A Fable of Infection

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Author(s): Laurence Simmons / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2020

Painting in the fifteenth century changed because the fragility of human life changed. Curiously, the bounty of Italian Renaissance painting was to flourish in the dark shadow of the plague. Art also infects: paintings contaminate, metaphorically, and perhaps even microbiologically. For, as has happened during our coronavirus closures, art galleries shut their doors. Viewing painting may also be a form of infection as the mind of the painter percolates, almost inexorably, into the mind of the viewer, as it seems to have done here, I hope, in my account of this work.

A sokféleség két formája és a homogenizáció

Author(s): János Tóth I. / Language(s): Hungarian / Issue: 4/2019

Diversity is the unity of sameness and non-sameness (difference). In a basic situation, the more significant the difference, the greater the diversity. However, the organic systems based on relatively homogeneous groups, sub-units and structures are governed by special rules. The heterogenization of groups, that is, their dissolution decreases diversity. I propose to present this paradox effect of homogenization through examples taken from biology and social studies. The structural diversity of humanity is closely linked to the objective and subjective sameness and identity of individuals. There are three fundamental, political approaches to relate to human diversity: hierarchy, the approach that emphasizes difference; equality that emphasizes sameness, and equality that emphasizes difference. The first approach belongs to the outworn past, therefore the battle for defining the future takes place between the remaining two approaches. The aspect that these approaches are debating is whether it is the individual form of diversity (globalization, deconstruction) or its structural form (emancipation, sovereignty) that must be promoted.

A STIEGLERIANESQUE CRITIQUE OF TRANSHUMANISMS: ON NARRATIVES AND NEGANTHROPOCENE

Author(s): Adrian Mróz / Language(s): English / Issue: 46/2019

While drawing from the philosophy of Bernard Stiegler throughout the paper, I commence by highlighting Zoltan Istvan’s representation of transhumanism in the light of its role in politics. I continue by elaborating on the notion of the promise of eternal life. After that I differentiate between subjects that are proper for philosophy (such as the mind or whether life is worth living) and science (measurable and replicable). The arguments mostly concern mind-uploading and at the same time I elaborate on a simple critique of mind-body dualism, which is one of the key imagined orders exploitable by technologies in the narratives of transhumanism present in popular culture. This is reframed as a problem of action. The focus of this article is on the claim that certain transhumanisms are dangerous forms of Neo-Darwinism. It comes from a critical assessment of capital and the exploitation of bodies through market forces. Entropy is a process of growing disorder, while neganthropy is an anthropological struggle against exploitation, not only of bodies, but of all ecosystems of the Earth. The arguments of Stiegler from a collection of lectures are recapitulated, and his claims are presented through the prism of transhuman narrative, with a particular focus on Christian Salmon's position in the book Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind.

A strawberry, an animal cry and a human subject: Where existential semiotics, biosemiotics and relational metaphysics seem to meet one another

Author(s): Katarzyna Machtyl / Language(s): English / Issue: 3-4/2019

The article discusses some semiotic approaches to the relation between nature and culture. Starting with outlining the structuralistic approach to this issue, especially the ideas of Juri Lotman and Algirdas Julien Greimas, the author finds parallels between different views on the relation between the natural world and human beings. First, the juxtaposition of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics with selected concepts of biosemiotics is discussed. The following part of the paper is dedicated to Bruno Latour’s ideas on nature–culture relation, hybrids and mediations. Then the author refers to Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere as the common space for all living and inanimate elements. Closing the paper with a return to biosemiotics, the author comes back to Tarasti’s ideas and compares these with some ideas in biosemiotics, paying special attention to the concepts of unpredictability, choice and dynamics. The comparison shows that some intuitions, assumptions and theses of these different scholars turn out to be surprisingly convergent. The author believes that the outlined parallels between Tarasti’s view, Latour’s and Lotman’s concepts, and biosemiotics may be promising for further research, inviting detailed study.

Agamben’in Siyasal Kuramı ve Türkiye’deki Suriyelilerin Hukuksal Statüleri

Author(s): Esin Hamdi Dinçer / Language(s): Turkish / Publication Year: 0

Suriye’de 2011 yılında başlayan iç savaşın belki de en sıra dışı sonucu yaşananmülteci hareketidir. Altı milyonun üzerinde insanın ülkelerini terk etmesiylesonuçlanan iç savaş, bugün itibariyle 3,6 milyonun üzerinde mültecinin Türkiyesınırları içinde yaşamını sürdürmeye çalışması ile sonuçlanmıştır (UNRA, 2019). Bukapsamda pek çok toplumsal araştırmanın konusu olan Suriyeliler özellikle Avrupave Türkiye hukuksal sisteminin yeni tartışmalarının da odak noktası haline gelmiştir.“Geri Kabul Anlaşması” (GKA) ve “Yabancılar ve Uluslararası Koruma Kanunu”(YUKK) ise bu bağlamda yapılan tartışmalarda öne çıkmaktadır.

An Adieu to Europe: The Impossible Necessity of Balkan Politics

Author(s): Jelisaveta Blagojević / Language(s): English / Issue: 1-2/2008

“Our experience is provincial,” writes Radomir Konstantinović at the very begining of his book, now famous, Philosophy of the Provincial, published in Belgrade in 1969. “Province is our destiny, it’s our evil fate,” he continues by using the metaphor of the provincial in order to describe the way of life and thinking typical of small town mentality.

APORIJE DEMOKRATIJE

Author(s): Bernard Harbaš / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 1/2020

This article deals with postmodern understanding of the problem democratic politics is facing. Throughout history, democracy has had different determinations and thus cannot have a universal definition. Since in democracy everybody’s voice count, it should also support the one who rejects it, and thus this order, in its full realization, creates autoimmunity (Derrida). For Jacques Ranciere, democracy cannot be defined as agreement, but on the contrary, as hatred and disagreement, because only that way fundamental democratic principles and procedures can be respected. Since agreement and equality lead to passivity and annul ability of critical individual thinking, resistance towards democracy itself is necessary in an authentic democracy. For Alain Badiou, democracy means a possibility for everyone to do what he wants and without any criteria i.e., that everybody expresses his opinion without argumentation. Therefore, he understands such order as a space for fulfilment of petty needs. Jean-Luc Nancy understands democracy not only as political order, but a way in which existence appears. He prefers neither direct nor representative democracy but looks at it as a singular plural appearance of the sense. Contrary to some postmodern theoreticians, Chantal Mouffe considers democracy can be realized only in its representative form, but that it also needs to consist of dispute and discussion. When the disputable dimension of democracy disappears, we entre into the post-political state characterized by agreement and passivity. Purpose of this article was to present and analyse some of the characteristics of democratic principles such as conflict, dispute, agreement, indeterminacy but also to point out possibilities of thinking democracy not only as political order, but also as a way of living.

Arhitektura i filozofija: paradoksi i metamorfoze njihova susreta

Author(s): Chris Younès / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 05+08/2019

Dobro je poznato da je Jacques Derrida isticao ideju o suštinskom suživotu filozofije i arhitekture, te je rekao: »Collège international de philosophie treba osigurati mjesto susreta (rencontre), susret mišljenja, između filozofije i arhitekture. Ne zbog toga da se konačno sukobe, već da promisle što ih oduvijek drži zajedno u najbitnijoj kohabitaciji.«

Art Addressing Consumerism in the Age of Late Capitalism

Author(s): Polona Tratnik / Language(s): English / Issue: 61/2021

The globalized world is still in the phase of late capitalism, signified by the establishment of multinational corporations, globalized markets and work, mass consumerism and the fluid flow of capital. The question of the criticism of art towards the capitalist system, its ideology and consumerism is therefore still current and is readdressed in this contribution. Considering this issue, the recurrent theoretical reference is American materialist aesthetician Fredric Jameson, who was among the first to define culture and art in the context of late capitalism. In the article the author revises Jameson’s critique of art addressing consumerism and demonstrates that he did not consider the relevance of the means of consumption as regards the cultural logic of late capitalism. She claims that in order to open space to examine contemporary art as being critical towards consumerism, one also needs to consider the ontological changes that have occurred to art and pay attention to performative art, while Jameson was still focused on a representational mode of art. By being performative and also setting out actions outside of spaces that were traditionally designed for art, in the space meant for consumption, art has much a better chance to act politically, which Jameson wished to see from art which addresses consumerism, but did not. The author argues that if one is to seek critical or political art in late capitalism, those would be the cases of artistic interventions into the means of consumption.

Biopolitics, Microbiopolitics, Neuropolitics, Cosmopolitics and Other Posthumanist Views of the Global Society

Author(s): Denisa Kera / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2007

The paper compares different views on technological society that develop the posthumanist position but avoid technological determinism or social constructivism. Special attention is given to the dichotomy between the concept of biopolitics (Foucault) and the concept of cosmopolitics (Latour) in relation to the issues of plurality and hybridity.

Black Mirror Dizisinde Nöro-İmge ve Beyin Ekranlar

Author(s): Ömür Şölen Soykan / Language(s): Turkish / Issue: Sp. Iss/2020

Neuro-image is a concept follows movement-image and time-image, generated by Patricia Pisters through Deleuze cinematography in the aim of characterize and clarify the new cinematographic image which has been assemblaged by neuroscientific and cognitive progresses based on the political occasion of demolition of Berlin Wall and 9/11. It belongs to third synthesis of time, future and formed in parallel neuroscienetifical and online internet cultural develepments. It's a cinematographic image is synthesized at the 3th synthesis under the political effect of pre-emptive design of future. The cinematography appeared in 21th century cinema that we see world within characters minds, not through eyes is assemblaged by themes which are given a lead by online and neuroscientific progresses. Patricia Pisters approached this new cinematographic component in the frame of Deleuze-Guattari schizoanalysis, researched in the frame of "brain is screen", brainscreens and conceptualized. In this paper, neuro-image at the 3th synthesis of time, brain screens and cognitive architectures in Black Mirror serial, Netflix, detected and explained in the aim of introducing neuro-image concept to Turkey cinema field and schizoanalysis utilized as a practice.

Capital Immunodeficiency and the Viral Contagion of Capitalism

Author(s): Jason J. Wallin,Jennifer A. Sandlin / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2020

As rates of COVID-19 continue to surge across North America, the ‘immunocompromised’ status of the West has come into plain view. The immunological deficiency of the West, we argue, is founded on and exacerbated by the conditions of ‘capitalist realism,’ as described in the work of Mark Fisher, wherein reality becomes annexed into the circuits of capitalist monetization and exchange value. Where life itself is born in forced equivalence to capitalism, COVID-19 emerges as an exception to this state of capitalist realism, circumventing the ubiquitous belief that the future will reflect in the ‘business as usual’ attitudes of Western culture and its vision of education. In contrast, we argue that COVID-19 introduces conditions that enable us to speculate on a future that does not simply reflect the ubiquity of capitalist thought. In consideration of capitalism’s terminal state, we draw from the thinking of Jean Baudrillard, Mark Fisher, and Jason Moore in order to issue a challenge for educators to rethink education and its aims absent a singular capitalist futurity.

Chinese Kung-fu Films and the Posthuman Daoism

Author(s): Wong Kin Yuen / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2021

This paper argues that Chinese- Kung-fu films are unique presentations of human movement as a system of bodily aesthetics. By adopting a Daoist aesthetics of yin-yang cosmology, martial artists perform the dictum by Zhuanzi’s “The myriad things come out of ji and go into ji”, with the character ji as some kind of the Deleuzian “desiring machine”. There we see a human-technicality convergence as characterized by a posthuman merger within the process of complex visuality, particularly presented through the cinematic form. Kung-fu performance on screen, therefore, affords a kind of natural cyborg intersectionality within what can be called a posthuman Daoism, a kind of commingling of the ancient and posthuman technics.

CLASSICISM AND ORIENTALISM IN THE LIGHT OF THE NEW GLOBALIZATION THEORIES

Author(s): Ljuben Tevdovski,Ile Masalkovski / Language(s): English / Issue: 03/2021

The intense and dichotomous relationship between orientalism and classicism that has been created over the last decades of the XX century, reaches new dimensions through the rapid scientific growth, the discoveries of new historical sources and artifacts, and, most importantly, through the paradigms change in many scientific disciplines. This development is also influenced by the rapid and multifaceted societal transformations in the intensively globalizing world of the new millennium. In this context, the paper explores the new understandings of these two important conceptions in the research of the past, and their redefined scope and relation in the light of the globalization theories and through the paradigm of ancient globalization.

CLAUDE LÉVI-STRAUSS, JACQUES LACAN I CZAROWNICTWO

Author(s): Michał Żerkowski / Language(s): Polish / Issue: 1/2019

The relations linking cultural anthropology of Claude Lévi- -Strauss to psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan have not yet been properly criticized in the anthropological literature. Whereas published in 1949 works of psychoanalytically informed Lévi-Strauss played a key part in Lacanʼs “return to Freud” in the spirit of structural linguistics. A closer examination of these texts as well as central concepts of structural anthropology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, taking into account not only the historical development of the latter, but also their ethnographic and clinical sources, raises fundamental questions about falsifiability, consistency, explanatory power and plausibility of structuralist hypotheses. The direction of inspiration was defined and always led from anthropological to psychoanalytic structuralism, although the former was often built on the basis of unjustified analogies, factual inaccuracies and excessive generalizations, and the latter additionally on the basis of manipulations present in both Freud’s and Lacanʼs writings.

Con-tangence et archi-facticité. Jacques Derrida et Didier Franck autour d’Edmund Husserl

Author(s): Masumi Nagasaka / Language(s): French / Issue: 1/2014

The aim of my paper is to articulate the intersection of two different readings of Husserl’s phenomenology proposed by Didier Franck and Jacques Derrida. In his first work on Husserl, Flesh and Body (1981), Franck translates the notion of Leib as flesh (chair), stressing the difference between flesh and body (corps/Körper). This work, apparently influenced by Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, and seeking to provide a solution to the aporias of Husserl’s phenomenology, was a direct response to Derrida’s reading of Husserl in the 1960s. In the text, Franck proposes to depart from the ‘tactuality’ of flesh that grounds all objectivity. Thus, he conceives the constitution of the Other as emerging through the contact of the subject with the Other, or ‘con-tingency’, which at the same time signifies con-tangency as a mutual touching and contingency as an accidental archi-facticity. Derrida replies to Franck’s reading in a chapter entitled ‘Tangent IV’ in his work On Touching – Jean-Luc Nancy (2000). Therein, Derrida insists on the necessity of untying con-tangency and contingency as archi-facticity. By this, he means that there are various contingent archi-facts which are not concentrated in mutual touching. In another chapter entitled ‘Tangent II’, he analyses passages from Husserl’s Ideen II, especially those used by Franck to support his argument. Derrida draws the conclusion that even a touching needs a kind of non-contact, or more properly, a non-coincidence of what touches and what is touched – what he calls the spacing of a non-presence or the very possibility of phenomenology in its impossibility. Franck and Derrida therefore suggest two different approaches towards the aporias of Husserlian phenomenology: the former proposing to find a solution to the aporia, the latter to live in the experience of the aporia.

Creating a Space of Their Own: Diasporic Women in Ravinder Randhawa’s 'A Wicked Old Woman'

Author(s): Mária Palla / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2018

A Wicked Old Woman is the first novel published, in 1987, by Ravinder Randhawa, a first-generation immigrant writer of South Asian descent, residing in Britain. In it, she recounts the wanderings of the female protagonist called Kulwant among her friends and family members in London. This fragmented account of her past and present focuses on her desire for identification and struggle in a life lived in between cultures, that of the metropolis and that of her ancestral land on the Indian subcontinent. As the life-stories of Randhawa’s characters unfold, London itself is seen being transformed into a multiracial and multicultural location, becoming the site where fictional hybridization takes place. Hybridity and liminality are experienced in multiple ways in the diasporic space where new identities are formed. While raising the issues of authenticity and colonial stereotypes, Randhawa represents identity as an unfolding process rather than a static given. Her topics also include arranged marriages, mixed marriages, abusive relationships, as well as healing as a communal activity, and the possibilities of accommodation of a diasporic community by the mainstream society.

Crna limfa/zeleno srce: alternativni leksikon duše

Author(s): Željka Matijašević / Language(s): Croatian / Publication Year: 2016

Black Lymph/Green Heart: The Alternative Lexicon of Soul is a glossary of terms which the author deemed significant for today's collective and individual psychic condition. The selected entries have their definitions as in ordinary lexicons. However, the alternative lexicon selects the terms differently, and uses a different methodology of their treatment. In this lexicon, you will find apparently arbitrarily selected entries with inconsistently written definitions. But it is precisely with that subjective and ironic approach that the author reveals the characteristics of the listed concepts, which are important in some not-so-rare situations. The ones that concern our psychological welfare. This unscientific book, that parodies the scientific structure of a lexicon as such, reveals the functioning of narcissists, egomaniacs, psychopaths and sociopaths who have become a norm, instead of an exception. If you want to know what melancholy and femmes fatales have in common, or what is the nature of a relationship between pathocracy and a tram, The Alternative Lexicon of Soul will give you the answers and make you laugh at the same time. Željka Matijašević was born in 1968, in Zagreb. She graduated in Comparative Literature, and French Language and Literature at the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She obtained her doctor's degree at the Trinity College of the Cambridge University. She is a full-professor at the Department of the Comparative Literature at the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. Her main interests are psychoanalytic theory and applied psychoanalysis. She is an author of six scientific books: Lacan: ustrajnost dijalektike (2005), Strukturiranje nesvjesnog: Freud i Lacan (2006), Uvod u psihoanalizu: Edip, Hamlet, Jekyll/Hyde (2011), Stoljeće krhkog sebstva: psihoanaliza, društvo, kultura (2016), Drama, drama (2020), and The Borderline Culture (2021). She also authored one novel, Defences with the Taste of Death (2019), and a lexicon Black Lymph/Green Heart: The Alternative Lexicon of Soul (2017). She is a member of La Fondation Européenne pour la Psychanalyse and the Croatian Writers Society.

Cyborg or Goddess? Religion and Posthumanism From Secular to Postsecular

Author(s): Elaine Graham / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2021

This article works on the premise that critical posthumanism both exposes and calls into question the criteria by which Western modernity has defined the boundaries between nature, humanity, and technology. Yet the religious, cultural and epistemological developments of what is known as the ‘postsecular’ may signal a further blurring of another set of distinctions characteristic of modernity: between sacred and secular, belief and non-belief. Using Donna Haraway’s famous assertion that she would ‘rather be a cyborg than a goddess’, I consider whether critical posthumanism’s valorisation of cyborg identities is also capable of negotiating this ‘final frontier’ between immanence and transcendence, secular and sacred, humanity and divinity. In essence: is there space for a religious dimension to visions of the posthuman?

Das lichte Gefüge. Ein Versuch über die Bildstrategien in Zsuzsa Bánks Die hellen Tage

Author(s): Eszter Propszt / Language(s): German / Issue: 29/2020

This essay attempts to uncover image strategies in Zsuzsa Bánk̕ s novel "Die Hellen Tage", in which characters use images in order to construct for themselves a sustainable order of meaning. ›Image‹ is understood here as a structured and structuring scheme, also visually mediated, that serves as an orienting pattern for thinking, feeling and acting. This notion points to four major forces of structuring or creating order (perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting) in their close interconnection.