Reassessing Heidegger on Van Gogh: Artistic Experience as Contextual Displacement

Abstract This article offers a novel account of Heidegger's long‐debated discussion of a painting of shoes by Van Gogh in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’. I argue that the Van Gogh episode is best understood as a carefully staged textual enactment of Heidegger's conception of artistic experience, properly construed. On my reconstruction, such experience involves a transformative reconfiguration of the experiencer's context of disclosure – a dynamic I refer to as ‘contextual displacement’. After laying out this conception, along with two further background assumptions that inform my approach (concerning the reliability of equipment and its ‘fading away’), I present a fine‐grained reconstruction of the Van Gogh episode, foregrounding its performative dimensions and complex internal structure. I then show how the contextually displacing character of artistic experience accounts for these features, making sense of why Heidegger constructs the episode as he does. I conclude by contrasting my approach with that of Stephen Mulhall, who highlights similar aspects of the episode but arrives at strikingly different conclusions.