[Felix Hoenikker]

Interpretation and Nihilism as the Depletion of Being: a discussion with Gianni Vattimo about the consequences of Hermeneutics.
5:2 | © 2001 Sebastian Gurciullo

1.

·Sebastian Gurciullo: What is the significance of the title of your recent book, Oltre l'interpretazione, Beyond Interpretation, what sort of movement is suggested by the "oltre" or "beyond": where to, to what, and why?[1]
· Gianni Vattimo: In a sense it is meant to mean something like going beyond the limits of current hermeneutics. I have the impression, as I say in the introduction to Beyond Interpretation, that hermeneutics has become a sort of general attitude. Almost everybody recognizes that we know only by interpreting, even in the theory of paradigms proposed by Thomas Kuhn, for instance. People in the experimental sciences are not scandalized by the idea that we interpret, but this recognition does not apply to the consequences of hermeneutics. As a matter of fact, I wanted to call this book "Consequences of Hermeneutics", as a play on a title of one of Richard Rorty's books[2], but this title was already used by my American publishers for a collection of essays of mine so I had to change it.[3]
· The question is therefore: Is hermeneutics simply a philosophy which theorizes that any knowledge is interpretation or is it something more than this? Now, when I say all knowledge is interpretation, is this still an interpretation or not? This was a question Nietzsche posed to himself some hundred years ago. So probably what I want to mean by "beyond" is the fact of asking myself explicitly, "what kind of a philosophy is hermeneutics?" because it cannot be a metaphysical description of the hermeneutical character or essence of all knowledge, because this knowledge of the hermeneutical essence of knowledge, would itself be an interpretation. So what kind of truth, in other words, can we expect from hermeneutics? Not a truth which claims to be the description of a state of affairs, but something different. And if we follow this line of thinking, in my opinion, we discover that the very truth of hermeneutics as a philosophical theory is tied to a nihilistic philosophy of history. It is only because something has changed in our perception of reality that we can speak reasonably of the interpretive character of knowledge. Consequently I have developed, in an a sense, a hermeneutical noseology, a theory of knowledge or epistemology, that is only possible if we accept an ontological nihilism. There is a history of Being which in a certain moment offers itself in the form of a peremptory objectivity, a strong reality, and then in our time offers or presents itself in the sense of something which is much more vague, much less peremptory, much less authoritarian.

2.

·SG: In the preface to Beyond Interpretation you observe that your proposal of "il pensiero debole", or "weak thought"[4] as this expression has been translated into English, has been misunderstood, that it has been "taken in too narrow and literal a sense". Can you elaborate on what kinds of misconstrual of the meaning of weak thought developed and what your intended meaning was?
· GV: I have in mind a couple of ways of misinterpreting "il pensiero debole". First, it was the popularity of this "school" of philosophy, so to speak, in Italy, starting in 1980 and particularly with the publication in 1983 of the collection of essays under the title Il pensiero debole.[5] People immediately interpreted il pensiero debole as a sort of rejection of any rational claim of reason, and in the intellectual climate at the time there was already a sort of mistrust in the claims of scientific rationality. Its the sort of thing that happens in Also sprach Zarathustra, where the animals of Zarathustra believe that the theory of the eternal recurrence is simply the idea that there is no fixed meaning, everything is possible, as a sort of negatively nihilistic interpretation of the death of God: God is dead, everything is possible, everything is permitted, everything is allowed, and so on. So, pensiero debole was interpreted in the 1980s in Italy as a sort of revindication of the pragmatic and also immoralistic attitude in relation to life: there is no truth, no values, no moral obligation and so on. This was the reason for the popularity of pensiero debole because it was also assumed that it allowed for a kind of categorical interpretation. It therefore became popular first in the form of a misunderstanding. Everybody spoke about pensiero debole exactly in order to say why they didn't agree with it. We got a lot of advantage from this categorical interpretation.
· In more philosophical terms, pensiero debole was taken as a sort of pure post-modern affirmation of the plurality of reasons, of rational languages. So it involved what I would call, again, a metaphysical reading of what the notion of pensiero debole meant. It was like saying: reality is not one, it is plural, but to say again that reality is not one but plural is still a form of metaphysics. Pensiero debole was therefore assumed to mean a purely relativistic philosophy: there is no single truth, there are many truths. I always say in my writings that relativism is a strong metaphysical attitude, and that only God, in a sense, could ever be a relativist, because only God could see all the different interpretations from above, which is from nowhere in a sense.
· Still another misunderstanding of pensiero debole occurs with some religious thinkers. There is a book, also translated into English, by Dario Antiseri, The Strength of Weak Thought[6], in which more or less pensiero debole is a sort of myth of recognizing that reason is weak so that we can jump into faith. So weak thought becomes a sort of preface to a form of Pascalian faith. This is also a misunderstanding.
· The best definition I have today for pensiero debole is that it is a strong theory of weakening as the meaning of history. It is a theory which claims to have good reasons, I don't want to say metaphysical demonstrations. For the idea that the history of human kind, or the human mentality, has a sort of leading thread which is a weakening of the strong structures of metaphysics: of personality, as in psychoanalysis; of government, as in modern democracy in relation to anti-authoritarianism; and of religion, as in modern secularization in comparison to the traditional view of the sacred.

3.

·SG: In Beyond Interpretation you mention a larger work that you are preparing, Ontology of Actuality, and in various places you speak of the need for hermeneutics to develop an ontoligie de l'actualite. Can you explain what such a project would entail and what we may expect from the work which you intend to publish under that title?
· GV: The term itself is taken from Foucault. Among Foucault's late writings there was an essay in which he spoke of two possible ways for philosophy: analitique de la verite and ontologie de l'actualite.[7] I don't think I take the later term, ontologie de l'actualite, in the same sense as the French. My starting point is Heidegger's appeal to remember, to retrieve Being. What can philosophy be today? Of course, for me, it can no longer be the metaphysical knowledge of Being qua beings, as in Aristotle, nor as an epistemological recognition in the Kantian sense of the transcendental structure of knowledge because, again, logic, epistemology and so on, are instrumentally organized by the sciences themselves. Experimental scientists, I think, don't need philosophers, not even logicians. So what can philosophy be?
· If we want to be faithful to Heidegger who has explained to us, and I believe in this part of Heideggerianism, that Being cannot be thought of in terms of stable structures of objectivity, nor even in terms of stable structures of knowledge as Kant claimed them to be, philosophy is just a way of answering appeals which come down to us through the Ge-schick, through the history or destination of Being. So what we can do is to understand ontology in the sense of what Being means in our current condition. What we are invited to do is to try to understand what Being means in our present situation in which we are confronted with a multiplicity of languages, of scientific languages. It is not that clear whether what we call Being is the same for physicians, astrophysicists, biologists etc. We have so many ways of approach to reality that we probably lose the notion of reality in its possible unity. Heidegger's idea that we have to remember what Being means, is not an eternal task of philosophy, but only for philosophy today. Why? Because we live precisely in that modern condition that was described by Max Weber as a multiplication of the spheres of existence where business is business, religion is religion, love is love, private life is private life, etc. We risk losing the meaning of Being in general. Is this a risk or not?
· This is a question that I have sometimes discussed with Jacques Derrida, because Derrida says we should no longer speak of Being because this is still a metaphysical avatar, a metaphysical program. But I think that if we lose the possibility of connecting or unifying our multiple notions of Being, we lose freedom. I mean that, in order to be able to jump from one field of Being to another one, from one language to another, we need to be able to manage, in a sense, all of them. So freedom is related for me to the fact of trying to retrieve what Being may still mean to us as a sort of unifying concept. I don't think this concept has to necessarily correspond to a Being objectively unique, because this would be again a metaphysics. It is rather a sort of rhetorical form of viability of reality to us. Take the very simple and everyday problems that occur in democratic societies. If everything is today left to specialists of ethics, science, economics, there is no longer any democracy. So in this sense I say that philosophy as ontologie de l'actualite is necessary to freedom, to a non-schizophrenic experience of reality, and even to democracy.

4.

·SG: In Beyond Interpretation you suggest that hermeneutics as the interpretation of the modern world is somehow linked to the advent of science and technology, to the world of techno-science. You suggest that the values of technological globalism, or the ensemble Heidegger calls Ge-Stell, are not to be thought of as being in opposition to an essential core of humanistic values, because both, in your view, are part of the world of modern nihilism, of the proliferation and conflict of interpretations. My question to you then is, what is the nature of the task of hermeneutics in informing the world of modern techno-science of its nihilistic destiny, for instance is this some sort of educative or enlightening task? Or is it more like a therapeutic task?
· GV: Well, I would say it involves both of these tasks. In a sense hermeneutics is a way of not losing one's soul among the different objects or forms of objectivity which are made available by modern technology. In a sense, what I would also emphasize in relation to other hermeneutical philosophers, even compared to Gadamer's theory, is that I am clearer about the fact that hermeneutics would not be possible as a philosophical theory without the modern scientific technological world. It is only in this world that the multiplicity of interpretations become visible.
· Everybody knows today, I sometimes say, that TV lies. And this is important because it is in a world where we have many TV networks that we understand that TV lies. We are placed in an interpretive world precisely because we live in a technological–communicative world. This is the link between the origins of hermeneutics and modernity in its technological, scientific sense. What is hermeneutics to do in the world of technology and science? I would say that it is exactly what Heidegger used to say when he wanted to retrieve the meaning of modern technology within a history of metaphysics. This means that it is only in so far as we recognize the continuity of our present world to our cultural tradition that we can live in it without losing our soul.
· This is, of course, a Christian religious expression, so what would it mean here to "lose one's soul"? It would mean probably to lose any possibility of determining our lives in a still subjective individual moral way. What people are increasingly afraid of in our world is the fact of what is called consumerism. While I am not an anti-consumerist like the Pope, what I recognize is that in the multiplicity or phantasmagoria of the merchandise among which we, or at least in which the late modern industrial world lives, we run the risk of no longer being able to enjoy anything because we no longer have a subjectivity which concentrates and goes from one experience to another. So, I admit in this, I have a sort of traditional view of subjectivity, of historicity, of experience etc. But this is the condition on the basis on which I can still erleben, I can still experience something because otherwise there would no longer be a comparison between my experience and the world, I wouldn't learn anything because I wouldn't remember anything if I don't have this sort of continuity.
· So, in a sense the task of an ontologie de l'actualite, as I said before, is to show the continuity of modern technology in relation to the western tradition and to detect the possible meaning of all this. For instance, even in social and economic terms, are we to think that the task of humankind and the world is to progressively increase objects, the world of objects. In terms of economics it appears that this is no longer the case, that it is more a matter of redistribution, of reducing our pretensions and claims in relation to nature in order not to completely exhaust natural resources. So in a sense, if we try to construct philosophically an ontologie de l'actualite, probably we shall have to consider the nihilistic idea of a reduction of the imposiveness of objectivity. This would lead us also, let us say, to a sort of new evaluation of the quality, instead of quantity, of the world; a diminishing of violence in relation to nature, an emphasizing of the idea of the importance of dialogue among human beings, and abandoning of violence in order to appropriate objects. This is what I would recognize as the task of hermeneutics in the late technological world.

5.

·SG: In terms of elaborating a little bit more on this task, is it something like Habermas's task of engaging expert cultures, for instance, does the hermeneutician attempt to engage the representatives or those who work within the techno-scientific ensemble?
· GV: Well in this sense I would say yes. For instance in the last few weeks I have made a change in my academic situation in Torino, having moved from the department of Philosophy to the department of Social Communications. Why? Because I am interested in teaching philosophy to people who don't simply become, in their own terms, philosophers. I want to expand philosophy beyond the boundaries of its own specialized field, otherwise philosophy would be completely useless to everybody. Generally, philosophy has to become a sort of rational organization of social rhetorics, of the social–ideological discussion of the world, of value discussions for instance. I acknowledge that I should know a little bit more about the experimental sciences, but my idea is that the experimental scientists should know much more about the history of philosophical thought, to value ideas and the debate of ideas, etc.
· I have mainly practical experiences of this. I have already taught some courses in the last two or three years in the polytechnical school of Torino on contemporary philosophy. I found people very open to this problematic and very interested in it because they work with the effective technological means and they need to be able to choose or decide, or to discuss politically, philosophically, ethically what they are doing. So in this sense, practically and politically, the presence of philosophy in our contemporary world seems to me more and more important exactly because scientific developments are so rapid. Problems of how to reconcile scientific possibilities to our moral of discursive continuity in society are increasingly important.
· This can be seen in bio-ethical questions where, at least in Italy, we have a situation in which on bio-ethics almost the only people who speak with authority and are listened to are priests, because late secular society, exactly because of this separation between the philosophical and scientific disciplines, no longer has the habit of discussing issues in terms of general philosophical values. The only possibility which is present today, not exactly exclusively, but the predominant attitude, is that which comes from the theology of the Catholic church. So again this shows that we don't have a properly secular and rational discussion on moral values. This is exactly what I said, there is a very rapid scientific development which requires new discussions of ethics and secular society is sometimes not able to do that because there has been a tendency to specialize simply in experimental sciences as knowledge.

6.

·SG: In regard to this discussion of ethics, in what ways is a hermeneutic ethic of continuity (as put forward by Hans George Gadamer) different or superior to an ethic of communication (as in Habermas and Apel) or an ethic of redescription (as in Rorty and Foucault's mature writings)?
· GV: In practical, or even in political terms, I would be in agreement with Habermas, Apel, Rorty and Foucault, so I wouldn't say that practically the distinction I make means very much. But I think, for instance in Apel and Habermas, there is always the risk of claiming that there is an undistorted and non-opaque intersubjective communication which is more or less the fact of a community of scientists. I mean by this that I don't see in Habermas and Apel completely excluded the risk of a central committee of enlightened intellectuals who know that the communication among other people in society is not undistorted, or otherwise, is distorted. Hermeneutically I have to take seriously every word of my dialogue partner. I cannot imagine that there is somebody who knows that social communication in our society is distorted because somebody knows what is not distorted. In a sense I see in Apel and Habermas still a sort of scientistic or totalitarian possibility, which of course, I wouldn't attribute explicitly to Apel and Habermas. But this still allows a distinction between what I would call the mandarins, people who know the truth, and other people who have to be helped to get out of the distortions of social communication. So I prefer hermeneutics as the basis of democratic dialogue because it excludes more clearly this risk of a central committee of intellectuals, experts, [and] scientists..., which still is a sort of metaphysical residue.
· What I would object to in Rorty's redescriptions and Foucault's aesthetic idea of moral personality is that they don't have very many criteria for distinguishing between pure artistic novelty and what I would call "new" moral values, because anything new would be good. Even in Derrida there is this risk. For instance if you read some late essays by Derrida, like De l'hospitalité,you find that what is surely good is what is surely new.[8] Derrida used to say a word like "vien", "come". I don't know whether Derrida is aware of the fact that it is also an erotic sexual invocation, but he probably wouldn't exclude that either in a sense [laughter]. But, what "comes" can be anything, so also Hitler presumably could be a new attitude in relation to the world, a new personal re-description. So I need some sort of criteria in order to recognize moral values which are not simply a matter of personal creativity because our personal creativity lives in a social-political environment.
· What I object to in Derrida, without of course any suspicion of anti-Semitism, is that he is, like Emmuneul Levinas, Jewish in the sense that he doesn't believe in any concretization of the history of salvation. There is no incarnation in Derrida's world, nor in Levinas, so that everyone, in every moment of history is immediately in relation to the absolute, to God, which means that history has no meaning at all. If you take the works of Derrida and Levinas, you would recognize that what they call "historicity" is the fact that we are always in history, but to be always in history is to be never in history, because we are always in a specific historical predicament. So what I want to object to in this general attitude, which also resembles that taken up in the late Foucault and Rorty even thought they are not inspired by Judaic tradition, is that the redescription is just a sort of aestheticistic morality, which leaves aside too simply and too strongly many social, political, and ethical problems as issues of public discussion.
· I find possibilities of arguing for a moral value in relation to others exactly in so far as I can connect them to a set of inherited values of a cultural tradition, which is not, of course, something objectively demonstrable. I don't say "this is European History", but I offer as an argument for my moral attitude, a discourse which, in my view, interprets European history. If you have another one fine, but you cannot simply say "my attitude is new and original and therefore it is good"

7.

·SG: With regard to Michel Foucault, I don't know what the situation is like in Italy, but in the English-speaking world he has definitely been immensely popular and also widely influential within academia, almost to the point I think of attaining a quasi-cult status at times. What do you think about this phenomenon?
· GV: This is probably the same in Italy, although perhaps no longer now. There are waves of popularity. At this moment we live in the little blackout which generally follows the great period of fame, but Foucault is still very strong, so why?
·SG: Well this is what I want to get your view on, the popularity of Foucault which may now be waning, because he does speak in his late works on the aesthetics of existence I wonder whether he himself traded on the cult status of the artist in modernity?
· GV: In the early Foucault I see this non-mediated contradiction that means that he can offer very good instruments for a critical description of contemporary society, what is less clear is what he would like to have instead. The late Foucault is a sort of anarchist aestheticist: everybody has to be free to construct his own moral view or attitude.
· Even this, in practical terms, involves the extention of elementary instruction to everybody. What do you teach in elementary schools, everything, or a social-traditional canon of culture? If not you simply choose a sort of exceptional aestheticistic theory of an enlightened minority which is an example for others who have to construct themselves completely alone. How do you expand the society of ethical beings if you don't have a possibility of constructing a social conformity, a social transmission? These are questions which Foucault leaves completely open.
· Now the popularity of a thinker like Foucault at the very end I would connect to the intellectual claims of being revolutionary without doing very much in society. I realise that this was not the case with Foucault. He was politically engaged with prisons and so on, he had a lot of personal political engagements. But you can be a strong Foucauldian simply by writing your critical books against American or European society in your office at Harvard. This is to me a very meaningful story. There is a recent very interesting political work by Rorty, Achieving our Country.[9] It is a very short history of the American intellectual in which Rorty also criticises not simply Foucault but the attitude of the radical American left-wing intellectuals because they are satisfied with something like a literary revolution. They criticise and so on but they don't have many ideas or they don't take up many responsibilities on what should be done in order to promote a society, even an anarcho-aesthetic society as seems to be advanced in Foucault's last works.

8.

·SG: The text of "The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism" which you refer to in Beyond Interpretation seems to suggest that a future philosophy needs to be prepared by making philosophy more sensuous, mythological, perhaps also aesthetic.[10] At the same time, mythology and religion needs to become more rational, more philosophical. The authors of the "System-Program" suggest that until this happens philosophers will have cause for shame. You seem to disagree with this judgement in the concluding passages of Beyond Interpretation. Is this because such a resolution is impossible in what Heidegger called the epoch of the sunset or withdrawal of Being?
· GV: The reference to the "System-Program" is just a sort of general inspiration. I agree with the authors of the "System-Program" that what we could try to imagine for our future is a sort of spiritualization of our society, in the sense of what I would call the increasing importance of the qualitative aspects of life in relation to quantitative aspects. Of course I am clearly aware that this is a problem for a late modern industrialized society.
· Marx used to say that religion is the opiate of the masses, now we could say that the mass media fulfils this role, as occurs in the coverage of the world championships of soccer. The mass media provides ways of being together, of creating a sort of communitarian feeling that is not justified by the real economic order. But couldn't this also be a way not simply of lying to the poor but of reducing poverty in the sense that life becomes more and more valuable for everybody?
· Marxism dreamed of a socialization of all property in order to have a humane society. Above all, this experiment, which has been attempted and has up until now not given us very much, has constantly required a very strong central power of the state. An alternative would be to reduce the importance of some factors of social inequalities, so that you probably can have a society in which many inequalities still are present, in terms of earnings, of assets, but many things become increasingly socialized, and more viable in the sense that we live more in the field of communication and in a world where people value leisure and so on.
· Again, what I am thinking of when I refer to the "System-Program", is that the ideals of Shelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel when they wrote and discussed this program as young men, are still our own goal. Historical alienation can be overcome only by some kind of spiritualization of our everyday life. This spiritualization probably cannot happen through the strong Hegelian way, where everybody becomes a philosopher, but through a sort of Schelling-Hölderlinian idea that society accentuates or emphasizes its aesthetic aspects. Also religion is no longer a program but more something like a humanitarian solidarity, interpersonal comprehension, etc. I even have the dream that one day we will have a sort of imaginary economics or social economy, because if you think of what would happen if the principle of reality should be enforced by the North American banks in the face of the South American indebted countries, if the banks came one day and said "ok, lets have back our money", there would be a sort of general collapse of the world economy because it would be also the North American banks that would go bankrupt. So what happens exactly? The economy goes on by again and again intensifying the debts in order to pay the interest on the previous debts. Economics is increasingly becoming an imaginary domain. Generally, even philosophers or theologians cite this fact as an example of our loss of the authenticity of reality. But probably this loss is also a good thing, because I think it is in this direction that we have to move. So the ideal of the "System-Program" is strongly changed but the direction toward an aestheticisation of our lives and the increasing importance of imaginary factors, of subjective and intersubjective factors in comparison to realistic factors is what we can think of as a sort of inspiration.

· NOTES
[1] Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy, trans. David Webb, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997. The interview was conducted by telephone (Melbourne-Torino), 1 July 1998.
[2] The reference here is to Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1982.
[3] Gianni Vattimo, Consequences of Hermeneutics, Humanities Press International, Atlantic Highlands, 1998.
[4] "Weak thought" is an imperfect rendering of the Italian original through which Vattimo has attempted to strike a correspondence with the later Heidegger's Verwindung or weak overcoming of the metaphysical tradition. As opposed to a strong, more virile and violent form of overcoming, an Uberwindung, Verwindung aims to short circuit the logic of repetition in attempting to overcome a metaphysical tradition driven by the compulsion to overcome. A form of thinking which accepts its own debolezza or weakness endures a process of convalescence and depletion which ironically twists the metaphysical tradition's tendency to want to escape its own past by remembering the violent tendencies through which it has constantly sought to close itself off to this very past. Hence the Italian debolezza, beyond its connoting weakness also suggests the predicament of the convalescent coming to grips with and accepting his/her condition. On Heidegger's usage of Verwindung see Vattimo's essay "Verwindung: Nihilism and the Postmodern in Philosophy," Substance,vol. 16, no. 53, p. 7 and The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1988, p. 40.
[5] Gianni Vattimo & Pier Aldo Rovatti (eds), Il pensiero debole, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1995. Vattimo and Rovatti co-authored the introduction to this edited collection (originally published in 1983) which became a kind of manifesto of debolezza (weakness).
[6] Dario Antiseri, The Weak Thought and its Strength, trans. Gwyneth Weston, Avebury, Aldershot, UK, 1996.
[7] There are a number of places where Michel Foucault uses these phrases, most notably in "What is Enlightenment?", but also in the lesser known essays "What is Critique?" and "What is Revolution?". All three essays, each composed in the last phase of Foucault's thinking, may now be found in the edited collection, The Politics of Truth, eds Sylvère Lotringer & Lysa Hochroth, Semiotext(e), New York, 1997.
[8] Jacques Derrida, De l'hospitalite: Anne Dufourmantelle invite Jacques Derrida a répondre, Calmann-Levy, Paris, 1997, English translation now available, Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, translated by Rachel Bowlby, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2000.
[9] Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1998.
[10] Friedrich Schelling, "Oldest System Programme of German Idealism", appendix in Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1990, pp. 265–7. See Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation, pp. 62, 119 n. 5, for a discussion regarding the disputed authorship of the "System Programme", whose candidates are Friedrich Hölderlin, Georg W. F. Hegel, and Friedrich Schelling. Vattimo observes that the authors most likely composed this piece during "the period of their friendship at the seminary in Tübingen, when the three friends had already lost faith in the French Revolution", and that current scholarly opinion suggests the piece is "the work of Schelling, formulated, with the help of his two friends, in 1795; the edition that has come down to us is from Hegel's hand and dates from 1796".

Sebastian Gurciullo recently completed a Ph.D. in Critical Theory at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University (Melbourne, Australia). His thesis studied the import of aesthetics to the respective critiques of subjectivity advanced by Adorno and Foucault. Sebastian has been producing publications of contemporary/experimental writing with the TEXTBASE collective. He can be reached at s_gurciullo@hotmail.com.