Art and the life-world: The duck, the rabbit, and the madeleine

Kemp, G. (2023) Art and the life-world: The duck, the rabbit, and the madeleine. In: Stern, T. and Elsner, A. (eds.) The Proustian Mind. Routledge: London. ISBN 9780429341472 (doi: 10.4324/9780429341472-21)

Abstract

An exploration of the connections between two ideas that beguile us in their relative proximity but which stand stubbornly apart, if only because of the considerable distance between their respective purveyor’s styles of thinking: Proust’s idea of involuntary memory—represented by the Madeleine—and Wittgenstein’s idea of aspect-perception—represented by the famous Duck-Rabbit drawing. Both are unassailably real, from a psychological point of view, or at least their basic experiences are real, if not their theoretical interpretation on the part of Proust or Wittgenstein. I consider the consequences and ramifications of the assumption that these two ideas—or sets of ideas— are indeed very close that they form no less than basis of the human life-world and the nature of art.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Kemp, Dr Gary
• Authors: Kemp, G.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities > Philosophy
• Publisher: Routledge
• ISBN: 9780429341472
• Published Online: 30 December 2022