Teorie vyprávění v kontextu Pražské školy
The review of: Bohumil Fořt: Teorie vyprávění v kontextu Pražské školy. Brno: Masarykova univerzita 2008, 135 s.
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The review of: Bohumil Fořt: Teorie vyprávění v kontextu Pražské školy. Brno: Masarykova univerzita 2008, 135 s.
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Contemporary humanities are increasingly criticized for their abandonment of rigorous scientific methods and their indifference, if not hostility, to the issue of truth. Particularly postmodernism is accused of being directly responsible for the emergence of the post-truth era in the academic and cultural field. Such critiques have been recently appropriated by conservative thinkers and the far-right, who turn them into political attacks against liberal values. The article aims at identifying and analyzing those features of the contemporary humanities which risk to offer theoretical support to the practical attitudes characteristic of our post-truth era. I suggest some ideas for a revision of those features, arguing at the same time against conservative attacks on the humanities. The article starts by comparing some fundamental moments in the development of the discourse on truth within the post-Nietzschean philosophy of the 20th century. The propositional and the phenomenological-existentialist conceptions of truth elaborated in the first half of the century are used as background to understand the impact of the “linguistic turn” on the humanities since the 1960s, with particular attention to the constructivist paradigm which grew out of the “linguistic turn” and continues to dominate the humanities today. Constructivism is the main object of conservative critiques of the humanities, though what conservatives really target through constructivism is the discourse of emancipation, which have linked the work of scholars in the humanities with the struggles of minorities and marginalized groups in society. The article rejects conservative critiques and affirms the necessity to develop the emancipatory potential of the humanities after the “linguistic turn”. This presupposes a renewed attention to the issue of truth, which would avoid a return to pre-Nietzschean, metaphysical or positivist approaches, looking for theoretical support rather in the 20th-century propositional and existential understandings of truth. The article takes issues from this point of view with three aspects of the contemporary humanities which are becoming more and more problematic in our post-truth era: ‘postmodernist relativism’, ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, ‘discursive imprisonment’. Rehabilitating facts, questioning the legitimacy of interpretations, reinstating agency, freedom and responsibility are the strategic moves suggested in the article to equip the humanities with the tools for critically facing the theoretical and practical challenges of the post-truth era and adequately respond to conservative attacks.
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The article considers the parameters of the professional ethos of an artist who chooses the neotraditionalist platform in light of Bourdieuian field model of cultural production. Based on the classification of groups of artists in accordance with the type and amount of their capital, the article describes the characteristics of the professional ethos of the dominant groups of artists, namely, the “aesthetes” and the “notables”. Referring to the ideas of notables artists’ social engagement as they developed from the end of the 18th century throughout the first decades of the 20th century, the article outlines the contradictions in the artistic professional ethos. The specificity of the ways in which artists implemented their creative ambitions under the conditions of Stalinist Soviet culture is explained through arguing that in the 1930s–1940s the traditionalist tendencies in culture were predominant. The case of the artistic behavior of the Soviet neotraditionalist composer Sergej Рrokofiev is analysed. It is claimed that Рrokofiev, using the resources of autonomy and heteronomy, combined the positions of an aesthete and a notable.
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This paper examines how heteronormativity operates as a mechanism of representation in cyber-narratives.1 I insinuate that post-structural analyses should be further appropriated in understanding cyberspace as a realm of power/discipline. Cyber-narratives on the “Muslim woman” for example are complex processes of disciplining into being “mute as ever” (Spivak 1988: 294). This paper ultimately re-reads cyberspace as a heteronormative realm imbricating “sexuality” and “race” (as technologies), and regularly representing the normal/abnormal, white/brown, man/woman as unproblematic, fixed categories (Butler 1990). Paraphrasing critiques of visual filmic narratives, the subsequent sections unravel how cyberspace creates unproblematic gendered and racialized “naked [read objective] bodies” of brown/white/men/women (Jameson 1990: 1). Michel Foucault (1978) and Judith Butler (1990, 1993), in their genealogies of sexuality, have examined how visual objectivity of the body itself are processes of control/discipline. This paper is an endeavour towards adapting such genealogies to cyberspace.
More...Nad novou knihou Tomáše Koblížka
The text is a review study of Tomáš Koblížek’s book. After an introductory summary of the book, we discuss three main issues: 1) the simplistic conception of Edmund Husserl’s “phenomenology of speech”, 2) the insufficient analysis of basic concepts, especially language as “expression”, 3) the adoption and emphasis of the disjunctive conception of two ways of seeing speech — original and scientific — in the wake of H. Pos. We argue that it is the third issue in particular that undermines the final section of the book, which introduces the conceptual dimension of speech. In Koblížek’s conception, the theorization of ethics becomes possible only by returning to an “originary” consciousness of language and is incompatible with a scientific stance. We suggest that, in our view, the contradiction is not so strong and a merger of the two is — even in the spirit of the “Saussurean postulates” — possible.
More...Le Magazine littéraire, br. 438, siječanj 2005.
Interview with Alain Badiou by Patrice Maniglier
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Motivated by readings of Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, and Deleuze and Guattari, this paper outlines the basis for three related claims: (i) the knowledge economy is a form of neoliberal globalization; (ii) education has become a form of knowledge capitalism; (iii) poststructuralism provides a post-Marxist critique of knowledge capitalist form of neoliberal globalization. I see my own work as a working out of the exploration of these themes aided by the work of Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze. While these philosophers view themselves in some kind of relationship to the legacy of Marx as Marxist or post-Marxist thinkers, they also entertain ways of going beyond both Marx and the Althusser’s Spinoza-inspired reading of Marx that was dominant in 1970s France. Foucault was intent on establishing a Left culture that was not Marxist, one that could engage with neoliberalism that did not simply repeat old structuralist binaries yet he remained wedded to political economy. He pursued the genealogy of the revival of homo economicus as the basis for the emergence of economic liberalism in the twentieth century. Deleuze and Guattari remained Marxists even after 1968 while systematically displacing Marxist concepts to introduce the concept of “desiring-production” (Marx and Freud), to put desire into the social realm of production as a libidinal investment that takes place without a subject and is autonomous, self-constituting, and creative. Lyotard, as a post-Marxist thinker, examined the status and development of knowledge, science and technology in advanced capitalist societies within the broader context of the sociology of postindustrial society and studies of postmodern culture. After the “fall” of communism, Derrida embraces Marx’s spirit of radical critique and the prospect of the New International to formulate a philosophy of social responsibility. In recent work inspired by these thinkers I posit an alternative form of educational globalization that I call “knowledge socialism” that is based on principles of openness, the ethics of collaboration, and the rise of peer production, which together can constitute a powerful modality of transnational networked intelligence.
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Review of: Michel Foucault, Povijest seksualnosti 4, Priznanja puti, Zagreb: Domino, 2021, 434 str.
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This paper aims to show the role played by the relations of comparison and associativity, as they are introduced in Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale, in the theories of Luis J. Prieto. This is done, first, on the basis of a historiographical approach, and second, on the basis of an exegetical approach to Prieto’s works. Thus, the paper first presents and analyses three programmes, corresponding to three courses Prieto gave at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba during the early 1950s. The analysis of these programmes will show the centrality of Saussure’s Cours in Prieto’s linguistic theorizing. After this, an attempt will be made to show the continuity between the theoretical tenets presupposed by the courses’ programmes and the main proposal advanced in Prieto’s article “Classe et concept. Sur la pertinence et sur les rapports saussuriens ‘de comparaison’ et ‘d’échange’”. By constructing this continuity we attempt to show: (1) the constant influence the Cours exerted upon Prieto’s thinking throughout his whole career, and (2) that such influence is manifested in the fact that Prieto did not generalize linguistic principles as such, but rather posited that linguistic principles were instances of more general semiotic ones.
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The aim of this study is to examine the concept of thinking as it appears in the works of the French post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze (including texts co-authored with Félix Guattari). More narrowly, the article focuses on the ways in which these authors draw inspiration for their definition of thinking from the works of French poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, and formulates a thesis in close connection to works by contemporary philosopher Jeffrey A. Bell. Bell, who also focuses on Deleuze’s notion of thinking, defines the dynamics of Deleuze’s thought through the concept of the ‘dynamic system’, referring to a form of conceptual consistency that, on the one hand, does not consist in stable identifications, or representation, yet does not, on the other, fall into pure indiscernibility, or chaos. Against the background of relevant discussions by the authors in question — Deleuze, Guattari, Artaud, and Bell — the study aims to conceptualise literary language as a structure that unfolds in space, and that can be understood as a fluid field between representation and chaos. The study also includes critical reflection on a similar idea by Jacques Derrida.
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The paper is suggesting one possible angle for the re-examination of Foucault’s portrayal of the historical role of German neoliberalism in his 1979 lectures entitled Naissance de la biopolitique. This particular season has been the object of the increased interest in recent decades for various reasons. One of the reasons is the broader theme of “biopolitics” developed in them (as well as in the two immediately preceding seasons), which was instrumental in subsequent interpretations and applications even before the 1979 lectures became available integrally. Another reason that has fuelled various interpretations and contentions, that are still ongoing as some recent publications attest, has to do with the general setting and tone of Foucault’s dealings with neoliberalism. Debates that have ensued have mostly been centred on the question of whether or not Foucault embraced certain neoliberal tenets that he was explaining in these lectures. But what is usually overlooked in these debates is the question of the historical accuracy of the impression that emerges from the 1979 lectures about the role that German “ordoliberalism” had after WWII. It is in a way surprising considering that Foucault’s relationship with the “historians’ guild” was strained, interspersed with criticisms and polemics. Some of these critiques are sketchily reproduced here to point at certain repeating weaknesses in Foucault’s dealings with the past. Crucial failing seems to be the concept of the “cut” or discontinuity whose consequence was usually such that Foucault was often forcing great contrasts onto the past. The concluding section proposes, although in a preliminary fashion and through a short comparison, that Foucault might have overstated the role that “ordoliberal” ideas had in Germany during the 1950s and 1960s precisely because he might have accepted the view that some of these ideas were not only the motor of economic and social development, but sort of a “third way” solution.
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The article describes the applied significance of the work of wit. Freud’s analysis of wit made an invaluable contribution to the cultural heritage of the 20th century, and was used in the fields of philosophy, art and political science, while its actual clinical application was sidelined. This paradoxical situation did not begin to change until the second half of the 20th century, when major new clinical approaches emerged, most importantly the structural psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. Lacan’s work provided a radical reassessment of psychoanalysis technique, including the conclusions Freud made in his observations of the unconscious “work of wit”. This article shows that this definition provided opportunities for a more direct reliance on the effects of the work of wit in psychoanalysis technique. The analyst is able to direct and support replacement mechanisms characteristic of the work of wit, and also to assist the analysand in transferring the focus of need from the object to symbolic mechanisms of satisfaction. The analytic process is also similar to the work of wit in the symbolic order of the analysand’s presence in sessions, The work of wit proves to be an impressive, large-scale structure that encompasses everything “binding” the subject to language and to the speaking Other.
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The subject I propose to address is so broad that the following few pages will inevitably take the form of a summary. Moreover, my title contains the word “structural”, which today is more misleading than illuminating. To avoid misunderstandings as much as possible, I will proceed as follows. First, I will give an abstract definition of what I consider to be the structural approach to literature. This approach will then be illustrated by a concrete problem, the narrative, and more specifically the plot problem. Examples would be taken from Boccacio's Decameron. Finally, I will try to draw some general conclusions about the nature of narrative and the principles of its analysis.
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A different, immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis is currently informing the posthuman turn. Emerging from an ERC-funded project titled Homo Mimeticus, this opening essay introduces the mimetic turn in posthuman studies via three related steps: first, it differentiates aesthetic realism and the metaphysics of sameness it entails from a posthuman mimesis open to differential processes of becoming other; second it inscribes the mimetic turn in a brief genealogy of re-turns to mimesis in the history of western thought; and third, it turns to contemporary manifestations of hypermimesis—from Covid-19 to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—to test the relevance of the mimetic turn. Together, these opening steps argue for the urgency to rethink mimesis in light of all too human, environmental, and posthuman challenges in the twenty-first century.
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A mimetic turn is emerging in posthuman studies. Taking as a starting point a recent re-turn to an immanent, embodied, and relational conception of mimesis constitutive of the ERC-funded project, Homo Mimeticus, this paper proposes three related conceptual foundations to further a “mimetic turn” already at play in sf simulations and now operative in embodied imitations as well. Building on pioneering work on the centrality of an “embodied” and “cognitive nonconscious” (Hayles 1999, 2017) on the one hand, and a “relational” conception of “posthuman subjectivity” (Braidotti 2019) on the other, I argue that mimesis, understood as an unconscious tendency to mimic others (be they human or nonhuman) provides a decisive and still missing link to account for the capacity of (post)humans to become other in the first place. The concepts of “mimetic pathos,” the “mimetic unconscious,” and “hypermimesis” provide three related conceptual steps toward a mimetic turn in posthuman studies, which as this special issue shows, is already underway.
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The relationship with other species has played a fundamental role in cultural evolution. Animal behavior has always been a source of inspiration for the human being: dance, music, costumes, rituals, art and technology were born through zoomimesis. The encounter with animal otherness is an epiphany and not simply an example: it is the unfolding of a different form of existence. To understand this, it is essential to question the traditional conception of animality. Animality is a metapredicative condition that also encompasses human beings, so that animal otherness is recognized as a partner in a contaminative dialogue. Humans are particularly interested in other species: many anthropological and psychological studies demonstrate this. This animal appeal has characterized the history of humanity since its origins, as shown by rock art. Posthumanist philosophy recognizes the hybridization between the human and the non-human, in a perspective of relational ontology. For this reason, zoomimesis represents a central topic in the posthumanist vision.
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This essay analyzes the use of fire on Upland Island Wilderness Area (UIW) to examine how postindustrial wilderness sites rework operative notions of nature, wildness, and preservation within U.S. environmental thinking and politics. Postindustrial wilderness areas complicate conceptualizations of nature as pristine, unspoiled, or even beautiful, challenging us to address biodiversity and ecosystem function in ways that are less centered on human(ist) values. An intensively managed pine plantation prior to wilderness designation, UIW blatantly transgresses liberal humanist boundaries of nature and culture, ecology and industry. I draw on feminist and posthumanist theory to demonstrate how contestations surrounding the use of fire on UIW resituate ethical and epistemic implications of wilderness management, offering a critical counterpoint to the prioritization of pristine nature within U.S. environmental politics and demanding less humanist approaches to the complex forest ecologies of the plantationocene.
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With the ongoing environmental disruptions, designers are increasingly interested in exploring nature–technology entanglements that create sustainable and collaborative futures. Although largely unarticulated, these emerging design inquiries are motivated by care for nature, which indirectly depends on cultural and social human practices. Drawing on a broad set of works on care from feminist theory, science and technology studies, and human–computer interaction, this article introduces a care framework that focuses on revealing tensions in the interrelationship between humans and nonhumans. The framework is used to examine an initial study in which five participants engaged with a speculative design probe, specifically a combination of a device and a plant, envisioning a scenario in which plants generate electricity. We reveal how forms of care manifest differently in a human–plant–technology dynamic and identify tensions, such as plants being considered utilities, proxies, or humans.
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The concluding words of Donna J. Haraway’s essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’ read, “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”. In this article, I aim to determine the extent to which that declaration implicates the question of the female body in representation—particularly, the goddess’s. Building on existing work that examines the female body in relation to the tradition of the nude in painting, I explore the possibility of assigning an identity to the goddess that Haraway chooses the cyborg over—specifically that of Venus, the mythological goddess of love and beauty, which I further read within the framework offered by the collaborative exchange between Haraway and the artist Lynn Randolph. In light of this, I position the cyborg and goddess within a certain vision of the relationship between women, nature and technology. In my conclusion, I call for a consideration of the possibility of a posthuman goddess.
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