No abstract

No abstract

It is impossible to separate the semiological from the mythological, the poetic from the historical, the aesthetic from the ideological. Since, as the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty insisted, any entity can be taken as an emblem of Being, one must be attentive to the symbolic power and semiotic valences of every word, object, and image. This article is an attempt to sketch out the role of the rock in Zen-inspired Japanese gardens and, consequently, to offer a new interpretation of one of the most famous gardens in the world, Ryōan-ji.

IThe Demiurge was in love with consummate, superb, and complicated materials; we shall give priority to trash. We are simply entranced and enchanted by the cheapness, shabbiness, and inferiority of material. -Bruno Schultz (1977:61 -62) [This epigraph serves as my first thesis.] IIIn the Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant shows how the aesthetic domain exists without any regulatory a priori whatsoever. This principle could be summed up and radicalized in one word: monsters. What the unformed is to the sublime, the deformed is to monsters. IIIIn the Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae (1579), Cosmas Rossellius describes a memory theatre that contains an all-inclusive category, suggesting that any monster of any sort may be used to signify any thing whatsoever, through totally idiosyncratic associations. We might supplement this axiom with its converse: a true monster will be remembered for the shock it produces, breaking all chains of association. IVThe logic of monsters is one of particulars, not essences. Each monster exists in a class by itself. Monsters may, however, generate entire classes of beings. V Monsters are variously characterized by accident, indetermination, formlessness; by material incompleteness, categorical ambiguity, ontological instability. One may create monsters through hybridization, hypertrophy, or hypotrophy;