Title: “Ethics and Aesthetics are One”: Wittgenstein, Sebald and the Fly
Abstract: In the paragraph 309 of his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein stages the following significant dialogue: “What is your aim in philosophy?—To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” I will first try to interpret this dialogue’s meaning in the frame of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which is oriented toward the free-floating aesthetic area beyond the logical realm of facts. Then I will turn to Wittgenstein’s elective relative, German expatriate writer Georg Winfried Sebald whose activity belongs to this area but strives to get out of its spell. If Wittgenstein’s philosophical ethics leaves the factual ground to achieve aesthetic levitation, Sebald’s literary ethics, vice versa, endeavors to get out of levitation to reach the ground of facts. From this staged dialogue between philosophy and literature as embodied in Wittgenstein and Sebald, I will concludingly draw consequences for the relationship between ethics and aesthetics.
Bio: Vladimir Biti is a Distinguished Chair Emeritus Professor of the University of Vienna, is currently Distinguished Chair Visiting Professor at Zhejiang University. Author of ten books, Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ein Handbuch gegenw?rtiger Begriffe, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2001, Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 (second, paperback edition 2017), and Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018, among others. Upcoming: Post-imperial Literature: Translatio Imperii in Kafka and Coetzee (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021). Editor of the volumes Reexamining the National-Philological Legacy: Quest for a New Paradigm, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014 and Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017, among others. Co-editor of arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and member of the editorial board of several international journals. Member of Academia Europaea since 2007. Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. Since 2016, he is the Chair of the Academy of Europe’s Literary and Theatrical Section.