Dror Pimentel

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design · Department of Visual and Material Culture

It is well known that Emmanuel Levinas places the 'other' at the heart of his phenomenology, as an agency the relation toward which constitutes subjectivity. As such, the Levinasian other is deprived of violence, and it is identified with the figures of the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow. The only resistance the other could muster against the...

In a quest after the essence of memory, a crucial distinction is made between the notions of memory and remembrance, following Plato’s distinction between mneme (memory) and hypomnesis (archive). The article’s main argument is that memory has to do with the technical aspect of life, while remembrance has to do with what we live for. This is because...

Contrary to Levinas, the event of hospitality does not take place in the face of the other, but rather, in the work of art. Art should therefore not be viewed as provoking pleasure, but rather, as an event of hospitality of radical alterity possessing the power to shake the foundation of its viewers. This is what endows art with an ethical dimensio...

The film The Survivalist portrays a dystopic world, wherein the most valuable asset is seeds. The 'seeds' metaphor applies not only in the context of agriculture but also in that of fecundity. The Survivalist's hostile hospitality toward a pair of nomads-a mother and her daughter-results in the pregnancy of the latter. In the last raid on his compo...

When Adina Bar-On--artist and teacher of abundant acclaim--asked me to write a text to accompany the Aesthetics and Bias exhibition, the first question that came to mind was about “bias,” the meaning of which was not entirely clear to me. Moreover, I was troubled by the connection between “bias” and “aesthetics,” two words that appeared to have no...

מאז ומתמיד היו הנעליים אובייקט תשוקה נחשק. מהו מקור קסמן של הנעליים, המהפנט אותנו וכמו מקפיא אותנו על עומדנו? הדברים שלהלן הם מעין רשומון של ההרהור בשאלה זו, וזאת אגב ריצוד בין נקודת המבט של הפסיכואנליזה הפרוידיאנית לנקודת המבט של הפנומנולוגיה ההיידגריאנית. הקריאה הצמודה בפרויד תתייצב בסברה כי הנעליים נופלות בקטגוריה של הפטיש, המסתיר מן המבט — באמצ...

"And who needs poets in destitute times", asks Hölderlin in one of his famous hymns-Bread and Wine. We can manipulate this question around and ask accordingly, who needs judgment in destitute times. And indeed, our times are destitute, no less, to say the least, than those of Hölderlin. And indeed, judgment is needed in our times, no less than poet...

Terror is no doubt a violent tool serving political ends of some sort. Nevertheless, terror has a phenomenality of its own. This discussion attempts at striping terror from its political ends while purposing to view it as a phenomenological event manifesting nothing but sheer violence. Following the thought of Benjamin and Derrida, the discussion l...

פאול צלאן – גדול המשוררים כותבי הגרמנית שלאחר מלחמת העולם השנייה; אנסלם קיפר – מגדולי האמנים הגרמנים החיים כיום. שני ענקים אלו נפגשים בסדרת תמונות שקיפר הקדיש לפוגת המוות של צלאן. במפגש זה מככב הזהב, כצבע המקור והחיים, לצד האפר, כצבע הגלות והמוות. גרמניה – במחוות מחשבה מלנכולית – היא זו שתובעת בעלות על המקור והחיים, ובתוך כך משלחת את היהודים לגלות...

It would seem that no other artist has succeeded in harnessing his art to social and political activism better than Joseph Beuys. This mainly holds true for Beuys' performance art (Aktion) of the 1960s and 70s that contributed greatly to the institutionalization of performance as a legitimate form of artistic expression. Beuys was not the first art...

Writing consciousness, being intelligence, is identified with Russia and America; non-writing consciousness, being spirit, is identified with Germany; writing consciousness as animality; poetry provides access to Being, traditional philosophy causes forgottenness of Being; two kinds of people: metaphysical man (man as subject) and pre-metaphysical...

The identification of writing with democracy; writing’s infertility, bastardy, orphanhood, marginality, distance from truth and presence; writing as promiscuous; written discourse as sorcery; association of sophistry with the archive, mnemotechnics, simulation; visual arts, in being inherently mimetic and deceptive, are forms of writing; modes of d...

Derrida’s logocentrism thesis, tenability of the Derridean project; phonocentrism; metaphysics and hierarchies; debasement of writing; history of the debasement of writing; the order of the sign; privileging of the phonic; the order of the sign as metaphysics’ Other; soul writing and physical writing; analogy between the soul and the book; writing...

Heidegger with Derrida: Being Written attempts, for the first time, to think Heidegger's philosophy through the lens of Derrida's logocentric thesis, according to which speech has, throughout the history of metaphysics, been given primacy over writing. The book offers a detailed account of Derrida's arguments about the debasement of writing, an acc...

Deconstructing the Platonic presence/sign, memory/archive hierarchies; the Derridean situation; memory’s inherent contamination by writing; the metaphysical pipedream of purity and pure presence; originary impropriety; deconstruction of metaphysics’ constitutive dyads; the sign as supplement; the logic of alterity; original difference, trace, and d...

Heidegger and Derrida; the deconstructive enterprise; logocentrism and Heidegger’s metaphysics; Derrida’s stance vis-à-vis Heidegger’s logocentrism; writing and its denigration; writing in the broad sense (ontological writing); writing as contamination of presence, Being, and the aletheic space; Heidegger and Plato; the notion of the proper; writin...

The primordial meaning of Being; Being and beings; the hermeneutic character of Heidegger’s philosophical interpretation; presence, presencing, and the sway of presence; time, form, and limitation; apeiron as resistance to limitation; reification as dissembling; the contamination of pure presence by permanence and demarcation; inwardness and purity...

Logocentrism in Heidegger’s thought; language as proximity to Being; the privileging of the phonic; Being/the voice of Being as the transcendent signified; metaphorics of the voice as expressing man’s relation to Being; the hand and the thing: human action as bringing about presencing; the hand and the gaze as the site of the disclosure of Being; t...

Derrida on Heidegger’s opposition, in Being and Time, to the metaphysics of subjectivity, Heidegger’s notion of man as asking the question of Being, as ek-sistence, as leaping beyond the ontic to the ontological; Heidegger’s rejection of notions, such as consciousness, soul, and spirit, associated with the metaphysics of subjectivity; Derrida on He...

Disclosure as preservation of concealment; falsity is a fundamental aspect of truth; the originary status of contamination; Being’s fate: the necessity of the metaphysical ob-ject, writing, and technology; Heidegger’s anticipation of Derrida’s supplement: metaphysics as a trace of Being’s forgotten meaning; Heidegger’s belief that ultimately, Being...

Dasein; the aletheic space as the space of human attunement to Being; freedom as relatedness to Being, as letting beings be, without mastery or appropriation, as congenial engagement with beings; dual (active/passive) conception of the gaze; the gaze, the divine, and Being, are names for the aletheic space; gazing, encountering, engaging with the O...

Most rare are those works of art that, in a simple visual gesture, succeed in formulating a dilemma that occupies culture as a whole. Such is the artwork of Joseph Beuys entitled Fat Chair. The work�viewed mainly from a phenomenological perspective�is comprised of two elements holding a tension: a chair on the one hand, and a lump of fat placed on...

Paul Celan was undoubtedly the greatest post-World War II German-writing poet, and Anselm Kiefer one of the greatest living German artists. These two giants can be seen to meet through a series of artworks that Kiefer dedicates to the depiction of Celan’s Todesfugue (Fugue of Death). Bringing together the verbal and the visual, the color of gold sy...

Terror is no doubt a violent tool serving political ends of some sort. Nevertheless, terror has a phenomenality of its own. This discussion attempts at striping terror from its political ends while purposing to view it as a phenomenological event manifesting nothing but sheer violence. Following the thought of Benjamin and Derrida, the discussion l...