Familjealbum : Familjevarons fenomenologi utifrån konstens bilder

Sammanfattning

Existence is essentially in a world and with others, as Heidegger stated, and this essay wants to emphasize that our first, closest and most prosaic experience of in- and with-being is our home and family. The aim is to explore, describe and understand the experience of the existential time space, that is constituted by the family ties companion-parent-child. The question at issue is: How can the existential experience of being in- and with family be phenomenologically described and ontologically understood? The question will be explored in relation to intimacy and through experiences as they are expressed in art, literature as well as painting, mainly by Duras, Lispector, Glück and Cronqvist, and in dialogue with philosophers such as Heidegger, Arendt, Levinas and Bataille. The phenomenon of family ties is the starting point of the exposition, which unfolds into three essential aspects, that will be further explored. Firstly, the experiences of home, what it is to share an intimate place, which constitutes the common life space of the family, displayed in the dialectics between world and nature. Secondly, the inner experience of community and contact as we find it by the lovers, where the exteriority of intimacy turns out to be essential. Thirdly, the relation to the child, which expose the wider context of generation and tradition. The examination then gathers the studied pictures of the phenomen family as expressed in art, and considers the phenomenological connections between family ties and the family album. Finally, the essay discusses in what ways the space in between has been showed to be essential to the existential time space of family, where in addition seemingly contradictory but intertwined temporalities has been exposed. As a conclusion the family existence can be understood as a complex of dialectical tensions and transcending and transformative movements.