Hagi Kenaan (PhD Yale University) is a professor of philosophy at the Philosophy Department at Tel Aviv University and Editor-in-chief of Iyyun: The Jerusalem Journal of Philosophy. He specializes in nineteenth-and- twentieth century European philosophy — phenomenology and post-phenomenology, philosophy of existence, hermeneutics and the philosophy of dialogue — with particular attention to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. In recent years, his work explores two main domains.

(I) The Imagination and the ontology of images, from cave art to street art to photography and VR. One of the main motivations for his writing on these subjects lies in the understanding that (1) The image — with its roots in the imagination — is an intrinsic existential dimension of the human; (2) Today, an all-encompassing capitalist visual order gradually prevails over and radically levels the sphere of everyday experience; And that (3) we need to find alternatives to the logic of the new capitalism, alternatives that depend on new creative ways of living with images while guarding the precarious openness of the imagination.

(II) Language and the Ethical: a phenomenological exploration of fundamental aspects of the human propensity for meaning, emphasizing its relationality, the presence of the non-conceptual in our lives, the significance of voice and the singularity of expression. These dimensions are inseparable from an understanding of the singular and incommensurable dimensions of selfhood (including, such themes as corporeality, temporality, mood, finitude), as well as of the possibilities of developing a sensibility, a mode of listening attuned to the singular presence of the other person. His work on these questions creates a unique bridge between the philosophy of language and ethics, more directly arguing that the philosophy of language must embrace a philosophy of listening, as its foundations are inherently ethical—a dimension that is often overlooked in this context. In recent years, this theme has taken on a new twist in a new book project, “The Possibility of a Dialogue,” examining the importance and possibility of dialogue in a world where organic forms of communality are gradually eroded and supplanted by technology, which increasingly regulates our linguistic practices.

 

Hagi Kenaan is co-editor of Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking (Springer, 2011). He is the author of The Present Personal: Philosophy and the Hidden Face of Language (Columbia University Press, 2005); The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014) — its French version Visage(s): Une autre éthique du regard après Levinas (Editions de l'éclat); Photography and Its Shadow (Stanford University Press, 2020); and most recently — co-authored with Y. Senderowicz, Time: Nine Philosophical Dialogues (Resling, 2022).