1994 research outputs found
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Emanuele Severino:The Language that Testifies to Destiny
Get PDFIn this event, two of Italy’s most renowned contemporary philosophers, Ugo Perone and Luca Illetterati, will discuss the irreducible novelty and untimeliness of Emanuele Severino’s philosophical contribution. They will address both the way in which philosophy always constitutes a confrontation with untimeliness within contemporary discourse and the way in which Italian philosophy in general, and Severino’s work in particular, have through the years staged this confrontation. Perone and Illetterati will each give a lecture and then discuss the specificity of Italian philosophy, the timeliness and untimeliness of philosophical reflection, and Emanuele Severino’s singular contribution to these questions. Emanuele Severino (1929-2020) was professor of theoretical philosophy at the Catholic University of Milan from 1954 to 1969. In the late 1960s, the Holy Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith (the body that in 1908 took over from the Office of the Inquisition the task of defending and promulgating Catholic doctrine) carried out an investigation into his work reminiscent of some most eminent precedents, as a result of which Severino left his professorship. (The report of the investigation reads: “Severino has criticised the very ground of the conception of God’s transcendence and the tenets of Christianity in a way that arguably no atheism or heresy has ever done before”). From 1970 to 2005, Severino was professor of theoretical philosophy at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Ugo Perone holds the Romano Guardini Chair for the Philosophy of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin. His work focusses on the question of the finite and the infinite. His best-known books are In lotta con l’angelo (1989), Il presente possibile (2005), and Ripensare il sentimento (2014). He has served as director of the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Berlino and as founder and director of the Scuola di Alta Formazione Filosofica. Luca Illetterati is professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Padua. His research focusses on German classical philosophy and in particular on Hegel. Among his monographs: Natura e Ragione. Sullo sviluppo dell’idea di natura in Hegel (1995), Fra tecnica e natura. Problemi di ontologia del vivente in Heidegger (2002), La filosofia come esperienza del pensiero e scienza della libertà. Un approccio a Hegel (2002). He is currently president of the Italian Society of Theoretical Philosophy and member of the Board of Directors of the International Hegel Society
Performing Embodiment:Practices of Reduction
Get PDFThe aim of the symposium is to explore the concept of reduction primarily from a phenomenological perspective, as a movement towards the cornerstones of lived experience, as an attempt to grasp the primary encounter between self and world through the senses, and as an articulation of the link between embodied experience and knowledge. Phenomenological reduction is not merely a theoretical concept but a practice or exercise. As developed by Edmund Husserl, phenomenology focuses on the operations performed by ‘living bodies’ in the most concrete and precise way, it is an ‘embodied approach to the construction of meaning’ (Susan Kozel 2007). Far from being just a theory resorting to reflection and analysis, or a merely operational method, phenomenology constantly integrates the intellect with sensory experience and is essentially performative. If the performative describes those actions in which one needs to figure out what one is doing whilst doing it, then phenomenological reduction is a performative approach to knowledge, an exercise of thought. ‘Practices of reduction’ refers to the idea of doing, of a poietic aspect through which different means approximate the embodied experience of the world. The symposium will thus focus on the possibilities that different means of expression (such as literature, dance, and music) afford in conveying and producingembodied experiences and will address the intersections of these forms of expression with the different technologies that make them possible nowadays, especially digital and AR technologies. The first day of the symposium will see the opening of the exhibition Catalysts – Somatic Resonance. Using AI and mixed reality techniques, the installation will immerse the audience in a choreographed somatic experience
Speech-Wrangling:Shutting Up and Shutting Out the Oral Tradition in Some Icelandic Sagas
Get PDFThis chapter considers the role of prolegomena and authorial interventions in constraining and contextualizing orally derived saga narratives in high medieval Iceland. It examines the question of whether prolegomena were intended to be included in oral renditions of the sagas and, if so, in whose ‘voice’ they were understood to be spoken. The ‘openness’ of a saga text — the extent of editorial freedom enjoyed by those concerned with extracting it from the oral milieu — has been much discussed; however, less attention has historically been paid to the freedom which the written texts then afforded any would-be reciter for emending or adapting their content when reading them aloud to a live audience. Prolegomena provide our most instructive source of contemporary commentary on how the written sagas should be understood and transmitted, and they therefore represent distinct and important critical texts in their own right, which inform our understanding of how ‘open’ or ‘fixed’ medieval Icelanders understood these extant written sagas to be
Unlikely Matter:The Open and the Nomad in <i>The Book of Margery Kempe</i> and the Middle English <i>Christina Mirabilis</i>
Get PDFIn The Book of Margery Kempe, the protagonist shifts between identities and geographies as a nomadic subject, dispersed across compassionate responses to violence that unusually include a recognition of animal suffering. The Life of Christina the Astonishing also seizes on the nonhuman aspects of extreme affective experience as her bodily transformations participate in a process of becoming-animal. Both texts reflect a medieval fascination with the devotional body as a zone of closure and opening where transhuman and interspecies associations can be safely explored
Highest Openness:On Agamben’s Promise
Get PDFThis essay follows the productive discussion of Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal that took place as part of the ‘Openness in Medieval Culture’ conference at the ICI Berlin. The essay attempts to develop a speculative notion of openness within Agamben’s work, in particular by connecting the question of openness to the question of the promise: the promise of the resolution of the question of man and animal ( The Open); the promise of the Franciscans’ vow, or sacramentum ( The Highest Poverty); and the promise of language ( The Sacrament of Language)
Theorizing Through the Global South
Get PDFHow is it possible to theorize not only on the so-called Global South, but also in, from, and through it? What appears as the universal often involves a gestureduc of generalization, flattening and dominating the particular, predominantly from a Eurocentric perspective. This workshop will discuss ways to unsettle the very distinction between the general and the particular that underlies claims to universality and simultaneously retain the claim to the universal that makes theorization generative and relevant. In this vein, it will reflect on the following questions: How are theoretical affinities transformed through contexts in the Global South? How can theoretical work be made relevant to the larger audience beyond particular region or area studies? What are possible strategies to present the theoretical impact of one’s work despite its constant peripheralization as a case study? How can one maintain a critique of the Eurocentric gaze without falling into the traps of ethnocentrism? What are the affordances that particular disciplines and institutions could offer to tackle such theoretical and methodological challenges? What methodologies can be employed to expand, if not transform, current understandings of the universal? Scholars from a variety of fields who undertake such inquiries are invited to jointly develop novel methods, approaches, and styles of knowledge production and circulation
‘Penile Stile’:Filmische Figuren der Impotenz
Get PDF»Warum erzählst Du mir nicht von all den anderen Typen, die bei dir keinen hochgekriegt haben«, wehrt sich Jamie, nachdem er bereits beteuert hat, das passiere ihm sonst nie, und Maggie, „don’t worry“, sie sei verhext, geantwortet hat (Love & Other Drugs, USA 2010, R: E. Zwick). »The penis stands in for and up for the man«, wie Annie Potts (2000) unübersetzbar formuliert. Doch so sehr er sich durch bloße Phantasien heben lässt, wie es heißt, so ist er auch das, über dessen Aufrichtung man keine Kontrolle hat. Denn die Entstehung von Verlangen steht nicht unbedingt in Einklang mit dem, der es hat. Dem penilen Eigenleben entgegen verspricht seit einer Weile Viagra – längst mit der Populärkultur verwoben – biochemische Kontrollierbarkeit. Ganz im Sinne westlich-kultureller Tendenzen, die statt auf inhärente Distanz lieber auf ich-geschwollenes Einssein setzen: Die Potenz des Viagra-assistierten Penis scheint das Risiko des Versagens nicht mehr in sich zu tragen. Der Vortrag widmet sich Fragen von Erektion, Dysfunktion und blauer Pille anhand von Filmausschnitten: Wie wird Genießen hier organisiert, welche kulturellen Dynamiken zeigen sich? Humor, Viagra-Unfälle und Peinlichkeit inklusive. Insa Härtel ist Professorin für Kulturwissenschaft mit Schwerpunkt Kulturtheorie und Psychoanalyse an der Internationalen Psychoanalytischen Universität Berlin (IPU). Ihre Forschungsschwerpunkte sind Psychoanalytische Kunst- und Kulturtheorie, Sexualitäts- und Geschlechterforschung. Jüngste Herausgaben: Reibung und Reizung. Psychoanalyse, Kultur und deren Wissenschaft, Hamburg 2021; Szenen des Sexuellen. Film als Analyse, RISS 96, Heftredaktion gemeinsam mit Johannes Binotto, Karl-Josef Pazzini, Manuel Zahn (im Erscheinen)
These Tears, This Gas, These Turbulent Times
Get PDFGas, made in the factories of future conglomerates IG Farben (Germany) and Imperial Chemical Industries (Britain), diffused from the battlefields of the First World War and seeped into dreams and thought. In Walter Benjamin’s concept, this gas of modern life re-synthesized, in retrospect, the apparent innocence of a photographic gaseous haze – which, in truth was a deposit of economic structure, political fantasy, a damp fog of imperial history that threatened to linger on – into a killing atmosphere on the Front, which in its way also threatened to persist, permeate, and poison the lamley declared after-war. What gases and deadly historical fogs surround people today in turbulent days of war and competition, of street control and protection of private property? What protections might a human adopt and adapt to see into and through the opaque atmospheric screens? Are new gases needed to neutralise the old ones or is the climate too much corrupted? Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and imbrications of politics and technologies, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, as well as the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness. Current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence. Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016) and Deeper in the Pyramid (2018) and The Inextinguishable (2021), both with Melanie Jackson
Rethinking Lyric Communities
Get PDFFrom the circulation of poetic forms across different languages and traditions around the globe, through the envisioning of national and transnational discursive communities, to the use of poetry in contemporary episodes of political resistance and its dissemination on social media, lyric poetry seems to be a privileged site for an inquiry into community formation and its politics. Various theoretical approaches cast poetry in this peculiar role, from French and French-oriented political philosophy, (exemplified in the famous exchange between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy begun in the 1980s), to the reevaluations — in reader-response criticism as well as in postcolonial and decolonial studies — of poetry’s roots in orality and performance. This workshop aims to bring the investigation of historical poetic communities into dialogue with recent developments in the theory of the lyric and in theories of community. While discussing a variety of poetic phenomena in modern European poetry that have been at the center of the critical debate — the poetics of the fragment, the unworking or désœuvrement of the work, the obscurity or polysemy of language, a change of aesthetic regime —, the workshop will also explore the lyric, in its longer history and transnational features, as a particular discursive mode that may offer alternative models of community formation. This symposium consists of three parts: an Oxford session at the Christ Church Research Centre, on 23 June 2022, a Berlin session at the ICI Berlin, on 5 July, and a poetry event, also on 5 July, at the ICI Berlin with Vahni Anthony Capildeo, Christian Hawkey, and Daniel Tiffany, who will read a selection of their poetry and offer their reflections on poetry, community and translation