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"Rébellion du signifiant": Rayonnement contemporain du concept de bricolage

Author(s): Ines Prica / Language(s): French / Issue: 2/2009

" In this paper the concept of bricolage is applied to the paradoxical contexts of transitory societies using the translation of general theoretical concepts to those politically recognizable. On the one hand, notions of intersubjectivity, improvisation and self-organisation suggest social functioning based on the principles of free market, management and self-government; while on the other, common understanding of transition as the "application of democracy according to a model", introduces radically different background of bricolage as non-inventiveness, imitation, fragmentary connection and "irrational mentality".

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"Uistinu nije moguća kritika onoga što činim" Jacques Derrida odgovara Florianu Rötzeru

Author(s): Jacques Derrida,Florian Rötzer / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 05+06/1987

Interview with Jacques Derrida by Florian Rötzer

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A critical note on the evolution of social theoretical and linguistic underpinnings of contemporary discourse studies

Author(s): Piotr Cap / Language(s): English,Croatian / Issue: 2/2019

This paper gives a critical overview of analytical approaches dominating the field of discourse studies in the last three decades, from the perspective of their philosophical and formative bases: social constructionism and linguistics. It explores different conceptions of the theoretical nexus between these two bases leading to the emergence of three distinct yet complementary strands of thought (i–iii). The paper starts with poststructuralist views of discourse salient in (i) Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory. Laclau and Mouffe’s assumption that no discourse is a closed entity but rather transformed through contact with other discourses is taken as the introductory premise to present a large family of (ii) critical discourse studies, characterized as text-analytical practices explaining how discourse partakes in the production and negotiations of ideological meanings. Finally, the paper discusses (iii) three recent discourse analytical models: Discourse Space Theory, Critical Metaphor Analysis, and Legitimization-Proximization Model. These new theories make a further (and thus far final) step toward consolidation of the social-theoretical and linguistic bases in contemporary discourse studies. The empirical benefits of this consolidation are discussed in the last part of the paper, which includes a case study where the new models are used in the analysis of Polish anti-immigration discourse.

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A meta-structuralist trap: Periodisation and Jan Mukařovský’s structuralism

Author(s): Aneta Daszuta / Language(s): English / Issue: 12/2018

The aim of this article is to show some methodological traps connected with the common tendency for periodisation of phenomena or processes in research, basing on the example of secondary literature about Czech structuralism, especially Jan Mukařovský’s theory. The author describes the narratives shaped in these works and shows how their symbolic charge directs the way of thinking about the heritage of the Prague school and Jan Mukařovský, which may influence the interpretation of his literary and aesthetic theory.

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A NON-PHALLOCENTRIC FEMININE WRITING PRACTICE IN VIRGINIA WOOLF AND ERENDİZ ATASÜ THROUGH THE ‘ALL-ENCOMPASSING FEMALE LANGUAGE’

Author(s): Muzaffer Derya Subasi Nazlipinar / Language(s): English / Issue: 33/2017

Language has always played an active role in creating a subjugated life for women. In this limited life, civilization is patriarchal, history is HIStory, literature is phallocentric and language is man-made. In order to break the chain of vicious circle, forcing them being the inferior ‘others’ of men, women seek the ways of de(con)structing all the fixed and hierarchical structures of male discourse and its manmade language. Among those women are Virginia Woolf and Erendiz Atasü, who assert that women can transcend all patriarchal boundaries between body/mind, female/male and self/other through the ‘all-encompassing female language’, enabling a nonphallocentric feminine writing practice. Depending on their concerns, this study puts forward how phallocentric ideology affects women and how it is challenged by women’s writing by basing its argument on post-structuralist feminist theories. It analyzes the pursuit of a female language by Woolf and Atasü to find out if the female language shares common features despite the philosophic, religious and cultural differences. The comparative analysis of the two writers reveals that the all-encompassing female language challenges and brings down the phallocentric discourse by de(con)structing the distance between ‘body and mind’ and achieves ‘wholeness’ by moving beyond the fixed confines of sexual differences.

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A POSTMODERN NARRATIVE FOR AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY

Author(s): Philip Higgs / Language(s): English / Issue: 04/2016

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.

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A post-structuralist revised Weil–Lévi-Strauss transformation formula for conceptual value-fields

Author(s): James B. Harrod / Language(s): English / Issue: 2-3/2018

The structuralist André-Weil–Claude-Lévi-Strauss transformation formula (CF), initially applied to kinship systems, mythology, ritual, artistic design and architecture, was rightfully criticized for its rationalism and tendency to reduce complex transformations to analogical structures. I present a revised non-mathematical revision of the CF, a general transformation formula (rCF) applicable to networks of complementary semantic binaries in conceptual value-fields of culture, including comparative religion and mythology, ritual, art, literature and philosophy. The CF is a rule-guided formula for combinatorial conceptualizing in non-representational, presentational mythopoetics and other cultural symbolizations.

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A quoi servent les genres? Partage, délimitation et classification dans l’anthropologie structurale et cognitive, sur l’exemple de la culture musicale

Author(s): Bojan Žikic / Language(s): French / Issue: 2/2009

Levi-Strauss’s theoretical-methodological "legatee" – anthropological structuralism was one of the most important theoretical frameworks used in cognitive anthropology. Since it was sometimes too abstract for ‘practical’ minds, trained in British-American empirical traditions, Levi-Strauss thought was mediated through the works of British structural-functionalist, particularly those of Mary Douglas and Edmund Leach, who established its premises as a kind of contextualised particularism of the unquestioned universalism. Ideas about the way in which human cultural mind functions, is one of the corner stones of cognitive anthropology, which cognitive anthropology shares with structural anthropology, and from which cognitive anthropology actually inherits what it shares with structural anthropology – this sounds properly structural – that is: an interest in the processes of division, demarcation and classification in a sense of cultural management of a perceived surrounding reality. An example for such analysis, that I use in this paper, is music, or more precisely music culture, an expression that I use in order to imply that the affinity to a type of music, or musical genre should be understood in a sense of a particular cultural way of thinking and acting.

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

Author(s): DEB J. HILL / Language(s): English / Issue: 02/2013

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.

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A Structural Study on the Image of the Turk in the British Caricatures

Author(s): Evrim Ulusan Öztürkmen / Language(s): English / Issue: 91/2017

The main tool of the caricature is the “line”. The line on its own, the characteristics of the line such as being horizontal, vertical, or diagonal and its figural characteristics such as being circular, curved, diagonal, or zig-zag create different associations and semantic fields in the mind. While the line in the caricature is processed with such tools as color, texture, shadow and perspective, it creates a discourse consisting of verbal and visual patterns. In this research, the following questions were sought to be answered by examining six cartoons published in England in the magazine Punch during World War I: What kind of image of the Turk do the lines in the England caricatures create? What kind of relationship is there between the visual content and the verbal content of the caricature? What are the concepts that make up the positive and negative contents of the images of the Turk?

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Activist Philosophy and the Occurent Arts

Author(s): Brian Massumi / Language(s): English / Issue: 3/2013

This text deals with a number of interrelated concepts – from something doing to the bare fact of activity, from bare activity to event and change, from change to potential and the production of the new, from production of the new to process as becoming. But process of becoming is also self-creation, and as such is double. It consists of relational and qualitative dimensions, which are also in their turn political and aesthetic, that is aesthetico-political and speculative-pragmatic. Practices we call politics and practices we call art are all integrally aesthetico-political, and every aesthetico-political activity is integrally speculative-pragmatic, and as such can be approached through the concept of techniques of existence. They are inventive of subjective forms in the activist sense – dynamic unities of events unfolding – so they qualify whatever domain in which their creativity is operative as an occurrent art.

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Afektivna topologija: Maks Rajnhard kuća (1992) Pitera Ajzenmana

Author(s): Željka Pješivac / Language(s): Serbian / Issue: 3/2013

This paper reconsiders the relation between digitally modeled architecture and a body in front of it or in it. Such a relationship investigates production or better affection of haptic space in a viewer’s body, and thus dislocation of the discursive function of the human subject and vision. Developing this thesis through historical, comparative and analytical method, the objective of this paper is to elaborate contemporary cognitions of affect and affectation (in the era of digital media) and modifications of a body perception in interaction with digital technology manifested through architectural design. The starting point is based on the philosophical views of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Mark Hansen. Attention is moving from poststructuralistic semiology and theory of text toward a new phenomenology.

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Aforizam u nezgodno vrijeme

Author(s): Jacques Derrida / Language(s): Croatian / Issue: 23/2018

Aforizam je ime. Kao što mu ime kaže, aforizam odvaja, bilježi disocijaciju (apo), završava, razgraničuje, utvrđuje (orizo). Aforizam dovršava odvajajući, odvaja kako bi dovršio - i odredio. […]

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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.

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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.

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Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the Perception of Reality from the Visual Field of the Other: Analysis of the Relation between Ordinary Language Philosophy and Poststructural Critique of Vision

Author(s): Margareta Jelic / Language(s): English / Issue: 9/2016

The first objective of this work is to establish a parallel between the ordinary language philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein as well as the philosophy of Stanley Cavell and poststructuralism and its theories through their apprehension of vision and seeing as conceptual categories. The second objective is the analysis of perception of reality from the visual field of the other (children, women, other civilizations and peripheral parts of society) as a place of position of the subject in the frame of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic poststructural theory, Jacques Derrida’s deconstructivism and psychoanalytic poststructural feminist theories (Irigaray, Kristeva).

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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.

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ALWAYS ON THE RUN: THE VICISSITUDES OF REALISM IN HUNGARIAN CRITICISM

Author(s): Sándor Hites / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2014

In this article I offer an overview of the ways in which the term realism has been understood and used in Hungarian literary criticism, from the introduction of the term into Hungarian discourses in the middle of the 19th century to the post-1989 period, when the term had to grapple with the legacy of its appropriation by the Socialist regime. I examine three specific junctures in the critical trajectory of Realism: the introduction of the term in the 1850s, the uses and abuses of the term by Marxist ideologues, and finally the aversion towards the term that emerged in the post-Socialist era. In addition to examining pivotal moments in the history of this critical concept in Hungarian literary discourse, my inquiry also offers a critical perspective from which to consider an enduring anxiety concerning the achievements, past and future, of Hungarian literary culture, an anxiety that finds expression in a symptomatic concern with the ways in which tendencies in Hungarian culture do or do not relate to cultural developments outside of Hungary.

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

Author(s): Thomas Basbøl / Language(s): English / Issue: 06/2015

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.

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Antagonističko, agonističko i singularno pluralno političko

Author(s): Nada Harbaš,Bernard Harbaš / Language(s): Bosnian / Issue: 01+02/2011

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.

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