Klasni rat i nakon njega

Author(s): Ernesto Laclau / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1-2/2015

Od početka stoljeća, četiri su ključna pojma oblikovala način na koji je zapad na europska ljevica shvaćala svijet. Otprilike početkom 1900ih, društveni i politički događaji bili su shvaćeni kao dio neumoljive propasti kapitalističkoga sistema i neizbježnoga kretanja prema socijalizmu. Tijekom 1930ih, ta je vizija bila uklopljena u perspektivu koja je opreku između demokracije i fašizma vidjela kao temeljnu političku podjelu.

Samoskrivljen povratak u djetinjstvo

Author(s): Aleksandar Mijatović / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2/2014

The paper compares two Foucault’s commentaries on Kant’s 1784 essay “Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklarung?): one concerns Foucault’s 1982-1983 lecture “The Government of Self and Others” (Gouvernement de soi et des autres), and the other his 1984 essay “What is Enlightenment?” (Qu’est-ce que les Lumieres?). Starting with a thesis that Baudelaire connects modernity (la modernite) with the experience of childhood, Foucault in his argument distinguishes between childhood, on the one hand, and immaturity or nonage (Unmundigkeit), on the other. Accordingly, enlightenment (Aufklarung), as the emergence from nonage, refers to the ability not to be governed (freedom), and not to the ability to govern (power). Hence, to emerge from nonage is at the same time the ability of the self-imposed return to childhood. This ability for intentional infantilism is connected with the concept of modernity as an attitude. The paper further juxtaposes and discusses Foucault’s modernity as an attitude and modernity as an event from his lecture “The Government of Self and Others”.

Co i jak poznajemy przez obrazy – edycja trzecia

Author(s): Krzysztof Rojek / Language(s): Polish Issue: 19/2016

Postmoderna kao Aufhebung religije i tijela

Author(s): Bernard Harbaš / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 1/2017

The article analyses the concept of postmodernity as the framework denoting philosophical and artistic understanding of contemporary era, especially in the second half of the twentieth century. This conceptual framework brakes with classical understandings of the world and life summoned in grandiose explanations which Lyotard calls Grand Stories, and as a principle introduces fragmentation and multitude of equally valuable and irreducible opinions. The article analyses the concept of religion as the view that aspires towards a unique and universal idea and message and its relation towards postmodern worldview, which inherits its ideas from relativism and incommensurability. Further on, the concept of the body and its status in postmodern thinking, especially its role in the construction of identity is being elaborated. Ending of the article strives to think through the relationship between religion and the body by indicating that, on one hand, contemporary culture of shaping the ideal is theological, and on the other, that Christianity is, first of all, a bodily phenomenon.

Хегел и Байрон. Диалог между „Феноменология на духа“ и мистерията „Каин“

Author(s): Deyan Penchev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 4/2017

This article discuss the relationship between stoicism, scepticism and unhappy consciousness in Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit” and George Byron’s play “Cain”. The Byron’s biblical hero Cain, a son of Adam and Eve, raises a number of philosophical questions and like Hegel’s concept of scepticism, revolt against the established heavenly norms and laws. Through the knowledge that comes from Lucifer and like Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, Cain reaches the self-consciousness for himself.

Категорія структури та її деконструкція як жести традиційної культури: на прикладі китайського постмодерну

Author(s): Yevheniya Vitaliyivna Bilchenko / Language(s): Ukrainian Issue: 2/2013

This article explains the archetypal origins of the non-classical discourse of the West in the traditional culture of the East. The author draws a postmodern gesture of deconstruction from the dynamic structure of the poly-centric cosmos of Chinese culture, modeled in accordance to the principle of "focus – field". The model of focus makes a man, who concentrates in itself the hole humanity. Self-realization of focused man is a way of realization of society. As a result we have an organic dialectic unity of universal and particular values. Ritual is the centre of focus-man, which determines his nature and behavior in accordance of the law of ancestries. One of the key characteristics of the world view of traditional crops (primarily cultures of the Far East) is the concept of structure. Structure – a holistic system form that consists of a streamlined configuration elements combined internal links. In the semantic topos of culture structure takes the place of an imaginary center, exposed sacralization and often perceived as the middle branch of the sacred, from which holiness spreads by radial circles weakening more away from the center. The main feature of the structural image of the world that builds the traditional world view, is a system concentricity. World is seen as a cleverly arranged, harmonious, orderly and predictable whole (cosmos), part of which were functionally justified and, to a greater or lesser extent, impersonal elements. This world is contrasted themselves and their sacred order of spontaneous disorder primitive forces of nature (chaos), frightening and dark images which occasionally made themselves felt through ecstatic mystery of cosmic movements in cultures like ancient Dionysus and through ugly Teratology archaic characters in "Olympic" clarity developed mythological systems. The traditional structure of space reminiscent of a peculiar system of concentric circles, which often acquire their spatial expression. Contents of this structure was determined authentic (non-reflective) tradition, replicable through ritual and myth – institutions that were perceived a priori as rules that are not discussed on the basis of complete identity norms and cultural needs of the subject as protesters tradition (the fundamental identity). In the centre of this indicative structure, though the focus of the intersection of all its radiuses, there was a certain philosophical or socio-cultural unit, which is conventionally taken by the Centre. The term " Center" indissoluble unity imply profane and sacred , physical and metaphysical dimension of human existence and preserve the traditional culture was perceived in a literal geographical sense and in a figurative, spiritual one (based on mythological geography). In Chinese culture centered built traditional anthropological model of the subject as a carrier of group (monocultural) identity, which does not provide for identity: it is only a collective identity. Identifying, understanding man of his membership of a particular cultural tradition, unfolds as a movement from the periphery to a center that is unique. The tragedy here is no individuality, because there is no distinction between personal and social existence of the subject normativity. An individuals with their requests, desires, needs and interests do not destroy a culture. Cultural norms and behavior patterns match (identified or at least not contradict) the personal qualities (mainly due to lack of awareness of their own self). Social institutions are seen as the primary ontological reality, absolute immediate given, a kind of rules, the validity of which is not negotiable. Accordingly, the mechanism of identification in traditional cultures is the process of socialization as !entry in the name! – which resulted in a man through ritual tests is their social status with the appropriate set of social roles. Formed entirely collectivist ideal "man-servant" or "man-actor" – in other words , a man without a man. Highest virtues of a man are: discipline, piety, humility and obedience as a model of existence – "to live like everyone else", not "being different". Traditional man is a canonical (contextual, or "empty") the identity of the so-called "eccentric" (individual, directed to an external site, which is perceived both as an internal supporting structure – as opposed to the "egocentric", targeted to endogenous personal core – Ego), "person" (social mask – the identification of individual personality traits of the place which it occupies in society). Model of the eccentric behavior is the standard. This is – a mirror of collective etiquette and official morality. Manifestations of traditional Eastern collectivism that formed the basis of practices communist and post-communist regimes of the Soviet Union, China and other countries are in the tradition of family education. Thus, the Chinese New Year ritual in support of the tribal hierarchy all the labors of family in order of precedence worshiped the head of the family saying, "I must". The principles of balance and combinatorial, which lie in the foundation of Confucian centris , are the basis for the formation of the phenomenon of Chinese post-modern in the art of twentieth century (literature in the style of the "mosaic of memories").

Nova usamljenost

Author(s): Jovan Čekić / Language(s): English,Serbian Issue: 0/1994

How to use the energy of catastrophe, and is the thing that is happening today really a renewal of time? In his book "The Years Eaten by Locusts" Borisav Pekic anticipated the renewal of time here in the Balkans. The time structure round which this book has been built shapes itself into a seemingly simple texture.

Filozofia (według) Gombrowicza

Author(s): Marek Bernacki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 29/2017

The main subject of the article is a discussion of Witold Gombrowicz’s philosophical views, which were presented in the cycle of lectures delivered by him in Vence at the turn of April and May 1969, in the presence of his wife, Rita, and two of his friends: Iza Neyman and Dominic de Roux. In 1971 the lectures, written down by writer’s friends, were published in French as Guide de la philosophie en six heures un quarto (“Philosophy course in six hours and quarter of an hour”). Author of the article shows Gombrowicz’s predilection to existentialism and structuralism– two contemporary doctrines which, in his own opinion, the writer discovered himself as the first in Europe in his debut novel entitled Ferdydurke (1937). Philosophical course presented by Witold Gombrowicz two months before his own death, was compared in the end of the article to the message (main idea) of the late poem by Czeslaw Milosz entitled Vocative, written in the end of the 20th century. In this dramatic text the death was described as destructive, dull and unconscious power. Both, the Gombrowicz’s philosophical course, as well as Milosz’s late poem Vocative – can be interpreted as testimonial of heroic human intellect and soul in their uneven struggle against sickness and death, concluded author.

From Common Meal via Acéphale to Unsacrificeable

Author(s): Bernard Harbaš / Language(s): English Issue: 15/2018

In this article, the author introduces several approaches to the concept of sacrifice. It begins with the classic sociological approach of Émile Durkheim who in sacrifice remarks forming, strengthening and maintaining of a community. In his anthropological conception, Georges Bataille demonstrates that the production and accumulation of wealth are wrong moral principles and suggests a new moral practice of giving oneself without asking anything in return, which represents the only way to realize a society of equals. Such a society, in which there would be no leader or a singular sovereignty, he calls Acéphale. For Jean-Luc Nancy, sacrifice is impossible. Starting from a standpoint that the Being is nothing and that there is nothing except this worldly plurality, Nancy considers sacrifice impossible since there is no higher principle for which the sacrifice would be performed. Beside the standpoints of the above-mentioned theoreticians, this article also offers a theory of discipline and sacrifice for achieving a socially expected perfect appearance. In all the mentioned theories, non-classic dimension of sacrifice is demonstrated. In them sacrifice is performed as activity for achieving social unity, greater equality, socially expected appearance and it is also presented as something impossible.

Consumption and Production as Forms of Resistance

Author(s): Bernard Harbaš / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2018

Concept of the political appeared for the first time in Carl Schmitt’s theory, implying the autonomy of political decision making specific in relation to other spheres of human actions such as economy and art. With the postmodern political theory, concept of the political starts to be used in combination with the notion of politics, as a sort of counterbalance to political power of established government and its efforts to fully master the society. One of the pioneers of postmodernism, Michel Foucault, believed that the resistance to totalitarian efforts of every politics is performed through caring of self (souci de soi), that is, through our individual action manifested as a sort of micropower and representing a counterbalance to official politics. That way, individual action represents the action which limits government’s efforts to fully equate politics and social life. Thus, certain sorts of consumption, as one of the fundamental economic activities, can be interpreted as a sort of political activism. Consumption, as a resistance to official politics and economy, can in contemporary context be noticed in projects like slow-food nutrition, buying of second-hand products, rejecting to ware cloths made of fur, rejecting to purchase from socially irresponsible corporations. Political activism can be noticed in production as well, which can be seen in the examples of Marx’s analyses of this activity. For Marx, only in communist epoch, production becomes an important activity because only then it is transformed from slavery work into a means through which individual capacities and senses are developed. In the communist epoch, with the abolition of private property, production becomes free and creative activity. In contemporary context, “free and creative production” can be perceived in the organic food production, use of already used materials when making cloths and furniture, hand-made production of cosmetic products, in so called home-made production. As it can be seen, consumption and production don’t necessarily have to represent products of global capitalism and ways through which the control over the working class is performed. On the contrary, these economic practices can represent both a form of political actions and to, as a “postmodern” concept of the political, function as a means in struggle against domination of capitalism and politics’ efforts to identify itself with the society.

O besmrtnim sijamkama – fikciji i fakciji… i još ponešto o braći po oružju, ne manje smrtno ozbiljnoj

Author(s): Nermin Sarajlić / Language(s): Bosnian Issue: 21/2015

Zapinje li kome ili ne, svejedno, neće ništa škoditi, da dočara starozavjetni pripovjedni horror dovoljno će biti u sjećanje prizvati Kratki film o ubijanju Krzysztofa Kieslowskog. Kao i onomad u drevno doba Ne ubij se izvrnulo u svoju suprotnost.

С. ЖИЖЕК О БЕССОЗНАТЕЛЬНЫХ ПРЕДПОСЫЛКАХ ИДЕОЛОГИИ

Author(s): Boris Dmitrievich Golovanov,Olga Volodymyrivna Frolova / Language(s): Russian Issue: 2/2019

Problem setting: The meaning of ideology in modern society does not need any validation, but the question of its forming remains extremely relevant. XXI century realia pushes to find new interpretations in traditional approaches. Views of S. Zizek unconscious preconditions of ideology are worthy of special analysis.Recent achievents and publications analisys. The problem of correlation between conscious and unconscious in symbolic activity has been repeatedly brought up in the works of authors who chose postmodernism as a methodological paradigm in their research. Many of them had continually undertook attempts to deconstruct the ideology phenomenon. The originality of S. Zizek research is in the use of Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis as an instrument for his research.Paper objective. Main objective of the following paper is to uncover the possibilities of uncounscious in phenomenon of ideology realization.Paper main body. In the following paper the establishing and functioning of ideology in the perspective critical to Marxism ideology is examined. The use of psychoanalytical approach as a methodological guide becomes extremely popular in many fields of knowledge. The works of S. Zizek make readers see the problem of ideology from different viewpoint, constructively criticize the established approaches, and detect heuristic possibilities of psychoanalysis use in this field.As opposed to methodological orientation of postmodernism, Zizek in his analysis ensures consistency with Marxism and German classical philosophy; he even states the necessity to rehabilitate Hegel and his dialectics. He believes that psychoanalytical interpretation of ideology reestablishes the concept of thinking to be a real process, without concentration on the world of subjective individual. He sees Marxism as a teaching to study and explains fetishistic forms of consciousness, categorizing ideology as its intellectual variation. Ideology is something bigger than a false reflection of reality. In the case of ideology, reality distortion is possible only because human individuals in their practical work unconsciously create and cultivate this kind of distortion. The mere existence of social reality is based on the fact, that individuals to reproduce this reality are not fully aware of the content and consequences of their actions.Psychoanalytical interpretation of ideology studies social practices and socially sustained beliefs as something derivative from subjective inner appetence of an individual. The most important objective of psychoanalytical criticism of ideology is to bring the ideological consciousness to the point where it can distinguish distorted products of projective activity in its own life. Psychoanalytical criticism of ideology should answer the question of what the symbolic order should be. It should be social reality constituting to save body and spirit health of individuals creating this reality.Conclusions of the research. The psychoanalytic interpretation of the phenomenon of ideology reveals that the connection between the values postulated by a particular ideology and the scientific argumentation used to substantiate these values is purely formal and optional. Scientific constructions, which are used by ideology, only «hide the excess pleasure inherent in any ideological form». The ideological construction is intended to hide behind rational arguments a thought that is destructive for the entire social system, that the goal of ideology is ideology itself, that the purpose of authority is authority itself. All rationalizations are only a by-product of the ideology’s desire for self-sufficiency. The conclusion is absolutely obvious: it is senseless to approach the analysis of any ideology from the side of its content. There will always be a gap between the declared values and the nature of the ideological form, which cannot be overcome by any rational analysis.

Alkisti Efthymiou in Conversation with Athena Athanasiou: Spectral Publics and Antifascist Eventualities

Author(s): Alkisti Efthymiou,Athena Athanasiou / Language(s): English Issue: 1-2/2019

This text is a conversation between Athena Athanasiou and Alkisti Efthymiou, drawing from Athena Athanasiou’s new book, Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). The conversation discusses the critical potency of collective subjectivities such as the Women in Black and expands on issues that include political agency, vulnerability in resistance, spacing appearance, performing public mourning, or the traveling of social movements, associating them with contemporary feminist and antifascist urgencies. Central to the text is the concept of non-sovereign agonism, a form of political agency that addresses (or takes into account) the dispossessed quality of subjectivity and pays attention to the relationality through which we are constituted as subjects.

SOCIOLOŠKA I FILOZOFSKA TEMELJENJA ETNOGRAFSKOG ISTRAŽIVANJA

Author(s): Renata Relja / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 2-3/2009

The basic aim of this paper is to provide insight into the sociological and philosophical bases of contemporary ethnographic research. Accordingly, we start from a discussion of the appropriateness and inappropriateness of qualitative and quantitative approaches.The paper provides a discussion of naturalism and sociological positivism, which argues for the idea of the unity of the natural and social sciences. The application of relativism is recorded, which reflects the influence of the phenomenology of the 60s and 70s of the twentieth century. The anti-realist “rebirth” has also made a significant impact on ethnography, and its consequences are contained in the process of the acceptance of constructivist perspectives within the research process. This paper also examines the traditions of creative and interpretive sociology, whereas in the context of the relationship between poststructuralism and ethnography emphasis is placed on an individual interpretation of social reality and an individual position in the social world. The influence of phenomenology can be read within an emphasis on full participation in certain social or cultural groups with the aim of discovering its key ideas. Interactionist ethnography derives directly from organized assumptions of symbolic interactionism, whereas the contact point of ethnomethodology and ethnography is summarized in their overlapping perspectives which are aimed at interpretative traditions based on the life-world, which have similar views on the role of social actors and which avoid the typical quantitative theoretical approach to reality.

Мишел Фуко и западната медицина

Author(s): Dmitry Mikhel / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 3/2020

The article analyzes Michel Foucault’s philosophical ideas on Western medicine and delves into three main insights that the French philosopher developed to expose the presence of power behind the veil of the conventional experience of medicine. These insights probe the power-disciplining function of psychiatry, the administra¬tive function of medical institutions, and the role of social medicine in the adminis¬trative and political system of Western society. Foucault arrived at these views by way of his intense interest in three elements of the medical system that arose almost simultaneously at the end of the 18th century: psychiatry as “medicine for mental illness”, the hospital as the first and most well-known type of medical institution, and social medicine as a type of medical knowledge focused more on the protection of society and far less on caring for the individual. All the issues Foucault wrote about stemmed from his personal and professional sensitivity to the problems of power and were a part of the “medical turn” in the social and human sciences that occurred in the West in the 1960s and 1970s and led to the emergence of medical humanities. The article argues that Foucault’s histories of the power of medical knowledge were philosophical histories of Western medicine. Foucault always used facts, dates, and names in an attempt to identify some of the general tendencies and patterns in the development of Western medicine and to reveal usually undisclosed mechanisms for managing individuals and populations. Those mechanisms underlie the practice of providing assistance, be it the “moral treatment” practiced by psychiatrists before the advent of effective medication, or treating patients as “clinical cases” in hospitals, or hospitalization campaigns that were considered an effective “technological safe-guard ” in the 18th and most of the 19th century.

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.

Od znaczenia do konceptu: pragmatyczno-kulturowe aspekty specyfikacji semantycznej

Author(s): Aleksander Kiklewicz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 07/2020

The author discusses theoretical issues of functional semantics, especially such directions of the contemporary anthropological linguistics as ethnosemantics and cognitive semantics. The diversification of the content of a lexical meaning under the influence of external, mainly pragmatic and cultural, factors is the primary object of interest here. Therefore, the author considers the degree of semantic specification of lexical units at various levels of interpersonal communication: both general and subcultural. As assumed by the contemporary cultural linguistics, a concept is considered to be a category of representation of knowledge encoded in language signs. The author gives arguments in favour of the view that the opposition of the (lexical, general) meaning and concept is gradual and concerns the scope of semantic information encoded in the sign in accordance with adaptive requirements.

PHENOMENOLOGICAL VARIATION AND INTERCULTURAL TRANSFORMATION: MERLEAU-PONTY’S PHENOMENOLOGY AND ABU-LUGHOD’S ETHNOGRAPHY IN DIALOGUE

Author(s): Laura McMahon / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

This paper develops phenomenological resources for understanding the nature of intercultural understanding, drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with feminist anthropologist Abu-Lughod. Part One criticizes Western framings of non-Western violence against women that render the experience of non-Western Others inaccessible. Part Two discusses how certain strains in Western feminism reinforce some of these problematic framings. Part Three offers a phenomenological account of our experience of other persons, and Part Four argues that intercultural understanding takes the form of a “variation” between one’s own and the other’s experience. Part Five explores the implications of this phenomenology of cross-cultural understanding for interpreting dynamic cultural transformations, and the politics of violence against women, in an interconnected and unequal world.

The Vulnerability of Animal Life in Derrida’s Philosophy

Author(s): Patrick Llored / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Derrida has been preoccupied by the animal from the beginning to the end of his life. It can be found from the first to the last texts, but its presence is always subjected to new formulations and explications, as if the question of the animal in Derrida’s thinking could never be exhausted: indeed, nothing and nobody can seemingly exhaust it… Our reading takes this inexhaustibility as its starting point in order to examine one of the last concepts reworked by Derrida towards the end of his life, to which his readers have hitherto paid scant attention: the concept of vulnerability. This article probes into the possibility for this concept to allow us to reread in depth Derrida’s relevant texts as a unified body of works, albeit without claiming to exhaust their meaning(s).

Metafilm ili o živoj singularnosti mišljenja – Gilles Deleuze i obrat metafizike slike

Author(s): Žarko Paić / Language(s): Croatian Issue: 1-2/2022

Ako bismo htjeli tradicionalno-ontologijski, a to znači bitno metafizički, odrediti u čemu se ogleda razlika u pristupu filmu Gillesa Deleuzea naspram fenomenologijskoga, psihoanalitičkog i semiologijskog uvida morali bismo ponajprije vidjeti može li se u »biti« filma otvoriti ono što pogađa metafiziku kao takvu.