Tamarkin's book puts forth a number of theses about what she calls relevance, based on an impressive and disparate number of sources. Relevance is understood as (1) a property of certain objects (especially poems and paintings), (2) an emotion (“the emotional side of consciousness”) experienced by people, and (3) the acts through which anything becomes meaningful or interesting to someone. These three are not obviously compatible, and work appears to be required. Could the work be philosophical?
Tamarkin's title announces a history of sorts, and then the waters quickly become too deep for comfort. In her attempt to determine the meaning of the word relevance, she resorts to etymology, to idiosyncratic uses of the term by various authors (Alfred Schutz, Dan Sperber, Emerson, et al.), to translations of translations (Derrida on Hegel), and to attestations of the word in English—all to no great avail. The relatively recent history...
