García Düttmann, Alexander

A Philosophical Cosmopolitan: Portrait of German Philosopher Alexander García Düttmann

Alexander   García Düttmann

Philosophy's alive and kicking in Europe – as borne out in the life and works of German philosopher Alexander García Düttmann. His career to date has led him through France and Germany to England, where he now teaches philosophy at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He has also covered a lot of ground in terms of subject-matter: Derrida and Adorno have led him to ethical issues, Hegel to aesthetics.

Admittedly, they're not easy reading, the works of Alexander García Düttmann, b. 1961 in Barcelona. There is something refractory about the texts, you've got to wrestle with them for a while. Yet this is not just rhetorical gesturing, but an out-and-out meaningful approach: early on in his career, Düttmann was already describing a semantic difference inherent in every language that yields for him, Derrida's translator from French into German, a dialectic of translatability and untranslatability. A critical reading of Walter Benjamin is perceptible here, but also Düttmann's far deeper exploration of Theodor Adorno. Argumentation ultimately leads to – not away from – aporia, writes Düttmann in his philosophical commentary on Adorno's Minima Moralia, which may serve to defend Adorno's aphorisms, but first and foremost characterizes his own thought and its articulation. What's sometimes refractory about the text is due to the insight that thought itself is in a constant state of tension with argumentation, that it is always a consummation in and of itself. And to mark this consummation, Düttmann occasionally has need of hyperbole as a form of "revealing transgression", which clearly evinces his allegiance to Adorno.

At Odds With Aids: Thinking and talking about a virus

García Düttmann combines the legacies of Adorno's Critical Theory and Jacques Derrida's Deconstructionism. And that has very tangible consequences: Düttmann takes on precisely those controversial issues that academic philosophy is wont to avoid in its disdain for "base politics". Here it is above all the concept of "identity" which – quite in keeping with Derrida – needs to be "de-constructed", so Düttmann, if it is to be at all applicable and helpful in facing problematic developments in our society. García Düttmann investigates the possibilities of a homosexual identity, concluding that those who are "different" have yet to be "acknowledged", and looks into the way our society deals with AIDS. He finds us "at odds" with the requirements of dealing with the disease and those directly affected. Düttmann actually sees an "historical turning-point" here and bemoans a collective failure to face the challenge.

The end after the end

And he takes on art – or rather the end thereof, its recent end, as not a few must have been surprised to hear when in the year 2000 García Düttmann threw his book Kunstende ("The End of Art") into the debate as a challenge to the complacent museum scene. Hegel was the first and, to date, most illustrious prophet of the end of art, which has subsequently been heralded, longed for and feared by countless others. Amongst Heidegger's successors, Arthur Danto was probably the last to take the question seriously, but it's still there, two hundred years after Hegel, and rifer than ever before. Düttmann nonetheless addresses the matter once again, though putting it in a new and different way in deliberate demarcation from Hegel. The existence of art, he says, is, like nothing else, so grounded in groundlessness that every single work of art produced raises the question of the end of art anew – as the possible consummation of art, in the sense of its successful conclusion, or as its downfall, in the sense of its definitive failure.

Erase the Traces

Seeing as so much is at stake in every work of art, it's no wonder Düttmann gives the matter such in-depth treatment. In his latest work on aesthetics, Verwisch die Spuren ("Erase the Traces"), he laments the current-day fetishization of art and its reification as Kultur – in other words a qualitative dilution for the sake of a huge quantitative presence. Düttmann takes on this subject passionately: seeing art as orphaned, he seeks ways to counter its demise and put an end to its ongoing ending.

Nor is his concern for the fate of art confined to pure theory: in 2004 he wrote the libretto for Paul Clark's opera Liebeslied / My Suicides, and lately he's been working on Italian film and theatre legend Luchino Visconti.

Selected bibliography Das Gedächtnis des Denkens: Versuch über Heidegger und Adorno, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1991 Uneins mit AIDS: Wie über einen Virus nachgedacht und geredet wird, Frankfurt/M: Fischer, 1993 Zwischen den Kulturen: Spannungen im Kampf um Anerkennung, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1997 Freunde und Feinde. Das Absolute, Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1999 [Croatian translation by Petar Milat, Zagreb: Multimedijalni institut, 2003] Kunstende: Drei ästhetische Studien, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2000 Philosophie der Übertreibung, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004 So ist es: Ein philosophischer Kommentar zu Adornos Minima Moralia, Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 2004 Verwisch die Spuren, Zürich – Berlin: diaphanes, 2005 Visconti: Einsichten in Fleisch und Blut, Berlin: Kadmos (currently printing) [Croatian translation by Dalibor Davidović, Zagreb: BLOK, 2006]