Hannah Arendt’s studies and essays on totalitarianism revealed that in the concentration camps of the National Socialists, human life reached a limit that teaches us something about the human being. Giorgio Agamben took up this insight and developed it further in his ethics of bare life.3 Are there indications in Arendt’s work that the human being can approach the limit of human life in other contexts as well? This essay will show that poverty also constitutes such a limit, a wall (...) at which we experience something about the human being, about the possibility and impossibility of a public life. (shrink)

Adorno conceives of art as something tied to its material. He understands artistic material as historically mediated: it confronts artists with technical problems that keep renewing themselves. Artworks solve these problems. When they succeed, they can only be the way they are. Their power lies in this impossibility of imagining them any different from how they appear to be. However, Adorno also suggests another idea of art: the idea of art without power.

A reconstruction of aspects of the philosophy of Adorno and Heidegger. This title reconstructs the philosophy of Adorno and Heidegger in the light of the importance that these thinkers attach to two proper names: Auschwitz and Germanien. In Adorno's dialectical thinking, Auschwitz is the name of an incommensurable historical event that seems to put a provisional end to history as a negative totality. In Heidegger's thinking of Being, Germanien is a name inscribed in an historical mission on which the fate (...) of Western civilization seems to depend: it thus becomes the name of a positive totality of history. (shrink)

Beautiful passages are passages of ‘pure presence’ inasmuch as they cannot be separated from an absence, from an absence that cannot be revoked by restoring a ‘pure presence’. Beautiful passages are passages that move and inspire because they do not withhold anything, though their gift and their surrender lies in an ellipsis that is essential to ‘pure presence’ and that cannot be sidestepped, as if a remainder, a reserve, or a surplus inhered in them. It is impossible to get a (...) grip on beautiful passages. They are riddles that have been solved but persist in the midst of their solution and do not forfeit any of their enigmaticalness. Their beauty resides in an experience of intensity, in an experience based on an elision, on a tightening and an averting. Such averting is an immediate turning towards the one who feels the intensity, touching and stimulating him as a consequence. This paper explores the question: Are there beautiful passages in Of Grammatology? (shrink)

Issue theme - Process:Music. At the beginning there was an encounter, accidental or not. In Zagreb, in the early 1960's, Orson Welles was shooting parts of The Trial based on the writing of Franz Kafka. A kind of rumor, a tale, was burned into the memory of a city that at the time feverishly invested itself into modernism. Among those newly founded institutions the Zagreb Music Biennale has played a significant role. Almost four decades later, in April 2009 the Process:Music (...) program within the 25th Music Biennale, has sought to take a step back, to orient itself in regard to the meeting that has brought together two major 20th century artists and a city, by mere coincidence or not. Six invited musicians and philosophers had not been given any strict specification whatsoever, just a formal indication in the guise of a rumor, gossip, hearsay or a tale to tackle an encounter that has materialized itself as a movie. Their interventions and new, additional, contributions in this issue of Frakcija Journal represent philosophical, musical and cinematic accounts inspired by and taken over by a tale, gossip, hearsay or a even a lie. Momentarily. By chance, or not. (shrink)

An essay on Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Mankind", published here in a Spanish translation.

This paper discusses hope and hopelessness in relation to history. It does so by turning to Benjamin’s famous statement that hope exists only for the hopeless, and to Derrida’s late thoughts on solitude and the world.

Through an analysis of the works of Italian filmmaker Luchino Visconti, García Düttmann explores the insight that it is never the real but always the possible that blocks the path to change.