Labyrinth: An International Journal for Philosophy, Value Theory and Sociocultural Hermeneutics
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God, Evil, Freedom. Reception and Interpretation of Dostoevsky in Luigi Pareyson and his Heirs
Full text linkThe essay aims to focus on reception and interpretation of Dostoevsky in the thought of Luigi Pareyson (1918-1991) and his heirs, who have developed a deep and original theoretical reading of Dostoevsky\u27s work, able to bring out not only its ethical stance, but most of the essential aspects of his thought, and to investigate its current relevance. The reflection of Pareyson – who promoted the introduction of Dostoevsky\u27s thought into the academic circles of Turin, being convinced that philosophy cannot avoid confronting the issues it explores – consists of three main moments: the experience of good and evil, the experience of freedom and the experience of God. Starting from consideration of Dostoevsky\u27s characters as ideas, Pareyson proposes a new and coherent philosophical interpretation of his work, which can undoubtedly be compared to those of Ivanov, Berdjaev, Evdomikov, Šestov. His observations around the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor and the "refutation of Ivan" – which, according to him, constitute the most significant and theoretically prolific moments of Dostoevsky\u27s production – seem unaffected by the flow of time and could still represent a valuable and indispensable contribution to the understanding not only of the great Russian author, but of human nature itself
What Is \u27Victory\u27 in the Orthodox Christian Ethics of War?
No full textThe text reconstructs the protocol of \u27victory\u27 as part of the interruption of enmity and establishment of temporary peace. Different understandings of the enemy and enmity imply that victory in war and cessation of conflict can essentially determine the way war is conducted, and that they follow rules of war. Victory is supposed to be a crucial moment that characterizes the ethics of war. Particular testimonies and thematizations of victory in the Orthodox Christian tradition can provide an intro-duction into a potential ethics of war that could ensure a new relationship towards the enemy and killing the enemy
Dostoevsky\u27s Poetics of Modern Freedom: Against Bakhtin\u27s "Polyphonic" Moral Truth
No full textIn an influential treatise, Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) asserts that the aim of Dostoevsky\u27s distinctive poetics is to advance a revolutionary, "polyphonic" model of moral truth. In this paper, I argue that while Bakhtin correctly identifies essential features of Dostoevsky\u27s poetics, these features are better understood as oriented toward meeting the free modern individual\u27s need to test ultimate moral ends and concomitant virtues in order to determine their truth. An Aristotelian poetics intended to educate audiences only in how to be virtuous to achieve moral ends that are given by tradition will have different essential features than will a modern poetics whose purpose is to help individuals determine what the virtues are. It is this latter purpose, I argue, that drives Dostoevsky to create the new stylistic devices that Bakhtin observes in Dostoevsky\u27s work, rather than the purpose of realizing a philosophically problematic "polyphonic" model of moral truth
The Compatibility between the Religious and the Nihilistic Currents in Dostoevsky’s World
Full text linkThe goal of this essay is to show the compatibility between two currents in Dostoevsky\u27s world, namely, the religious and the nihilistic. Based on Nietzsche\u27s theory of nihilism and Deleuze\u27s interpretation of Nietzsche, I introduce a dynamic model – reactive nihilism – a destructive force that annihilates fading values to clear the way for the advent of a new value. Through the textual analysis, primarily focusing on the religious dimension presented by saintly characters and biblical intertextuality in The Brothers Karamazov, this essay argues that Dostoevsky\u27s two trends do not conflict at all, but express in a common dynamic model, that is reactive nihilism
Dostojewskijs Gottesfrage aus der Sicht von Jean-Paul Sartre und Slavoj Žižek
No full textOne of the most discussed problems in Dostoyevsky\u27s work, at least in Western philosophy and especially in Existentialism, concerns the question of God, which has been received and interpreted in very different ways. This editorial introduction will refer to two readings - that of Sartre and that of Slavoj Žižek. The aim is to show that these two interpretations, although at first sight seemingly antithetical, are not mutually exclusive but complementary.
Translation as a New Tool for Philosophizing the Dialectic between the National and the Global in the History of Revolutions: Germanizing the Bible, and Sinicizing Marxist Internationalism
Full text linkThis paper uses Martin Luther and Mao Zedong\u27s translation strategies to philosophize anew the dialectic between the national and the global in the history of revolutions. Luther and Mao each instigated a "revolution" by translating a universal faith into a vernacular; the end product in each case was the globalization of his vernacularized faith and the export of his local revolution all over the world.By vernacularizing a universal faith, Luther and Mao respectively inaugurated a new national idiom, a new national identity and, in the case of Mao, founded a new nation. The far more intriguing phenomenon which I identify – and on which I seek to make my most original contributions is: Protestantism and Maoism developed global reach not despite, but because of, their insistence on a local translation-articulation of a universalist ideology.My paper attends to both the similarities and differences between Luther and Mao.
La déformation : Bataille et l\u27irreprésentable
No full textThe deformation: Bataille and the irrepresentable The present article is focused on the interactions of matter and form in the writings of Georges Bataille. Starting with the notion of "formless" (informe) that he outlined in the journal Documents (1929) and through Georges Didi-Huberman\u27s text on the "formless resemblance" (1995), we will try to show how, in Bataille\u27s work, high and low respond to each other and intertwine to generate a "spastic" device of deformation that allows the desire to reshape the writing and the images that surround it. For this purpose, we will apply Gilles Deleuze\u27s approach to the painting of Francis Bacon, which is fundamentally opposed to "representation" in order to achieve what Deleuze calls the "pure figurative" (expression of sensations, affects and impulses). The approach will help us to understand how Bataille\u27s works respond to the same demand for "material deformation" and "formal materialization", which manifests itself by accident and is addressed less to the understanding than to sensibility.
The Call of Being: On Pure Phenomenality and Radical Immanence
Full text linkA book review of The Michel Henry Reader, edited by Scott Davidson and Frédéric Seyler(Evanston, Illinois: 2019, 266 p.).
Translational Universality: The Struggle over the Universal
Full text linkThe aim of this paper is to investigate the idea of universality through the lens of translation, in an attempt to sketch out what can be called a translational universality. As the starting point, I will take into consideration the recent Étienne Balibar\u27s works on the universals, and especially his strategy of translation, i.e. the strategy of enunciating the universal by means of translational process. In the next step, I will analyze political consequences of the universalizing practices of translation, which due to their capacity to enunciate the universals, according to Balibar\u27s thesis, have generated political communities. In order to examine this aspect, I will discuss the constitutive role of translation in the formation (Bildung) of German cultural identity in the 19th Century, by exposing Humboldt-Schleirmacherian model of translation. In doing so I will lean on Berman\u27s study on translation in Romantic Germany and on Venuti\u27s political reading of nationalist narratives of typically German foreignizing translation. The conception of Bildung, envisaged as an experience of the otherness through translation, will be approached as a historical model to understand the notion of translational universality that is at issue in this paper. After these historical and philosophical analyses, which in translation view one possible way to articulate a certain struggle over the universal from the particular position of cultural difference, the article will address some questions regarding our contemporary situation: what would be a historically different and potentially emancipatory form of universality? What are the translational capacities of such a universality to generate a new framework for political communities?
Das Erhabene im phänomenologischen Sinne: Die affektiv leibliche Erfahrung des Raumes
Full text linkThe Sublime in a phenomenological sense: The Affective Bodily Experience of Space The aim of the following paper is to redefine the sublime in phenomenological terms, a task long overdue. Departing from Kant, it claims that the phenomenological sublime is an emotion aroused neither by the power of our reason transcending the inadequacy of imagination as it concerns nature, nor by the overwhelming powers of imagination as it concerns an artwork, but by the excess of sensuousness over conceptuality, which is bodily felt. This shift into bodily apprehensions, though advanced by empirical psychologists, took place in the twentieth century resulting from Husserl\u27s and Merleau-Ponty\u27s reformulation of the affective sphere of the body and of its concomitant experience of space. Their criticism of compossibility and harmony lead to a disruption of the bodily metaphoric order inherent to artistic representation. This becomes evident in the conception of present architecture, as the works of Tschumi and Eisenman show. The phenomenological emotion of sublimity expresses thus the affective bodily experience of space.