Nachlass I

This is the firstin a series of posts for paid subscribers in which I share my research on the notion of the “end of art”—the theory that art is a thing of the past and that we have arrived at a cultural dead-end. These notes are the result of thorough reading and interpretation, and contain quotes from obscure sources that are invaluable for anyone who wants to understand the crisis of nihilism, the cultural history of the west, Hegel’s “End of Art” thesis, and the possible future of art.

From the Nachlass, 3/25/25-4/2/25. Thoughts on Agamben, Kafka’s “Great Wall of China,” Freud’s Humour (1927) essay, and an outline of my forthcoming book on art.

1.

Irony and self-consciousness are still the chief concern of Spirit, and the artist of the future must serve both the ironic mind and the bleeding heart. The historical development of human consciousness has, in ever-greater intensity, become an automatic self-negating process of irony, and therefore kitsch—the false image of art refracted through hedonistic self-appeasement rather than selfless surrender to Being—has, for now, become its destiny, whether with self-awareness in high conceptual “Contemporary Art” or with provincial naivete among the suburbs and country.

In my master’s thesis, which I titled No One Knows: Post-Representation in Hölderlin, Heidegger, and Stevens, I attempted to elaborate on some cryptic lines in Heidegger’s lecture on Hölderlin’s “The Ister” hymn where he claims that Hölderlin goes beyond this fated death—summarized by the thesis of the “pastness of art” in Hegel’s Aesthetics—through poetizing on the concealed essences of rivers, rather than transforming those rivers into symbols by taking the sensuous image and making it serve as a vehicle for a Platonic idea.

After writing it, “essence,” wesen in German or ousia in Greek, stood out to me as the crucial concept here, something which I had failed to properly address.

Here is what Agamben, in The Man Without Content, has to say about essence, Hölderlin, and the crisis of modern aesthetics: