The Unstable Object: Glifo, Blow and Sacco at MoMA, 1972

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Halland
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Structural Element ◽  
Jean Baudrillard ◽  
Stylistic Development ◽  
Epistemological Status ◽  
Architecture And Design

Summary This article discusses three radical objects—the Glifo shelf from 1966, the Blow chair from 1967 and the Sacco chair from 1968—that were all exhibited at Museum of Modern Art’s ground-breaking architecture and design exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape in 1972. The article proposes that these early postmodern objects should not merely be considered a new stylistic development, a new aesthetics or as expressing new conceptions of sociopolitical ideologies; rather, they can be considered as instigating a new epistemological status of objects. A close reading reveals how the structural element of Glifo, Blow and Sacco is hard to trace and how these objects’ physical limits seem to soften or even dissolve. By engaging with the writings of Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida and Manfredo Tafuri, this article claims that the poststructuralist landscape of ideas has a material counterpart in some objects from the late 1960s and then discusses the political and intellectual implications of such unstable objects.

The Political Theology of Schelling

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saitya Brata Das
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Political Works ◽  
The Way

This book rigorously examines the theologico-political works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, setting his thought against Hegel's and showing how he prepared the way for the post-metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida.

Reading Politics with Machiavelli

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald J. Schmidt, Jr
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Family Farm ◽  
Louis Althusser ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
Key Concepts ◽  
White Nationalism ◽  
The Republic

Reading Politics with Machiavelli is an anachronistic reading of certain key concepts in Machiavelli’s The Prince and The Discourses (as well as some of his correspondence). In 1513, soon after the Medici returned to power in Florence, Machiavelli lost his position as First Secretary to the Republic, and he was exiled. On his family farm, he began a self-consciously anachronistic reading of great political figures of antiquity, and, in combination with his own experience as a diplomat, crafted a unique perspective on the political crises of his time. At our own moment of democratic crisis, as the democratic imagination, as well as democratic habits and institutions face multiple attacks from neoliberalism, white nationalism, and authoritarianism, I argue that a similar method, in which we read Machiavelli’s work as he read Livy’s and Plutarch’s, can help us see the contingency, and the increasingly forgotten radical potential, of our politics. Louis Althusser argued that Machiavelli functions for us as an uncanny authority, one whose apparent familiarity is dispelled as we examine his epistolary yet opaque account of history, politics, and authority. This makes his readings a potentially rich resource for a time of democratic crisis. With that challenge in mind, we will examine the problems of conspiracy, prophecy, torture, and exile and use a close reading of Machiavelli’s work to make out new perspectives on the politics of our time.

Coleridge's “ideal Realism”: an alternative to the “doctors of the Absolute”?

1995 ◽  
Vol 16 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Mary Anne Perkins
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Magnum Opus ◽  
The Absolute ◽  
First Time

A few months ago I read Peter Nicholson's The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists for the first time. In the index I found more than a hundred references to Hegel and only one to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. However, as many of the latter's writings, published for the first time in recent years, become generally accessible there is an increasing sense that he has been unfairly deprived of his due status as a philosopher. This is partly, no doubt, the syndrome of the prophet in his own country and partly the inevitable consequence of much of his later work remaining unpublished until recent years. Coleridge himself, with what some would take to be confirmation of an over-sensitivity to criticism, felt the neglect of his work went deeper and betrayed an anti-philosophical trait in British character. Despite his close reading of the work of many of his German contemporaries it seems that he did not read more than sixtyone pages of Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik. His margin notes to this work are, on the whole, negative in their criticism. However, despite significant disagreements, there is much common ground in theme, argument and conclusion between his many drafts of the ‘Logosophia’, his intended magnum opus, and Hegel's system.

The Monarchic Imperative in Rabbinic Perspective

AJS Review ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 15-39
Author(s):  
Gerald J. Blidstein
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Historical Institution

Recent decades have seen a flowering of research into the political tradition and culture of the Jewish people. It seems appropriate, therefore, to undertake an investigation of key rabbinic discussions of a central biblical and historical institution: the monarchy. This study opens with a close reading of the sources and attempts to understand them in their conceptual and literary contexts, moves on to a consideration of possible historical contexts and repercussions, and concludes with some reflections on the relation of our topic to the messianic element in Israel's faith.

Scatter 2

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The One ◽  
Nuremberg Trials

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-138
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of

This chapter tracks the history of cruelty in the administration of the death penalty. It moves from the history of blood (cruor) and bloody cruelty (e.g., the guillotine) to a history that involves the disappearance of blood and the non-bloody process of interiorization. It argues that psychical cruelty makes cruelty not only difficult to determine but also, as Jacques Derrida insists, one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis. This chapter begins by following the signs of the mutation of the death-dealing discourse in the Christian, European West; it ends by reading the Jewish joke as the sign of a psychoanalytico-philosophical alliance that is explosively out of tune with the political theology of the death penalty.

Protodemocracy and the Fall of Sovereignty (Hobbes, Aristotle)

2021 ◽  
pp. 203-249
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Language Theory ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Rhetorical Dimension ◽  
Models Of Reading

A close reading of Hobbes stresses the latter’s recognition of a democratic or proto-democratic moment at the root of the political, at the aporetic moment of transition from the state of nature to the political state. This rather effaced priority of democracy sits uneasily with Hobbes’s deep suspicion of it, and its constant association in his work with rhetoric and oratory. A reading of Hobbes’s language theory in light of Aristotle’s distinction between phonè and logos shows how this rhetorical dimension of language is in fact irreducible (and indeed exuberantly exploited in Hobbes’s own writing), and how, especially in Hobbes’s elaborate and fascinating discussion of counsel, it relates to the structural failing both of the sovereignty Hobbes is concerned to defend and of the models of reading he promotes in the Leviathan.

Creating Gendered Images of the Soldier Figure in Literary Works

2019 ◽  
pp. 97-120
Author(s):  
Yan Xu
Keyword(s):  
Political Participation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Military Academy ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Social Sphere ◽  
Participation Of Women ◽  
Female Soldier

The fourth chapter operates as a deviation from the previous chapter by looking at a literary perspective of the soldier image through works by writers with direct army or combat experiences. Moreover, this chapter also aims to examine how these writers managed to assert their own influence as social critics, to achieve personal independence, and to advocate for women’s political participation. Xu offers a close reading of three different literary works, including one by a female soldier who had studied at Whampoa Military Academy, in order to critically inspect the gendered images of soldiers and advocate for the participation of women within the political and social sphere of the time.

On Reading Organizational Culture

1992 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-355 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Linstead ◽  
Robert Grafton-Small
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Culture ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Common Knowledge ◽  
Everyday Practice ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Organizational Cultures ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
Production Of Culture ◽  
Interpretative Approach

The study of organizational cultures has been dominated by an interpretative approach which has emphasized the production of culture at the expense of the creativity shown by the consumers of cuiture, organizational members. 'Corpor ate culture' is distinguished from 'workplace' or 'organizational' cultures, and a number of other problems emerging within the literature are identified. These are presented as organizational culture versus cultural organization; cultural plurali ties ; rationality and the irrational; common knowledge and its constitution; power and ideology; and individualism and subjectivity. It is then argued, after a detailed discussion of concepts drawn primarily from a close reading of the work of Jacques Derrida, that a postmodern approach to organizational culture would recast the problems in terms of a revised conceptualization of subjectivity, and would formulate culture as paradox, otherness, seduction, and discourse. This would entail studying the 'bricolage' of organizational members within the 'microphysics' of what de Certeau calls the 'tactics of everyday practice'.

scholarly journals The Other Side of Hospitality: Migratory Aesthetics in Yael Bartana’s True Finn

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 91
Author(s):  
Achia Anzi
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Traditional Art ◽  
Cultural Specificity

My paper examines Mieke Bal’s concept of migratory aesthetics through the prism of hospitality. Critical of academic and institutional tendencies that either deny particularism or pin agents and artefacts to their alleged context, Bal develops her concept as a way of accommodating contemporary mobility without undermining cultural specificity. While arguing that “there is no such thing as site-unspecific art”, Bal is also critical of new historicism’s and traditional art history’s overemphasis on “provenance”, and underscores the political ramifications of this approach. Her critique can be read through the framework of hospitality. The notion of “provenance” frames the guest as the other and limits her ability to participate in the host’s culture. Hospitality, however, as Jacques Derrida maintains, is an ambivalent concept. While extending a friendly welcome, it also preserves hierarchy between the host and the guest. In my paper, I examine this other side of hospitality in Yael Bartana’s film True Finn (2014) and in Lost in Space (2005) of Mieke Bal and Shahram Entekhabi. I explore how these films organise the host/guest relation and how they deal with the political entanglement of hospitality.

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