Stories wanted: Shadows under the mistletoe

The Chiaroscuro is a blog that dances with the spectres of memory—a place where the past is never truly gone but lingers like an elusive shadow, slipping between moments of our everyday lives. Here, we’re fascinated by those fleeting glimmers of memory, the eerie remnants of what once was but somehow never left. Each story, reflection, and image we feature weaves nostalgia together with the uncanny, exploring how the echoes of yesterday reach out to touch the present, haunting us in unexpected ways. This season, as festive lights twinkle and winter settles in, we’re gathering short, evocative pieces on the theme Shadows under the mistletoe.

Towards a Hauntology of Life and Death

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

Philosophically questioning the relation between life and death is usually considered to be the proper territory of movements such as existentialism and Lebensphilosophie. This belief is instigated by the explicit treatment of the life-death relation by authors such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre who, each in their own way, exposed and examined the presence of death in our daily lives. With the rise of poststructuralism – undermining the existentialist ideal of a free and autonomous individual – subjects such as life and death also lose their central importance, as they are replaced with historical, linguistic, and textual concerns. Or so one thinks, because the case of Jacques Derrida provides us with a vivid counterexample in this regard.

Doing Justice to Poetry: Gadamer and Derrida on Reading Paul Celan

A post by Lucas Gronouwe

INTRODUCTION

What does it mean to do justice to a text, be it philosophical, literary, or poetic? In this regard, what is the task of philosophical hermeneutics, the discipline traditionally concerned with explanation and interpretation? This is the question at stake in the ‘Gadamer-Derrida encounter’, an intellectual debate that retains its relevance, not only because it has ‘animated contemporary philosophy’ (Di Cesare 2004, 74), but also because the practice of reading and interpreting texts makes up a large part of research and education in the humanities as such. By revisiting the diverging hermeneutical strategies of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jacques Derrida, this paper seeks to determine how we can engage in the practice of reading and interpreting in a righteous and just manner.