The Art of Reconciliation

Dag Petersson offers a comprehensive critique of the philosophy that has dominated 200 years of modern thought, politics, economy, and culture. The basic question is this: why does dialectical metaphysics fail to keep what it promises? What is it about dialectics, that makes it fall into irreducibly distinct variations of itself, when all it promises is to synthesize, to reconcile and make whole what is fragmented and alien to itself? An undisciplined creativity intrinsic to completing reason comes to light through analyses of how dialectical systems begin. Every dialectical philosophy must account for its own birth, and it is at this point, when it also articulates its promise of universal synthesis, that the book discovers a desire for light-writing, or photography. Only the most immediate element light can mediate the necessary self-determination of thought at its origin. Light must begin to write. A philosophical critique of dialectics is therefore also a point of departure for a new aesthetic ontology of photography.

Autorentext
Dag Petersson is Associate Professor at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, Copenhagen, Denmark. He has previosuly been Senior Researcher at the Danish Royal Library and lecturer at the University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Jacob A. Riis (2008), and co-editor of Actualities of Aura: Twelve Studies of Walter Benjamin (2005).

Zusammenfassung
Every dialectical philosophy must account for its own birth, and it is at this point, when it also articulates its promise of universal synthesis, that the book discovers a desire for light-writing, or photography.

Inhalt
Preface PART I 1. Introduction to a Reality of Dreams 2. Image, Remembrance, Awakening: Toward a Dialectics of Intensity 3. Correspondences: Postal, Political and Poetical 4. Water: The Revolutionary Element of Reflection and Likeness 5. Fantômes, or Death and the Metropolis: Reconciliation as the Shock of History 6. Categories of Language, Vision and Music PART II 7. The Forces of a Preface 8. Sacrifice: the Gift to Economy PART III 9. Love and the Difference a Family Makes 10. A Appendix Index