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Parades were an intrinsic part of urban life in Belgium between the middle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars have used these festivities time and again to probe into nationalism and the growing political tensions of the time. However, much less attention has been paid to the relation between these parades and the townscape itself. Th is article tries to fi ll this gap by exploring how urban festivities can reveal the diff ering ways in which small-town populations coped with the dilemma of modernization versus preservation (or even creation) of a historical townscape. To this end the routes of the parades are examined, as well as the selective illumination of certain buildings and town quarters, the fl oats and temporary constructions used during these festivities.
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This article examines the extent to which spaces are structuring influences on, or targets of, action. Two factors and their interactions are presented: the extent to which a space is 1) maintained and 2) used. As these factors increase in strength, the structural influences of a space increase while agential opportunities are diminished. Conversely, as spaces become dilapidated and abandoned, structural forces are weakened and the potential for creative action heightens. These spaces can be conceptualized as elements of the ‘residual landscape’: spaces left behind by socio-historical processes and practices. Special cases are considered where the factors are inversely related and issues of structure and agency are complicated. A brief case study serves to illustrate each type of space and the factors which operate therein.
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Th is article explores what enables a space to become festive. We start by reviewing how the festive has been deeply connected with play, to the point of being considered a type of play, or more generally, a type of interaction. What enables the festive is the ability to interact with the substance on which participants feast. Th e question we will then explore in more detail is: given a subject matter from which to build a festive occasion or space, how do we go about making it happen? How do we model the festive space? It is impossible to show that there is only one way of going about enacting the festive. For this reason, it is more productive to propose a model of how to achieve such task. Th e model that emerges in this article proposes that dismembering the festive substance, in a participatory way, facilitates its enactment. We then examine two cases of festive enactment in diff erent mediums: the textual feast of Julio Cortázar’s novel Hopscotch that turns the printed page into a festive space, and the making of festive theatre, including the creation of the festive play Fire ’Scapes.
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Rosario Assunto, an Italian philosopher of aesthetics begins one of his most interesting and dense essays with a terrifying image about the Earth where we live—“calvizie della terra dissacrata” (1983, 15)—meaning that the Earth becomes bald because of the actions of the man and loses every characteristics of beauty and sacredness. According to Assunto’s theory the homo oeconomicus is the author and the promoter of a Promethean, titanic, industrial and malodorous town where the sense of art, beauty and the harmony in landscape are forgotten and erased. The Modern homo oeconomicus is satisfied in his thoughts and works with such a desecrated and raped Earth, rather, he desires this kind of landscape as a symbol of his own progress. I remember that when I first red this essays I asked to myself what kind of philosophy I could propose in such a horizon and what kind of analysis I could develop. Maybe geophilosophy could now give some answers. Geophilosophy, according to the version I will propose, deconstructs the usual and reductionist grammar about the concept of space and place, suggesting a new expressive, perceptive and, finally, ethic possibility for the relation between human beings and places. In this paper I provide my interpretation of geophilosophy, inspired by Gilles Deleuze’s words, the first philosopher of XX century who wrote about this concept. Then I will analyze non-places according to the famous definition proposed by the Marc Augé and I will go beyond the French anthropologist’s definition suggesting a new interpretative model for places and non-places by linking my idea of geophilosophy to Deleuze’s concept of rhizome. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the complexity of the concept of place and finally put into evidence that places, which constitute our roots, are all the spaces we have around, even non-places. Post-modern era mainly produces non-places: geophilosophy has to explain the philosophical and cultural reasons for this production by pointing out which possible modalities of connection we can find between contemporary human beings and places.
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Shakespeare is thought to be a monumental playwright and poet whose verbal genius largely makes up for a few troubling passages, or for a few « problematic plays » (as they are still conveniently called) which give a bit of tang or perhaps only very little undermine a fundamentally orthodox political, religious and philosophical message. This paper does not claim to deny this. Rather, it lays emphasis on Shakespeare’s dark – yet undeniable – side. Claiming that Macbeth is evil but somehow admirable is not enough. One may perhaps put forward the idea that Macbeth is desperately wading, though unsuccessfully, towards some kind of Nietzschean realm beyond Good and Evil. One may perhaps, however briefly, suggest that with this character Shakespeare broaches the ontological question, that he senses a univocal and undifferentiated dimension of Being, but from a negative point of view.
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This text tries to underline the major meanings of the salvation and evil beginning from Nae Ionescu’s philosophy, especially his course on Faust – the matter of salvation in Faust of Goethe –, the Romanian philosopher being one of the most important figure of the intellectual elites during the Romanian interwar space, an outstanding personality that created the generation of Mircea Eliade, Vulcanescu, Cioran, Noica et alii. The matter of salvation has two essential meanings : a transcendental meaning and a spiritual meaning, inside the human being. Nae Ionescu lays stress on dual conception of Goethe : the evil as the necessity of being is not present at Goethe; there is the presence of evil as the absence of good – privatio boni (the Augustinian doctrine). The duality of Goethe’s feature is the reflection of two sorts of solutions : first of all, the knowledge and second of all, the living. In fact, this is sign of knowledge during the Renaissance as an identity between science and magic. In opposition to Wagner as the type of the non‑tortured scientist, Faust is the metaphysician overwhelmed with sorge (care). Oscillating between salvation – as the possibility of regaining the Absolute – and evil, Faust finishes by obtaining his "Das ewig Weibliche"
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This study aims to analyze the incapacity of language to define and express being. Bitterness is a fundamental state of being, both a sentiment and an attitude, a way to look at and to think of the world. We are trying to emphasize the way Cioran constructs a language of death in order to lay his being in it.
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The article studies the work of Jean Améry, as reliable evidence upon the various appearances of the evil, which crossed the XXth century: from the physical violence of the man on the man, to the so‑called « natural evil », until the paradoxical form of liberation represented by the suicide.
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The representation of the evil admits at least three models : medical and pathogenic, mechanistic and logical or geological and civilizational. If we leave aside the metaphysical and theological views postulating a nature or the final meaning of evil, the evil is what to avoid or to fight for a pratical reason, a view that we can find a model for in Greek Metis.
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This article focuses on the answer of Musil to the question : can we really do without good and evil? Even if Musil has been strongly influenced by his reading of Nietzsche, he developed his own point of view about the nature and the value of the distinction between good and evil. Good and evil are not “absolute constants” but “functional values”, and this distinction must be valued by herself : there are a bad evil, a bad way to be good, a good way to be bad, and perhaps a good way to be good. As a result it seems that we can not do without good and evil, even if they can not be taken as ultimate moral concepts.
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Fritz Mauthner’s critics of language (Sprachkritik) concludes that human language is a useful instrument of social communication and transaction, but a deficient medium for knowledge and for every form of expression of subjectivity. Mauthner’s analysis of the contemporary language crisis (Sprachkrise) has much in common with Maurice Maeterlinck. Jorge Luis Borges was in his ironical way one of the most perspicacious interprets of Mauthner’s linguistic skepticism.
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« A pear for the thirst » is a french expression that means « ressources for the future ». It’s a battle of a poet against evil, the big evil, fanatism and obscurantism.
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Whatever conceptions we develop in the western world about the origin and the nature of evil, it is impossible to avoid referring to the biblical text, Genesis 3. The many different interpretations that are made of this text invoke it less in order to read what it says, than in order to transform it into an illustration or a theological legitimation that post‑dates its creation. I will demonstrate how the concept of original sin develops in Christianity and conflicts with the Gnostic, the Christian and the Jew; however it is also necessary to return to the text, to interpret it from a position that is first of all philosophical and upon the basis of a hermeneutic that responds to its unique qualities before inscribing it into this or that dogmatic interpretation. The reflections of Ricoeur and Nabert upon sin and evil are tested out on Genesis 3 on the basis of a concept of the processes of symbolisation developed by Kant and, in our time, by Blumenberg.
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Our reflections attempt to capture the spasmodic confrontation between philosopher and idea, and to convey the intricate mechanisms involved in circumscribing and mapping out one’s own spirit.
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The introduction to issue 8 of Alkemie points to Camus and Cioran.
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Touched by the very first experience of a personal evil, we try to figure out why the world must be torn apart by any opposites. This kind of awakening makes us suddenly conscious of the binary nature of the world we live in, and finally of the binary nature of our minds. In order to transcend this impossible situation, our psyche will be ready to behold the opposites, thus to expand beyond the limits of the current world.
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Since education, unlike manipulation, is possible only as a co-action in freedom, it occurs, and can occur only at the point where educational co-actors’ (i.e. those in mutual educational coacting) personalities are being respected and developed. That implies that the education is an action founded in respecting the Other as different, autonomous and free human being. Furthermore, that figures that the education is essentially always an education for pluralism of values, presuppositions, beliefs, thoughts, ways of life that people develop as their very own and through which they manifest their personalities. But, as the co-action in freedom, that respect has to be mutual. Therefore, educating means developing the Other as different, as one that respects his own personality, but also respects Others’ personalities.
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