Transience: A poiesis, of dis/appearance

Customer Reviews:

• poiesis

  As a matter of fact, the phenomenon of transience has thus far been neglected within so-called "Western philosophy". Echoing major concepts of Bergson, Deleuze, Heidegger and Nancy (to name a few), Julia Hölzl fills in the gap and proposes an onto-phainoúmenology of the ephemeral, thereby continuing a "tradition" begun by Derrida: namely the (im)possibility of naming. By means of an "ethics of dis/appearance"--seen as praxis, not as directive-- the book opens possibilities of impossibility. Yet, it is first and foremost through the implementation of a different language that such a "poiesis of the only once" is put into practice.
  
  This beautifully and poetically written book opens an entirely new chapter in contemporary continental philosophy, and is a must-read for all those interested in different ways of dealing with "fundamental questions" such as being, time, or difference.
  
  

  source: Amazon, by user: A21CJRGYHOELKD

• Reading Julia Hölzl; or transient reading

  One of the main trajectories of "Transience: A poiesis, of dis/appearance"--in thinking `transience'--is the problematizing of the `here' and the `now'. "Transiences are there, albeit never here." (26) And by extension, this is the problem of referentiality: if one is not able to legitimately correspond the sign and what it is supposed to signify, then there is always already a gap between the idea and the phenomenon, in knowledge itself. As Julia Hölzl elegantly traces throughout her work, `transience' is always already beyond both metaphysics and phenomenology: in fact, one might even be able to go as far as to say that it is what both rely on, yet at the same time it is the undoing of both concepts (if we can call them that).
  
  And this is when Hölzl, touching Derrida, gets to the problem of naming itself: for what is to name but to attempt to `know'; but at the same time, naming is catachrestic--at the end all one can say about a name is that it is named as such because it is named (so naming is always already tautological). This she wonderfully captures in the Beckettian paradox of `we cannot name, but at the same time, we must name'. And as she points out, "it is only with/in their becoming different, within their becoming-transient that they can be named" (67) and to compound it even more, "for they cannot be named they have to be named." (80) In this sense, one senses that each name is then always already both a trace, and at the same time an opening: so a conflation (if one can momentarily utter this term) of a future-anterior. By extension we don't name as if we already know (as if there is some correspondence) but we name both because we cannot know, and we want to (need to) know at the same time. For, naming is always already an invocation of the absence of something: not as a negation, but as (to paraphrase Hölzl) an affirmation of their presence that requires an absence.
  
  It is the elegance and sophistication with which Julia Hölzl unveils her thinking that makes the book such a joy to read. For each moment is an event in sense of a surprise, and yet retrospectively what was--and should have always been--evident, that could not but be. And it is this that continually invites us--calls us--to reading, and re-reading her; as each act of reading, each time we read her, is always already transient, in disappearance.

  source: Amazon, by user: A3GLHY8HB1S9RN