scholarly journals Now: A Post-Romantic Countertextuality of the Contemporary

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Corby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Ethical Position ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
To Come ◽  
Ethical Stance

In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.

scholarly journals Untimely Meditation: Nietzsche et cetera

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 631
Author(s):  
Arno Böhler
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Eternal Return ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Stage 4 ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
To Come ◽  
Mode Of Being

The following lecture performance was a part of the research festival Philosophy On Stage#4 at Tanzquartier Wien, where new relations between philosophy and the arts were tested and put into practice. The lecture starts with the claim that philosophical thinking necessarily performs the temporality of the untimely as a mode of being-in-time, which realises a revolt of time against its times in favour of a time to come. Being neither part of the past nor of eternity, the temporality of the untimely calls future events into being.Insofar as philosophy shares the temporality of the untimely with the arts, the lecture-performance defines arts-based philosophy––the alliance of art and philosophy, by which philosophy has started to implement artistic practices into philosophy––as a field for the appearance of the untimely. As Jacques Derrida has shown in Politics of Friendship, the proposition “Alas! if only you knew how soon, how very soon, things will be – different! –”, characterises precisely the aporetic principle of a democracy of the future, grounded in the temporality of the untimely. The genitive ‘of’ thereby indicates a mode of democracy which does only exist as long as it keeps itself open towards its own changeability and eventfulness. Therefore it necessarily takes place as the prelude of a future one is able to affirm full heartedly in advance, that is to say, over and over again. A mode of being-in-time that touches the secret of Nietzsche’s most abysmal thought: the thought of the eternal return of the same, in which somebody has realized the never ending eternity loops of be-coming; a life of immanence; a recurring movement of eternity within itself.

The Messianic: Waiting for the Future

2020 ◽  
pp. 156-180
Author(s):  
Jacques Derrida
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Universal Structure ◽  
To Come

This chapter evaluates the messianic tone that deconstruction has recently adopted, which is the turn it takes toward the future. The messianic future which deconstruction dreams is the unforeseeable future to come, absolutely to come, the justice, the democracy, the gift, and the hospitality to come. Jacques Derrida at first avoided the notion of the messianic on the grounds that it entailed the idea of a “horizon of possibility” for the future and, hence, of some sort of anticipatory encircling of what is to come. But after this initial hesitation, Derrida adopted the term “messianic.” Deconstruction is not the destruction of religion but its reinvention. It helps religion examine its conscience, counseling and chastening religion about its tendency to confuse its faith with knowledge, which results in the dangerous and absolutizing triumphalism of religion. Derrida also distinguishes the “messianic” as a universal structure from the various “messianisms,” which are a little too strong.

The Thinker of the Future – Introduction to The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed Up as Justice

2005 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Drucilla Cornell
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
Pure Reason ◽  
Valid Knowledge ◽  
The Future ◽  
Systematic Structure ◽  
To Come

There has perhaps been no greater thinker of the future than Jacques Derrida. Throughout his entire body of work Derrida constantly returns to the thinking of the “perhaps,” of the arrizant. This thinking of the “perhaps” takes shape as what is “new” and other to our world, something that is therefore unknowable even as a horizon of ideality that both arises out of and points to what ought to be in any given world. I renamed deconstruction the philosophy of the limit so as to emphasize Derrida as the protector of what is still yet to come. My argument was fundamentally that Derrida radicalized the notion of the Kantian meaning of “laying the ground” as the boundaries for the constitution of a sphere of valid knowledge, or determinant judgment. In Kant, to criticize aims to delimit what is decisive to the proper essence of a sphere of knowledge, say for example science. The “laying of limits” is not primarily a demarcation against a sphere of knowledge, but a delimiting in the sense of an exhibition of the inner construction of pure reason. The lifting out of the elements of reason involves a critique in the sense that it both sketches out the faculty of pure reason and surveys the project as the whole of its larger architectonic or systematic structure.

Closer Still: The Total Artwork

Lyric Cousins ◽  
2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Richard Wagner ◽  
Interior Decoration ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.

National Biography and the Arts of Memory: From Thomas Fuller to Colin Matthew

Mapping Lives ◽  
2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Donaldson
Keyword(s):  
Important Place ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
To Come ◽  
Restoration England ◽  
National Biography

The arts of memory and of biography have always been closely related. For instance, the memoir, which is an act of remembrance, has a double sense: it looks at the past and to the future, selecting from the stream of memories to form an enduring record called memorial by which events and people can be remembered in the years to come. In Restoration England, memoirs and memorials were popular forms when the word ‘biography’ first appeared. During this period there was an intense interest in the chronicling of the lives of those who contributed much to political and religious events. This commemoration of lives, which gained momentum in Restoration England, was an ancient enterprise. Biographies were regarded as durable monuments wherein the idea of remembrance took an important place. This attributed significance made those endowed with powerful memories venerated people. This chapter discusses the remarkable memorialists of the period. It looks at the career of Reverend Dr. Thomas Fuller as a biographer and as an author of many historical works. Fuller exhibited a photographic memory and an inclination to the memorization of long passages. In addition to this technique, he also adopted a rule that assisted memory; he employed the methodical distribution of facts into discrete locations. As for his biographical methods, Fuller considered two factors: the sense of pragmatism, and the sense of piety.

Messianic Fiction in Antoine Volodine's Nuclear Catastrophe Novel Minor Angels

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 223-237
Author(s):  
Susannah Ellis
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
The Future ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Linear Plot ◽  
Collapse Of Communism ◽  
To Come ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Nuclear Catastrophe

In Specters of Marx, Derrida suggests that a non-revolutionary — ‘spectral’ — Marxism could alleviate a contemporary crisis in imagining the future in the late twentieth century. This ‘presentist’ crisis results from the collapse of Communism and the alleged triumph of neoliberal democracy, and leaves a dubious choice between neoliberal consensus and potential totalitarianism. This article outlines Derrida's call to a messianic wait for the singularity of an always-arriving future-to-come, and suggests that it provides an entry into the post-nuclear universe of Antoine Volodine's Minor Angels, where a non-linear plot centres on the ghost of a failed Marxist revolutionary and its return. Outlining how Minor Angels creates a spectral temporality which undercuts both aspirations to a ‘radiant future’ and a stagnant present, this article argues that, read alongside, Derrida and Volodine sketch out a democratic future to come that gestures towards an alternative to presentism.

scholarly journals CULTURE AS THE FOUNDATION FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR PERSONALITIES AND LIVES

2020 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-268
Author(s):  
Д. Пол Шафер
Keyword(s):  
Racial Violence ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
Life Threatening ◽  
Johan Huizinga ◽  
To Come ◽  
Defined Culture

Given all the problems that exist in the world today - from the COVID-19 pandemic and racial violence and prejudice to the environmental crisis and colossal disparities in income and wealth – people everywhere in the world are being severely challenged and thinking a great deal about the development of their personalities and lives. When Edward Burnett Tylor defined culture as "the complex whole," it was apparent that all people live a "cultural life" as a whole made up of many parts. Matthew Arnold went farther in this regard by contending that the challenge in life is to create a "harmonious cultural life" through the development of all our faculties and powers. Johan Huizinga went even further when he provided a powerful and profound insight into this matter by stating that the challenge is to create balance and harmony between the material and non-material dimensions of life, and therefore all the diverse activities and developments in the world and in life. Given the severe imbalances and disharmonies that exist in this area at present as a result of placing a much higher priority on the former dimension compared to the latter dimension, it is clear that this problem can only be resolved and rectified by placing a much higher priority on the development of non-material activities such as the arts, humanities, education, and spirituality going forward into the future. Not only is this the key to coming to grips with many of the world’s most complicated and life-threatening problems and changing directions in the world and in life in the future, but also it is the solution to developing our personalities and lives as balanced and harmonious wholes. This will result in a great deal more caring, sharing, compassion, cooperation, conservation, and creativity in the world, thereby putting us in a much stronger position to come to grips with the problems we will be confronted with in the future, creating more compatible lifestyles and ways of life, achieving sustainable development, and becoming cultural personalities in the realistic and idealistic sense.

scholarly journals Letter to a Dead Playwright: Daily Grind, Vicki Reynolds, and Archive Fever

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 122-132
Author(s):  
Glenn D'Cruz
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Spectral Structure ◽  
Open Letter ◽  
Live Performance ◽  
Colonial Literature ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Form Part ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come

’Nothing is less reliable, nothing is less clear today than the word “archive”,’ observed Jacques Derrida in his book Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (1996). This paper reflects on the unsettling process of establishing (or commencing) an archive for the Melbourne Workers Theatre, to form part of the AusStage digital archive which records information on live performance in Australia. Glenn D'Cruz's paper juxtaposes two disparate but connected registers of writing: an open letter to a deceased Australian playwright, Vicki Reynolds, and a critical reflection on the politics of the archive with reference to Derrida's account of archive fever, which he characterizes as an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement’. Using Derrida's commentary on questions of memory, authority, inscription, hauntology, and heritage to identify some of the philosophical and ethical aporias he encountered while working on the project, D’Cruz pays particular attention to what Derrida calls the spectral structure of the archive, and stages a conversation with the ghosts that haunt the digitized Melbourne Workers Theatre documents. He also unpacks the logic of Derrida's so-called messianic account of the archive, which ‘opens out of the future’, thereby affirming the future-to-come, and unsettling the normative notion of the archive as a repository for what has passed. Glenn D’Cruz teaches at Deakin University, Australia. He is the author of Midnight's Orphans: Anglo-Indians in Post/Colonial Literature (Peter Lang, 2006) and editor of Class Act: Melbourne Workers Theatre 1987–2007 (Vulgar Press, 2007).

On Being Haunted by the Future

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-201
Author(s):  
David Wood
Keyword(s):  
Black Hole ◽  
Real World ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Hard Work ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Future ◽  
Universal Structure ◽  
To Come ◽  
Taking Responsibility

This chapter discusses the future as another site of contestation. Jacques Derrida insists that people understand the “to-come” not as a real future “down the road” but rather as a universal structure of immanence. However, such a structure is no substitute for the hard work of taking responsibility for what are often entirely predictable and preventable disasters. It is important to steer clear of the utopian black hole, the thought—or shape of desire—that the future would need to bring a future perfection or completion. To avoid the trap set by such a shape of desire, it is not necessary—indeed is necessary not—to reduce the future to a universal structure of immanence. What is equally disturbing is not people's inability to expect the unexpected but the failure of the institutions to prevent the all-too-predictable. Too many of the institutions have conditions of sustainability that are unhealthily insulated from the real world, or indeed coconspirators in the fantasy that people can go on like this.

Michael Chekhov and the Search for the ‘Ideal’ Theatre

2006 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrei Kirillov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
Language Version ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
History And Theory

In a keynote address delivered at the Michael Chekhov symposium ‘Theatre of the Future?’, held at Dartington Hall in November 2005, Andrei Kirillov argued that Chekhov’s ideas have not yet been fully assimilated, pointing out that merely to follow his exercises without understanding their connection to the actor’s imagination and meditative as well as spiritual dimensions is to fail fully to understand him. Andrei Kirillov is a researcher and Assistant Chair at the Theatre Department of the Russian Institute of the History of the Arts. His numerous publications on the history and theory of Russian theatre include Michael Chekhov: the Path of the Actor, co-edited with Bella Merlin (2005), and Teatr Mikhaila Chekhova: Russkoye Akterskoye Iskusstvo XX veca (The Theatre of Michael Chekhov: the Art of Russian Acting in the Twentieth Century, 1993). Bella Merlin originally enhanced the English-language version of this lecture, and with the author’s approval it has been further edited by NTQ for publication.

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