RESUMEN Este artículo, después de situar, etimológica e históricamente, los conceptos de utopía y distopía realiza un breve vistazo a la doctrina pesimista de Schopenhauer, para luego mostrar cómo Émile Zola la articula y la despliega en una distopía, en ciertos pasajes de La alegría de vivir. Se concluye, a través de varias preguntas, cómo Zola ficciona, en la figura de su personaje Pauline, una pequeña isla de felicidad dentro de un enorme océano pesimista, inquietante y malévolo: la utopía y (...) la distopía surgen entrelazadas en una ficción que, historiando y politizando la cuestión, muestra cómo lo filosófico aparece en la ficción novelesca cuando ha sido colocado allí a propósito. ABSTRACT This reflective article, after situating, etymologically and historically, the concepts of utopia and dystopia, takes a brief look at Schopenhauer's pessimistic doctrine, to then show how Émile Zola articulates and deploys it in a dystopia, in certain excerpts from The Joy of Living. It is concluded, through several questions, how Zola fictionalizes, in the figure of his character, Pauline, a small island of happiness within a huge pessimistic, disturbing, and malevolent ocean: utopia and dystopia emerge intertwined in a fiction that, historically, and politicizing the issue, shows how the philosophical appears in fictional fiction when it has been placed there on purpose. (shrink)

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

Biographical novels about historical women artists have been experiencing a veritable boom in recent years. Written mostly by women, they can be understood as women authors’ attempts to reach out across time to other “artistic” women whose lives “speak to us” today. It has long been a key insight of historical fiction research that a historical novel reveals more about the time in which it was written than the time in which it is set. As such, it (...) can be assumed that contemporary novels about historical women speak as much to twenty-first-century conceptions of femininity as to particular historical moments of female subjectivity. This paper will compare two novels about historical women artists: Janice Galloway’s Clara about nineteenth-century German pianist Clara Wieck-Schumann and Priya Parmar’s Exit the Actress about Restoration actress Nell Gwyn. While based on historical facts, both these novels use the greater freedom of fiction to depart from biographical conventions. It will be demonstrated that although they resemble each other on the discourse level, employing shifts in the narrative perspective, conspicuous typography, and graphic elements, they differ markedly in the biographical and fictional subgenres in which they participate and, hence, in their gender politics. (shrink)

Individual humans as well as human communities interact in a great variety of ways and, in essence, Unesco's Silk Roads Major Project endeavors to shed light on the cultural interactions along the trade routes linking various Eurasian civilizations. The term Silk Road or Roads conjures up visions of caravans laden with rare goods, carrying them from the distant, perhaps even the so-called “mysterious”, East towards the Western World. This general impression is partially created by the word “silk”, name of a (...) commodity generally and correctly linked with China where it was first produced. It is good to remember that a “Silk Road” is a historic fiction, invented in the nineteenth century by the German geographer von Richthofen to call attention to the existence of, first and foremost, commercial contacts between China and the Roman Empire. Silk was but one of the many goods circulating all along the many roads criss-crossing the great Eurasian space. This short essay will provide some information on the languages used along the land arteries of communication between East and West. (shrink)

Between 1957 and 1961, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote a lengthy work of historical fiction, a trilogy collectively titled The Black Flame. Through the lenses of four American families, the narrative offers an illuminating glimpse into the American, political drama of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the degree to which “the negro problem” featured in important decisions and events. Reiterating ideas found in his other works—like Black Reconstruction —the narrative foregrounds the gravity of the (...) “Negro Problem” in the formation and constitution of American culture and political institutions.While this paper will examine a few of the specific arguments that emerge from The Black... (shrink)

This article discusses the similarities and differences between what might be called two »crises of historical consciousness« in the late 17th and the late 20th, the first engendered by a combination of philosophical scepticism with new techniques for questioning the credibility of historical sources and detecting forgeries, the second in our crisis. The result is a widespread cultural relativism to which the debates on colonialism and feminism as well as the practice of anthropology and literary theory have contributed. (...) In both periods, the debate about epistemology is linked to the opening of the frontier between history and fiction and the rise of a hybrid genre of historical novel/novelistic exemplified by St. Real and Defoe in the first crisis, and by Eco, Keneally and many others today. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL VISION OF CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE GERMAN MARTINEZ Fordham University Bronx, New York VIEWED FROM the institutional, interpersonal, or religious standpoint, marriage is not a distinctively Christian phenomenon, but it is a human partnership with inherently religious symbolism. Consider the complexity of its dimensions : it is a personal bond that is consummated in a sexual relationship; yet its full human reality contains different levels of meaning which (...) point to a transcendent mystery; it is secular and social and at the same time spiritual and personal. Philosophical anthropology and the phenomenology of religion explore these dimensions and stress the complexity of marriage. An entire range of questions stem from the nature and mystery of the conjugal bond as well as from the multiplicity of forms in which this human partnership has been realized in different historical periods and cultures. Precisely because marriage actually takes place in a concrete historico-cultural context, theological reflection must recognize the complexity of this human experience, and this calls for interdisciplinary study. Theological anthropology sees a profound meaning in the created reality of marriage, for it recognizes therein the essential components of a community of love open toward God. An understanding of human values reveals how the experience of marriage touches the roots of people's lives; an understanding of redemption reveals how marriage belongs to both the order of creation and the order of redemption. An anthropological approach is essential. " In good theology one can no longer adopt the simplistic distinction between ' natural mar451 452 GERMAN MARTINEZ riage' and 'sacramental marriage....'" 1 Marriage is not only a meaningful sign of an anthropological reality but also the expression of the human response toward transcendence. Furthermore, the lived experience of marriage in modern society makes us more and more conscious of human existential needs, and theology has to interpret and respond to them in correlation with the content of faith. Against the background of the human sciences and our awareness of the present historical reality, study of this complex experience that is marriage calls for constructive reflection on its anthropological roots. That is where the sacramental mystery is anchored. The crisis in the theological understanding of marriage stems primarily from a crisis of culture, and new anthropological perspectives can establish the possibility of a more personal theology. In fact, the underestimation of its human values or, more precisely, the lack of a personalist anthropology and of an adequate theological consideration of sexuality has been at the root of the weakness of the traditional approach to marriage.z As Theodore Mackin puts it, " The marriage sacrament, like all sacraments, has as its matrix a complex human experience. And there is no understanding of the sacrament unless we first understand its 1 W. Ernst, "Marriage as Institution and the Contemporary Challenge to It," in Contemporary Perspectives on Christian Marriage, ed. R. Malone and J. R. Connery (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1984), p. 69. The following studies are especially valuable in terms of an anthropological approach to Christian marriage: J. Ratzinger, "Zur Theologie der Ehe,'' in Theologie der Ehe, ed. H. Greven (Regensburg 1972), pp. 81-115; H. Doms, "Zweigeschlechtlichkeit und Ehe,'' in Mysterium Salutis, ed. J. Feiner and M. Lohrer, vol. 2, pp. 707-750; T. Mackin, "How to Understand the Sacrament of Marriage,'' in -Commitment to Partnership; Explorations of the Theology of Marriage, ed. W. P. Roberts (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), pp. 34-60. z Two major Catholic documents of the magisterium insist on the need for further theological reflection in terms of the personalistic reason behind the theology of marriage: John Paul II, The Apostolic Exhortation on the Family (see Origins, 2 (1981): 438-467); Gaudium et Spes, 47-52 (ed. W. M. Abbot, pp. 249-259). " The beginning, the subject and the goal of social institutions is and must be the human person, which for its part and by its very nature stands completely in need of social life" (Gaudium et Spes, 25; Abbott ed., p. 224). VISION OF CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE 453 matrix-experience." 3 In theological terms, the covenant v1s1on governs the partnership reality, but that divine call without this created reality would be meaningless. While the present essay does not include all the... (shrink)

RESUMEN Según Furio Jesi y Giorgio Agamben, la máquina antropológica es un dispositivo histórico que produce imágenes del hombre. En este artículo nos proponemos retomar esta categoría y mostrar que existen dos grandes modelos de máquina según la naturaleza de la imagen generada: la máquina teológica-bíblica, que funciona hasta el siglo XIX y que produce al hombre como ícono; la máquina ateológica, posterior a la muerte de Dios, que produce al hombre como fantasma. ABSTRACT According to Furio Jesi and Giorgio (...) Agamben, the anthropological machine is a historical dispositive that produces images of man. This paper aims at returning to this category and demonstrating that two models of the machine can be found depending on the nature of the image produced: the theological-biblical machine that operates until 19th century and that produces man as icon, and the a-theological machine, after disappearance of God, that produces man as phantasm. (shrink)

There are thirteen instances of the term schema throughout the chapter “Le panoptism”, from Surveiller et punir. We consider that the meaning of this technical term found in Foucault’s work refers to the philosophy of Kant. Gilles Deleuze is one of the few thinkers who noticed the connection between the issue of power and the Kantian schema. Considering that the diagram is analogous to the Kantian schema and the schema —as in Kritik der reinen Vernunft— is a product of imagination, (...) which is the Foucauldian term that corresponds to imagination? This question itself leads to an ontology. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that Foucauldian archeology and genealogy require a political and historical ontology of imagination, which has been partially outlined by Deleuze, but never thought in connection with the imagination. (shrink)

German Idealism develops its philosophy of history as the theory of becoming absolute and as absolute knowledge. Historism also originates from Hegel's and Schelling's discovery of absolute historicity as it turns against Idealism's philosophy of history by emphasizing the singular and unique in the process of history. German Idealism and Historism can be considered as the central German contribution to the history of ideas. Since Idealism became most influential for modern philosophy and Historism for modern historiography, they (...) are analyzed in this volume in a collaboration of philosophers and historians. German Idealism is presented in Schelling and its critics Schlegel, Baader, and Nietzsche; Historism in Ranke, Droysen, Burckhardt, and Treitschke. The volume further presents the impact of Idealism and Historism on present German approaches to the philosophy of history and outlines the debates on the possibility of a philosophy of history and on the methodology of the historical sciences. (shrink)

Narrative history and narrative fiction can be thought of as opposite ends of a single theoretical continuum. Much of the literature on Stalin's purges and the rise of the Soviet gulag system, however, seems to be something more than fiction, yet less than strict historiography. There are five criteria which ease the difficulty in determining whether a given work is history or fiction: the qualitative degrees of truth, the scope of the work, the purpose of the work, the relationship of (...) the author to his or her subject, and the relationship of the reader to the narrative. In some cases the nature of historical events combines with the peculiar capabilities of narrative description to blur the distinction between reality and invention, and places constraints upon the historian's choice of narrative genre. Two hybrids are used as exemplars of works that are both historical and fictive: Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago and Danilo Kis's A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. (shrink)

What are we doing with utopia? The ideas I am going to share with you relate to what urban designers have done with utopia, which is based on the historical relationship that grew up between utopian thinking and the intent to organize and control the arrangement of space and thus manage society in order to ensure its development.

Alasdair MacIntyre´s criticism of Modernity essentially refers to the problem of compartmentalization, which restricts the possibility of achieving excellence in an integral lifestyle. Among other reasons, compartmentalization is especially derived from an insular valorization of the workplace based on a reductionist understanding of productivity in terms of mere efficiency. Aimed at overcoming the moral confusion derived from the overestimation of technical, skilled productivity and individualistic cooperation in private corporations, this article offers a thicker explanation of MacIntyre’s theory of productive work (...) in light of a narrative approach that opens up the possibility of achieving standards of excellence in modern production. To do so, it follows MacIntyre’s understanding of productivity in terms of craftsmanship by explaining what excellence in production is and the role it plays in achieving unity of life and excellence in modern corporations based on two criteria derived from a historical definition of production, namely, craftsmanship and collegiality. (shrink)

Fog in August is a German film based on Robert Domes' historical novel of the same name. The film provides a fictionalized account of the institutionalization and eventual killing of children and adults labelled as a burden on the State and unworthy of life. On one level, this is a story of good versus evil, where innocent patients are manipulated by callous doctors and nurses. At a deeper level, however, it is possible to read the characters as more (...) complex and such a reading gives an insight into the paradox of how a genocidal policy was able to be systematically implemented by health care professionals who had previously taken an oath to provide care to all people. Carl Jung argued that powerful stories, told across generations, contain mythical archetypes that help drive the plot and convey beliefs about humanity. The aims of this paper are to explore Jungian ideas within Fog in August that help the historical story it is based on resonate with viewers today, and demonstrate how the application of these insights can help health care professionals more fully understand morally distressing events and, as a result, support and improve the safety of patients. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by HerselfGail K. Hart (bio)Confessions of a Poisoner, Written by Herself. Translated and introduced by Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene. New York: MLA, 2009. xliii + 196 pp. $12.95.Confessions of a Poisoner is an epistolary, autobiographical novel, first published anonymously in German as Bekenntnisse einer Giftmischerin in 1803. Lurid accounts of sex, incest, murder, and other crimes contributed to its status as (...) a sensational document in its day, especially in light of the illicit activities of the Countess Charlotte Ursinus, who was arrested and prosecuted for multiple poisonings allegedly committed between 1779 and 1803. Readers were eager for details of the countess's affairs and crimes, and the novel can indeed be read as an account, perhaps her account, of a very busy life of iniquity.The book is extremely engaging, and absorbing because our autobiographical narrator has unusually acute insight into human affairs and human character. From early youth, she finds pleasure in the art of seeming and she is proud of the skill with which she reads those who have something to offer her. Indeed the book could double as a seminar in social manipulation as the narrator negotiates her culture's obstacles to women's self-fulfillment. One is often reminded of George Lillo's murderous Millwood from The London Merchant, who in 1731 made the observation:It is a general maxim among the knowing part of mankind that a woman without virtue, like a man without honor or honesty, is capable of any action, though never [End Page 68] so vile. And yet what pains will they not take, what arts not use, to seduce us from our innocence and make us contemptible and wicked, even in their own opinions?(I:3)The narrator of Poisoner, though she might agree with Millwood, sees her part in the vile actions as both determined and chosen. The early steps of corruption were abetted by passion (incited with some calculation by early lovers) but also by the education she received, which she describes as being more masculine than feminine. Her father's failure to guide and restrain her thirst for knowledge has apparently left her with the ambitions of a conquerer and the social duties of an aristocratic woman—and, as Countess Orsina would have it, where men use daggers, women use poison. Yet she also accepts responsibility for all that she has done, quite convinced that most of it was wrong. The moral philosophy of the piece is somewhat peculiar, but she strives in the space of the one long letter that makes up the book to give an honest account of her duplicitous deeds.This intriguing life story also has significant scholarly value, and the editors/translators, Raleigh Whitinger and Diana Spokiene, have appended an excellent introduction that examines the poisoner's confessions as a document of its time. Our narrator is both wise and well-educated, and she discourses frequently on contemporary literature and philosophy, inserting herself into a variety of cultural debates. For example, her opinions on the value of Richardson's novels for the education and protection of young woman—that Richardson's ideals of virtue are delusional and therefore dangerous—run counter to prevailing wisdom on what young ladies should read. Her struggles with Kant and critical philosophy, which, she claims, diminished her pulchritude, are also instructive. Additionally, the editors make a very convincing case for the authorship of Friederike Helene Unger, whose husband was the publisher, and whose other works bear certain strong resemblances to the prose and the ideas of Poisoner.All of this excitement and knowledge comes to us in a supremely lucid and readable translation. I rarely read fiction in translation without being regularly reminded in some way of the translator. One sees an odd word, puzzles out a sentence and thinks about how one might have done that differently—and one gets distracted. That is not the case with this text, and this is especially surprising because the original German is that "of an era both culturally and historically distant" (xxvii). Whitinger and Spokiene have done a superb job of resurrecting a forgotten German text, embedding it in... (shrink)

“Talking Back to Frida: Houses of Emotional Mestizaje” is, in part, a historical meditation on the silencing of three women, Frida Kahlo, Maria Enríquez, a Mexican woman who was sexually assaulted in 1924, and me. Written in an innovative historical fashion that joins techniques drawn from fiction, journalism, and history, the article attempts to understand specific assaults on women’s voices by drawing readers into the historical worlds of the protagonists. “Talking Back” also seeks to respond to Hans (...) Kellner’s incisive theoretical challenge: how do historians’ person histories affect their historical choices? The article’s organization depends on my understanding of language, color, and physicality, as the emotional architecture of the Deep Southern and Mexican places tend to both enclose and partially free the protagonists. The essay begins by leading the reader into my own past in the Deep South, a past where German Jewish and Russian Jewish relatives engaged in a cultural battle over form, personal style, and will. Confronting a German Jewish world where only things—never feelings—seemed to matter, I found solace in the friendship of a black servant. That friendship, in turn, helped prompt a particularly empathic historical voice. The southern section is followed by a journey into Frida Kahlo’s Mexican world. In that world, Kahlo’s severe physical pain and solitude construct inner and outer universes. The people who populate these worlds are friends, lovers, husband, and the Mexican poor. Kahlo’s artistic renditions of these people reflect, the article suggests, both the depth of her love for them and a tendency to use them in response to her despair. Finally, “Talking Back” reconstructs the world of María Enríquez, a Michoacán peasant woman assaulted in public by her former boyfriend. Abandoned by friend, sister, and Catholic women on the way to church, Enríquez develops a voice laced with generosity, cultural insight, and a rare self-possession. (shrink)

Abstractabstract:This article revisits the utopian fiction of German science-fiction writer and poet Paul Scheerbart, considering the place of race and gender in his fantastical glass architectural spaces. This is primarily done through a reading of clothing and decoration in these texts, elements that are often explicitly mentioned in relation to women and people of color. Historical context concerning modernist paradigms, metaphorical interpretations of architectural glass, the connection between clothing and architecture, and the place of women in the Werkbund (...) provides a framework that serves to extrapolate the significance of some of Scheerbart's narrative elements, demonstrating the ways Scheerbart's philosophies both aligned with and departed from the modernist trends that were gaining force during his career. His constant self-contradiction, humor, and absurdist plots, however, undermine any notion that Scheerbart's fiction should be understood as straightforward polemics, and serve to complicate his position within the philosophical traditions he has been aligned with. (shrink)

The focus of this article is J. Leslie Mitchell’s Spartacus (1933), his fictional representation of the slave rebellion in ancient Rome led by the eponymous gladiator. The article begins by examining Mitchell’s contribution to debates over the role of the revolutionary writer in Left Review in the mid-1930s and his place in the British Left in this era, before going on to survey the ways in which the figure of Spartacus and the German Spartacists are represented across Mitchell’s oeuvre. (...) It then explores key source material utilized in the writing of the novel, as well as outlining comparisons between Mitchell’s representation of Spartacus and those of his fellow novelists Howard Fast and Arthur Koestler. Including close readings of Spartacus and informed by archival research and previously unpublished manuscript items, the article argues that at the same time as denouncing the cruelties of Roman rule, Spartacus also signals Mitchell’s passionate opposition to what he considered the violent histories of oppression suffered by the commons of the earth of all times, culminating in the capitalist crisis of Mitchell’s own period in the 1930s. Mitchell creates this effect of historical simultaneity by writing a work of myth-history – as opposed to historical realism or political propaganda – that employs the utopian legend of the Golden Age to inspire radical dissent against modern deprivation. (shrink)

El ensayo ofrece una lectura de la tragedia Woyzeck, del dramaturgo alemán del siglo XIX Georg Büchner. Se intenta mostrar que la obra de ficción constituye una suerte de antípoda respecto de su fuente de inspiración: el informe psiquiátrico que precipitó la condena del sujeto histórico que da título al drama. En esta perspectiva, se propone como clave de lectura el complejo de variaciones que aporta la obra en torno al tópico o la figura de la animalidad como fuerza neutra, (...) impensable e incontrolable que no solo arrastra al protagonista hacia la desgracia, sino que además opera como principio dinámico de toda la galería de personajes. The essay offers a reading of the Woyzeck tragedy, by the XIX century German playwright Georg Büchner. It intends to portray that the fictional work constitutes a sort of antipodes in relation to its source of inspiration: the psychiatric report that precipitated the sentence of the historical subject, which gives the title to the drama. On this point of view, a reading codeis proposed from the set of variations that the play contributes to the subject or the figure of animality. As a neutral, inconceivable, and uncontrollable force, which not only pulls the protagonist towards tragedy, but also functions as a dynamic principle of the complete rangeof characters. (shrink)

This handbook explores the ways biomedicine and pop culture interact while simultaneously introducing the reader with the tools and ideas behind this new field of enquiry. From comic books to health professionals, from the arts to genetics, from sci-fi to medical education, from TV series to ethics, it offers different entry points to an exciting and central aspect of contemporary culture: how and what we learn about scientific knowledge and its representation in pop culture. Divided into three sections the handbook (...) surveys the basics, the micro-, and the macroaspects of this interaction between specialized knowledge and cultural production: After the introduction of basic concepts of and approaches to the topic from a variety of disciplines, the respective theories and methods are applied in specific case studies. The final section is concerned with larger social and historical trends of the use of biomedical knowledge in popular culture. Presenting over twenty-five original articles from international scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds, this handbook introduces the topic of pop culture and biomedicine to both new and mature researchers alike. The articles, all complete with a rich source of further references, are aimed at being a sincere entry point to researchers and academic educators interested in this somewhat unexplored field of culture and biomedicine. (shrink)

The existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers is the father of a discourse on the spiritual consequences of the Holocaust. First addressed as the Schuldfrage (the question of guilt) by Jaspers immediately after the Second World War in his famous Heidelberg lecture, it has reappeared in various forms in German life and letters. Post-unification Germany has witnessed the valorization of the German experience of the Second World War. This ongoing re-evaluation has its antecedents in the generational literature of the 1970s (...) and 1980s. Whereas the Vaterliteratur of the 1970s (by authors such as Christoph Meckel, Uwe Timm, and Peter Henisch) was often embedded in a left-wing critique of the establishment, recent contributions to this growing genre (by Marcel Beyer, Stephan Wackwitz, Wibke Bruhns, and Ulla Hahn among others) speak to the issue of collective identity and transgenerational family trauma outside distinct left- and right-wing interpretations of National Socialism. The current writings on the life during the Third Reich (filtered through the experiences of discrete generations) are a confluence of historical writing, memorial literature, biography, and fiction. They are closely related to the discussions that W. G. Sebald initiated in his 1997 lecture series on the silence of German postwar literature with respect to German suffering. The subsequent debate on how to bring closure to this ?German suffering? was intensified by Günter Grass's widening of the concept of German victimization beyond the air war controversy in his book Crabwalk (2002). As Grass distinguishes clearly between the various post-World War II generations (and their different perspectives on historical events), the question becomes whether these recent writings will bring about a final so-called ?zero hour? in German postwar history. (shrink)

The life and career of Adolf Hitler has long been a mystery to scholars. Central to that mystery is Hitler's youth. So far, scholars have found little in Hitler's youth that presages or augurs Hitler's subsequent political development or explains his phenomenal success in his rise to power. Many historians and biographers have noted a strange logic to Hitler's career. Yet that logic has never been identified. Clearly, it is neither deductive nor inductive logic. Charles Sanders Peirce discovered a "third (...) form of logic" that he called "abduction." Abductive logic has unique characteristics and exerts a strange power over the human mind that is very different from other forms logic. Although the discovery of abductive logic is relatively recent, it has long existed and has been identified as the basis of two streams of literature that became extremely popular at about the time of Hitler's birth: the detective story, embodying a new type of fictional hero, "Ratiocinative Man," which bears a strong resemblance to Hitler; and the tracker stream, exemplified by Voltaire's "Zadig" and the novels of Karl May, which Hitler early encountered and which exerted a lifelong influence on him. In this work, the author presents the nature and characteristics of abductive logic, and explains how Hitler may have employed this logic in his rise to power. The author then presents Peirce's theory of interpretation of historical documents and applies it to the facts of Hitler's youth to explain the genesis of der Fuehrer from his earliest recollections to his mountaintop experience in which he conceived himself as the leader of the German people. (shrink)

Starting from the observation that women artists who die by suicide are an object of fascination in Western culture, this article posits the existence of a ›cultural myth of the suicidal authoress‹, which it examines via an analysis of three fictional representations of historical women writers who died by suicide or were suspected of having done so: Christa Wolf’s novella Kein Ort. Nirgends, Werner Schroeter’s film Malina – which is interpreted as a portrait of Ingeborg Bachmann – and Karin (...) Struck’s Ingeborg B.: Duell mit dem Spiegelbild. Drawing on the concept of the diva as developed by Elisabeth Bronfen and Barbara Straumann, it argues that the key to the cultural appeal of the figure of the suicidal women artist lies in what is perceived to be her unusual authenticity: her life and work are perceived to be one, and her suicide is interpreted as a guarantee of her authenticity as both a person and an artist. The article also explores possible reasons for the gendered nature of this myth and asks whether literary or filmic representations of suicidal women artists do an injustice to their subjects by identifying them so persistently with their deaths. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: Almost all the voices of the six million Jewish men, women, and children who perished in the Holocaust were shuttered in the massacres of the Einsatzgruppen and inside the gas chambers (and vans) of the six German extermination camps (Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka II, Bełżec, Sobibór, Chełmno, and Majdanek). Some of the victims' writings and drawings have survived, and these testimonies remain today a fraction of the millions of voices that were lost forever. With this paper I would like to (...) convey the idea that the (reconstructed and often fictionalized) voices that can be found in Holocaust feature films represent a homage to the victims who perished, and that these films (independently of their commercial success or their minor historical errors) often bring knowledge about the victims' suffering, antisemitism, the ghettos, the transports, the massacres, the Vernichtungslager and the Konzentrationslager to the vast public, and represent a glimpse into the shuttered voices of the Shoah. I also argue that, approached with caution, Holocaust films (antisemitic German propaganda films, post-war documentaries and post-war feature films) can be a valuable contribution to the historiography of the Shoah. (shrink)

The late nineteenth century was not only a time in which religious faith was questioned in light of increasing claims of natural science. It is more accurate to see the familiar Victorian crisis of faith as but one aspect of a larger historical phenomenon, one in which the methods of both religion and science came under scrutiny. Among several examinations of the status of scientific knowledge in the waning decades of the century, the treatment of the subject by the (...) German theologian Wilhelm Herrmann and philosopher Hans Vaihinger rejected its objective nature and denied that either scientists or theologians had access to the truth of nature. Although this stance regarding the nature of science, religion, and their relationship was limited to intellectuals in German society at the time, it foreshadowed developments in our own day in which the traditional search for truth has been problematized. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Reading Plato MimeticallyHayden W. Ausland(Timon Sillographus fr. 52W)Plato comes to mind first as a philosopher, but we should not forget that he bequeathed his philosophical understanding to posterity mainly in the form of his literary works. How best to appreciate these has traditionally been a matter of some disagreement, although one problem has lately come to the fore: What limitations inhere in subjecting the dialogues' philosophical component to (...) analysis in isolation from its literary context? But an emergent consensus that they are best read "dramatically" remains vague in its method, meaning different things to different people. Much confusion is attributable to current academic trends in philosophy or literary theory, and it is hard to know how best to approach the question. In its responsible form, however, the endeavor to read Plato as a literary philosopher rests on principles neither arbitrary nor very new. It is therefore possible that restating some key traditional maxims can serve a constructive philological purpose. In the following, these are first presented under four general headings within section I and then (section II) illustrated with reference to the argument of Plato's Phaedo.1I1. Mimetic Drama versus Philosophical TreatisePlato's philosophical writings are evidently not methodical treatises. As literary dialogues carried on without the benefit of his participation, they are materials inconvenient for doxographers or dogmatic opponents. This does not mean that they are works meant to record the factual or even typical conversations of other persons, for the historical features they exhibit are subordinate to clearly fictional hypotheses. Plato's writings accordingly resist the assumption that they convey simply anyone's philosophical doctrines, if by this we mean definite theses to which a thinker is theoretically committed.2 So Plato's dialogues are different from what the form became especially later, where it often served the needs of technical instruction or religious disputation; in such dialogues teachings indeed appear straightforwardly as statements of designated characters. But in Plato's genuinely dramatic compositions none of the personae can be assumed to speak for the author—even where a paraenetic hypothesis for a discussion might suggest otherwise. Plato's role as a major figure in the history of philosophy has made this recognition hard for students of his dialogues. Modern philosophical exegesis remains rooted in its earlier professional habits, and the most dogged attempts of recent times to elicit a Platonic doctrine in this way betray an ecclesiastical background with tolerable clarity.3 Thus a superficially [End Page 372] plausible approach takes the apparent protagonist as a philosophical spokesman for the author himself. Socrates, who was Plato's teacher and philosophical model, most often seems to serve this role and thus seems to have been the paradigm for a Timaeus, Critias, or occasionally nameless understudy. On such an assumption a Platonic teaching (whether unitary or developing) can be isolated from the statements or arguments made by dramatic characters of this type, who are presumably Plato's literary spokesmen. This is to feel one psychagogic effect of the literary design, but it fails to do full justice to the dialogue form as used by Plato. Other dialogues can employ drama for the sake of their teachings, but what appear as teachings in Plato's dialogues can normally be understood as argumentative topoi included for the sake of a greater dramatic economy. And that so many of the dialogues feature unequal conversational relationships derives from the nature of the situations he fictionalizes, as well as the difference between the modern and ancient understandings of dialogue.4 Plato's dialogues accordingly need to be appreciated as real works of the literary art, conveying what they do as poetic wholes rather than as vehicles for views attributed to select characters.Plato's dialogues require a literary treatment in terms germane to their philosophical nature, for there lurks a complementary misunderstanding in readings that ignore key differences between ancient and modern principles of composition. Such readings either reduce philosophical significance or else can coalesce with doctrinal readings to ill effect. Thus, for instance, scholars will reduce the character Socrates to a kind of dramatic "hero."5 But the romantic hero is a modern invention distorting... (shrink)

The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation (Bil dung) and its Historical Meaning. This article aims at analysing the historical meaning of the German ideal of self-cultivation (Bildung), considering its different uses and interpretations over time. Based on the historical semantics of Reinhart Koselleck and the bibliography on the subject, it reconstructs the core transformations in its semantic structure from the beginnings in the late Middle Ages to its institutionalization in the German school system in the (...) nineteenth century. The development of the ideal of Bildung in Germany is characterised by the tension between its function as means of integration through education and its function as instrument of social distinction. The reflexion on this educational ideal is presented as a counterpoint to some of the contemporary educational practices, based on the imperatives of the market and the neoliberal management of human capital. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Sources of MemoryJeffrey Andrew Barash“What does it mean to remember?” This question might seem commonplace when it is confined to the domain of events recalled in past individual experience; but even in this restricted sense, when memory recalls, for example, a first personal encounter with birth or with death, the singularity of the remembered image places the deeper possibilities of human understanding in relief. Such experiences punctuating everyday (...) life highlight the central place of memory as a source of human identity.With a few notable exceptions, such as Henri Bergson or Maurice Halb-wachs, this central role of memory was rarely a topic of interest in the theoretical orientations of our century. It played only a peripheral role in the different philosophical orientations and in the human sciences of this century until, very recently, new attempts have been made to comprehend the significance of memory, above all in the fields of intellectual history and philosophy. Without dealing exhaustively with the bibliography of works on memory, I will mention what seem to me to be the signs of a recent renewal of questioning in this area of interest to historians and philosophers alike. This will lead me to the specific problem I will address in the pages that follow.One of the chief sources of the historian’s recent interest in memory has been the historians’ conflict (Historikerstreit) of the 1980s concerning the interpretation of the German and European past since the rise to power of Nazism and in the aftermath of World War II. As the generations who lived through and—from a given perspective—remembered these events increasingly disappear, the question concerning their precise historical meaning has reemerged with a new urgency. In this vein, for example, as the relatively new periodical History and Memory: Studies in the Representation of the Past and the collection of essays Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution,” edited by Saul Friedlander, amply attest, the relation of memory to historical narrative is as important as it is problematic: to the extent that eyewitness memory claims a status of objectivity beyond the fictional sphere of [End Page 707] the imagination, its role in informing historical narrative involves the very issue of objectivity itself. 1Independently of this query concerning the relation of memory and history in recent scholarship focusing on the twentieth century, a number of studies have attempted to place the idea of memory in historical perspective during premodern periods. In this regard, we may cite Janet Coleman’s recently published work, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past and Mary Carruthers’s treatment of the subject of memory in the medieval period in The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2 A number of other recent works in the field of intellectual history have attempted to grapple with the intriguing problem of the historicity of the phenomenon of memory in the West. This idea of the historicity of memory has been inspired at least in part by Pierre Nora’s essay, “Between Memory and History,” which introduced the multi-volume series he directed, Les Lieux de mémoire. In this vein, Patrick H. Hutton’s History as an Art of Memory, Matt K. Matsuda’s The Memory of the Modern, and Richard Terdiman’s Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis all center on the historical transforma-tions to which, according to the different perspectives of their works, “memory” has been subject. 3 Like Nora, they link this historicity of the social and cultural role of memory to the radical transformations that Western civilization has undergone in the modern period.In a philosophical perspective David Farrell Krell’s work, Of Memory, Reminiscence, and Writing: On the Verge, presents a very different idea of the phenomenon of memory. 4 Where the intellectual historians of modernity stress the mutations in the role of memory, Krell, following in the footsteps of Jacques Derrida, emphasizes one essential line of continuity that, to his mind, has tied [End Page 708] together the tradition of philosophical reflection on memory from Plato and Aristotle up until Freud: the metaphoric reference to memory as the faculty... (shrink)

Frequently, historical comparisons are asymmetrical in the sense that they investigate one case carefully while limiting themselves to a mere sketch of the other case which serve as comparative reference point. The debate on the German Sonderweg and the rich historical literature originating from this debate can serve as examples. This article reconstructs the pros and cons within this controversial debate, reports its results and puts it into a broader historical context. It analyzes the comparative logic (...) implied by the Sonderweg thesis and argues that the interpretation of modern German history in the sense of a Sonderweg can only be maintained if related to the question why Germany turned fascist and totalitarian in the interwar period while other societies did not, and if Western countries are selected as units of comparison. The choice of comparative reference points turns out to be decisive and partly dependent on normative priorities and conventions. The article points to dangers and opportunities inherent in asymmetrical comparison. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 12.3 (2002) 305-323 [Access article in PDF] Scope Note 41 Bioethics and Cloning, Part I Susan Cartier Poland and Laura Jane Bishop This is Part One of a two part Scope Note on Bioethics and Cloning. Part Two will be published in the December 2002 issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal and as a separate reprint. Contents For Parts 1 And 2 (...) Part 1Part 2I.History of the ScienceI.Ethical PerspectivesII.Historical CommentaryII.Religious PerspectivesIII.Animal WelfareIII.Fiction and FilmIV.Laws and Legal Literature"Clone" is a collective noun (I, Stewart 1997, p. 771). A collective noun names a group and is composed of individual members, such as "herd" or "flock." Derived from the Greek kl¯on for twig or slip, "clone" was first used in biology to describe the aggregate of asexually produced progeny of an individual, either naturally occurring or man-made; the definition later expanded to mean a group of genetically identical members who originate from a single ancestor. Thus, a clone is a group that results from the process of asexual reproduction.In nature, cloning occurs either by parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) or by fission (embryo splitting). In a pioneering experiment in 1952, Robert Briggs and Thomas J. King (I, 1952), cancer researchers at the Institute for Cancer Research (today part of the Fox Chase Cancer Center) in Philadelphia, demonstrated on frogs another method of cloning by transplanting nuclei into enucleated cells, a technique called "nuclear transplantation," which John B. Gurdon and colleagues (I, 1958, 1975) used to create clones of frogs.Then, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, two back-to-back frauds in cloning occurred. First, the cloning of a human described by American science journalist David Rorvik in the 1978 book In His Image was called a hoax by a court in [End Page 305] 1982. Second, the cloning of three mice, announced by German wunderkind Karl Illmensee to scientific circles in 1979 (and to the public in 1981), could not be proven to be true, according to convincing evidence by McGrath and Solter (I) published in 1984.With their pronouncement that mammalian cloning was impossible, McGrath and Solter essentially stopped cloning research and funding for such biological research. So by the mid-1980s, instead of further investigating cloning, developmental biologists studied embryology related to in vitro fertilization, while molecular biologists studied recombinant DNA under the newly relaxed NIH guidelines. These two strands of scientific investigation came together in the work of Ian Wilmut, who created in vitro embryos using nuclear transplantation to reproduce genetically engineered cattle. Wilmut was seeking a way to increase the successful birth rate when, in the 1990s, he produced identical twin sheep, Megan and Morag, cloned from an embryonic cell, followed by another sheep, Dolly, cloned from an adult cell. The birth of a mammal from an embryo whose genetic material came from an adult cell firmly re-established the possibility of cloning from adults. Prior to Dolly's birth, scientists believed that adult cells lost the ability to dedifferentiate—i.e., to become unspecialized—and so could not direct the development of an embryo through to birth.The 1997 announcement of Dolly's birth initiated the present widespread discussion of cloning. Because of its potentially vast applications across human health, medicine, agriculture, and business/economics, cloning raises a host of issues including those concerning: genetics and genetic engineering, patenting, animal rights and/or animal welfare (especially for transgenic, research, or cloned animals), organ transplantation, reproduction, eugenics, pharmacology (drug production using transgenic animals), research practices, informed consent, stem cell research, women's rights, children's rights, parental rights and responsibilities, and theology and philosophy. It fosters questions about the meaning and purpose of life, the limits of human powers to intervene in research and therapy, and what it means to be human or animal. In addition, environmentalists and organic farmers raise concerns about the effect of novel animals and plants on the environment, while nutritionists and the lay public wonder... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Destruction and Transcendence in W. G. SebaldMark R. McCullohIFor all the Saturnine pessimism of W. G. Sebald's application of Walter Benjamin's view of historical process (an attitude toward history expounded upon at length in an influential work by Susan Sontag), the author's sense of irony about the human predicament is irrepressible. 1 Human beings seem destined to remain prisoners of various paradoxes—they both create and destroy, they are (...) capable of acts of love as well as bitterness and hate, they make efforts to document and communicate, but at the same time they tend to forget and are given to suppressing the truth, they are driven by ideals, yet remain hobbled by imperfection. Art and music, passed on from generation to generation, seem to be the most common way that human beings transcend the strictures of their imperfections, inadequacies, and their finitude. And to the extent that art indeed survives over time, and continues to be perceived and appreciated by beholders, the aesthetic enterprise succeeds. However, ultimately, as the Book of Ecclesiastes and Shelley's "Ozymandias" remind us, all human endeavor is in vain, and, to assume the perspective of physical cosmology for a moment—and in this regard Benjamin's cosmic vision appears painfully accurate—our speck of earth, dwarfed by a vast universe the true immensity of which has been revealed by the Hubble Telescope, will one day be ground to dust and debris like the rings of Saturn, and our sun will exist only as a burned-out hulk. But such a future world, devoid of beholders, and devoid of creators and their artifacts, is not Sebald's primary subject, even though it clearly forms the teleological backdrop for his third novel, The Rings of Saturn (1995, English version 1998). Rather, Sebald pursues his art in spite of a terminal prospect that will ultimately confront our [End Page 395] planet and solar system. His primary subject, the effect of trauma on individual and collective experience, is instead closely linked with the passing of Europe as a tradition, as an idea—as an idiosyncratic and innovative, but inherently corrupt contributor to cultural history. In the course of his narratives he also addresses the redemptive role of art in memorializing the past and attempting to capture the passing present. In both respects he attends to the humane and the sublime as well as the tragic and the grotesque.Paraphrasing the art historian Svetlana Alpers, one early reviewer of Sebald's novel Austerlitz (2001) points out the self-contradictory nature of preserving the transient moment in art:Why create visual art at all when everything on earth must be represented in its inexorable transitoriness; why paint earthly scenes with such incredible care and precision as if they were permanent? 2The care and precision of the painter's craft (in this case, the Dutch still-life painter David Bailly) are devoted to the representation of a scene that is by its very nature transient and even tenuous—like the scenes of sublime beauty in Sebald's fiction, the artist's depiction "courts and admits" its own fragility. What Bailly does visually, Sebald attempts in words. Take, for instance, the following passage from Vertigo, Sebald's first novel, which was titled in German (with considerably more irony) Schwindel. Gefühle 3 :At a hairpin bend I looked out of the turning bus down into the depths below and could see the turquoise surfaces of the Ferstein and Smaranger lakes, which, even when I was a child, on our first excursions into the Tyrol, had seemed to me the essence of all conceivable beauty.(p. 176)The author has already prepared the reader for this moment of awe by remarking on the otherworldly "slow-motion quality" of the waterfalls descending from the mountain cliffs and on the boulders in their screes spreading downwards into the wooded hillsides, "screes which reached from the mountains down into the forests like pale fingers into dark hair..." (p. 176). Examined closely, the passage in question suggests both the enduring power of natural beauty and, especially with its precise reference to an automobile long since out of production and unfamiliar to... (shrink)

A term of relatively recent mintage, coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in 1866, ecology draws on ancient Greek to establish and consolidate its meaning. Although scholars all too often overlook it, the anachronistic rise of ecology in its semantic and conceptual determinations is noteworthy. Formed by analogy with economy, the word may be translated as “the articulation of a dwelling”, the logos of oikos. Here, I argue not only that a vast majority of ecosystems on the planet are (...) subject to environmental upheavals and ecological crises, but also that ecology as the crossroads of dwelling and articulation is in crisis, having come into its own and made explicit what was silently present in its historical enunciation. As a result, ecology needs to be deromanticized, decoupled from the bucolic and the picturesque, and dissociated from nativism and autochthony. Every organism, ecosystem, or place is affected by the forces of unsettlement and displacement; all dwellings and their articulations are shaken to the core and set in motion, rendering ecologies exilic. Ecologies today share the exilic condition, which also threatens to level the differences among them, without the chance of returning to a stable origin, itself nothing other than a theoretical fiction. In what follows, I propose to chalk out the outlines of exilic ecologies. (shrink)

Gustav von Bergmann (1749–1814) was a Lutheran pastor in Livland, one of the Baltic provinces of the Russian Empire. Being interested in Enlightenment ideas, he published a string of literary, historical and political works in German and Latvian. In these works, the tension between ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ wings of Baltic Enlightenment becomes visible, and they can serve as an example of intertwined and often conflicting ideas concerning the education of the ‘common people’ and agrarian reforms within the context (...) of Volksaufklärung (Popular Enlightenment). In the article, an overview of the debates on serfdom and political reforms has been provided by sketching different approaches of Baltic intellectuals and also influences on their ideas from German-speaking countries. Bergmann wrote historical works that emphasised the need of social reforms, but at the same time opposed radical political changes; the shift in his views was influenced by French revolution. His publications in Latvian were in line with Volksaufklärung ideas and corresponded to the concept of gradual transformations by preparing peasants for freedom through the means of education. Belletristic fiction in almanacs, sermons, and translation of German bestseller Noth- und Hülfsbüchlein (1788) served this purpose along with the practical work such as smallpox inoculation. (shrink)

The value scenario is a useful tool in the sheaf of methods within value sensitive design. When envisioning new technology, this tool supports the designer in speculatively considering relevant stakeholders, values expressed or rebuffed by an artifact’s design, and tensions that may exist between those values. This paper explores how science fiction stories can serve as value scenarios to supplement traditional historical methods, especially when informants are no longer accessible.

He work of the Russian nationwide conference ‘National identity through language and literature. Characteristics of conceptoshere of national culture‘ is analyzed in the article. Previous theoretical sources on the issue in question are summarized. The matters represented in the considered scientific forum are generalized. Diachronic analysis of national cultural consciousness as well as complex cognitive-based approach are used to investigate the issue. Special attention is paid to the study of linguistic world-image as exemplified in fiction, folklore, religious texts, business papers, (...) scholarly works and media texts, as well as to the research of intercultural communication in the era of multiculturalism and globalization. As long as terms ‘cultural code‘, ‘national code‘, and ‘fictional code‘ are not precisely defined, the problem of terminological field was noted, as well as the issue of linguo-cognitive interpretation of methods for representing country image in linguistic consciousness. The attention was paid to Russian as a foreign language, to perception and transforming of European cultural codes by American and western European writers in synchronous and diachronic ways. Geopolitical factor of North and South that matters both in global and local context was noted, particularly the issue of German distinction of the modern European mindset was reviewed. Lots of speaker papers mirrored interdisciplinary links that is of importance for contemporary scholarship in the context of globalization and multicultural society. Up-to-date schools of thought in the field of linguistics, literary studies and journalism were represented. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His WorkGereon KopfHeidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. By Reinhard May. Translated with a complementary essay by Graham Parkes. London and New York:Routledge, 1996. Pp. xviii + 121.Reinhard May's Ex Oriente Lux: Heidegger's Werk Unter Ostasiatischen Einfluss (1989), translated into English by Graham Parkes as Heidegger's Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, makes a significant contribution (...) to the growing body of work that explores the intellectual connections between early twentieth-century German philosophers and Chinese classical texts on the one side and contemporary Japanese philosophers on the other. In particular, May explores similarities [End Page 122] between the work of Martin Heidegger and contemporary translations of Taoist writings available to and known by Heidegger such as Martin Buber's Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-Tse (1910), Richard Wilhelm's Laotse: Tao te King: Das Buch des Alten vom Sinn und Leben (1911), Jan Ulenbrook's Lao Tse: Tao te King: Das Buch vom Rechten Weg and von der rechten Gesinnung (1980), and Paul Shih-yi Hsiao's translation of the Tao te Ching. Hsiao himself describes the latter project in his "Heidegger and our Translation of the Tao te Ching," which was published in Graham Parkes' Heidegger and Asian Thought (1987). On the basis of this comparative reading, May argues that Heidegger's essay "Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache," published in Unterwegs zur Sprache (1953/1954), constitutes a fictionalization of the conversation he had with the Japanese Germanist Tezuka Tomio and, ultimately, a confession of his indebtedness to Chinese and Japanese philosophy.May's argument evolves in four steps. In chapter 1, he establishes Heidegger's familiarity with the above-cited German translations of the Laozi and the Zhuangzi as well as with the fundamental Taoist concepts. May cites Heidegger's correspondence with Hsiao on their collaborative translation of the Laozi as well as commentaries by Heinrich Wiegand Petzet and Otto Pöggeler, who document Heidegger's familiarity with the translations by Buber and Ulenbrook, and thus establishes Hei-degger's knowledge of fundamental Taoist ideas and writings.In his second chapter, May reads Heidegger's "Aus einem Gespräch von der Sprache" in light of Tezuka's own account of their conversation and concludes that Heidegger poetically constructs his version in order to support his own philosophy and, ultimately, as May argues in chapter 5, to confess his intellectual debt to the Japanese philosophical tradition. May suggests that a note at the end of Unterwegs zur Sprache, which claims that the conversation that "has remained unpublished for some time, originates in 1953/4, and was occasioned by a visit from Professor Tezuka of the Imperial University in Tokyo" (p. 14), is "clearly incomplete and inaccurate" (p. 14). In addition, May cites discrepancies between the accounts of Heidegger and Tezuka with regard to crucial aspects of their conversation: while Tezuka observes "that the kind of indefiniteness conveyed by this film [Rashmon] concerning our knowledge of reality may have intrigued Heidegger as an East Asian phenomenon," Heidegger makes his Japanese interlocutor say that "[w]e Japanese are not disconcerted when a conversation leaves indefinite [im Unbestimmten] what is really meant" (p. 14). Similar discrepancies can be observed in their accounts of passages dealing with the Japanese rendition of the Heart Sūtra's shiki soku ze kū and the Japanese word kotoba. Tezuka's own report furthermore emphasizes Hei-degger's tendency to force similarities, as in the case of Heidegger's rendition of kotoba as Ding. Confronted with these "indications," May concludes that Heidegger did not report a conversation but rather presented a fictionalized conversation in such a way as to enable the readers to mistake it for the historical record.In chapter 3, May meticulously identifies similarities between Heidegger's work and the German translations of the Laozi and Zhuangzi to which Heidegger had access. Thus Heidegger paraphrases von Strauss' observation "that one is only [End Page 123] through the other" as "the Other to it [Being] is simply Nothing"; "Being and Nothing are not given beside one another. Each uses itself on behalf of... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Michael Murray THE CONFLICT BETWEEN POETRY AND LITERATURE While Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur are widely regarded as engaged in a common hermeneutic enterprise, the greater radicality of Heidegger must fracture such a view. This difference shows up in a striking manner in the conflict between the concept of poetry and the concept of literature. After elucidating its significance, I shall explore a new sense of fiction that reinscribes the (...) conflict and invites us to interpret a canto of Wallace Stevens. Let us enter Gadamer's dispute with Heidegger where he declares: "It is true... I can appeal to the 'transcendental' sense of Heidegger's Being and Time. But where else I call on Heidegger — in that I seek to think 'understanding" as a 'happening7 — [my thought] is turned in an entirely different direction." That direction, Gadamer goes on to explain, arose "out ofthe need for self-clarification that came over me as a philologist and interpreter of philosophical texts." To which he adds trenchantly: "My point of departure is not the complete forgetfulness of Being, the 'night of Being,' rather on the contrary — I say this against Heidegger as well as Buber— the unreality of such an assertion. That also holds good for our relation to the tradition." ' This last statement is directed against the encompassing project of Heidegger's later work, his epochal history ofBeing from Anaximander to Nietzsche. This ontological history or aletheia process is charted in terms of the figure of day and night that come so easily in German where the West is das Abendland. Heidegger hyphenates this name (Abend-land) in order to bring forward its status as land of the evening. The historical 59 60Philosophy and Literature evening in question points us back toward the dawn of the West in early Greek thought, poetry, and life, and to its second weaker beginning in the Classical period, and thence ahead to die darkening ofthe modern world, marked by the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the massification of man, and the resentment of the creative — a darkening that has passed into its night and approaches its midnight now in the age of the Gestell or total framework. As such this time betokens the possibility of a second dawn nourished by the memory of the first, though it cannot be a return. Elsewhere Heidegger elaborates this late modern situation in Hölderlinian terms as the Age between the No Longer and the Not Yet. What is thought by the time of die Between and by the language of the lighting-concealing history-of-Being is, according to Heidegger, what really specifies the hermeneutic situation of modern man, poetry, and society. While Gadamer accepts the nineteenth- and twentieth-century discovery ofhistoricity, and tries to advance insights of Heidegger along with his own to clarify the conditions of humanistic knowledge, he rejects the consummative eschatology of Hegel but no less the catastrophic eschatology of Heidegger. As he emphatically declares: "I do not believe at all that we live Tietween' two worlds.... Only the prophet who already sees the promised land would have, in my estimation, the possibility of saying the like. I remember, instead of this, the one world I only know, and which in all decay has lost far less of its evidence and cohesion than it talks itselfinto."2 Of course Heidegger himself insists upon a relation to tradition, reiterated in the asseveration of his later years "that everything essential, everything great arises from man's rootedness in his homeland and tradition."3 Nevertheless, one must say that the revolutionary renewal of Heidegger that presupposes the revolutionary break is not the renewal for which Gadamer speaks. To Ulustrate this divergence of Gadamer from Heidegger we may ponder the concept of the classic. This example occupies an important place in the argument of Truth and Method because the experience of the classic is recognized as combining a genuine historical efficaciousness with a normative significance in the formation of the Western literary tradition (TM, pp. 253ff). In a more recent paper Gadamer explains die "peculiar contemporaneity" that accrues to classic works of literature by reason of tiieir Wirkungsgeschichte or effective-history.* First, they occupy "a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Common Sense and Theological 9 9 Exper_,ence on the Bas s o,f Franz Rosenzweig's Philosophy NATHAN ROTENSTREICH The position of Franz Rosenzweig's thinking within the framework of presentday philosophy is difficult to ascertain. Though he was deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition, his chief work, The Star o] Redemption (Der Stern der Erlgsung, 1921), was conceived outside the main discussions of the philosophical controversy in the twenties. He formulated (...) his ideas side by side with the trends of German philosophy, but not by way of keeping pace with these trends. Yet his polemic against traditional philosophy in general, and against idealism in particular brings Rosenzweig close to the character of the rebellion represented by Existenz-Philosophie. 1 I The question of grounding a philosophical system or a set of philosophical ideas with an objective toward faith clearly poses the difficulty, in terms of the ultimate authority, of maintaining the validity of such a system of ideas. Could that authority be reason, which as a source of ideas and confirmation is outside faith while having consequences or expressions within the scope of faith? Or is faith, asserting the existence of God and his relations to world and man, an independent source? In case faith is an independent source, does it have the guarantee of its validity in its own boundaries, or does it still point to a source of validity which is outside faith and yet is not reason? It seems that Franz Rosenzweig was willy-nilly in his concern with this question. As said before the first approach would have been to construct a system along rational lines. This, however, would have done violence to a basic anti-rationalistic trait in Rosenzweig's thinking that can be clearly discerned in his The Star o] Redemption, in his Kleinere Schri]ten and in his small book, Understanding the Sick and Healthy, published until now in English only. Rosenzweig's criticism of rationalism may be summed up as follows: a) Reason strives for a unified conception of the world; and in support of this monistic fiction its assimilative energy is ready to seize upon all arguments that militate against the doctrines and practices of faith. b) Reason tends to ignore the existence of the individual which it regards as 1On the relation between Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger, see Karl LSwith, "M. Heideggerand F. Rosenzweigor Temporality and Eternity," Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch,III (Sept., 1942),53-77. [353] 354 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY merely one of the variations of an all-inclusive unity. The question of the relation of the particular to the general or of the individual to the whole, which has engrossed philosophers since time immemorial, has no place in rationalistic systems. c) Since reason places the understanding above the things to be understood (and hence also above the data of religious experience, including the existence of God), we find that from a speculative and historical point of view rationalism has a strong bias against religion or theology. The other way open to Rosenzweig was to rely on the principle of Revelation, but he could not adopt this principle as the basis of his system for the following reasons" a) The first reason can be understood from Schelling's paradox: He who adheres to Revelation does not philosophize, and he who philosophizes finds Revelation inadequate for his purposes. Since Rosenzweig was basically a philosopher --despite his protestations to the contrary--he was precluded by that very fact from appealing to the evidence furnished by Revelation. On the contrary, he sought to find a non-rational basis for Revelation itself. b) The second reason that precluded Rosenzweig from taking the traditional course of relying on Revelation is implicit in that principle itself as Rosenzweig understood it. Revelation in his system has no enlightening or cognitive significance, or what is called in Christian theology Kerygma, instructive knowledge. In Revelation, he says, God reveals only revelation; He reveals himself to man and to man alone.2 In his view, then, Revelation does not transmit informative content and hence has no dogmatic significance. It is a dialogue that posits the existence of the participants, the existence of God, and (highly important for... (shrink)

This article reflects on the dynamics of the public sphere in the early modern period by analyzing the figure of the peasant and the notion of the common(s) in dialogue pamphlets. Beginning with a discussion of what it means to speak of a public sphere in relation to the early modern period, it examines one of the most famous Reformation dialogues, _Karst-hans_, published anonymously in 1521 in Strasbourg. Just before the German Peasants’ War (1524–26), the Lutheran dialogue, polemically directed (...) against the theologian and satirist Thomas Murner, positions the peasant as a critically mature citizen, with the hoe (_Karst_) symbolizing his potential militancy. This article specifically draws on the notion of publicity that the dialogue articulates. Using it as an example, this article analyzes the transitions and mutual projections between fiction, urban culture, and peasant protest, the structures of which are significant for the literary representation of agrarian protest far beyond the Reformation. In its final section, this article closely examines the media genre of the dialogue pamphlet and outlines some horizons of its historical development up to the Enlightenment concerning its political use and its relation to the ideal of a dialogic and socially leveled public sphere. By arguing that there existed an implicit ideal of the public sphere as a common good in the early modern period, the aim is also to clarify what distinguishes this early modern understanding of the public sphere from its conceptualization as a marketplace that has dominated our understanding of it since the Enlightenment. The prehistory presented here should provide resources for reimagining the future of the public sphere at a time when its actual structure is once again very much at stake. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)