue". This connection between singularity, alterity and temporality is one of the reasons why Celan so strongly objects to the application of the traditional concept of metaphor to poetry. As Celan says, "carrying over [übertragen]" by metaphor may imply an unwillingness to "bear with [mittragen]" and to "endure [ertragen]" the poem. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first consists of five distinct prolegomena which all address the mentioned variety of applications of the term "counter-figures", and especially the rejection or critique of either metaphor (by Aristotle, for instance) or the concept of metaphor (defined by Aristotle, and sometimes deemed "anti-poetic" by both theorists and poets). Even if we restrict ourselves to the traditional rhetorico-poetical terms, we may see how, for instance, metonymy can be a counter-figure for metaphor, allegory for symbol, and irony for any single trope or for any piece of discourse at all. The limits of figurality may indeed be located at these points of intersection between different types of tropes or figures, and even between figures or tropes and the "non-figurative trope" or "pseudo-figure" called catachresis. The second part, following on from the open-ended prolegomena, concentrates on Paul Celan's poetry and poetics. According to Celan, true poetry is "essentially anti-metaphoric". I argue that inasmuch as we are willing to pay attention to the "will" of the poetic images themselves (the tropes and metaphors in a poem) to be "carried ad absurdum", as Celan invites us to do, we may find alternative ways of reading poetry and approaching its "secret of the encounter", precisely when the traditional rhetorical instruments, and especially the notion of metaphor, become inapplicable or suspicious — and even where they still seem to impose themselves.

Poetics of Subjectivity : Existence and Expressivity in Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy

In the last thirty years, primarily feminist scholars have drawn attention to and re-evaluated the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir (1908 1986). Her philosophical practice has been described as non-systematic, and her literary writing has been viewed as part of her non-systematic mode of philosophising. This dissertation radically deepens the question concerning Beauvoir s philosophical motivations for turning to literature as a mode to express subjectivity. It explicates the central concepts of Beauvoir s philosophy of existence, which are subjectivity, ambiguity, paradox and temporality, and their background in the modern traditions of existential philosophy and phenomenology. It also clarifies Beauvoir s main reason to turn to literature in order to express subjectivity as both singular and universal: as a specific mode of communication, literature is able to make the universality of existence manifest in the concrete, singular and temporal texture of life. In addition, the thesis gives examples of how Beauvoir s literary works contribute to an understanding of the complexity of subjectivity. I use the expression poetics of subjectivity to refer to the systematic relation between Beauvoir s existential and phenomenological notion of subjectivity and her literary works, and to her articulations of a creative mode of using language, especially in the novel. The thesis is divided into five chapters, of which the first three investigate Beauvoir s philosophy of existence at the intersection of the modern traditions of thought that began with René Descartes and Søren Kierkegaard s intuitions about subjectivity. Chapter 1 interprets Beauvoir s notion of ambiguity, as compared to paradox, and argues that both determine her notion of existence. Chapters 2 and 3 investigate the phenomenological side of Beauvoir s philosophy through a study of her response to early French interpretations of transcendental subjectivity, especially in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. My analysis shows that Edmund Husserl s distinction between different levels of subjective experience is central to Beauvoir s understanding of subjectivity and to the different ego concepts she uses. Chapter 4 is a study of Beauvoir s reflections on the expression of subjective thought, and, more specifically, her philosophical conceptions of the metaphysical novel and the autobiography as two modes of indirect communication. Chapter 5, finally, compares two modes of investigating concrete subjectivity; Beauvoir s conceptual study of femininity in Le deuxième sexe and her literary expression of subjectivity in the novel L Invitée. My analysis reveals and explicates Beauvoir s original contribution to a comprehensive understanding of the becoming and paradox of human existence: the fundamental insight that these phenomena are sexed, historically as well as imaginatively.