Vid Snoj The Other between Ethics and Aesthetics

My short reflection will revolve around the other. The concept of the other can function as a link between the areas of ethics and aesthetics, or as a bridge for crossing over between them. My point of departure will be the other in the broadest accepted sense, that is, the other as a near or distant, familiar or alien otheranother human being in his otherness in relation to me. Beginning in the area of ethics, which always somehow concerns our coexistence with the other, I will set out one problematic aspect of this coexistence. When to coexist means to live together with a distant other, we may not fully realise the difficulty of the task. In that case, perhaps our strongest connection with him is art. From here I will cross over to the area of aesthetics, proceeding with the art of the other because art is the distinctive subject of aesthetics, which was conceived as a philosophy of art in the Romantic era. In my discussion, however, I will try to detach the other from his originative, or proprietorial, relationship to art into which we force him, perhaps uncritically, when we use the possessive of-phrase art of the other. My aim is to show that the first place in this relationship belongs to otherness in another way. I will thus conclude with the other which comes before art, losing the initial conceptual outline: not with another person but with the other (in neutrum, spelt with a lower-case o) or with the Other (spelt with a capital O) which transcends the otherthe Absolute. The original meaning of the Greek word thos is a place ofespecially human dwelling. Ethics is thus an area of philosophy which explores the place, the environment of our dwelling. In the 20th century, it even became the first philosophy through the thought of Emmanuel Lvinas, which gave rise to the ethical turn of ontology. The basic event on which Lvinas philosophy builds is not the event of being, but of an encounter, a face-to-face encounter with the other. The face of the other addresses to us an appeal which makes us feel called upon to take responsibility for him, to preserve his being. Yet how to coexist with the other if he is a distant other for us? How to live in his neighbourhood, close to him, if this is not to be an isolated encounter but a long-term symbiosis?

The other is, of course, not only my neighbour. He is also an exotic, distant other. The other other, so to speak. And there can be more than one. For example, the populace of a gypsy camp. The gypsy is the distant other who is too close to us. And this does not apply only to contemporary Slovenia, a young democracy still in her teens. As was established by a poll in 1998, the gypsy is the most unwanted fellow human in the whole of Europe, that other whom we do not want to become our neighbour but to be kept at a distance.1 Nevertheless, there are many of us who are moved by gypsy music. We are overwhelmed by the vibrations of a tremendous immediate attachment to earth on the one hand, and of an eternal homeless melancholy on the other. We can accept gypsy music, but we reject the gypsies: our acceptance of the other may be limited to the others music. This music, however, may arouse our interest in its Sitz im Leben, making the other more encounterable in his lifeworld. Music may be a bridge, although it will not prevent the constant clash of our lifeworld with the alien one. Gypsy life is an eternal nomadism roaming the social margin, a reality that is both resistant to the programs of assimilation and tiresome for the rest of us. The gypsies are the most marginalised people in Europe. Unable to settle down in forms of social life compatible with ours, they deviate time and again into delinquency. We are condemned to a more or less patient coexistence without a solution: each and every attempt at an Endlsung, even a benevolent one, would merely reflect our addiction to the illusion of our own power. A failed attempt to rescue the world. Our illusion is the conviction that democracy is a universal political system which suits the social being of all nations and peoples in the world. The gypsy way of life triggers a perpetual conflict with democracy, which is unable to absorb and process the sensibility and mentality of a nomadic people. Yet there are many of us who would not live with gypsies, but still listen to gypsy music and live with it. So much about the distant, alien other and his art, about the gypsy and his music. And now, as I announced at the beginning, let us move to a more comprehensive and more generally conceived discussion about the art of the other.

Cf. Susan Tebbutt, Introduction. Sinti and Roma: From Scapegoats and Stereotypes to Self-Assertion, in: idem (ed.), Sinti and Roma: Gypsies in German-Speaking Society and Literature, New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998, pp. ixx.

It is not necessary to imagine the other as a human being, particularly not when the term refers to what precedes art. To the ancient Greeks, art (tchne) was essentially poetic, that is, creative. As Plato says in The Symposium (205cd), creating (poesis) is a bringing into being, in matter to be precise. In mimetic arts such as poetry, painting, sculpture, and music, this is done in word, colour, stone or metal, sound or voice. In early modernity, however, the reflection on art followed the lead of art itself and found its essence in the procedure. The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky even reduced art to procedure (priem) alone, claiming that art as a procedure was nothing other than a procedure of alienating things.2 Shklovskys idea that art is founded upon alienation as rendering-something-into-other takes us back to the relationship between the other and art. If, to the ancients, art was essentially the bringing into being, and if, to the moderns, procedureas the essence of art is the conducting of this bringing, then the question arises whether the procedure itself is conducted or not. The fundamental question is where the alien resulting from this alienation originates: in the procedure or in something else by which the procedure itself might be conducted? The battleground where this is to be decided is modern art itself. Modern art is the triumph of procedure and sometimes also its excess. In that part of modern art which will ultimately fall away from art, the procedure of alienation can be a pro-vocation. The fallen art becomes a technique of provoking. The moment of provocation occurs when the initiative is taken over by the artistic procedure. The pro-vocation is then a calling forth of alienity in the procedure itself by introducing novelty upon novelty. The technique of provocation is a repetition of the new by ever other means. Thus the production of novelties, the tour de force, which imposes technique instead of inspiration, is separated from art. Provocation is the action of the uninspired, who promote procedureand therefore artas production or invention, not as discovery. The search for novelties progresses far from the sources. Now I will put forward a bold, for some perhaps even shocking thesis: original art art in general and particularly modern art with its notorious deviation from presenting thingsis, as an art whose procedure itself is conducted, a translation. Conducted by what? And do arts have any language at all, so that it would make sense to refer to them as translations?

Cf. Viktor klovski, Umetnost kot postopek, in: Aleksander Skaza (ed.), Ruski formalisti, translated by Drago Bajt, Ljubljana: Mladinska knjiga, 1984, p. 23.

Art is a translation only inasmuch as it speaks. The languages of art are different. Unlike the verbal language of literary art, the languages of the other arts do not signify by themselves: their meaning, for example the meaning of geometrical forms in emblematics, is always conveyed already in the imaginary of a given culture or the symbolic register of the verbal language. Nevertheless, they impart eloquence to the element in which they exist. The eloquent element thus made to speak is more than a means; it is a mediator, a medium, outside which there is no art. Inasmuch as the languages of art exist each in its own element, each may also possess its own hermeneutics. The translation of the language of art into human language is always questionable. This applies even to verbal art, which concerns translation within the human language itself. But translation becomes particularly risky in the case of music. To us, heirs of the Romantics, music seems above all to express a feeling. But if it does, explains Vladimir Janklvitch, there is only a certain indistinct feeling in the beginning, rendered atmospherically, nondiscursively, by suggestion alone. For this reason music can designate something only in the future perfect [au future antrieur].3 It will always only have signified. The time of its interpretation is thus the future perfect, and its distinct meaning essentially a formation in the human language. Music as language is the language of suggestion, which appeals, summons, searches for a response, and when it finds one, probably overwhelms us more than the other languages of art do. This is why music requires so much more of the responding responsibility, if I may borrow George Steiners term, orto use another of Steiners wordsof the answerability in which our response is formed with a responsibility to the musical sound, without, for example, transmuting it rudely into visual images and words which designate the imagined.4 Music can be a translation of the inaudible language of things that knows no prosody or intonation; an example is the dialogue of the wind and the sea in Debussys symphonic poem The Sea (La mer). Or else musicand then it is a modernistic, or rather, avantgardistic heresyproduces a sound which bypasses all translation, searching for the new, aspiring to be a pure series of sounds, not only outside any discoursivity and signification, but also past any mediation: a duration of sound that is bound to nothing, a pure immanence in which the sound is no longer a mediator or a resonant element of the other.

3 4

Cf. Vladimir Janklvitch, La musique et lineffable, Pariz: Seuil, 1983 (2. ed.), p. 81. Cf. George Steiner, Real Presences, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 8.

In short, the language of art that remains art translates. When, for example, Friedrich Hlderlin in his hymnic poem As when on a holiday (Wie wenn am Feiertage ) describes the morning after a night storm, he calls storms the thoughts of the communal spirit which quietly end in the poets soul.5 Given that spirit, Geist, is a usual word for God in Hlderlins poetry, the storm is a thought of God which reaches into the poets soul. The poet translates this thought, this impulse which becomes the thought of the heart, into a word and mediates it to his fellow human beings. Thus translation can be the transfer of the pre-lingual into language. What exists is translated into impulses, into thoughts of the heart, and this translation carries the premonition of a primal translation, a translation of the Absolute (or the Other, depending on the vantage point)that is, the premonition of the other than being. By the thought of the heart I definitely do not mean the reason of the heart on which Blaise Pascal placed his bet. In the usage discussed here, this thought is not a discursive thought (dinoia) but one which precedes it, inasmuch as the heart is the seat of thinking and feeling in both ancient Hellenism and biblical Judaism. Indeed, if there were no such thoughts of the heart being translated into the languages of art, any speaking of art would be simply a more or less sophisticated figment. Art originates in translation, and is original only in translation. The artistic procedure is nothing but a conducting of the translation, and this is why art has been, over and over again, a discovery of the procedure as a mode of mediating the other. The criterion of this mediation, however, is not an other as a human being, it is not my own or anyone elses understanding or reception of a given art. The criterion of art as translation is the other itself: not that which, although resisting translation so far, nevertheless remains translatable, but the untranslatable: the Absolute. Art mediates the other by alienating the familiar, and if we respond to this alienation responsibly, art diverts us from rooting ourselves in sameness (t dion). It diverts us from both ontology and the politics of idiot-ism. What art translates are hints of the other. The languages of art receive from the other hints to be translated, which conduct the artistic procedure in its alienation process. Such a hint is not an arbitrary sign; on the contrary, it is translated into a sign which is interpreted and conveyed further by the language of art. Therefore art is an epiphany of the other and at the

Cf. Friedrich Hlderlin, Wie wenn am Feiertage , in: idem, Smtliche Werke, edited by Friedrich Beissner, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1951, p. 118.

same time a mediation of this epiphany. It interprets the hints and immediately carries them out. Art catches and collects the hints of the other. This collection is its primal logos structure, that which is groped and intuited by the thoughts of the heart. A pre-discursive and pre-verbal structure. Lgos, a fundamental word in the earliest philosophical language of the West, has many meanings. It can mean word, speech, thought, sense, susceptibility to sense, but also the wholethe collectionwhich precedes thinking and speaking and rules the cosmos, both the human and non-human worlds. Now, however, I would like to establish a new sense for lgos: a collection of hints as a translation of the thoughts of the heart. In this sense, lgos is by no means identical with discourse, a rational, logical, argumentative speech. It is a collection of what is translated by the thoughts of the heart even before the element is verbalised, adapted to the language of art. It is something that precedes a text, a painting, or a musical piece, something without which there would be no composition of words, colours, or sounds. At the same time this collection, assembled by the thoughts of the heart, makes possible the thinking of art. I do not mean only the thinking on the subject of art (although it makes possible that, too), but particularly the thinking peculiar to art, thinking within the same element in which the language of art exists. Each art thinks in its own language. To think artistically means to perceive the literary, visual, musical element in its own ability of speech, in what it can express (or suppress). As a collection of the hints of the other, translated into thoughts of the heart, lgos is translated into the language of art by the poesis, the poetry, of the procedure. It is translated into words by the Dichten of poetry, although the other arts, too, are basically po(i)etic, that is, creative in their translating. However, arts are not absolutely creative. Receptivity to the hints of the other is determined by the primal passivity of all artistic creation, by a passive which only turns into the active when those hints are brought into the language of art. The hints of the other impel the artist to adapt the element of his language to them, without being able to comprehend and name the other itself. In the words of Vincent van Gogh: There must be a certain je ne sais quoi in oneself that shuts ones mouth and makes one active, something that keeps silent even though one speaksthat keeps silent inwardly, I meansomething that

impels one to action, to activity.6 The artist need not know how to break this discursive silence, or how to give an approximate discursive designation to what he creates through thinking in the language of his art. In works of art, the hints of the other manifest themselves where the language of art condenses in its element, for example in the non-figural colour stains of Fra Angelicos paintings or, conversely, in the tiny uncoloured spots of Czannes canvases. The art which translates the hints of the other is never only a translation of the sense without the letter (and therefore unambiguously translatable into discourse), but always also a translation in the letter, in the flesh of the letter. An incision into this flesh. An emptying out the element of its ability of speech. When, however, hints of the other wake up a response, a rapturous yes in the artist, the language of art acquires a hymnic intonation. Despite the unutterability of the other, there is no more fear of naming. The names of the other known from our Judeo-GreekChristian tradition are Elohim, Zeus, Abba. And many others. Whose, then, is art? Art belongs to the other. Yes, the Other. Translated by Nada Groelj

Cf. Vincent van Gogh, Briefe an den Bruder Theo, t. 1, edited by Fritz Erpel, Zrich: Diogenes, 1982, p. 322.