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Why does anyone need, especially today, when slowly, but steadily we become victims of „virtual reality's“ cybermimesis, to attempt to be „more real“ than „Reality“ itself?
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Nearly all the work of Kara Walker produced thus far including Gone: An Historical Romance Of A Civil War As It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress And Her Heart (1994); The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995); The Battle of Atlanta: Being the Narrative of a Negress in the Flames of Desire . A Reconstruction (1995); Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, K.E. B. Walker, Colored (1997) . I cite a few of the titles to give you some flavor of the work . nearly all the work employs the same technique: the adhesion of black paper cut-outs to white gallery walls.
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The other, which is seen as a form of self-definition, is used as a way of telling what is different in historical context. The view of the other is stereotype, stigmatization, prejudice, marginalization and exclusion. Since the history of humanity, many other types of othering have emerged and individuals have identified “other /others” to identify themselves. In this study, Gypsies subjected to ethnocentric marginalization are discussed. The Gypsies, who live as a nomadic community, have been marginalized in every country they went to, and faced many exclusionary definitions. The aim of this study is to examine the problems of Gypsies’ marginalization in the context of a historical perspective and to emphasize that cinema, which is a branch of art, should focus more on the excluded people like Gypsies. For the purpose of the study, the film Korkoro Tony directed by Tony Gatlif is discussed. The film tells the traumatic events of a real Gypsy family. The film Korkoro was chosen for its direct overlap with the work. The film analysis was based on the deconstructive reading of Derrida. During the reading, the film was analyzed on 5 questions determined by New Mexico Literacy Project. Although not all Western films are examined individually, it is clear that in general terms, non-Gypsy directors do not pay much attention to the problem of Gypsies’ marginalization. For this reason, both literature review and film analysis concluded that Western directors should make more films about the marginalization of Gypsies.
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Marshall McLuhan, in the 1960s, coined the well-known phrase “the world is a global village” at a time when the Internet did not exist, and new communication and media technologies were about to transform the world into a planetary village via interconnection. However, McLuhan may not have anticipated that accelerated technological advances would be made possible by communication without a “physical mediator-factor” and that the utilitarian and instrumental dimension of communication would give way to cultural and social domination and manipulation. In the numerical age, Foucault’s notion of “bio-politics” as a system of complete control and regulation of the body and life by means of science and technology is, at first glance, an outdated term, belonging to the past of modern, biopolitical and repressive societies. The numerical control is today based on a deep urge for individual and narcissistic exhibitionism in the new expository society.
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This paper analyses the formation of power of the Christian regime of truth in the context of Foucault’s concept of strategic formations. The main emphasis is on the sexual formation of power in three focal points of its agency. The first focal point is formed around the conflict between the Old Testament truth regime and the Canaan cult of fertility. The second focal point is formed around the influence of ancient philosophical thought, primarily through the philosophy of stoicism, which sees abstinence from the sexual act as an opening to divine inspiration and around medical knowledge of antiquity. The third focal point is formed around control mechanisms of the Christian regime of truth through classification, regulation, prohibition, tariffing offences and corrections of doctrine. The main purpose of the formation of power is the vertical structuring of the regime of truth in its anthropomorphic and androcentric immanence.
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This paper offers the basic theses behind the concept of narcissistic distortion, which can take place in two directions – the paper explains subject formation and experience in so-called concave and convex narcissistic mirroring. The theory proposed in this paper largely relies on Lacan's mirror stage, and on his contribution to subject's development of self-consciousness through constitutive-imaginary dimensions of subjectivity. In cases of inserted concave or convex distortion, the subject locates themselves in the place of the Other, by identifying themselves with their own distorted mirror image in the Other. These distortions influence subject formation in a very concrete manner, carrying over the predisposition for certain instabilities in latter mirroring. The paper is illustrated with a case study aimed at easier understanding of the approach offered in it. It also provides a critical reflection on the possibility of plane mirror formation, as well as a detailed designation of convex distortion and four positions of concave narcissistic distortion.
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Borowicz analyses Jerzy Krzyszoń’s novel Obłęd [Madness], treating it not only as a literary testimony of the experience of psychosis, but also as an expression of the social conflicts that marked Poland after March 1968. The first part of the article is concerned with a psychoanalytic understanding of psychosis and the possibility of its linguistic recording, whereas the second part places the fears and hallucinations described in the novel in their historical context. Obłęd [Madness] can be seen as an unexpected literary reaction to the anti-Semitic campaign of March 1968 which suggests another, more inclusive, understanding of Polish identity.
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A quick look on the history of criticism and literary theory of the current period shows curious reversals and strange returns. Indeed one can see the slow and unrelenting disappearance of rhetoric, justly qualified as restricted, since it has been all too often limited to identifying and classifying of the various figures. It has been replaced by a new criticism, a fundamentally formalist one, the assumptions of which are akin to those of the “text sciences”; if the structure, the “poetical function” of the texts were underlined, it was to the detriment of their functional reference and their meaning to put it simply. There is no doubt that today this approach is running out of steam and is meeting some decline. For that reason, the history of literature is coming back in force and finds a new youth with the developments of the theories of perception. But there reappears also a new interest in a semantic approach of the texts, which is concerned with their references. This approach, which comes from logistics (G. Frege), undoubtedly opens a philosophical horizon, particularly on some kind of ontology. Thus it is not surprising to find that a great many studies question the metaphorical process again from that perspective given the paradoxical nature of its reference and thus of its ontology which could be summed up through the usual exordium of the Majorcan storytellers: “Aixo era y no era” (it was and was not). Paul Ricœur insists on the paradoxical nature of the metaphorical reference since “the metaphor is a way of working on the language which consists in giving the logical subjects predicates that are incompatible with the first ones” (From Text to Action).In his book The Living Metaphor, the French philosopher analyses the concept of the “ontological metaphor” from the idea of the “divided reference”. Ricœur moves away from a purely stylistic or linguistic approach, centred on the word (a deviant denomination) to describe the metaphorical process on the level of the phrase and of the discourse (a non-pertinent predication): “Then there is a metaphor, since we can discern <…> the resistance of words <…> their incompatibility on the level of a literal interpretation of a sentence” (From Text to Action). But that non-pertinence and the abolition of the reference in the everyday reality are not a purely gratuitous verbal game, for they liberate “another kind of reference to other dimensions of reality” (The Living Metaphor). It is that way of tension of the metaphor which we intend to present in our study for it expresses some kind of „ontological vehemence” as Ricœur puts it so well? Let us add that the metaphor seen as a new description of reality, can be conceived, so to speak, as a “model”, in the sense of a prototype which accounts of the way a literary text functions when it is a “opening on the world”, when it places itself “in the service of things that want to be expressed” and when it responds “to the need of a discourse that comes from all forms of experience” (Mimesis, Reference and new figuration in “Time and Narrative”).
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This essay attempts to uncover image strategies in Zsuzsa Bánk̕ s novel "Die Hellen Tage", in which characters use images in order to construct for themselves a sustainable order of meaning. ›Image‹ is understood here as a structured and structuring scheme, also visually mediated, that serves as an orienting pattern for thinking, feeling and acting. This notion points to four major forces of structuring or creating order (perceiving, thinking, feeling and acting) in their close interconnection.
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In his book Ghosts of My Life, Mark Fisher borrows Jacques Derrida’s term hauntology and repurposes it to describe a sense of a lost futurity haunting contemporary music. He singles out party hauntology as a specific subset of hauntology in pop music in which uneasiness looms behind a facade of excess and pleasure. This paper revamps Fisher’s term by focusing on the music of the Canadian artist The Weeknd. Exhibiting what Fisher terms depressive hedonia and interpassivity, The Weeknd is an example of the retreat into privatized suffering which cannot recognize its social character. However, the paper goes further by arguing that The Weeknd’s music possesses an eerie quality due to a clash between upbeat, dance rhythms and dark lyrics which depict The Weeknd’s constant plunging into recreational sex and drugs although they do not satisfy him. As Fisher explains, the eerie is necessarily bound up with issues of agency and the paper will argue that the invisible agent behind The Weeknd’s compulsive repetition is the death drive understood as Žižekian undead wandering around in guilt. Ultimately, as the mechanisms of capitalism in itself operate by the rules of the death drive, it will be shown that,due to his inability to understand his place in the system and submission to the necrocratic symbolic order, The Weeknd’s music is the perfect soundtrack to the capitalist realist regime.
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This essay aims to elucidate how political paradigm transitions affect trends in architecture and urbanization. For this purpose, the Foucault term heterotopias are used as the notion that reflects architectural and constructed objects as not merely being places of living, but also the status and power symbols of certain individuals and the ruling oligarchy. To illustrate our premise, we used a devastated, organically constructed, socialistic Hotel Ruža, located in the old town city center, which was later, during the postwar reconstruction, turned into a modern building. Today, this newly reconstructed hotel aims to show the guests’ affiliation to a specific social class and create the simulacrum that Mostar is an urbanized and modern city that possesses traditional elements interposed with contemporary urbanistic constructs. However, at the same time, this modern building’s construction serves to create a feeling or an illusion that the country is approaching western, developed urban spaces, while the reality is very different.
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This paper aims to investigate how power relationships operate in the language standardization field. To do this, a theoretical framework based on Michael Foucault’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of power is applied to determine what power relationships are evident in the works on standardization abroad (as opposed to Lithuania) and the same framework is used to analyze qualitative interviews with Lithuanian copy editors in order to find out what position they occupy in the Lithuanian field of language standardization. It appears that whereas both higher education in general and specific linguistic expertise are required to gain power in the language standardization fields of the English-speaking countries, in Lithuania it is specifically the linguistic education and belonging to the state language committee that gives access to the power to generate knowledge and thus standardize language.
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Founded on readings in quantum theory, poststructuralist philosophy, and world literatures, this article argues that an Orphic tradition can be traced over the last two thousand years, translating a history of human response to the environment which has contributed to the poetic formulation of an ecological ethics that we propose to call vatic environmentalism.
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The article aims at providing a genealogical discourse analysis of the document United States Objectives and Programs for National Security, known as NSC 68, with a particular focus on the role that the discourse of NSC 68 played at the outset of the Cold War. The analytical basis of the research is the post-structuralist Foucauldian discourse analysis and the realist paradigm of international relations theory. These tools are applied to reveal the repercussions that the discourse of this document constituted, and, at the same time, the subject knowledge it offered to the U.S. political leaders. Via the scientific method of comparison, analysis and synthesis, the paper highlights the importance and role of the aforementioned discourse in formulating ideological differences and in the interpretation of threats when identifying state’s attitude and position in a new world of bipolar division.
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The author analyzes the difference between Hegel’s and Deleuze’s notions of ‘the difference’. Hegel’s heterogenous and non-identical difference dissipates in a speculative movement of thought and becomes a moment in a whole that is identical with itself. Deleuze, on contrary, tries to pull the difference out from a dialectical embrace of the notion and to affirm it as a transcendental quantity, or as a condition of possibility of empirical differentiations. There¬fore, he forwards transcendental empiricism in opposition to the Hegelian identity of difference. There is a sharp contrast between these two conceptions of the difference, but they both, in their specific manner, possess strong practical/political charge and both can be used as explanatory models for understanding today’s condition in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the region, as well as in the much wider context.
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The purpose of the article covers the background of interdisciplinarity in art history and design, identifying main movements that contributed to the formation of the interdisciplinary methodology of the XXI century. The research methodology is in applying of historical-comparative and chronological methods, as well as the method of terminological analysis, which helped to identify and consider the theories in philosophy, aesthetics, culture, oriented towards the consistent development of the system methodology, as well as their application in art history and design. The scientific novelty of the study is to broaden the understanding of the occurrence and formation of interdisciplinary methodology in art history and design, identifying the movements that contributed to the synthesis of knowledge. Conclusions. The movements in philosophy, aesthetics, and culture of the 20th century, covered in this article, contributed to the occurrence of a general scientific interdisciplinary methodology that is still relevant today. The progressive development of the systematic process is reflected in he structuralism and poststructuralism which specific to Western European art. The formation of systematic methodology in the USSR is also important. This commitment for integration has brought together the concepts and methods of different sciences, which served for building synergies with its common basis for describing the mechanisms of occurrence of any phenomena in nature, technology, society. Synergism is aimed at studying processes in complex, dynamic, self-organizing systems. At the same time, the laws of self-organization of these systems are not private, but universal in the character of the transition from the lowest forms to the highest, from one order to another, and therefore apply to the study of culture and art.
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The title of the study is a paraphrase of Gilles Deleuze’s inspiring work How Do We Recognize Structuralism? (1974). The explanation proceeds in three steps. First, the author – following Wolfgang Iser’s conception – defines the relevant differences between ‘discourse’ and ‘theory’ (W. Iser). Second, he presents Marxism as a discoursive ideal type (Max Weber’s Idealtyp) that characterizes several (seven) distinctive features: (i) totality, (ii) dialectics, (iii) base and superstructure, (iv) materialism and historization, (v) subjective and objective, (vi) true and inevitable, (vii) revolutionary practice. In the third chapter of his study, the author briefly formulates a wider sociological context; inspired by the concepts of Shmuel Eisenstadt and Cornelius Castoriadis, he defines Marxism as one of the discourses articulating the cultural project of modernity and as part of a permanent process of ‘social self-production’.
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