Vergangene Vergängnis: Für eine Philologie des Stattdessen

2017 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyowon Cho

AbstractBetween Erich Auerbach and Walter Benjamin, there existed a remarkable friendship, which on the one hand manifested itself as an unobtrusive disputation, and yet which on the other hand could be considered an unintended collaboration toward an old-new ideal of philology. Auerbach claims that with the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, Western European literature reached the climax of the figuralism that Auerbach, if belatedly, wants to bring to the fore. Benjamin, in contrast, finds energy for the revolution in the surrealistic love that traces back not to Dante, but to the Provençal poetry which Auerbach regards merely as preliminary to Danteʼs literary achievement. In his The Origin of German Tragic Drama, Benjamin highlights the concept of creatureliness, whose significance for his philosophy of history is no less than that of justice. Auerbach, for his part, does not find its expression in the Germany of the 17th century, but in the France of the 16th century, namely in the work of Michel de Montaigne. However, Montaigneʼs creatureliness is rooted in sermo humilis, which is best embodied in the story of Peter who denied his Lord Jesus Christ three times. By contrast, German creatureliness detects its dissolution in the idea of natural theatre that Benjamin locates in the work of Franz Kafka. Sermo humilis is the perfection of figuralism, whereas the idea of natural theatre means reversal of allegory. The perfected figuralism and the reversed allegory cooperate in the idea of the philology of instead (Philologie des Stattdessen), whose task it is to make bygone the futility of worldly things.

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franco Masciandaro

The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with his Politics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, and the Decameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger – what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" – which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her.


1970 ◽  
Vol 41 (116) ◽  
pp. 33-48
Author(s):  
Dennis Meyhoff Brink

DANTE’S LITERARY ATMOSPHEROLOGY | The article argues that recent theories on affect and atmosphere by, for instance, Teresa Brennan, Lauren Berlant, and Peter Sloterdijk, can enter into an extraordinarily fruitful interchange with Dante’s Divine Comedy. On the one hand, these theories can direct our attention to the hitherto overlooked atmospheric phenomena that occur ubiquitously in Dante’s Comedy and provide us with concepts that render them legible as products of human emissions. On the other hand, the numerous descriptions of different atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy can contribute to overcoming the lack of linguistic specifications and distinctions which – according to theorists such as Brian Massumi and Peter Sloterdijk – characterizes today’s Western understanding of affective atmospheres and impedes its ongoing theorization. Based on readings of a selected number of atmospheres in Dante’s Comedy, the article argues that the Comedy not only anticipated insights that were not articulated theoretically until the twentieth and twenty-first century, butalso makes up an exceptional encyclopedia of affective atmospheres that have not yet been examined, neither by Dante researchers, nor by theorists of affects and atmospheres. Therefore, both camps have much to learn from Dante’s literary atmospherology, which the article aims to make explicit.


2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 405-417
Author(s):  
Elias Polizoes

This article offers a reading of the “Conclusioni provvisorie,” the last section of Eugenio Montale's La bufera e altro. It takes its lead from notion of Classicism outlined by T.S. Eliot in his 1923 review of Ulysses and argues that the recourse Montale makes to Dante in particular, and to Christian symbolism in general, is structurally akin to the parallel James Joyce draws between Homer's Odyssey and the world of the early 1920s. In Eliot's view, it is by invoking the coherence of ancient myth that a writer can lend shape and significance to the chaos of the modernity. In Montale's case, however, rather than work to organize the chaotic present according to the idealized image of form and order Classicism promises, the structural use the poet makes of Christianity serves a demythologizing function. On the one hand, it exposes how Classicism is unable to marshal the chaos of the present beyond transforming it into a work of art; on the other, it shows that ideas of order are in fact allegories of the kind elaborated by Walter Benjamin, that is to say, provisional, makeshift, and ultimately empty.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (66) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isak Winkel Holm

Isak Winkel Holm: “Arendt and Kafka. The Right to Rights in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’”Franz Kafka experienced a legal and political vacuum opening up in the middle of civilized Europe, Hannah Arendt saw it culminating in the death camps. In this sinister historical situation both authors were not so much interested in the question of specific rights as in the more fundamental question of the right to have rights – to use Arendt’s famous formula. This essay explores the intricate relationship between Kafka’s and Arendt’s analyses of the “calamity of the rightless”. On the one hand, Kafka’s literary diagnosis of rightlessness will be reconstructed through a reading of his story “The Metamorphosis”; on the other hand, Arendt’s philosophical portrait of the rightless refugee will be developed in a discussion of her early Kafka essays and, first of all, of her Origins of Totalitarianism. The contention is that Arendt’s notion of the right to have rights and, hence, her reading of Kafka function as important corrections of modern Kafka research.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (26) ◽  
pp. 248-272
Author(s):  
Alice Mara Serra

This text underlines the way in which, for Georges Didi-Huberman, topics including matter, symptom and memory become primordial to the thinking of images. But as Didi-Huberman proceeds, the course that leads him to highlight such topics first addresses other topics that, inphilosophy and iconography, sought to deny such readings, namely: image as form and its correlative meanings, that is, image as symbol and image as visibility. Didi-Huberman, however, argues that the notion of form may no longer be merely opposed to that of matter, nor be considered as solely idealistic. If, on the one hand, Didi-Huberman presents the insufficiency of the deconstruction of the notion of form presented by Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, the displacements of the notion of form proposed specially in Ce que nous voyons ce qui nous regardepoint to an approximation to deconstruction, mostly to the themes of trace, index and “the belows” (les dessous) of images. In addition, passages of this and other works of Didi-Huberman may insinuate a connection between the notions of trace and aura, which refer to convergences concerning the deconstruction of the visible and the dialectical image. This text seeks to reconstruct such directions from writings of Didi-Huberman and, in this way, restores other writings that border on them: specially from Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin.


Author(s):  
David Anderson

The introduction commences with a ‘detour’ into the history of landscape art and the picturesque, suggesting ways that this mode pre-empted what may seem like more modern ideas about the interference between perception and representation. This discussion is folded into a brief account of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and the interventions of theorists including Doreen Massey and Marc Augé, establishing an immediate context for the work of Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair. Suggesting a twin heritage of the ‘English Journey’ on the one hand and the French Surrealists and Situationists on the other, the introduction then offers the tension between amant and amateur as a way of characterizing the balance of exotic/everyday, plan/coincidence, and high-brow/low-brow in these figures’ work. It considers the role of pedestrianism and melancholia before closing with a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Gustave Doré’s ‘New Zealander’.


Dialogue ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50
Author(s):  
Peter Loptson

In W. H. Walsh's widely read book, An Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1951) there is set out a distinction which became virtually classic, or canonical, between two kinds of philosophy of history. On the one hand, there is critical philosophy of history, which investigates, in what is supposed to be a more or less neutral and objective way, the actual practices of historians, with a view to determining their methods, the character of their cognitive and explanatory claims, resemblances to other kinds of inquiry, differences, and other matters of allied type. Critical philosophers of history are supposed to have a relation to their subject at least similar to that of philosophers of science to theirs. Walsh approved of critical philosophy of history, and pointed to directions of its future progress. On the other hand, there is speculative philosophy of history, which seeks to give philosophie content and structure to the actual course of history, typically, world history. This was the sort of thing engaged in by people like Hegel, and Auguste Comte, and Spengler and Toynbee; Walsh did not approve of it at all. Walsh's distinction, and similar if different perspectives on it, appear among other places in William Dray's Philosophy of History and in articles on philosophy of history in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.


2009 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 117-133
Author(s):  
Lina Vidauskytė

Šiame straipsnyje aptariama Walterio Benjamino alegorijos samprata, kuri gali būti suprantama ir kaip jo taikomas filosofinis alegorinis metodas. Šis metodas traktuojamas kaip būdas kalbėti apie kitybę. Alegorija, kuri reprezentuoja barokinį Trauerspiel (tai savarankiškas žanras, o ne antikinės tragedijos tąsa), pasižymi tam tikru pertrūkiu tarp formos ir turinio, arba tarp reikšmės ir išraiškos. Benjaminas siekia reabilituoti alegoriją – romantikai buvo pradėję ją nuvertinti. Čia pasirodo svarbi Benjamino kalbos samprata, o tiksliau – nuopuolio situacija, kuri atsispindi ir kalboje. Alegorija pasirodo kaip vienintelė įmanoma tokioje situacijoje. Alegorijos fragmentiškumas, konvencijos ir išraiškos dialektika, priklausomybė nuo reikšmę suteikiančio autoriteto, kilmė iš liūdinčio / gedinčio žvilgsnio, kuriam pasaulis suskyla į atskirybes, formali giminystė tokiems turiniams kaip irimas (Verfall) ir mirtis, kilmė iš „kalbos dvasios nuopuolio“ („Sündenfall des Sprachgeistes“), kurį alegorija ir išreiškia, alegorijos sąsaja su kita nei žmogiška būtimi yra pagrindinės filosofinio alegorinio metodo ypatybės.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: alegorija, simbolis, Barokas, Romantizmas, netiesioginis kalbėjimas, kitybė, Trauerspiel, tiesa.Allegory as representation of the OtherLina Vidauskytė SummaryThis article deals with German philosopher’s Walter Benjamin philosophical concept of allegory. The concept of allegory is aplied as method in the main works of Benjamin. This method is concidered as a way of speaking about the Other. Allegory represents Baroque Trauerspiel (it is an autonomous genre rather than continuation of Anciet Tragedy) and have interruption between form and content, meaning and expression. Benjamin seaks the rehabilitation of allegory from its humiliation since Romanticism. Benjamin’s notion of language after the Fall is one of the most important issues for using allegory, or indirect speech. Allegory is nearly the one way of expression in such historical (not mythological) situation. Allegory’s fragmentation, its dialectics of convention and expression, its origin from mourning gaze, formal kinship to such contents as decay and death, its origin from “the Fall of language spirit” etc. are the main characteristics of such philosophical method.Keywords: allegory, symbol, Baroque, Romanticism, indirect speech, Other, Trauerspiel, truth.


2021 ◽  
pp. 154-173
Author(s):  
Juan Manuel Torbidoni

This paper analyses the concept of “nowtime” (Jetztzeit) in Walter Benjamin’s “On the concept of history.” It shows its centrality in Benjamin’s philosophy of history, by defining it in opposition to two elements of Kantian philosophy: on the one hand, “empty, homogeneous time,” on the other, the faith in the infinite, inevitable progress of a generic “mankind.” It argues that the notions of now-time and truth as flitting hark back to Benjamin’s early concern about the devaluation of experience in modern philosophy and the need to rescue the ephemeral as a decisive element in metaphysics. Rather than a historical category, now-time denotes an instance of redemption


2014 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 189-201
Author(s):  
Dorota Gil

The concept of “the beginning and end of history” in Serbian historiosophy. Dominant problematic and methodological featuresIn this study, the most representative and (importantly) not easily methodologically categorised historiosophical concepts of the Serbian state and nation are taken into consideration. Among these, the most elementary point of reference is that of “the beginning and end”. On the one hand the Serbian philosophy of history – dependant both on common historiosophical concepts and native ideas – demonstrates its connections with orientations of a post-Hegelian background; while on the other connections can be seen with the Providentialist historiosophy dominant in the first part of the 20th century in Serbia and, nowadays, taking into account history in Soteriologic and Eschatological terms – Christian historiosophy (more strictly: the Orthodox theology of history based on the Russian pattern), as well as eclectic historiosophy referring to the contamination of indigenous folk tradition and ethicised Orthodoxy (which in turn synthesises mythic and messianic elements). Within all perspectives and methodological practices, the very thought enabling the whole history of Serbia and the Serbs to be grasped – referring at the same time either to constant casual mechanisms concerning the national consciousness or to the variously-defined national psyche – is co-constructed and present in all ideas: the concept of “the beginning and end”. Within this concept, several events and historical figures – forming a constitutional and basic domain of meaning with its potential as loci communes – are grasped: the beginning of Nemanjić’s state, St. Sava as the “Serbian beginning and end”, and the very central event – the Battle of Kosovo – within the transcendental frame – as the beginning of the cyclically repetitive “holy history”, etc. Kategorie początku i końca dziejów w serbskiej historiozofii – dominanty problemowe i metodologiczneArtykuł omawia najbardziej reprezentatywne i – co istotne – wymykające się jed­noznacznej kategoryzacji metodologicznej ujęcia historiozofii dziejów państwa i narodu serbskiego, w których kategoria „początku i końca” stanowi elementarny i stały punkt odniesienia. Zależna od ogólnych koncepcji historiozoficznych, ale także oparta o refleksję rodzimą, serbska filozofia historii ujawnia związki z nurtami o rodowodzie postheglowskim, nade wszystko jednak z dominującą tu w I poł. XX wieku historiozofią prowidencjalistyczną i – także współcześnie – ujmującą historię w perspektywie soteriologicznej i eschatologicznej – chrześcijańską (a dokładniej – wzorowaną na rosyjskiej – prawosławną teologią historii) oraz ukształtowaną w oparciu o tradycję ludową i zetnizowane prawosławie eklektyczną historiozofią syntezującą pierwiastki mityczne i mesjanistyczne. Niezależnie od perspektyw i strategii metodologicznych historiozoficzną refleksję umożliwiającą ogarnięcie całości dziejów Serbii i Serbów, a przy tym wskazującą na stałe mechanizmy sprawcze lokalizowane w sferze świadomości, bądź też rozmaicie rozumianej psychiki narodowej, współtworzy elementarna – obecna we wszystkich koncepcjach – kategoria „początku i końca”. W jej obrębie mieszczą się konstytuujące podstawową sferę sensów i mające status loci commu­nes najważniejsze wydarzenia i postaci historyczne (początek państwa i świętej dynastii Nemanjiciów; św. Sava jako „serbski początek i koniec”; centralne wydarzenie – bitwa na Kosowym Polu – w wymiarze transcendentnym – „początek” cyklicznie powtarzającej się „historii świętej”, itd.).


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