Alexander García Düttmann

Alexander García Düttmann's lecture in the Mimara Museum, 25th Music Biennale Zagreb, April 2009

Alexander García Düttmann (born 1961 in Barcelona) studied Philosophy in Frankfurt as a student of Alfred Schmidt and in Paris as a student of Jacques Derrida.

Career

After obtaining his PhD from Frankfurt, he spent two years at Stanford University as a Mellon Fellow. His first academic position in the UK was a lecturership in Philosophy at Essex University. Currently he is professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has taught in Melbourne, at Middlesex University, where he was professor of Philosophy for seven years, and at New York University, where he was a visiting professor in the autumn term of 1999.

Work

Düttmann has published a number of authored books, many of which have been translated into several languages (English, Italian, Croatian, Japanese). His research in the past few years has been focused on the philosophical problem of deconstruction, the work of Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, the concept of exaggeration in philosophy and Theodor Adorno’s moral philosophy. He is currently researching the question of participation in art and politics; he next will investigate the question of the contemporary in art, the relationship between photography and philosophy and the question of immortality in contemporary philosophy.

On more than one occasion, he has collaborated with artists. In 2004 the chamber opera Liebeslied / My Suicides, for which he wrote the libretto, and which featured music by Paul Clark and photographs by Rut Blees Luxemburg, opened at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.

Critique

Düttmann has been described as an author shutting off his work against critique through spurious esotericism. Robin Detje, e.g., characterizes Düttmann as representative of "the old style religion of man-as-genius".[1] Düttmann's writing, Detje argues, is dominated by the wish "to shine mysteriously, invulnerably, authoritatively and to erect his own monument".[2] With each new topic, according Detje's critical analysis, Düttmann attempts "to withdraw into his solitary cocoon in which he can play by his own rules of language alone – a place where only his own vague murmurs are sounding".[3]

Publications

References

  1. ↑ Merkur 2016, no. 5 (May), p. 84: "Männergeniereligion alter Schule".
  2. ↑ Merkur 2016, no. 5 (May), p. 84: "geheimnisvoll, unangreifbar und autoritär leuchten und am eigenen Denkmal arbeiten".
  3. ↑ Merkur 2016, no. 5 (May), p. 84: "allein in einen Kokon zurückzuziehen, in dem nur seine eigenen Sprachregelungen gelten und nur sein eigenes Raunen ertönt".
  4. ↑ Cf. Doris Vera Hofmann, 'Review of Das Gedächtnis des Denkens. Versuch über Heidegger und Adorno,' Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 16 March 1992, p. 28: "The style is leaden. Even a trace of Derrida's esprit whose tradition Alexander García Düttmann invokes would have breathed the kind of life into the book that exists nowhere but in language." ("Der Stil ist bleiern. Schon eine Spur vom esprit Derridas, in dessen Tradition Alexander García Düttmann sich gerne sähe, hätte dem Werk jenes Leben einhauchen können, das es nur in der Sprache gibt.")

Weblinks

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