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Still Life, A Mirror: Phasic Memory and Re-encounters with Artworks

Mac Cumhaill, Clare

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Abstract

Re-encountering certain kinds of artworks in the present (re-listening to music, re-reading novels) can often occasion a kind of recollection akin to episodic recollection, but which may be better cast as ‘phasic’, at least insofar as one can be said to remember ‘what it was like’ to be oneself at some earlier stage or phase in one’s personal history. The kinds of works that prompt such recollection, I call ‘still lives’ - they are limited wholes whose formal properties are stable over time. In the first part of the paper, I spell out a way of making sense of the peculiar power that certain artworks have to occasion such recollection – it is, as I explain, a power or ductus that derives from the form of the artwork, though possession of such a power is not limited to art. I then detail three dimensions along which episodic recollection and phasic recollection as occasioned by re-encountering ‘still lives’ differ: metaphysical, phenomenological, and descriptive. In the second half, I explore a challenge for my account of phasic recollection, which in turn helps make more vivid my proposal as well as the spectral analogy at the heart of it: Just as one can see regions behind one by looking in the direction of a mirror located in the same space in which one is, sometimes by re-encountering certain kinds of artworks now, past intervals or phases ‘behind one’ can be ‘made present’ in a way that the paper aims to make plain. I also explain to what extent phasic recollection might be understood as a form of mental time travel, and what the attendant phenomenology of ‘transportation’ involves.

Citation

Mac Cumhaill, C. (2020). Still Life, A Mirror: Phasic Memory and Re-encounters with Artworks. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 11(2), 423-446. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00472-y

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Apr 28, 2020
Publication Date Jun 30, 2020
Deposit Date Mar 16, 2020
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Review of Philosophy and Psychology
Print ISSN 1878-5158
Electronic ISSN 1878-5166
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 11
Issue 2
Pages 423-446
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00472-y

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Advance online version This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.






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