A POSTMODERN NARRATIVE FOR AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

Author(s): Philip Higgs / Language(s): English / Issue: 4/2016

In this essay I argue for a distinctively postmodern African knowledge culture which recognizes that knowledge is not only local, but also inter-subjective. Such an African knowledge culture not only includes the idea of what I refer to as plural conversations in an inter-African context, but also includes a cross-cultural knowledge that facilitates cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. In the light of this, I propose an orientation to African knowledge culture that has cultural relevance insofar as it is mounted on concepts peculiar to an inter-African context, as well as in the larger context of a continuing cross-cultural dialogue. Such an African knowledge culture acknowledges the necessity to develop the ability to grasp the fundamentals of indigenous African cultures and other cultures by way of adopting and living out what I call a postmodern dis-position. Such a postmodern dis-position would perceive an African knowledge culture not only as an inter-cultural African philosophy of personal intent, but also as the practice of cross-cultural dialogue, where culture takes on the form of a consensual or social epistemology, that is, an epistemology deliberately situated in a particular cultural context and sensitive to the need for cross-cultural dialogue. In this instance, the individual recognizes and exercises knowledge(s) appropriate to his/her culture, and at the same time has a critical awareness of the knowledge(s) and cultural traditions of both his/her culture and that of other cultures. In so doing, the individual constructs a sound epistemic identity for his/her culture, as well as one that meets the particular demands of his/her unique cultural context. Such an epistemic identity perceives of philosophy as a product of, and a reflection on, reality, as a guide to life; while the experience out of which philosophy emerges is determined by how people have lived in their particular historic and cultural contexts.

A RECONSIDERATION OF FOUCAULT’S “MARXISM” IN RELATION TO THE THOUGHT OF LOUIS ALTHUSSER

Author(s): DEB J. HILL / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2013

The purpose of this paper is to supplement existing studies that have explored Foucault’s “Marxist” inclinations by means of a focused consideration of the thought of the person who challenged Foucault with an entirely different version of Marxism – his friend and mentor, Louis Althusser. My argument here is that “Marxism” has been treated largely as a singular category within the literature, meaning that an understanding of the points of difference and agreement Foucault had with competing versions of Marxism has been conveniently ignored. As I maintain within this paper, one cannot fully understand the nature of Foucault’s relationship with “the Marxist tradition” – and his comments about various aspects of this tradition – without understanding Althusser’s own “rereading” of what could be regarded as dubious versions of Marxism. As I further contend, Foucault’s recalcitrant attitude towards traditional orthodoxies of scholarship and method owes much to Althusser’s articulation of Marx’s anti-humanist, anti-historical, and anti-Hegelian revolution in thought and practice.

African Woman Rises from the Ashes: Alice Walker’s Mimicry of Classic Ethnography in Possessing the Secret of Joy

Author(s): Zohreh Ramin,Farshid Nowrouzi Roshnavand / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2017

Before the advent of deconstructive schools of thought in the second half of the twentieth century, anthropology and ethnography were hailed as scientific disciplines whose major consideration was to provide an objective analysis of other cultures. However, the launch of such critical approaches as postcolonialism, feminism, and postmodernism has nullified the two disciplines’ claim to scientificity and objectivity by laying bare their sexist, racist backdrop. In the postist zeitgeist, new ethnographies have been promoted in an attempt to disrupt the hierarchical relationship between the researcher and the studied subject of classic ethnography through including first-hand marginalized voices. Moreover, they blur the long-held generic boundaries between science and fiction via establishing the “ethnographic novel” as a medium that committedly voices the subalterns. Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy (1992) is one of these new ethnographic novels which has as its protagonist an oppressed African woman. What makes Walker’s work distinct and notable is that the feminist writer subversively employs the conventional mode of ethnographic writing to stand up to African patriarchy and its horrific ritual of female circumcision.

Agon-kompleks

Author(s): Luka Perušic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 03/139/2015

Considering the three orders in the cosmic assembly (macrocosm, microcosm and mesocosm), using an integrative analysis of cosmological understandings of variously-oriented metaphysicists and scientists, I firstly reach to a conclusion on entanglement of two developed cosmic principles that define the relational totality of objects and meanings. The first I term gathering- one-allness, which I describe with arhe-complex. The second I term itself-against-striving, which I describe with eris-complex. On the basis of a shift from enclosed systems (non-living being) to open systems (living being), I elaborate how arhe- and eris-complex create logoscomplex and agon-complex and in what way this new entanglement passes through corporeality (microcosm) to society (mesocosm), in the broadest sense appearing as a strife between realpolitics and utopian striving. In further development, I suggest an articulation of the current world state with the term biopolitical agon in which the power flows through infosphere relays. It is based on dismembering the living into convertible information that contains power in the ability to regulate and be regulated, i.e. the ability of the biopolitical to subdue logos with agon through logos itself, which I attempt to explain by matching this issue with previously mentioned phenomena. With corporeality as an instrument of transformative bitisation, I further discuss societal leaning towards cancelling the original purpose of logos-complex and depowering it regarding the control of bodily articulation of its own purpose-defining. This I shortly outline and then route back to the research’s starting point.

AN EXISTENTIAL ERRAND: SCHOLARSHIP, AUTHORSHIP AND THE CRISIS OF REPRESENTATION

Author(s): Thomas Basbøl / Language(s): English / Issue: 6/2015

Since 1968, at least, academia has been subject to the “crisis of representation.” This essay explores the consequences of the “postmodern condition” for the identity formation of academics. It is informed by Foucault’s and Deleuze’s understanding of the pivotal intellectual developments in the late 20th century, which are taken to challenge Wittgenstein’s presumption that language is essentially about the assertion of facts. Instead of abandoning representation, however, it proposes to meet this challenge squarely, proposing a disciplined engagement with its particular difficulty. Facts are deployed in academic writing, it argues, through the act of scholarship. The ability to represent a fact is at the core of the knowledge that is implicit in the self-formation of the scholar.

An–arhé kao glas naroda

Jacques Rancière i dosezi politike nesuglasnosti

Author(s): Žarko Paic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 04-06/2015

Zašto govorimo da je danas sve postalo političko i da se sve odvija u znaku estetskoga? Nisu li ta dva naizgled suprotstavljena pojma možda ipak samo Janusovo lice iza čije se maske skriva praznina drugih određenja osim onoga što suspendira svako moguće (nad)određenje? Govori se, naime, da je politika moć vladanja ljudima u zajednici (politeia, civitas dei, republika, monarhija, demokracija). Estetika se, pak, označava područjem čiste tjelesnosti iskustva onoga što pripada jeziku i slici u doživljaju ljepote. Nije riječ o osjećaju, već o doživljaju. Razlika je u tome što je osjećaj predmet psihologije. Usto je i pokretač umjetnosti kao odnosa između djela i promatrača. Doživljajem imenujemo refleksiju osjećaja na višoj razini opažaja. Politika kao moć i estetika kao doživljaj nisu u suprotnosti s obzirom na određenje onoga što ih omogućuje. Nemoguće je provoditi vladavinu moći bez podražaja u osjetilnome doživljaju. Odnos između tog dvojega čini se uzročno–posljedičnim. Ipak, problem nastaje kada se postavi u pitanje njihova veza. Ono što više ne određuje politiku kao moć niti estetiku kao doživljaj osjetilnosti u svijetu zacijelo dolazi s nastankom neke posve drukčije »politike« i »estetike«. S onu stranu »moći« i »osjetilnosti« prebiva njihovo mjesto. Očito je riječ o drukčijem odnosu. To je događaj djelovanja bez–temelja. Grci su ovo imenovali riječju an–arhé. Suvremeno mišljenje nakon Heideggera, otpočevši s etičkim obratom u djelu Emmanuela Lévinasa, može se otuda nazvati post–fundacionalizmom ili rastemeljenjem bezuvjetnoga načela »prirode«, bitka kao prisutnosti, ideje Boga i svega što je imalo značajke onto–teologijske tradicije.

Antagonističko, agonističko i singularno pluralno političko

Author(s): Nada Harbaš,Bernard Harbaš / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 1-2/2011

This article is an attempt to present historical development of the concept of the political. Through positions of Carl Schmitt, Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, this article demonstrates three different understandings of the relations between politics and the political. While Carl Schmitt understands the political as the precondition of a state and defines it through the antagonistic relation friend/enemy, Mouffe and Laclau determine the political as agonistic, transforming at the same time the enmity into the relations between adversaries. Instead of Schmitt’s idea of enmity, as well as Habermas’s deliberative definition of democracy, the two theoreticians suggest a concept of agonistic pluralism should be introduced which would, along with the agreement, necessarily include disagreement on political matters. Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, similarly to Mouffe and Laclau, and following Heidegger, bring the political into relation with philosophical and define it as a constant questioning of current politics. They believe that every agreement necessarily leads to totalitarianism so that the political thus always needs to be opposed to power and government.

Antiteologija novoga događaja

Alain Badiou i kontingencija politike

Author(s): Žarko Paic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 10-12/2015

Jezici u kojima je riječ »novo« sinonimom bezuvjetnoga raskida s tradicijom u metafizičkim su temeljima dovoljno »stari« da bi imali mogućnosti istinskoga kazivanja tog imperativa vremena. Kao da umjesto njih o našem vremenu bolje govori ono neljudsko iz sklopa kibernetičke tehnologije. Programski jezici računalstva zasnovani na binarnome kôdu postali su nadmoćni simboličkoj snazi »prirodnih« jezika. Štoviše, čini se da su u svojoj zastarjelosti osuđeni na ono isto što je suvremeni francuski filozof Alain Badiou namijenio filozofiji. Da je, naime, njezina sudbina postati izložbenim »predmetom« u muzeju ukoliko ne uspije otvoriti mogućnosti nadilaženja ove epohe. A ta epoha od 19. Stoljeća za svoje presudne pojmove ima znanost, politiku i umjetnost.

ANXIETIES OF KNOWING: ACADEMIC PATHOLOGIES, CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND THE CULTURE OF SELF

Author(s): Michael A. Peters / Language(s): English / Issue: 6/2015

This exploratory paper coins the term “academic pathologies” to discuss in a critical approach the culture of the academic self focusing on what is called “anxieties of knowledge.” The paper plays with these themes in reference to the work of Kierkegaard, the American film director Woody Allen, and Jacques Derrida. This topic and paper has eluded me over the years as I tried to grapple with various formulations. The paper that follows the history of my failed attempts is an exercise in self-therapy, confession and self-examination about my continuing inability to produce this paper.

Arhepolitika, parapolitika, metapolitika

Author(s): Bruno Bosteels / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 04-06/2015

Arhepolitika, parapolitika i metapolitika tri su neologizma s kojima Jacques Rancière, u središnjem poglavlju svoje knjige Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy objavljene 1995. (engleski prijevod objavljen 1998.) promišlja dominantne likove onoga što je nazvao »politikom filozofa«, od Platona do Hobbesa i od Marxa do Bourdieua. U tom promišljanju na kocki je, zbog toga je to poglavlje središnje u knjizi, pitanje odnosa između politike i filozofije, a to je samo jedan od primjera za odnos između realnog i mišljenja o realnom.

Artikulacije tijela i tjelesnosti u filmu

Author(s): Krunoslav Lucic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 03/139/2015

The paper elaborates different articulations of the cinematic body and corporeality. Figure of body and the concept of corporeality can be comprehended in two different ways: as a film “corporeality” or as a “corporeality” in film, i.e. as a materiality of the film medium that is technologically determined and would otherwise be impossible, or as a materiality of the key film figures which are realized there in different forms. Also, the paper points out to the connection between the spectator’s body and the tactile image as articulated in the phenomenological approaches to cinema. In this context the paper explores the relationship between these three concepts focusing on diverse ways of representing the body in the genre, style and history specific film works. The focus is placed on the mechanics of body figures in American silent film comedy, attractions of the early silent film and on the representation of mostly woman’s, but also man’s body in the fictional works of the classical film style.

Avangarda i politika

Istočno evropska paradigma i rat na Balkanu

Author(s): Marina Gržinic / Language(s): Serbian / Publication Year: 2005

One always searches for some symbolic point from which one can claim that something ended and something else began, even though there are no beginnings and no endings.

Bakhtin’s Theory of Speech Genres and the Addressivity in Cultural Pragmatics of Genres in Literature: “Genus” vs. “Genre”

Author(s): Rainer Grübel / Language(s): English / Issue: 3-4/2015

This paper suggests a new approach to literary genres and modes via the addressivity of texts and performances, which takes it starting point from Bakhtin’s concept of speech genres. First it deals with Bakhtin’s publi¬cations on literary genres, which are interpreted differently by literary theoreticians and critics, and the problematic status of his texts on speech genres, which were not prepared for publication by the author. It then takes Jan-Luc Nancy’s concept of addressing – with its components of “speed”, “accuracy”, “touch” and “retreat” – into account, and applies them to the modelling of literary genres and modes. The final part of the paper shows how the addressivity of genres and modes relates to the selected hybrid texts from Russian and Croatian literature, i.e. to Daniil Kharms’ “Failed Performance”, Dmitrii Prigov’s Stichograms, Gennadii Aigi’s “Without Title” and Ranko Marinković’s “Hands”.

BEAUVOIR’S FEMINIST REALISM

Author(s): Carmen Petcu / Language(s): English / Issue: 15/2016

In the present paper, I focus on Beauvoir’s investigation of women’s oppression, her observations on young women’s sexuality, her analysis of female subjectivity, and her debate of the normative masculine imaginary. The results of the current study converge with prior research on Beauvoir’s investigation of the constructed character of “woman,” her analysis of female embodiment, the sexual difference in Beauvoir’s view, and her assessment of the social constructions of masculinity and femininity. My analysis complements the growing literature on Beauvoir’s notion of situation and sex, her interpretation of the nature of woman’s submissiveness, her concept of sexual difference, and her account of patriarchal marriage.

BENDRINIS INTELEKTAS IR PASIPRIEŠINIMAS KAPITALUI SOCIALIZUOTO DARBO EPOCHOJE

Author(s): Kasparas Pocius / Language(s): Lithuanian / Issue: 89/2016

This article discusses the influence of Marx’s labour theory for contemporary social thought. While his conceptions of machine work, formal and real subsumption influenced the mainstream of class struggle in the 20th century, his theoretical framework was recently refreshed both by poststructuralist and Italian autonomist authors, who discuss Marxian conception of general intellect. It is difficult to argue about general intellect and its liberation from capitalist relations while having in mind the condition of contemporary labour power in the contemporary stage of capitalist production, which autonomists define as social factory and which is based on immaterial labour and precarity. However, an alliance between the living labour (or multitude) and technologies which embody the power of capital must be based on the will of this labour power (or forces) to get rid of capitalist relations. General intellect itself can be created only along with the strategies of resistance against exploitation. Finally, the perspective of general intellect allows to argue about building communist society within the capitalist empire and to change the dialectical Marxist revolutionary paradigm with the non-dialectical paradigm of liberation and heterogenization of social forces. However, is only possible to do it by gradually removing the chains of capitalist relations and developing mutual relationship of free singularities. Therefore it is worthwhile to argue about the individual and collective singularities, their environment and the new subjectivities that they would create.

Bolest u procjepu biologije i kulture

Postmoderno shvaćanje bolesti kao biokulturne pojave

Author(s): Darija Rupcic / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 03/143/2016

The intention of this paper is to highlight and reflect on the development of a tradition that considers the importance of cultural influences on health and illness. Delicate balance between illness and culture is what constitutes the elusive truth of illness and post-modern understanding of the illness as biocultural phenomenon in biocultural model. Using authors such as Michel Foucault, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Ivan Illich, David B. Morris and others helps to bring out the intricate, complex and subtle link between illness and culture. Scientifically based biomedical model, outdated in its Cartesian-mehanicistic conceptual scheme but growing in popularity at enormous speed, considers illness as an object and body as a mechanical machine. Although it did bring prosperity and eradicated many diseases, it offers us an alternative path to a new and still uncertain understanding of illness as transformable process, resulting as the intertwining of culture and biology. By putting an emphasis on this narrative, we will critically overview the existing dominant biomedical model of illness and we will consider the possibility of introducing a new biocultural model of illness expanding the existing biomedical model. The expected contribution of this work will go towards the possibilities of theoretical and practical foundation and a search for the possibility of the different pluriperspective and multidimensional approach to illness and health.

Bosna kao granica Evrope: Andrić i Angelopulos

Author(s): Dragan Kujundžic / Language(s): Serbian / Publication Year: 0

Bosna, kakav primer. Bosna, kakav primer? Poslušajmo u ovom ponavljanju dve mogućnosti definisanja prostora: jedan, koji će spominjati prošlost, katastrofičku ruinu poznatu kao «istorija», suviše poznatu u svojoj pretskazivosti, gramofoniju prostora znanog kao «Evropa» – Bosna, kakav primer – i drugu, pitanje, mogućnost mesta/prizora (site/sight) ili graničnosti radikalno osobite u svojoj singularnosti, u svojoj još neoblikovanoj, raščinjenoj egzemplarnosti, do koje tek treba da dođe, jedno nečuveno pitanje – Bosna, zaista, kakav primer?

COLLABORATING WITHOUT PARTICIPATION: NOMADIC ETHICS AND RESISTANCES IN THE SINGULARITIES OF NORMATIVE ACADEMIC PRACTICE

Author(s): MANDY MORGAN / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2013

This paper presents a reflexive account of collaboration in the context of not participating in the project that energized this special issue. Having begun producing work for collective biographies of academic practice, I arrive here through contributions more akin to the usual practices of academic review and critique than the collaboration with which we started. Through engaging Braidotti’s (2006a, 2006b, 2006c, 2008) notion of nomadic ethics, I want to transform the position of review and critique. Like a normative reviewer, I am responding to my colleagues work. Yet rather than attending to the normative rules of knowledge production, I attend to moments where resistances to those normative practices call me to respond within the boundary-lines that demark our spaces (rights, duties, characteristics and so on) as we are writing theory together. In the process, I try to use critique to articulate the connections between the boundary-lines we traverse and test the limits that are enabled by our collaborative resistances.

Contours of a multi-layered mysticism

The History and Time of a Painting Paul Klee, Angelus Novus

Author(s): Žarko Paic / Language(s): English / Issue: 7/2015

Owing to the interpretation of Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus has become the paradigmatic work of modern art. Its mystery is not manifest only in the possibility of revealing the mystical on the borderline between the apocalypse and melancholy. Based on Klee’s approach to the idea of modern art, the aim of this article is to propose a hypothesis on the symbolic meaning of colour. It is about that which emerges from the “surplus of the imaginary” in painting as a combination of “construction” and “composition”. Klee was the only one after Cézanne, as Heidegger noted late in his life in his Diaries and Notes, to have spoken of art as something beyond metaphysics. How should one think the relationship between colour and composition in the contemporary visual arts of ‘today’, if what defines the contemporary art of the event (the performative turn) emerges as the end of history and the implosion of time in the technological and scientific construction of virtual worlds? Can the Messianic and the melancholic in art’s demand for the “surplus of the imaginary” return into painting, as time condenses in the moment the world is created?

CRAFTING SPACES BETWEEN THE BINARY: RENEGADE LOCATIONS FOR THE RADICAL RE-VISIONING OF NON-TRADITIONAL GRADUATE ADVISING

Author(s): Krystie Nguyen,Roland W. Mitchell,Chaunda Allen Mitchell / Language(s): English / Issue: 1/2016

At the dawn of the 21st century the revolutionary energies that once fueled the Civil Rights Movement have been usurped into a sanitized narrative of American exceptionalism undergirded by a static black white racial binary. This article explores the ways that these sanitized binaries curtail the development of “mutually beneficial forms of engagement in postgraduate supervision.” By evoking bell hooks’ “politics of location” the co-authored narrative inquiry presented in this article considers how educators can develop renegade locations for a radical re-visioning of education for advisors and mentees of color. And more specifically, how a of woman of color from outside the United States alongside an African American man and woman graduate advisor, can go about identifying these spaces in the “politics of location,” beyond this pervasive black white paradigm.