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The present study concentrates on the phenomenon of intertextuality in one of Bohumil Hrabal’s key early works, namely, the “existential” short story entitled Kain. The author examines especially the intertextual resonances between Hrabal’s work, Camus’s The Stranger, Dante’s Vita nuova and Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther
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The paper discusses one aspect of the reflection on Hegel’s philosophy in France after 1945 and its impact on literary work. Hegel attracted not only Existentialist philosophers but also some writers interested in Hegel’s philosophy of history. The paper presents two novelists — Jacques Laurent and Roger Nimier — belonging to the “Hussards” Movement and analyses their relationship to Hegel and the influence of this relationship on their authorship.
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The article proposes a contemporary reflection on Hegel’s famous quote “the real is the rational andthe rational is the real” that tradition has often misinterpreted. Inspired by a new reading by JeanFrançois Kervégan (which translates the sentence “the rational will become effective/real and thereal/effective will become rational”), the article focuses on one of the possible illustrations of thisHegelian thesis. Émile Zola’s novel The Work consists of a very interesting analysis of the notions ofreality, effectiveness and rationality that the author applies to both literature and visual arts. Behindthe controversies of Pierre Sandoz and Claude Lantier, it is possible to discern all the debates thatopposed Émile Zola to his friend Paul Cézanne.
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The paper deals with the fundamental phenomenological difference that one can find in philosophyas analysis and interpretation of the appearing of phenomena, established by Edmund Husserl atthe very beginning of his thinking: the difference between the appearing as lived experience, andthe phenomena as appearing entities. The paper skeatches some transformations of this motive inthe late thinking of Husserl culminating in the analysis and interpretation of the „living presence“.
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The present essay represents an attempt at a new philosophical reflexion on the phenomenon of desire. Drawing on the phenomenological background, namely, on Husserl’s idea of intentionality andthe universal a priori of correlation, but also on Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and others, the author proposes to define the perceiving subject in its relationship to worldly reality precisely as desire andlack, thus highlighting what he calls an ontological dimension of desire.
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The present paper represents a phenomenological reflexion on the question of animality. Drawing from a selection of phenomenological texts, ranging from Husserl and Heidegger to MauriceMerleau-Ponty, the author pleads for a different view of animality than that which would posita neatly cut anthropological difference between the human subject and animal. In the final sectionof the text, the difficult question of inter-animality (as opposed to intersubjectivity) is treated insome detail.
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Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts are usually interpreted as a transitional work betweendifferent elements of Feuerbach’s and Hegel’s philosophy which are still strongly present in the workof young Marx, and between Marx’s mature historical materialism. In the present text, we will try toshow (with reference to the recent discussions on “young Marx”, especially in the French context),that the Manuscripts, in fact, contain an ontology that cannot be reduce either to a mere residuum ofclassical German philosophy, or to a materialist conception of social life. We shall try to describe thisoriginal ontology as an ontology of the sensible, or as an ontology of the finitude of human sensibility
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Performatives in the sense of speech act theory have long been held for the elementary building blocks of theatre and performance. This article proposes a theory of performative models as autonomous forms that are (1) propositional (to be worked with), (2) reified (things in their own right), and (3) inherently heterotelic (shifting in their purpose between models-of and models-for, and are always put to uses outside the epistemological system that created them). The article contextualises speech act theory with cultural and political events of the 1960s: the act of naming as an exemplary speech act is set against the disintegration of imperial powers and the postcolonial emancipatory initiatives striking back against the oppressive (and often nominalistically prescriptive) pasts. Rather than the acts of naming, the decisive factors are recognition (that a certain event is happening) and consensus (that the event is valid and constitutes a new social reality). Analysing case studies from drama and history, this article also addresses speech act theory’s failure to come to terms with theatre and performance proper, epitomised by Searle’s claim that, “in a perfectly straightforward sense,” there are no true speech acts (i.e., performatives) in actors’ performances – any promises made by actors on stage cannot be reasonably held to account outside the stage, in real life. This profound misunderstanding on Searle’s part (but also otherwise common) of the actors’ performed personas and the remit of their promises within the performed social realities of the play. The nature and validity of performatives made in performance is the prompt for this essay. I argue that the situation in performance is epistemologically not a parasitical form but rather a case of performatives more complex and holistic than in real life.
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In this paper, I suggest that the notion of qiyun (qi: spirit; yun: consonance) in the context of landscape painting involves a moral dimension. The Confucian doctrine of sincerity involved in bringing the landscapist’s or audience’s mind in accord with the Dao underpins the moral dimension of spiritual communion between artist, object, audience, and work. By projecting Kant’s and Schiller’s conceptions of aesthetic autonomy and the moral relevance of art onto the qiyun-focused context, we see that the reflection on parallels and differences between the two cultural traditions helps to better understand the moral dimension of qiyun aesthetics.
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Adolf Loos is one of the few figures that Wittgenstein explicitly named as an influence on his thought. Loos’s influence has been debated in the context of determining Wittgenstein’s relation to modernism, as well as in attempts to come to terms with his work as an architect. This paper looks in a different direction, examining a remark in which Wittgenstein responded to Heidegger’s notorious pronouncement that ‘the Nothing noths’ by reference to Loos’s critique of ornamentation. Wittgenstein draws a parallel between the requirement to start philosophy with an inarticulate sound and the need, in certain cultural periods, to highlight the borders of tablecloths using lace. Paying heed to Wittgenstein’s remark sheds further light on a Loosian influence at work in his thinking about modern civilization, both in his well-known ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ and in the earlier notes from his 1930 lectures at Cambridge.
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The purpose of this symposium is to explore the ways in which literature, broadly construed to include poetry and narrative in a variety of modes of representation, can change the world by providing interventions in justice. Our approach foregrounds the relationship between the activity demanded by some individual literary works and some categories of literary work on the one hand and the way in which those works can make a tangible difference to social reality on the other. We consider three types of active literary engagement: doing philosophy, ideological critique, and necessary rather than contingent performance. Kate Kirkpatrick opens with Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (2013), reading the narrator as not only a critic of colonial and postcolonial discourse but also a literary exemplar of the search for justice when it is difficult to know to what level of explanation to attribute its absence. Rafe McGregor demonstrates how the final season of Prime Video’s The Man in the High Castle (2015–19) makes a radical break from the previous three, exposing the misanthropy at the core of right-wing populism and calling for a fundamentally democratic response from the left. Finally, Karen Simecek argues that poetry in performance has a potentially reparative function for the ethically lonely – the vulnerable, the oppressed, and the persecuted – in society.
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In a period of global pandemic and confinement to our homes, the end of art is not only a philosophical hypothesis, it is a fact of society. We have experienced that modern societies, those that were able to make art an absolute at one point in their history, no longer need the arts, or the physical presence of artists and spectators, or have considered them inessential, and therefore contingent. Is this what G. W. F. Hegel prophesied with his thesis of the end of art? In this paper I aim to clarify this by referring to the sources of Hegel’s lectures and by examining the reception by nineteenth-century French writers. 1) First, I give a reminder of the different ways in which Hegel’s theme of the end of art can be interpreted. 2) Then, I give a second reminder concerning the reception of Hegel’s Aesthetics in France, with a focus on the translations. 3) Finally, I propose to study three writers who determine three ways of conceiving the appropriation of Hegel in the 19th century and of the theme of the end of art: Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert.
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The transformation of the arts, foreseen and announced by Hegel, coincides with the birth of modernity. One of its essential aspects is the noetic turn in literature, which can be seen as a manifestation of autoreflexivity within the framework of intraliterary dynamics: autoreflexivity engages the questioning of language, it redefines the status of the lyric subject and the narrator, it problematizes discursivity and thus proposes new approaches to referential reality. Literature becomes a specific form of thought and a crucible of reflection by occupying a terrain that neither science nor philosophy could explore, that of existential human experience, not yet conceptualized. Literature thus produces discourses and concepts that can later be grasped and systematized by science and philosophy. An exemplification attempts to illustrate this process from the 19th century to the present day.
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This paper attempts to cross-read the End of Art as it is conceptualized by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and André Gide’s and Jean Lorrain’s versions of the myth of Narcissus. The most relevant mythemes such as beauty, self-love, duplication, “specularity” and death are apprehended in their recovery by fin-de-siècle aesthetics. The hermeneutic back-and-forth movement between the two texts assesses the structural symbols carrying various models of the evolution of art and formulates what Hegel could have possibly understood by this concept. The results of our interpretation are then related to certain phenomena of the history of art, and particularly of literature in the 20th century.
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The article summarizes the major topoi of Hegelianism that Malraux adopts in his texts on art (The Voices of Silence, The Imaginary Museum and The Metamorphosis of the Gods), before focusing, in particular, on Malrucian interpretation of the end of art and on the links that the latter has with his own concept of the imaginary museum. According to some of Hegel’s exegetes (Bernard Bosanquet, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, Thierry de Duve, but also Theodor Adorno, Arthur Danto, Joseph Kosuth, Rainer Rochlitz or Jan Patočka), the end of traditional art paves the way for its retrospective conceptualization, its reconfiguration in the public space, as well as for very exciting debates on the nature of contemporary art, post-religious, post-national, post-historical in a way. The article illustrates the original place that Malraux occupies within this “positive” and creative interpretation of the end of art.
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Based on the theory of Arthur Coleman Danto I try to outline possible similarities between the state of art after its end and the state of melancholy. The melancholic breaks the order, thus paradoxically drawing its boundaries. Aristotle’s Problems, Robert Burton’s Melancholia, and a study of Melancholia of theorist László F. Földényi help us to name characteristics of this state.
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The question of the telos of art, understood as a term or as a purpose, occupies a key position in the theoretical writings of the humanists. During the Renaissance, the death of art had a heuristic value: it gave meaning to the notion of the “rebirth of the arts”; it legitimized the work of art historians, such as Vasari’s Lives, which were written to compensate for the death of works of art and artists, and it stimulated the legitimization undertakings that accompanied the artistic and poetic revival. The theorists of poetic art thus set out to demonstrate the usefulness of poetry but also to determine its specificity and its own purpose. The Naples school contributed to the popularization of the concept of admiratio, while the dissemination of Aristotle’s Poetics favored the spread of the concepts of mimesis and catharsis. Mimesis is therefore often considered as an “internal purpose” and subordinated to an “ultimate purpose” which consists in teaching by giving pleasure. Catharsis allows the development of a therapy for the passions and the legitimization of literary genres contested by Plato or Boethius. However, it is condemned by some who prefer a pedagogy of example that intends to clearly formulate moral rules. Indeed, while the aesthetic purpose of poetry is taken into account, the ethical purpose takes precedence.
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