The Revenant Quarterly

<rss version="2.0"
	xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"
	xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/"
	xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
	xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"
	
	>

<channel>
	<title>The Revenant Quarterly</title>
	<link>https://revenantquarterly.org</link>
	<description>The Revenant Quarterly</description>
	<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:36:01 +0000</pubDate>
	<generator>https://revenantquarterly.org</generator>
	<language>en</language>
	
		
	<item>
		<title>CURRENT ISSUE</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/CURRENT-ISSUE</link>

		<pubDate>Wed, 06 Jan 2021 00:12:07 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/CURRENT-ISSUE</guid>

		<description>
  
    &#60;img width="825" height="158" width_o="825" height_o="158" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" data-mid="99924945" border="0" data-scale="4" data-no-zoom="true" data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/825/i/44008779cd1b2e103994d8605097621409fff6754134a8f188b4128a5a96cf44/The_Revenant_Quarterly.png" /&#62;
    &#38;nbsp;
  

     VOLUME 11,
    

      ISSUES 1/2WINTER / SPRING 2025
&#38;nbsp;
    

      Matias Botero
      – PALIMPSEST GARDEN
    
  
– BOOKLET – TEXT –&#38;nbsp;PLAN &#38;amp; SECTION–&#38;nbsp;PERSPECTIVE 


     Arnold Klein
      – MS

    
      William H. Aile
      – FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE– ON DENYING THE GOOD
– ON CONTINUING– ON CONTENT


      Anna Gregor
      – CATTELAN’S COMEDIAN: SUBJECTIVITY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF SHARING A WORLD IN THE ART-JUDGMENT
    
 
Suvi Karjalainen 
      – THREE LANDSCAPES


      Kid Twist 
      – PERISCOPICS
to look / to see– A PANEL DISCUSSION ON ART (NEW YORK, MAY 17th 2025)


          ARCHIVE
        
      
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Matias Botero - BOOKLET PALIMPSEST GARDEN</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-BOOKLET-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 19:35:37 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-BOOKLET-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</guid>

		<description>
	

	Matias Botero
– PALIMPSEST GARDEN BOOKLET

	
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e8a48db294738a022428757784fb3349f87f008ddefb466c059173bf70526ac0/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_01_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230438" border="0" data-scale="87" data-no-zoom="true" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e8a48db294738a022428757784fb3349f87f008ddefb466c059173bf70526ac0/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_01_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e44e2a9840b6c3f94526e27c144146378aecf534da89a39a1a7bf1270d831d4/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_02_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230439" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6e44e2a9840b6c3f94526e27c144146378aecf534da89a39a1a7bf1270d831d4/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_02_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/282cf02e2783024a9e85c4d82b9f7e85a02529f2736746c634210bd4756e63d0/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_03_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230440" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/282cf02e2783024a9e85c4d82b9f7e85a02529f2736746c634210bd4756e63d0/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_03_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/93b1ffcdf147f3999da6b7af67f32e3051feefb0391cb64c7e6dc4435f00a27e/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_04_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230441" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/93b1ffcdf147f3999da6b7af67f32e3051feefb0391cb64c7e6dc4435f00a27e/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_04_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4d95bdb5faa81073f3d107eceadd6c0932d2a8f0a2c9ce204ceb61bde9668536/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_05_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230442" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4d95bdb5faa81073f3d107eceadd6c0932d2a8f0a2c9ce204ceb61bde9668536/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_05_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f62914a48cf7384e48c6333c8abc4b842802dcaff3dd2b509d3278fa4c304d6a/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_06_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230443" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f62914a48cf7384e48c6333c8abc4b842802dcaff3dd2b509d3278fa4c304d6a/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_06_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7b158dfc685f56bf3013d53ce42a0fd11e770bd548a2db0748a53aeb23cf5db6/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_07_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230444" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7b158dfc685f56bf3013d53ce42a0fd11e770bd548a2db0748a53aeb23cf5db6/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_07_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b38227b3f47f78118e9d362e1d19ee0b2fc448b652dc0cef8a409edcf3f941a4/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_08_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230445" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b38227b3f47f78118e9d362e1d19ee0b2fc448b652dc0cef8a409edcf3f941a4/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_08_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/798c82c7900a835a12d8b34196be5367b749fc23c1439aecba0dea8be422f681/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_09_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230446" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/798c82c7900a835a12d8b34196be5367b749fc23c1439aecba0dea8be422f681/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_09_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4d75e4aa2575f16520499cc6a0955bfef14dd4e49132a2e1095344140cc2bd65/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_10_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230447" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4d75e4aa2575f16520499cc6a0955bfef14dd4e49132a2e1095344140cc2bd65/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_10_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b2e787a9f32d203a6a1fa8068efe1d4ba226e6cb98da17ab95f5e4bf7e24f6ef/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_11_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230448" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b2e787a9f32d203a6a1fa8068efe1d4ba226e6cb98da17ab95f5e4bf7e24f6ef/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_11_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b025f79af50c07ef217c7ede42755e2ac8c4cb647bf3a4058961e32d790240b6/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_12_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230449" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b025f79af50c07ef217c7ede42755e2ac8c4cb647bf3a4058961e32d790240b6/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_12_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c836c7d01a13ed3d278ead344b44164f2a2e786c98fb496b76d34be891335d87/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_13_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230450" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c836c7d01a13ed3d278ead344b44164f2a2e786c98fb496b76d34be891335d87/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_13_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d54f9bed9204113d9a1a7dc0ab988938a18eb23acac7b713476bb3dfd941a0a5/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_14_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230451" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d54f9bed9204113d9a1a7dc0ab988938a18eb23acac7b713476bb3dfd941a0a5/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_14_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7dbac851dfac00aec3a0f13fd8d308db23b28ea657f663630449bcda64875731/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_15_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230452" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7dbac851dfac00aec3a0f13fd8d308db23b28ea657f663630449bcda64875731/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_15_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ea29e28b6646eaef0328ccb959e052285fa17bf94847ccd5e932448adcbb545c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_16_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230453" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ea29e28b6646eaef0328ccb959e052285fa17bf94847ccd5e932448adcbb545c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_16_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5757525c5e80da5c935787174516a1070ba8cc23408cdacb74e25731856b8583/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_17_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230454" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5757525c5e80da5c935787174516a1070ba8cc23408cdacb74e25731856b8583/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_17_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/30032a97550122d299e15e51cf2eab6ea227336d5ceabfa4aaca3f94575dc6e6/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_18_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230455" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/30032a97550122d299e15e51cf2eab6ea227336d5ceabfa4aaca3f94575dc6e6/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_18_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1deec8610bd1281a88df9eac84023a57d26c910d044385583e75113453b080b7/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_19_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230456" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1deec8610bd1281a88df9eac84023a57d26c910d044385583e75113453b080b7/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_19_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2502c4cadf5e28fe29ae0f55da7100eb72fcf0582ed8386a8ff1ab3335595ccf/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_20_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230457" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2502c4cadf5e28fe29ae0f55da7100eb72fcf0582ed8386a8ff1ab3335595ccf/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_20_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3d80e84a668b684f9f74ae034d8435990855e011f302767efd6d678737831083/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_21_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230458" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3d80e84a668b684f9f74ae034d8435990855e011f302767efd6d678737831083/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_21_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e69008def2410fa6f4c3067b768a06c16f638c7b12e5b09d4db9d71c618d2e32/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_22_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230459" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e69008def2410fa6f4c3067b768a06c16f638c7b12e5b09d4db9d71c618d2e32/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_22_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/182ea773f06939bcd347f217272915a64eae440bc062cd81c7f405dcb2b397a7/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_23_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230460" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/182ea773f06939bcd347f217272915a64eae440bc062cd81c7f405dcb2b397a7/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_23_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10b5fd39d37c44e239a486fe5232223cf88df6512f3e01c824861ef50d996731/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_24_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230461" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/10b5fd39d37c44e239a486fe5232223cf88df6512f3e01c824861ef50d996731/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_24_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/872276f841edd1f312f71e89d4211d82f718894b351e3bfe2e9b8d35fe48774c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_25_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230462" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/872276f841edd1f312f71e89d4211d82f718894b351e3bfe2e9b8d35fe48774c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_25_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0be4f0ba7cd55245a384e544924a3a7e61b447b8ad8ac03b80c6924a9e664b1c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_26_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230463" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0be4f0ba7cd55245a384e544924a3a7e61b447b8ad8ac03b80c6924a9e664b1c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_26_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6bab8c25536956677ee11f68e8bfbc98312f318f49b155de4fcd0180050094bb/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_27_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230464" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6bab8c25536956677ee11f68e8bfbc98312f318f49b155de4fcd0180050094bb/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_27_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4504becdf80672a7464c6e21764d1c5ec678873cd2cba7ef2dd8f449d1634fdd/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_28_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230465" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4504becdf80672a7464c6e21764d1c5ec678873cd2cba7ef2dd8f449d1634fdd/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_28_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/be5c682445525c16f59c2581be1f7612268044526412b71466fe2ac2b7132912/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_29_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230466" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/be5c682445525c16f59c2581be1f7612268044526412b71466fe2ac2b7132912/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_29_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/64710b74f97c70fc17c2da0af9011f3ad22ffa9e9900473b1c0bf509c7a9a908/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_30_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230467" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/64710b74f97c70fc17c2da0af9011f3ad22ffa9e9900473b1c0bf509c7a9a908/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_30_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/41529acaeadae4fbb30c2bd0a68ae1f0d2633ca997d6252096d2e986b1054bb8/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_31_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230468" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/41529acaeadae4fbb30c2bd0a68ae1f0d2633ca997d6252096d2e986b1054bb8/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_31_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef02a9ee554fc72e24bfe356af7049f1055cb7b7c74cd392bbb1da9f1bf97e86/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_32_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230469" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef02a9ee554fc72e24bfe356af7049f1055cb7b7c74cd392bbb1da9f1bf97e86/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_32_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/33312deaa90ccf240c97b936ad25e2873af13937dd73f2cbabfe72ff0df6f233/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_33_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230470" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/33312deaa90ccf240c97b936ad25e2873af13937dd73f2cbabfe72ff0df6f233/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_33_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cde720256ca72da5848a780a4cab41afd9669d2aa81205b1523eccc86cbbec34/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_34_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230471" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cde720256ca72da5848a780a4cab41afd9669d2aa81205b1523eccc86cbbec34/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_34_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e4a24e61dac5aa2e69c3434a26561085632a3f2170046f81ac81ee31aec381ee/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_35_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230472" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e4a24e61dac5aa2e69c3434a26561085632a3f2170046f81ac81ee31aec381ee/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_35_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c737f2ede02f201c42295ec8fd613af18449a91afbc7d1670564b7aa35a3dd60/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_36_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230473" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c737f2ede02f201c42295ec8fd613af18449a91afbc7d1670564b7aa35a3dd60/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_36_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/acb9ec6e3e4b565c6792aa8f388b0bfa07baa73039de0b7b5173c5063f68ab9e/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_37_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230474" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/acb9ec6e3e4b565c6792aa8f388b0bfa07baa73039de0b7b5173c5063f68ab9e/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_37_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/47618ed7abef8d03ab0ff9bf58fe7ac51805679f8a68a856160f0a9f9c330cf3/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_38_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230475" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/47618ed7abef8d03ab0ff9bf58fe7ac51805679f8a68a856160f0a9f9c330cf3/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_38_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/57466f025aa1a86a1357cd71e8a4f9faf8f1da937181e1d079dc7cac97fcf66a/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_39_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230476" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/57466f025aa1a86a1357cd71e8a4f9faf8f1da937181e1d079dc7cac97fcf66a/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_39_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/470cd5331965dfba3b99d596c1e70215bbc259ef3206400ed9db09fa92cb9cac/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_40_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230477" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/470cd5331965dfba3b99d596c1e70215bbc259ef3206400ed9db09fa92cb9cac/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_40_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2fce831aed3f7d07a13ed3aa242bb8a1e2887ba1ffaed792671675e82fdfac24/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_41_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230478" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2fce831aed3f7d07a13ed3aa242bb8a1e2887ba1ffaed792671675e82fdfac24/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_41_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="4961" height="2953" width_o="4961" height_o="2953" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bf0fb4517fe5f869c262005bf2074fa08017c57a1bb4ca316671f4597d880d5c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_42_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234230479" border="0" data-scale="88" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bf0fb4517fe5f869c262005bf2074fa08017c57a1bb4ca316671f4597d880d5c/Matias_Botero_BOOKLET_Page_42_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#38;nbsp;Text︎

	
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Matias Botero - TEXT PALIMPSEST GARDEN</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-TEXT-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:15:36 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-TEXT-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</guid>

		<description>
	

	Matias Botero
– PALIMPSEST GARDEN&#38;nbsp;

	
	The mud walls of the Almanshia railway station in Alula are disintegrating. In a few decades, they will no longer be there. The mud, once erected upon itself, has today half returned to the ground. The ruin is an intermediary stage in the transition of matter from verticality back to horizontality. In this liminal state, devoid of their original function, the walls straddle ambiguously between being architecture, and being landscape. As such, they become stimulating hosts for contemplation, play, creation… 


Our project stems from a paradoxical desire: to perpetuate the ephemeral beauty of the eroding walls. However tempting it might be to go about this by freezing the walls in their actual state1, we consider that that would be the ruin’s ruin. The ruin is a state, and its essence lies in its perpetual transformation. Thus, we propose that what ought to be perpetuated is the process of disintegration itself, rather than the specific forms it has thus far yielded. 


We consider that ‘the ruin’ is itself an architectural program: the experiential possibilities it generates are sufficient in themselves. We therefore propose to officialize the today inaccessible site as a garden; a garden of ruins, where erosion and time’s passage are the main themes. 


To perpetuate disintegration we propose to build new walls, that will in turn disintegrate. This construction is taken as an opportunity to sublimate the arc of the wall’s life: out of flatness, matter is displaced to erect a wall—a hole is dug; once piled up, the extreme heat and cold of the desert, as well as the harsh winds and seasonal rain storms begin to erode the wall; eventually the matter returns to the ground, the hole is filled back up. The project replicates this cycle of matter at the scale of the entire site. We dig an indentation on the terrain and make an adjacent mound. The material for the project thus comes from the site itself. A labyrinthic matrix of walls, that is a proliferation of the existing spatial structure, are used as retention elements for the displaced ground. The site becomes terraced, topographic. An architectural landscape, disintegrating. 


A palimpsest is a parchment where multiple layers of text have been superposed through time upon each other. Out of this superposition, new meanings emerge. In a sense, the Almanshia railway station is a palimpsest2. Built incrementally, with various materials and in response to different cultures and needs, all its layers coexist today, generating peculiar spatial situations as they disintegrate at different rates. The site is thus the product of a process of layering, which our project intends to continue. The construction of the new walls officializes what the abandoned railway station already is: a Palimpsest garden. 


As the Saudi economy mutates from oil to tourism, the Alula valley promises to undergo significant change. Given its aesthetic and cultural capital3 The Royal Commission intends to position Alula in the global panorama, attracting 2 million tourists annually by 2030. The question of how to treat the disintegrating mud walls is today a point of contention: the disappearance of the walls means losing significant tourist attraction; the stabilization of the walls is only a temporary solution; the reconstruction of the site means the potential loss of archeological material. 


Among the major urban changes to the today primarily agricultural city4 is the construction of a tram line, following the path of the historical railway tracks, and connecting the major heritage sites. The Almanshia station will be the first stop of this tram line, and thus the entry gate to Alula for the outside world. Located in a residential neighbourhood, the site is today surrounded by a mosque, two schools and a market. Thus situated at a point of daily flux of publics both local and international, Palimpsest garden functions as a public space addressed to all. The perimeter of intervention was defined by drawing the smallest possible rectangle that encloses the entirety of the site. Given the irregular contour of the existing plan, the negative spaces between the old and new perimeter became the spaces of intervention. Approximately the size of a soccer field, Palimpsest garden intertwines a diversity of spatial situations: the lookout point; the valley; the fresh date grove; the narrow alleyway and the spacious hall; rooms both roofed and open to the sky; the stone, the mud, and the concrete wall; the new and old. 


To recapitulate: the Almanshia site is characterized by the interplay of two processes acting in opposite directions: incremental construction and perpetual erosion. Our project endeavours to continue the historic process of layering by adding a new set of walls, so that the material process of erosion can continue to produce marvellous and thought provoking forms that are midway between architecture and landscape.

 ︎ Booklet &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp;Plan &#38;amp; Section︎

	
[1]&#38;nbsp;At present in Alula, three main strategies are used to treat the mud walls, all of which have in common the impulse to stop the process of disintegration. Identical reconstruction, stabilisation of the ruin as a ruin, and restructuration.
[2]&#38;nbsp;The site was at first a well. At the outset of the XXth century, the Ottoman empire embarked on the construction of a railway line connecting Damascus to Mecca. In 1907, The Almanshia Station was inaugurated with the construction of a series of stone pavilions along the tracks, including a railway station, a storage unit, a twin water tower and a metal wind pump, a residential unit for the station master, a telegraph office, and a bathroom and utility unit. In 1914, the Turks joined WWI as an ally of the central powers. The Arabs, whose territory was under Ottomans control, supported the British through the Arab Revolt. In 1918, A perimeter mud wall was built to protect the station from Bedouin attacks. In the same year, however, the station was bombarded by air. In 1919, the Ottoman control of the station came to a complete end. In 1925 what was left of the railway tracks was completely damaged by a flood. During the same year, the site was transformed into the Imara (town hall of the local governor, or Amir). This led to the construction of a series of mud buildings using vernacular techniques, as well as a few adaptations to the building from the ottoman period. Thus, what was once a secondary railway station grew to incorporate administrative offices, reception halls, a mosque, residential quarters for the amir, his family, servants and guests, a police department, and telegraph office. In 1964, the Imara changed location, and the site has remained abandoned till today.
[3]&#38;nbsp;Alula is an Oasis in the desert. Given this privileged situation the site has been inhabited since the cradle of human civilization. Furthermore, it was a key stop in the incense and spice road, which implied it was a place of intense cultural and economic exchange. Numerous civilizations have left their traces, including the Dadanites and Nabatheans. 
[4]&#38;nbsp;Another prospected change is the installation of a high volume pipeline. Cutting through the hejaz mountain range and all the way to a desalination plant in the red sea, its purpose is to remedy the city's already precarious water situation. In fact, the pressure of the current date agriculture already exceeded the oasis’ equilibrium, so the water table is sinking deeper each year.
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Matias Botero -  PLAN &#38; SECTION PALIMPSEST GARDEN</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-PLAN-SECTION-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:29:54 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-PLAN-SECTION-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</guid>

		<description>
	

	Matias Botero
– PALIMPSEST GARDEN PLAN &#38;amp; SECTION

	
&#60;img width="3893" height="2146" width_o="3893" height_o="2146" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/821e7e073d8ef9866d72394c6d157b32239617638913747928de8e25b114af16/Matias_Botero_PLAN---SECTION_Page_2_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234231415" border="0"  src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/821e7e073d8ef9866d72394c6d157b32239617638913747928de8e25b114af16/Matias_Botero_PLAN---SECTION_Page_2_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;
&#60;img width="1174" height="2138" width_o="1174" height_o="2138" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/db98d4a74b8751b0c450909b5fb0063c9c3dea49af63ce5daf9358620d9692cc/Matias_Botero_PLAN---SECTION_Page_1_Image_0001.jpg" data-mid="234231429" border="0" data-scale="35" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/db98d4a74b8751b0c450909b5fb0063c9c3dea49af63ce5daf9358620d9692cc/Matias_Botero_PLAN---SECTION_Page_1_Image_0001.jpg" /&#62;

︎ Text&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;Perspective︎

	
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Matias Botero -  PERSPECTIVE PALIMPSEST GARDEN</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-PERSPECTIVE-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</link>

		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:36:01 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/Matias-Botero-PERSPECTIVE-PALIMPSEST-GARDEN</guid>

		<description>
	

	Matias Botero
– PALIMPSEST GARDEN PERSPECTIVE

	
&#60;img width="1942" height="1849" width_o="1942" height_o="1849" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/585ff3a0c4c744fd45d252c9a4b46f112d4959ec0e90c5a03a2e064585309db1/4.-PERSPECTIVE.jpg" data-mid="234233751" border="0" data-scale="70" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/585ff3a0c4c744fd45d252c9a4b46f112d4959ec0e90c5a03a2e064585309db1/4.-PERSPECTIVE.jpg" /&#62;

︎ Plan &#38;amp; Section

	
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Arnold Klein – MS</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/Arnold-Klein-MS</link>

		<pubDate>Sun, 01 Jun 2025 20:20:14 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/Arnold-Klein-MS</guid>

		<description>
	

	Arnold Klein
– MS

	
I probe my pocket for my pen, but what I clutch
Turns out to be my thumb. The old obtundent touch:
Whose C-spine nerves demylinate expects as much.


They call this symptom “hand in glove.” – But, not to bitch,
When you can’t proprioperceive which finger’s which
To get a glove on straight, without some baffling hitch,


(Which I remember once dispatching with dispatch),
Is fiendishly complex: some digit’s bound to catch;
And hand and glove, which seem so much a match, mismatch.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


They call it “foot in stocking” when your feet go blank.
Since balance much depends on feedback, sole to shank,
You tip when standing still, and when you move, you bank.


So every venture forth becomes a tightrope walk:
You have to plot a line ahead in mental chalk
To keep yourself from deviating. – Not to squalk.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


My right foot doesn’t dorsiflex – it sort of wags
When lifted off the sidewalk. And the right hip sags;
So one must what’s called “vault” – that’s clear the leg one drags


By stilting on the other. And so on one chugs.
A ratchet slipping cogs. Until the leg one lugs,
Misfiring before, like loose-in-socket plugs,


Fatigues and scrapes the ground. The further on one pegs
The oftener one stumbles. By their final legs
One’s promenades imperil. So one walks on eggs.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *
But even slowing up, one falls. That quadriceps,

Enervate to begin with, by the end of schleps

Can’t get that foot out front in time to catch missteps.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


There’s ways to cope, of course, with such small deficits

And years, perhaps, before what now relapse-remits

Begins progressing, and one calls this sojourn quits.


But whatsoever lesions claim which body parts,
One’s lost forever, once demylinizing starts,
What makes the self transparent to the self – Descartes’


“Immediate experience that self-unites
The body and the mind,” in which regime, by rights,
Without awareness, or intent, the soul delights.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


A competence the fortunate may be absolved

For doubting .– It’s like base in which perfume’s dissolved:

Insensible itself, but everywhere involved


In everything the soul delights in or conceives

Delighting in – and what else no one hale believes

Is how ungenial a life its leaving leaves.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


That present joys disrelish is a present fact.

But so must those imagined: one cannot abstract

A union so immediate the very act


Of apperceiving sunders it and not convict

The lie in the imagination: you depict,

If somewhat tweaked, diminishments that now afflict.

&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;&#38;nbsp; *


So even to one’s idylls one imports complaints.

And when one’s present projects and the ones one paints

Are just about as sickly, motivation faints,


Since who develops, not to mention, implements

Designs as disagreeable as what presents?

And consciousness is constituted of intents;


It ideates, to every enterprise it mounts,
A hundred &#38;nbsp;it won’t execute. &#38;nbsp;Should it renounce
Futurity, there’s little left in things that counts.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp;*

Another thing the hale may doubt. To one things cheer

Their value seems intrinsic – why he holds them dear.

It’s only when all outcomes are about as drear


That value is revealed as preference. &#38;nbsp;Don’t prefer,
And everything’s as impotent to charm or stir.
Although, since pain remains, precautions still deter.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *

Since one is just alive enough to suffer things.

There’s always something some dysmetric member dings,

And lesioned spinal nerves, like sympathetic strings,


Bejangle weirdly through and after normal pangs.

One’s world consists of obstacles one shuns or bangs;

And so, with more that hurts, the further back one hangs.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


And don’t forget, with numbness, and apart from raps,

One burns and freezes, bides Lhermitte’s electric zaps

And zonesthesias, like one’s trunk’s compressed by straps,


And knowing those are figments doesn’t (not to carp)

Make dysaesthesias less importunate or sharp.

Disease, then, like an underdrone, or vibraharp,


Compels incessant self-attention. – Not to grump;

Since plenty have it worse. And everyone must lump

The malady that constitutes the body-stump.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


Who threw me in the body-stump? – Mankind’s estate,

To cite a gnostic hymn, not just sclerotics’ fate.

The answer is a fiend, of course, which who’d debate,


And throw implies a native place his cosmic plot
Prevents us from resuming, but can’t make forgot;
Else how’d we know from whence we came and into what?


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


Or know this world the inn it is, to cite the rest,

And not our very dwelling? – The adept, not guest,

But internee. – In which transcosmic house arrest


He veils his extramundane portion, lest his host

Discover it and wean it earthwards. Fatal post;

But that he knows the stump is not his innermost


Consoles him for his sojourn, how so long it last

And alien his attitudes; at how so vast

A distance stands repose, when once the stump is cast.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


Except there is no fiend, no plot, no inn, no hope.

A part of light am I – the basic gnostic trope –

And not a part of this! gives woes a cosmic scope


That lets a mortal take his existential lumps

Heroically, as bagatelles his real self trumps;

For all that, though, his consciousness remains the stump’s;


Which on the bright side means that when his heartstrings snap

His consciousness, like blockage in a toilet’s trap,

Gets flushed into oblivion. The oddments, scrap.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


Unless oblivion should prove a cosmic bluff.

A universe like this, which has been cruel enough

To visit consciousness upon unconscious stuff,


Creating pain thereby for, it would seem, a goof,

Is cruel enough to further show its cloven hoof

And make that consciousness annihilation-proof.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


Which renders suicide de trop – one still attends.

But even so, though no annihilation pends,

The body would be gotten through. At least that ends.


&#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; &#38;nbsp; *


The gnostics pictured planet earth a penal hell

Around which fiends have stacked, concentric shell by shell,

Three hundred barricades. Our cosmos (prison cell


Enough, without the fiction of a fiends’ cabal)

Spans thirteen billion light years. Still, it helped morale

To feign that from beyond its void, which freaked Pascal,


Solicited another – thither would I bail!
Then physicists immensified the cosmic scale
Times fifteen trillion. Though one managed not to quail


Before an aeon fifteen trillion times as small,
One starts to now – escape just seems too long a haul;
Unless the soul, when it’s no more the body’s thrall,


And creeps no more, is turned to the transcosmic hail
And far outspeeds mere light. For light regards this jail:
So how can light escape it? And the soul: how fail?
	
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>William H. Aile – ON DENYING THE GOOD</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-DENYING-THE-GOOD</link>

		<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2025 03:42:29 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-DENYING-THE-GOOD</guid>

		<description>
	

	William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

	
On denying the good


It’s long since been observed that there are good bagels, good sex, and good deeds, and that what “good” comes to in each case depends on the noun it modifies. A good talking to will be judged by different criteria from a good campsite. The good, in short, is the good of the kind. This is true enough, and well observed, and I won’t be understood to be contradicting it when I say that, for all its variations, the good, across all kinds, makes a claim on us. One would be forgiven for thinking, reading the day’s op-eds, that moral life might consist solely in judgments of the bad. There is scarcely a good person left in the history books about whom some clever critic has not found out something damning. The surprising thing, however, if we attend to our own composition, is not that the persons of history were and died, like us, as humans, but that we should take this to qualify their goodness. We are afraid, I think, of calling a human good for fear they’ll turn out to be the devil. But this should, I think, show that we misconceive goodness, for if there exists a good person they must be human and being human must be imperfect. We act as though our standards were so high none could meet them, but this doesn’t show what we wish, that we have high standards, only that we are bad judges, and have lost the sense of a good word. I said the good makes a claim on us – what is this claim? Generalizing – which, we forget, has its place – the good makes a claim on our attention and asks no more than that we recognize it as such. Good paintings, good jokes, good ideas, where they are such, make themselves known to us,


crying what I do is me: for that I came.


This is not to say we must announce every good grape, for we are bound by a feeling for situations to say only those things that are called for – and not every delight is remarkable at every hour. This sense of situations, that is, of relevance, is precisely, I add by the way, what a so-called social medium aims to deaden, as though it were at all times relevant to report on your breakfast. No, we needn’t announce it to recognize the good. A problem arises, however, when we are asked to recognize some bad connected with it. A good cheese makes a claim on our attention, as should the indignities of dairy farming: must the one be denied to acknowledge the other? Here I assert my maxim: we must never deny the good. This does not mean: eat the cheese. It does mean: we stand to gain nothing but a corrupt consciousness by denying that a good of its kind is good. This is the moral nuance one wishes to cultivate, for oneself and one’s company. To be able to hear with due horror accusations against Kings and not deny what’s good in a good person. I have heard it said of a painting that it couldn’t be good owing to actions of the painter, as though goodness of one kind followed only by entailment from goodness of another. I would be more forgiving of this pseudo-judgment if it didn’t so often eventuate in an excuse for not looking, and so in one more mode of self-imposed ignorance about the world we share. Complain! But if you do not look at the world you complain about you must pardon us for returning to it. But don’t mistake me for an apologist for bad people; I bid you see the good, not blind yourself to the bad. There come, in fact, times – and none can tell you when one is – when goods must be forsaken. Good jokes, even good deeds, are not sufficient reason to keep the company of a bad man, and you may – I’m none to tell you no – decide that a good painting ought to be sacrificed for a greater good. Only let this be indeed a good and let your judgment rest on a true account of the reality it judges, for it is only a sacrifice if some good goes with it, and as much as we ought never deny the good, perhaps the greatest gift this maxim, followed, brings is the ability really to sacrifice, for we are rich in proportion to the goods we can afford to let alone.

	
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>William H. Aile – ON CONTINUING</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-CONTINUING</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 02:43:44 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-CONTINUING</guid>

		<description>
	

	William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

	
On continuing


Two very close acquaintances of mine were recently debating, not without evident despair, whether, in the world of art, it was not more aptly said that the greatest problem the artist faces is that of beginning – as the one had it – or finishing – as the other did. I wonder that they were not both mistaken, and sorely, and that it is, in point of fact, continuing that is most difficult, and more difficult now than ever. Consider their cases. We all know someone, and all fancy ourselves not to be someone, who dreams, as they say, big, but can’t make good and convert some of those dreams into thoughts the rest of us can share. Such is the one who claims, in a work by Constantius, to be unable to write at the pace of his thoughts, only when we offer to write them for him, would he just dictate, finds he really has nothing to say. This is the one who struggles to begin. Call him B. B thinks highly of himself, and for a time others complemented this thought by thinking him a man of promise with his best days ahead of him. But, perhaps affected by this expectation or perhaps effecting it, every start stops B, and the sentences that wake him up to begin put him down to finish. That is to say, B, who can’t get started, is also one who can’t get done with it. We say he struggles with beginning, but we mean he fails to make a beginning that’s worth finishing, or – we on the side more readily see than he – to let a beginning really begin, which is to see it to the finish. The writer F, who, seemingly to the contrary, reports herself good at beginnings but can’t find an end for her works, is having the same problem: F’s beginning, having not an end, is not really yet a beginning, and where she, thwarted, leaves off and puts down her pen, she is right to report, is no real end in the desired sense. We are approaching the thought that starting writing can hardly be called beginning any more than stopping can be called finishing. We can all start and stop, but the work demands more, and who among us today can begin and finish? So what do both of these sad creatures lack? Continuity, in a word; the ability to go on in the same effort, in a mouthful. Everyone, we sometimes forget, has thoughts, and, as I live and breathe, can write them down as they come. What we want from artists – or I do; you do what you want – is a little, or much, as if it could be measured, more: we want what we lack, which is the ability to have a good thought and see it through. But this fixation on beginnings and ends, lamenting that one or the other is the real, great, struggle, strikes me as quite typical of an age which, if you consult any song, sees the act of art, like the act of love, to be the thing of one or another moment, with no sense of extended effort – “even if it takes all night or a hundred years” about sums up this lack of any sense of time within one’s life: tonight you will outlive; a hundred years you won’t. What is really described in these lyrics is the fact that if it doesn’t come about tonight we’ll happily bear the mark of failure and longing for the remainder of our lives. And I wonder if this isn’t how many self-styled artists actually reason: if it comes together today, I’m a genius, and if not, then at least I have an incapacity to be sad at. Can we hope for a love or a labor of it that doesn’t give up after the first day? Again, waking up and starting a novel anyone can do; and the contrasting case is not finishing a novel, which is to jump to a time we can’t imagine, but continuing what’s been started. Writing a novel does not take one, and – need I add? – does not take two days, one of beginning and one of finishing. And this is not owing to page count: if this is true of a novel it is true of a poem or painting. Don’t, I pray you, bore me or excuse yourself with the examples, existent, of extempore masterpieces – these are, rather than the lessons in preparation they could be, today but so much propaganda to take up and give up as quickly, which is the imperative, never uttered – needn’t be because heard in every incoherence – which carries, and disperses, the moment. And here, in continuing, is a word for the real work against the powers that conspire against the day. I once had a young person, naming this conspiracy, tell me consumer capitalism had made continuity impossible, and I dare say he was right. But this, if it needs to be said, let me say, is an empirical fact – nothing more. It is what you’ll conclude if you conduct a survey: all fall. But the reason we need the artist is because she conducts no survey to find out whether she can do what she finds it in herself to set about doing, and sees it through. Sufficient unto the day is the art thereof. If you too are discouraged by the impossibility of continuity, then give up and pray for the advent of one who isn’t, else take courage from the fact that you are, in this fact, alone, and precisely as you should be, an impossibility, and get on with it.

	
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>William H. Aile – ON CONTENT</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-CONTENT</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 21:40:56 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/William-H-Aile-ON-CONTENT</guid>

		<description>
	

	William H. Aile
– FROM THE LAST ESSAYS OF W. H. AILE

	
On content

There’s something to the claim that everything’s been done. One can hardly express contempt without feeling one’s brow quoting a lost first furrow. And empirically speaking we seem right to conclude that there’s nothing new to do from the fact that nothing new is done. We fall in the same love we hear in songs; get duped by the same lies; protest the same indecencies. Again and, it seems, again we mimic what’s made – and what’s made is nothing new. Producers green-light the sixteenth Star Wars; galleries are re-hung with the same easy scrap; books are printed and reprinted with the same turns, words, and terrors; and, pain beyond pain, the apotheosis of the scientific method, TikTok, for its never ending stores of content, may have in and of itself finished form. There are those little burps of consistency that fate brings to the surface in the dumb world’s selection of the right words for its wrong ways, of which the title “content creator” as that to which kids, I’m told, aspire – meaning, if you live under the rock that is our common sky, one who coordinates, makes, and posts matter online – is an arresting example. The content in question is but so many clever variations on a theme from a given platform: dance or makeup videos on TikTok; unboxing or reaction videos on YouTube; and beyond into ever more niche corners of the web. But every post, I’m informed, not only those quasi-professional ones – even a post by you, Reader, or me – creates content, that is, something for viewers to consume. That this consumption is rather queer compared to the consumption of, say, cake, I must remark. The video once consumed remains consumable – grows, even, in another apt phrase, like a virus, more consumable, enough to make one wonder whether we aren’t the consumed and not the consumer in these cases. But the point is: “content” is an almost applaudably forward word for work that finds it needn’t face its form – and, I dare say, can’t, being, as it is, cast onto such platforms. – But doesn’t TikTok offer a medium (I seem to hear some young soul ask) – the reel and the feed – which its influencers work within to mold these various genres? And isn’t the creative working-within-material-constraints all artists have ever done? – One need only take one reflective step away from one’s phone to see that the constraints are, in the case of the content creator, but not in the case of the artist, absolutely arbitrary and made by those with interests in your death and repetition. To be sure, not in your biological death – for you’d then stop making and consuming its content – but, depend upon it, in your annihilation. – But is it art? Can it be? – We should, I think, question the usefulness of this word if it applies as easily to what gives us reason to live as to what contributes to our doom. Now don’t mistake me. It is not that any painting is better than any piece of content: for it must be admitted, too many paintings are as shallow as the average ware on Instagram, and the art market, if heeded, is but one stuffy algorithm dictating shape to work that will – or would – pad the portfolios of the very villains postured to profit from your death. If we think, as I’m afraid it is now normal to think, that what makes a work art is its entry into the market, or its hanging on a wall, or our pleasure in it, or our interest, however brief – then we will be inclined, within reason, it seems, to call a post on Instagram art. But rather than raising content to the level of art, what we’ve done is reduced all art to content. If that is all we think art is, then the repetitious stream of content on TikTok and the discontent it carries are what we deserve. – But what more could art be? – It is one of the sickest twists of modern life that we are accustomed to cant and cliche that are at once true and empty, and we inherit the – true – idea that art makes life meaningful and that it creates new possibilities for meaning, but with either no sense of how to live with this truth, and so no sense of what art is, or else a sublime indifference to it; but reflect – will you? – on the thought: art makes new possibilities for meaning: meaning now, before it’s made, it is impossible – which it is – and what it wants to be is not another familiar actuality, but will create – it must – not content but a form. And that’s just what a form is: a thing’s possibility of meaning, which a work of art must make. If this doesn’t sound like what art does, then we have lost the sense of that word and the world it illuminates. And if we can fare just as well without the word – and can we? – then we can’t without the thing. For the repetition of the actual flatters, at the expense of potential, present selves by repeating back to us what we already are, and without new forms we will watch and live, with no new sense, the same after the same, and let – if even now it lives – the last light of our unattained life be extinguished by a torrent of content.

	
</description>
		
	</item>
		
		
	<item>
		<title>Anna Gregor – CATTELAN’S COMEDIAN: SUBJECTIVITY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF SHARING A WORLD IN THE ART-JUDGMENT</title>
				
		<link>https://revenantquarterly.org/Anna-Gregor-CATTELAN-S-COMEDIAN-SUBJECTIVITY-AND-THE-POSSIBILITY-OF</link>

		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2025 22:08:45 +0000</pubDate>

		<dc:creator>The Revenant Quarterly</dc:creator>

		<guid isPermaLink="true">https://revenantquarterly.org/Anna-Gregor-CATTELAN-S-COMEDIAN-SUBJECTIVITY-AND-THE-POSSIBILITY-OF</guid>

		<description>
  
  
            Anna Gregor
            – Cattelan’s Comedian: Subjectivity and the Possibility of Sharing a World In the Art-Judgment
          
        
    Introduction
    Cattelan’s Comedian, a work of conceptual art that takes the form of a banana duct-taped to a wall, seems to claim that Kant’s Critique of Judgment, written nearly three hundred years ago, is irrelevant to contemporary art. Comedian does not occasion Kant’s paradigmatic judgment of taste “This is beautiful.” But neither does the judgment that it is not beautiful disqualify it from being a work of art because beauty no longer seems essential to a thing’s art-status. The banana reminds us that we live in a post-medium condition in which anything can be art, and it does so with a $120,000 price tag and a smirk. 
    Comedian created a stir in 2019, sparking strong feelings of glee, despair, and confusion expressed in writing, action (in the case of two artists who ate iterations of it), advertisements (Popeyes and Burger King launched ads in which a chicken sandwich and french fries were duct taped to a surface), and myriad memes.1 Although I know of no one who articulated their feelings about Comedian by claiming it to be beautiful, it is the degree and the variety of felt responses and claims of its art-status, or lack thereof, that, rather than showing it to be irrelevant, calls for a reconsideration of the relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to contemporary art. 
    Kant’s aesthetic philosophy is primarily concerned with what is at stake when we—say, you or I, or anyone else—make aesthetic judgments that claim universal validity, as we do when we judge whether or not Comedian is a work of art. Both Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve have emphasized Kant’s insights into aesthetic judgments and have articulated how they are relevant to an artworld in which beauty is inessential. In this paper, I will compare Cavell and de Duve’s respective inheritances of Kant. Then, guided by their readings, I will redefine purposive form so as to highlight what is at stake when we make aesthetic judgments of art.
    Kant’s Judgment of the Beautiful in Nature and Art
    Art is not Kant’s central concern in the Critique of Judgment. Rather, Kant is concerned with the transcendental ground of aesthetic judgments of the beautiful. There is something peculiar about judgments of beauty: they, like all aesthetic judgments, are based on an individual’s subjective experience of pleasure; and yet, when we make them we act as if what we judge to be beautiful ought to be judged beautiful by everyone. Kant inductively reasons that if we are justified in this claim that judgments of beauty based on our subjective feelings are indeed universal and necessary, then the faculties responsible for the feelings that underlie judgments of beauty must be common to and function similarly in all human beings. If we approach an object disinterestedly, we will all—or ought to all—agree in our judgments. Thus, we must posit that there is a shared human sense that makes possible universal accord, a sensus communis. The existence of this sensus communis cannot be empirically proven, but it must be presupposed if it is possible to communicate our subjective feelings to one another.2
    For Kant, the paradigm example of such pure judgments of taste is not a judgment of art but of nature, for it is primarily in experiencing nature that we encounter purposive forms: forms that appear as if made for some purpose but to which none can be ascribed. Purposive form prompts the free play between the faculties shared by all humans: the imagination, the faculty we use to construct the objects we encounter in the world, and the understanding, the faculty by which we categorize these objects. This free play is accompanied by a special pleasure: disinterested pleasure, which arises from the feeling of harmony between the faculties.
    The implications of the idea of a sensus communis that grounds aesthetic judgments of beauty are only indirectly moral. Judgments of taste, based on the presupposition that our subjective feelings are sharable experientially reassure us of the possibility of human accord. Judgments of taste display a propensity for moral judgments, in which we often are called upon to set aside our own interest for what is morally good.3 The feeling of beauty, which presupposes a sensus communis, signifies that it is possible that we humans are united by feeling; that we share a nature, a world.
    It is questionable whether for Kant the moral implication of presupposing a sensus communis in judgments of natural beauty transfers to judgments of artistic beauty. While the objects belonging to the fine arts are the only human-made things that are appropriately called beautiful, the judgments of beauty made with reference to them are generally not judgments of free beauty, like those made regarding nature, but judgments of adherent beauty, in which the free play of the faculties is less free, hampered by the fact that all fine art objects fall under a medium-specific class and are therefore judged by virtue of the perfection of the concept of that class: specifically, either poetry, oratory, architecture, sculpture, painting, horticulture, or music. Further, because they are judged according to these concepts—concepts that seem to Kant dangerously close to the concepts of things made for the end of mere gratification—the purposive form in works of art must be connected with moral ideas lest they become objects of mere vanity.4
    But art has changed significantly since Kant wrote the Critique of Judgment. With these changes controversies have arisen regarding what counts as art, how it ought to be evaluated, and by whom. Over the course of the twentieth century, the determinate concepts of the different classes of the fine arts, with reference to which Kant believed judgments of beauty were rendered adherent, have become indeterminate. Coincidently, beauty has ceased to be the primary standard for evaluation. Since the 1960s, much of what has been called art can no longer be subsumed under the neat classification of the fine arts at all, with the consequence that the concept of art has become so indeterminate as to almost be indiscernible from other types of things—not only from human-made objects, but also, with the advent of environmental art and socially engaged practice, difficult to distinguish from natural things and moral actions in some cases. Anything, it seems, can be art, and it needn’t be beautiful. Faced with these new problems, Kant’s aesthetic theory, with its emphasis on beauty and the medium-specific classes of art, seems irrelevant. 
    Kant Updated: Danto, Cavell and de Duve
    Despite its apparent irrelevance to our experience of contemporary art, some thinkers have grappled with how Kantian aesthetics might deal with the ontological and evaluative problems that have accompanied the changes in art since the 1960s.
    A major strategy for thinkers faced with art’s recently unclear ontological status and evaluative standard has been to pursue a new definition with determinate criteria by which to decide the status of a thing that claims to be art. For such thinkers, it is only after the ontological problem is solved that the problem of evaluation can be broached. One such thinker, Arthur Danto, interprets Kant’s conception of a work of art as an aesthetic idea, an idea made sensible; or, in Danto’s terms, an embodied meaning.5 After something is identified as an artwork by properly tracing its causal history, it can then be evaluated in light of how well the idea is embodied; or, in Kant’s terms, in light of the degree of genius present in a work and how it is informed by taste. Danto, claiming that Kant’s conception of judgments of beauty in the fine arts laid out in §43-54 is incompatible with his conception of judgments of beauty in nature, abandons Kant’s transcendental grounding of aesthetic judgments of taste in the sensus communis. For Danto, the judgments of taste regarding art do not depend on the faculties common to all humans. Art is essentially art-historical and so can only be properly identified and subsequently evaluated by someone who possesses a knowledge of art theory and history. Someone who doesn’t have that knowledge—who isn’t a part of the art world—can neither correctly identify nor evaluate art. Their subjective experience is irrelevant to the work of art. 
    In contrast to Danto’s re-determination of the newly indeterminate concept of art, Stanley Cavell and Thierry de Duve take the indeterminacy of art, and the consequent controversies regarding what art is, what we value in art and who art is for, to be central to the experience of art from the 1960s onward. For both thinkers, art remains an indeterminate concept, so that, lacking criteria to appeal to, the classification of something as art can’t come prior to its evaluation.6&#38;nbsp;7  We can’t empirically prove that something is a work of art. We can only, based on a subjective feeling or conviction, judge something to be art by claiming it to be so. This art-judgment is an aesthetic judgment similar in structure to Kant’s judgment of taste: a judgment based on a subjective feeling that claims universality on non-conceptual grounds.8&#38;nbsp;9  Both emphasize the claim involved in the art-judgment’s appeal to universality and posit a transcendental grounding of such judgments: if we can validly claim universality for our subjective feeling that something is art, then we must have basic human faculties in common that make possible the communication of subjective feelings that underlie this universally valid judgment.[10]11  
    De Duve calls the present condition of art, in which a banana duct-taped to a wall can be considered an artwork, the Art-in-General system. In contrast to the Beaux-Arts system, wherein “social consensus reigns that specifies the conventions of a given medium,” the Art-in-General system is defined by the fact that “art can be made from anything whatsoever…: any material, any medium, any style, any technique, and subject-matter, any form, any object.”12 In short, anything goes. For de Duve, the art-judgment is based on a subjective feeling that something is art that we feel to be, and therefore claim to be, universally valid.13 De Duve updates Kant’s Critique of Judgment for the Art-in-General system by mechanically replacing every instance of the word “beauty” with the word “art,” thereby translating Kant’s paradigmatic judgment of taste “This is beautiful” to “This is art.”14 De Duve includes negative aesthetic judgments, so that the judgment “This cannot be art,” too, is an aesthetic judgment claiming universal validity.15 The art-judgment, based on the sense that one’s subjective experience has universal validity, signals a sensus communis. The presupposition of a sensus communis requires that we understand everyone else’s claims to signal the same—despite the empirical fact that our claims often do not agree.16 We must presuppose a sensus communis, the “faculty of living in peace with our fellow men,” and the corollary disinterestedness, precisely because the judgments we make often do not agree. However, the fact that anything goes in the Art-in-General system means that the possibility of fraudulence is definitional to art and that each work of art must be experienced singularly and judged by an individual by dint of feeling.&#38;nbsp; 
    In contrast to de Duve, who has devoted his career to bringing to light the historical transition from the Beaux Arts System to the anything-goes, Art-in-General system, Cavell, writing in the mid-sixties at the height of modernism, is still concerned with medium specificity. However, his concern about fraudulence in art suggests that he is responding to the same situation that de Duve is: an art condition in which no a priori criteria can guarantee something the status of art.17 The art-judgment for Cavell takes the form of a medium-judgment, i.e., “This is sculpture” (or any of the traditional Western classifications of fine art with which Kant would have been familiar), despite—or because—those very classifications have become indeterminate with Modernism. It is not the empirical medium or technique that determines whether something is sculpture or painting, and therefore art in general, but rather the feeling of making meaning from material in relation to the tradition of the different arts and their respective concepts that underlies Cavell’s art-judgment.18 For Cavell, like de Duve, the art-judgment is a subjective feeling that “must be felt, not merely known—or…must be known for oneself.”19 At the same time, this aesthetic judgment is of the type for which we “[claim] this agreement even though we know from experience that [we] will not receive it.”20 The claim to universality is a claim to share a world; disagreement is our failure to do so: “I want to tell you something I’ve seen, or heard, or realized, or come to understand, for the reasons for which such things are communicated (because it is news, about a world we share, or could).”21
    Despite these similarities, there are differences—perhaps fundamental—between de Duve and Cavell. However, they will have to be analyzed in another essay as I have neither the breadth of knowledge nor the space to do so here. A list of differences will have to suffice, though it is yet to be seen how fundamental these differences are. 
    
      On the different kinds of aesthetic judgments and their special pleasures: De Duve dismisses Kant’s differentiation between the pleasure specific to judgments of agreeableness (gratification) and judgments of beauty (disinterested pleasure).22 Cavell, in contrast, retains this distinction, indicating that Kant’s appeal to ordinary language (“this is pleasing to me” in contrast to “this is beautiful”) points to a logical difference between the two aesthetic judgments.23
      On the nature of aesthetic judgments: De Duve believes aesthetic judgments are not logical.24 In contrast, Cavell argues that aesthetic judgments that claim transcendental grounds are logical and conclusive, although “not conclusive the way arguments in logic are, nor rational the way arguments in science are.”25 Rather, they are logical in the sense that they appeal to a “constant pattern of support or justification whose peculiarity is that it leads those competent at it to this kind of agreement.”26 It is my sense that the appeal to “logic” proper to aesthetic judgments for Cavell is his correlate to Kant’s positing of the existence of a sensus communis that grounds aesthetic judgments. 
      On Kant's relevance and the relation of nature and art: De Duve ‘updates’ Kant by advocating for a reading of the third critique that replaces every instance of the word “beauty” with “art.” The need to do so, according to de Duve, is because there has been a historical transfer of significance from beauty to art, which, according to him, occurred with the transition from the Beaux Arts system to the Art-in-General system. When Kant was writing, beauty in nature seemed to be a promise of the possibility of human accord, but now art has assumed that role. For de Duve, the connection between art and nature has been severed irreversibly, just as the Art-in-General system has replaced the Beaux Arts system. In contrast, Cavell doesn't seem to feel the need to explicitly update Kant. Cavell claims that modernism “only makes explicit and bare what has always been true of art.”27 I imagine he would make similar claims about Kant: modernism, and what follows, has simply revealed what has always been true of Kant, namely, that we feel we are united by feeling in a deep way. My sense is that Cavell translates Kant’s sensus communis, the sense shared by humans due to the formal relation between their cognitive faculties, into human convention, which is “not arbitrary but constitutive of significant speech and activity; in which mutual understanding, and hence language, depends on nothing more and nothing less than shared forms of life, call it our mutual attunement or agreement in our criteria.”28 That is, the cognitive faculties aren't merely given us by nature, but informed by the conventions of a form of life. Conventions for Cavell are not something one can remove like a pair of glasses, nor are they something we consciously agree to, as in the idea of a social contract: they are the forms through which we experience reality. In fact, one might say that they are not even human-made: we are born into them, must learn how to navigate them and survive within them in a similar way that we are born into what we consider nature. If nature is convention in this sense for Cavell, as his affinity for Thomas Kuhn’s picture of scientific paradigms suggests, then the relation of nature to art need not be severed. In fact, just as it does for Kant, it may still hold the privileged position of being the one human-made thing for which we can claim universality for our subjective experiences. 
    
    Despite these differences, Cavell and de Duve both succeed in reminding us that Kant’s aesthetic judgment of beauty is structurally similar to judgments of art. With their guidance, I will now reformulate some key Kantian terms for use in the contemporary art world. 
    De Duve likens the feeling that something is art to love.29 Similarly, Cavell acknowledges that we are concerned with artworks, so much so that we treat them the same way we treat people.30 According to Kant’s criteria for disinterestedness—indifference toward the existence of the object—these characterizations of our feelings that accompany the experiences of artworks seem far from disinterested. We feel artworks to be intended because they are made by someone for, we feel, some purpose. However, as Cavell puts it, the intention specific to works of art doesn’t intend to express something specific or achieve some end. Rather, it is an intention that “celebrates the fact that men can intend their lives at all… in the scene of indifferent nature and determined society.”31 It is this special intention that Cavell understands Kant to mean by “purposiveness without purpose” in works of art.
    In light of Cavell’s reformulation of purposiveness without purpose as a kind of intention that celebrates humankind’s ability to intend at all, it doesn’t seem to me too far of a step to similarly reformulate disinterestedness as an interest in the fact that humans have differing interests; that is, that the convictions underlying our judgments are not wholly reliable, and, consequently, that our claims to their universal validity may be mistaken. Following from my proposed definition of disinterestedness, I propose a reformulation of “purposive form,” that which prompts the disinterested free play of the faculties, as an individual’s claim that something is art. Purposive form is an art-claim that sets in motion the free play of imagination and understanding and ultimately produces, or fails to produce, the disinterested pleasure attendant to the art-judgment. 
    In the case of an art-claim of a thing that we already expect to be art, say, Paul Cezanne’s painting The Basket of Apples, the pleasure that results from the free play may not be distinguishable from our expectation that this painting by a famous painter is art, so the art-claim goes unnoticed. In contrast, faced with a claim that something we initially feel not to be art is indeed art—say, an iteration of Comedian in the form of a banana duct-taped to a wall—we must nonetheless acknowledge that such a claim indicates that someone—at the very least, the artist—feels differently than we do—or at least claims to feel that way. Should the recognition of the art-claim prompt free play, oscillating between tracking patterns in our phenomenal experience of it and relating our experience to concepts, we may find, despite ourselves, that we can begin to follow a material logic, and the pleasure attendant to this discovery may act on our initial feelings, modifying our conviction and consequently changing our judgment. 
    At this point, it may seem that anything that claims to be art is indeed art. But a Kantian aesthetic theory of art requires that an individual’s subjective feeling underlie the art-judgment. It is noteworthy that this approach to art allows the opposite outcome as well. Returning to Cezanne’s The Basket of Apples, I may assume that the painting is a work of art, defaulting to my socialized expectation that paintings by Cezanne are art. But if the painting’s art-claim fails to get the free play going, or if I fail to find pleasure in it, I may find myself feeling that this thing that I, and so many others, had assumed to be art is not art at all. 
    Danto would scoff at this claim: I am free to say that The Basket of Apples is not good art, but it is incorrect to claim that it is not art, just as poor Testadura is simply wrong to claim that Rauchenberg’s bed is just a bed. But this misses what is special about art: that, whether faced with a famous painting of fruit or a 25¢ banana duct-taped to a wall, we can each validly claim universality for our art or not-art judgments. That, as de Duve says, “ there exists a line, for each of us to draw, that separates true from fake art, a line that depends exclusively on one individual’s judgment exerted on singular cases.”32 Or, as Cavell puts it, “it is up to me (and, of course, up to you).”33—And since it is up to me, I take the last sentence of this essay to claim that Comedian is not a work of art—not because a readymade can’t be art, but because this readymade reeks too strongly of money for me to trust its claim to art.
  

      [1] 
      
        “Popeyes and Burger King Taped Fast Food to the Wall to Troll Maurizio Cattelan’s $120,000 Duct-Taped Banana,” 
        Business Insider, December 10, 2019.
      
    
      [2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1987), 156.
    

      [3] Kant, Critique of Judgment, 127.
    

      [4] “Unless we connect the fine arts, closely or remotely, with moral ideas, which alone carry with them an independent liking, [mere enjoyment] is their ultimate fate.” 
      Kant, Critique of Judgment, 195–196.
    

      [5] Arthur Danto, “Kant and the Work of Art,” in What Art Is (Yale University Press, 2013), 116–34.
    

      [6] For Cavell, “Now I might define the problem of modernism as one in which the question of value comes first as well as last: to classify a modern work as art is already to have staked value, more starkly than the (later) decision concerning its goodness or badness.” 
      Stanley Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 200.
    

      [7] For de Duve, “When faced with a borderline case such as that of the readymades, it is no longer possible to make the distinction between art in the classificatory sense and art in the evaluative sense.” 
      Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 42.
    

      [8] For Cavell, “The problem is that I no longer know what sculpture is, why I call any object, the most central or traditional, a piece of sculpture… [It is] a reaffirmation of the first fact about art, that it must be felt, not merely known—or, as I would rather put it, that it must be known for oneself." 
      Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 202.
    

      [9] For de Duve, “... the word art expresses an aesthetic appreciation, that is, the feeling that the painting in question really deserves to be called a work of art beyond its merely nominal belonging to the art of painting. By “feeling,” I mean something more complex than simply a sentiment, affect, or emotion; I mean an intuition, a “sense,” or, precisely, a “feel” resulting from a consultation with oneself that does not follow a path of logical, intellectual reasoning.” 
      Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 41.
    

      [10] For Cavell, “it is news, about a world we share, or could.” 
      Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 178.
    

      [11] For de Duve, “democracy’s transcendental foundation.” 
      Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 104.
    

      [12] Thierry de Duve, “By Way of Conclusion,” in Duchamp’s Telegram (Reaktion Books Ltd, 2023), 377.
    

      [13] Thierry de Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 41.
    

      [14] Thierry de Duve, “A Most Remarkable Thought Experiment,” in Duchamp’s Telegram (Reaktion Books Ltd, 2023), 193.
    

      [15] Ibid., 192.
    

      [16] “Kant knows as well as anyone that like everything that depends on socioeconomic factors, education, and ideology, taste—practiced taste, that is—follows the various fault lines that determine every other social divide… If I am justified to claim universal assent for my judgment of taste… it is not empirically but transcendentally, at the level of the a priori conditions founding my aesthetic experience as well as anyone else’s, and regarding any object as well as the one in front of me. What my claim means is that I cannot fail to suppose that my neighbor is endowed with the same faculty of judging as the one whose presence in me my own pleasure signals. Even and especially if she uses her taste differently, she uses it freely, a fact I cannot fail to read as signaling the possibility for her feeling to agree with mine without being constrained to it… denying her taste would be denying her sensus communis, which in turn is tantamount to denying her humanity.” 
      Duve, Aesthetics at Large, 95–96.
    

      [17] “The problem is that I am, so to speak, stuck with the knowledge that this is sculpture, in the same sense that any object is. The problem is that I no longer know what sculpture is, why I call any object, the most central or traditional, a piece of sculpture.” 
      Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 201.
    

      [18] “The medium is to be discovered, or invented out of itself.” 
      Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 205.
    

      [19] Ibid., 202.
    

      [20] Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 89.
    

      [21] Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 178.
    

      [22] I’m unable to find this in an essay, though Thierry has mentioned it in class numerous times.
    

      [23] Stanley Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 89.
    

      [24] Thierry de Duve, “Overture: Why Kant Got It Right,” in Aesthetics at Large (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 15.
    

      [25] Cavell, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say?, 88.
    

      [26] Ibid., 88.
    

      [27] Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 175.
    

      [28] Stanley Cavell, “Excursus on Wittgenstein’s Vision of Language,” in The New Wittgenstein (Routledge, 2000), 68.
    

      [29] Thierry de Duve, “Le Sens de La Famille: Aesthetics as the Transcendental Ground,” in Aesthetics at Large (The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 91–106.
    

      [30] Cavell, “Music Discomposed,” 178.
    

      [31] Ibid., 175.
    

      [32] de Duve, “By Way of Conclusion,” 381.
    

      [33] Cavell, “A Matter of Meaning It,” 199.
    

</description>
		
	</item>
		
	</channel>
</rss>