Essays from the Edge: Parerga and Paralipomena

Introduction

Introduction Few write as an architect builds, drawing up a plan beforehand and thinking it out to the smallest details. Most write as they play dominoes: their sentences are linked together as dominoes are, one by one, in part deliberately, in part by chance. —arthur schopenhauer, essays and aphorisms in 1851, the German philosopher arthur Schopenhauer gathered together two volumes of his scattered essays, aphorisms, dialogues, and random thoughts and published them under the recherché title Parerga and Paralipomena.1 Far more than his masterwork of 1819, The World as Will and Representation, it reached a surprisingly wide readership and made his reputation. the 1850s were, after all, a grim period of political reentrenchment following the failures of the revolutions of 1848, and the time was ripe for the sour pessimism and disillusionment with reason expressed in his philosophy of the irrational will. if any progress were to be made, Schopenhauer implied, it would be through realistic, unsentimental means, not idealistic bombast and grand gestures. Schopenhauer was especially cynical about the systematizing pretensions of his predecessors, most notably Hegel, whose rationalist architectonic he had long sought to demolish. accordingly, he made no effort to assemble his ideas in any logical form or organize them in a coherent manner. the Greek words he chose for his title signaled his antisystematic intentions. “Parerga” means the surrounding frames around a work or “ergon,” what might be thought of as superficial ornaments or accessories rather than as foundational structure. “Paralipomena” means what has been omitted from the original work or the supplements that might be added later, postscripts rather than the body of the text. Schopenhauer knew that truth might well lie in the interstices of a well-wrought text, even in what its author had deleted along the way or what occurred to him after its publication. in our own day, the value of seemingly extraneous and superfluous afterthoughts and deletions was vigorously reaffirmed by Jacques Derrida in The 2 essays from the edge Truth in Painting, published in 1978.2 His main target was Kant’s Critique of Judgment with its attempt to circumscribe the work of art and distinguish it radically from extraneous decoration, for example the draperies on statues or colonnades around buildings.3 For Derrida, the quest to distinguish intrinsic aesthetic beauty from extrinsic nonaesthetic context was doomed to failure because the lack necessarily inherent in any work solicits the supplement of the frame to complete it. Or rather that supplement opens it up to an endless chain of additional parerga, which never fully succeed in producing closure. the energeia that goes into the making of the ergon is never sufficient, Derrida argued, to close it off entirely from what is outside its borders. texts and contexts always interpenetrate ; frames are both limiting boundaries and porous containers. What is ornament and what is ornamented are never fully distinguishable. Even seemingly nonverbal art objects are permeated by a discursive frame, pushing them beyond naïve recognition as self-sufficient artifacts.4 around the same time, the editors of theodor W. adorno’s posthumously published Aesthetic Theory included some ninety pages—sixty-two in the English translation—of fragments and notes, which he had intended to integrate into his larger argument, under the heading “Paralipomena.”5 Defending their decision , they explained that the selections “were in part later additions and in part ‘extracts’: passages excised from the original text that adorno intended to place elsewhere. the integration of these fragments into the main text proved to be impracticable. Only seldom did adorno mark the exact place where he wanted, and almost always there were a number of possible places for their insertion.”6 although not intended to be rounded-off aphorisms in the manner of adorno’s celebrated collection Minima Moralia, they often produced the same effect, as nuggets of condensed rumination on particular themes that were related to, but not fully integrated into, his longer argument. their relatively haphazard order also conformed to the often paratactic quality of adorno’s prose, which deliberately eschewed the entailment and hierarchy of conventional argumentation. these are perhaps exorbitant considerations to bring to bear in the introduction of a modest collection of disparate essays, such as the one before you. But they help provide a candid explanation—perhaps even plausible justification —for its seemingly random and unthematized organization. that is, each of these essays was originally a supplement or a postscript to a larger project, which produced a conventional scholarly tome. Called into being...