2018/08/18 by Patrick Anderson · 1 citation
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Japanese History and Culture #German Literature and Culture Studies #Decadence, Literature, and Society #Subjectivity #Transcendental number #Art #Poetry #Object (grammar) #Literature #Philosophy #Epistemology #Linguistics
paper · doi:10.1080/13528165.2018.1533755
openalex publication_date 2018/08/18 · openalex created_date 2018/12/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
This essay examines two seemingly disparate performances of radical generosity: the meticulous conceptual work of Japanese artist On Kawara, and the much-maligned practice among queer men of deliberately seeking seroconversion (to HIV positivity) through ‘bug chasing’ and ‘gift giving’. I begin with a critical (and not often-considered) moment in the early history of empathy: a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, who was at the time apprenticing for the renowned sculptor Auguste Rodin. Rilke had previously been a student of Theodor Lipps, the scholar responsible for coining the English word ‘empathy’ as a translation of the German einfühlung. Rilke’s poem ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’, about an ancient sculptural ruin, invokes the original sense of enfühlung as an aesthetic encounter in which the subjectivity of a human spectator becomes radically entangled with—and in fact undone by—the interiority of a beloved object. Rilke treats this encounter as profoundly significant—as profoundly earth-shattering—precisely because it originates within the non-sentient object itself, and precisely because it evokes a radical re-figuring of the very terms of personhood. Subjectivity and objecthood, for Rilke as for Lipps, are not merely co-constitutive, but are intertwined at a much more fundamental level: the level of being itself.