Jackson Pollock's Address to the Nonhuman.

Impersonality has long been part of modernism's self-definition, it having become a catchword for the reaction on the part of modernists against one kind of prevailing ('romantic') description of the nature of artistic sensibility. This paper attempts, however, to make some distinctions between the logic of impersonality, and what I take to be another sort of logic, equally important to modernism but not as explicitly formulated, which I call the nonhuman. Nietzsche is the best exponent of this other conviction about how modem life ought to be depicted, and so this paper will be an attempt to read him, (1) for his philosophical content and affiliation to modernism, and (2) for what seems to me to be an astoundingly prescient anticipation of the work of the late modernist painter, Jackson Pollock. I use Nietzsche to honour Pollock's own refusal to interpret will in any standard psychological categories, and I situate the concept of will within the technical logic of modernism. If the question of mourning and trauma is very much alive in Pollock's work, I argue that it must be subordinate to all the ways in which aligning ourselves to the nonhuman dimension of will allows for a psychology which transcends or transforms mourning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]