Abstracts

Jørgen Veisland (Bio)

Entropy as the primal physical and metapysical force: Introducing Dror Pimentel’s Aesth-Ethics: Of Hospitality in Art, reading Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”

Introducing Professor Dror Pimentel's book Aesth-Ethics. Of Hospitality in Art.(2025)

Professor Pimentel calls attention to a primordial Being, relating it to the Hebrew concept of rav, a primal disorderliness. Rav is conceived as an internal and external state of flux without temporal or spatial limits, an Otherness.This Being is hosted in the artwork, endowing aesthethics with an ethical dimension. Professor Pimentel discusses the aesthetic-ethical relation in his analysis of several artworks, e.g., works by Franz Kafka where we encounter the figure of the odradek; Anselm Kiefer's painting Your Golden Hair Margarete; Joseph Beuys' Fat Chair; John Keats' poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. In these interpretations Dror Pimentel elucidates the subtle, complex ethics of aesthetics, an ethics which is always immanently present in Being.

Interpreting Stephen Crane's short story “The Blue Hotel” (1899).

The light blue color attached to the external walls of Pat Scully's Palace Hotel belies the true blue color of the legs of the heron, a natural blue declaring the bird's position against any background. The surface color of the Palace Hotel screams and howls, advertizing its hospitality in an exaggerated manner. The screaming and howling is also Crane's self-reflexive gesture, a tacit critique of Expressionism. Crane's brilliant choice of Nebraska as the locus of the story paves the way for the true hosting taking place in the story: the flat wasteland of Nebraska hosts the wind which, by extension, continues the hosting which assumes the dramatic form of a primal disorderliness. The front door of the hotel is blown open and the wind scatters the articles of the interior, including, significantly, a deck of cards which is subjected to a chaotic mixing and disseminating exceeding that of shuffling. The Swede's repeated, frustrated efforts to become hosted in the hotel culminates in a fist fight between him and the proprietor's son and is continued in a bar in town where the Swede is knifed to death over a disagreement about drinks. Order is thus restored in a delicate balance as disorderliness is excluded from the process of hosting.

Entropy as the primal physical and metapysical force.

Entropy is explicated in a number of books by the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli, a.o. The Order of Time (2018). Entropy is present in all of nature, taking the form or rather non-form of a swiftly accelerating state of disorder at the level of the electron and the minutest particles in the cosmos. Entropy occurs as an elimination of time, resulting in the emergence of an essentially spatial dimension of all things. Things, in fact, do not exist – in their place we have events, says Rovelli. Time is a space, as in Søren Kierkegaard's concept of the moment, øjeblik, (The Concept of Anxiety;1843) the barely perceptible, almost non-existing wink of the eye, a process whereby eternity as space enters the eye in a glance inserted between two winks. Contemporary quantum physics confirms the hosting of a primordial, disorderly Being in the natural environment which includes the artwork. Space is a quant of Being manifesting itself sporadically, disorderly.