Aporie powszedniej zażyłości
Aporias of Daily Intimacy

Review: Bjørnar Olsen, W obronie rzeczy. Archeologia i ontologia przedmiotów. Przełożyła Bożena Shallcross. Warszawa 2013. „Nowa Humanistyka”

Summary/Abstract: The text is an attempt at a critical assessment of the view on the project of appreciation of material aspects of culture and of pointing at their constitutive role in shaping the social “everyday commonness” as presented in Bjørnar Olsen’s book "In Defense of Things. Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects". The researcher, taking a stand against binary oppositions which follow Cartesian marginalisation of matter as “extended thing,” does not avoid stumbles and inconsistencies. They are revealed mainly in combining, as in bricolage, often remote modes of thinking about things (juxtaposing Heidegger to Latour, in which the former’s peculiarity of thinking, seems controversial). Heidegger’s conceptions of understanding proposed by Olsen induces the reader to ponder on a possibility of reconciling “emancipation” discourse (going in the direction in which “the defense of things” follows) with non-linear one (opposing the idea of progress) view on history. Olsen also points at aporias that scientific discourse is entangled in when he is trying to describe what in an imperceptible and “reserved” way is founded by social reality.

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