From the Star to the Disaster

Paragraph ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 84-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Hart

Franz Rosenzweig's The Star of Redemption comes before the Shoah and Maurice Blanchot's The Writing of the Disaster comes after it. The one addresses itself with hope to the figure of a star; the other meditates on the state of being without a guiding star. The figure of Emmanuel Levinas stands between these two works, since Totality and Infinity is marked by Rosenzweig's critique of totality and The Writing of the Disaster is in part a response to Levinas's philosophy. Both Rosenzweig and Blanchot propose a new way of thinking, one that calls unity into question. This essay seeks to clarify what ‘thought’ means for Rosenzweig and for Blanchot. In what ways do Rosenzweig and Blanchot converge? In what ways do they diverge?

2006 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew H. Johnson

In this paper I want to make some general comments on the state of archaeological theory today. I argue that a full answer to the question ‘does archaeological theory exist?’ must be simultaneously ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Yes, there is, demonstrably, a discourse called archaeological theory, with concrete structures such as individuals and schools of thought more or less substantively engaged with it; no, in that the claims for a distinctive way of thinking about the world in theoretical terms specific to archaeology, to which most or even the largest group of archaeologists would willingly or knowingly subscribe, are over-stated. In particular there is a lack of correspondence between theoretical backgrounds and affiliations that are overtly cited by archaeologists, on the one hand, and, on the other, the deeper underlying assumptions and traditions that structure their work and condition its acceptance. These underlying traditions stretch from field habits to underlying paradigms or discourses. I will explore this latter point with reference to the manner in which agency theory and phenomenology have been developed in archaeology. My conclusion suggests some elements of a way forward for archaeological theory; it is striking that many of these elements have been addressed in recent issues of Archaeological dialogues.


2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-174
Author(s):  
Dorota Kielak ◽  

The article addresses the problem of the culture-creating role of museums designed by Mieczysław Treter in the first years of the Second Polish Republic – an art historian from Lviv, the curator of the Museum of the Lubomirski family name in Lviv and the director of the State Art Collection in Warsaw. The publicist of this author is a testimony of how in the first years after Poland regained independence, attempts were made to develop a new way of thinking about the culture-forming function, status and formula of Polish museums, adequate to the changed realities of life in a free state. It formulated the postulate of treating museums as an institution of Polish cultural policy, an institution supporting the rebuilding of an independent state and its status on the international arena. In the perspective of the perceived role of museum outlets, the way of thinking about culture understood as a constant update of historical values was revealed at the same time. The museum discourse of Treter also revealed the shortcomings of extra-banking thinking about culture, which on the threshold of independence – on the one hand – was to be harnessed in state-building processes, and on the other – to realize values developed in the years of national captivity.


Author(s):  
Peter Coss

In the introduction to his great work of 2005, Framing the Early Middle Ages, Chris Wickham urged not only the necessity of carefully framing our studies at the outset but also the importance of closely defining the words and concepts that we employ, the avoidance ‘cultural sollipsism’ wherever possible and the need to pay particular attention to continuities and discontinuities. Chris has, of course, followed these precepts on a vast scale. My aim in this chapter is a modest one. I aim to review the framing of thirteenth-century England in terms of two only of Chris’s themes: the aristocracy and the state—and even then primarily in terms of the relationship between the two. By the thirteenth century I mean a long thirteenth century stretching from the period of the Angevin reforms of the later twelfth century on the one hand to the early to mid-fourteenth on the other; the reasons for taking this span will, I hope, become clearer during the course of the chapter, but few would doubt that it has a validity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 650-672
Author(s):  
Josef Weinzierl

AbstractQuite a few recent ECJ judgments touch on various elements of territorial rule. Thereby, they raise the profile of the main question this Article asks: Which territorial claims does the EU make? To provide an answer, the present Article discusses and categorizes the individual elements of territoriality in the EU’s architecture. The influence of EU law on national territorial rule on the one hand and the emergence of territorial governance elements at the European level on the other provide the main pillars of the inquiry. Once combined, these features not only help to improve our understanding of the EU’s distinctly supranational conception of territoriality. What is more, the discussion raises several important legitimacy questions. As a consequence, the Article calls for the development of a theoretical model to evaluate and justify territoriality in a political community beyond the state.


Author(s):  
José Duke S. Bagulaya

Abstract This article argues that international law and the literature of civil war, specifically the narratives from the Philippine communist insurgency, present two visions of the child. On the one hand, international law constructs a child that is individual and vulnerable, a victim of violence trapped between the contending parties. Hence, the child is a person who needs to be insulated from the brutality of the civil war. On the other hand, the article reads Filipino writer Kris Montañez’s stories as revolutionary tales that present a rational child, a literary resolution of the dilemmas of a minor’s participation in the world’s longest-running communist insurgency. Indeed, the short narratives collected in Kabanbanuagan (Youth) reveal a tension between a minor’s right to resist in the context of the people’s war and the juridical right to be insulated from the violence. As their youthful bodies are thrown into the world of the state of exception, violence forces children to make the choice of active participation in the hostilities by symbolically and literally assuming the roles played by their elders in the narrative. The article concludes that while this narrative resolution appears to offer a realistic representation and closure, what it proffers is actually a utopian vision that is in tension with international law’s own utopian vision of children. Thus, international law and the stories of youth in Kabanbanuagan provide a powerful critique of each other’s utopian visions.


Traditio ◽  
1948 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 161-185
Author(s):  
Kurt Lewent

Cerveri was decidedly no poetical genius, and often enough he follows the trodden paths of troubadour poetry. However, there is no denying that again and again he tries to escape that poetical routine. In many cases these attempts result in odd and eccentric compositions, where the unusual is reached at the cost of good taste and poetical values. On the other hand, it must be admitted that Cerveri's efforts in this respect were not always futile. His is, e.g. an amusing satire upon bad women. One of his love songs, characteristically called libel by the MS (Sg), assumes the form of a complaint submitted to the king as the supreme earthly judge, in which the defendant is the lady whose charms torture the lover and have made him a prisoner. This poem combines the traditional praise of the beloved and a flattery addressed to the king. Its slightly humoristic tone is also found in a song entitled lo vers del vassayll leyal. Here Cerveri, basing himself on a certain legend connected with St. Mark, gives the king advice in his love affair. Again the poet kills two birds with one stone, flattering the sovereign and pointing, for obvious purposes, to his own poverty. The latter is the only topic of a remarkably personal poem in which the author complains bitterly that, while many of his playmates have become rich in later years, the only wealth he himself did amass were the chans gays and sonetz agradans which he composed for other people to enjoy. Cerveri even tries to renew the traditional genre of the chanson de la mal mariée by adding motifs of—presumably—his own invention. This tendency towards a more independent way of thinking and greater originality in its poetical presentation could not be better illustrated than by the two poems which the MS calls Lo vers de la terra de Preste Johan and Pistola The one puts the poet's moral argumentation against the background of the medieval legend of Prester John, the other, which forms the subject of the present study, sets its teachings in a still more solemn framework, the liturgy of the Mass.


1967 ◽  
Vol 71 (677) ◽  
pp. 342-343
Author(s):  
F. H. East

The Aviation Group of the Ministry of Technology (formerly the Ministry of Aviation) is responsible for spending a large part of the country's defence budget, both in research and development on the one hand and production or procurement on the other. In addition, it has responsibilities in many non-defence fields, mainly, but not exclusively, in aerospace.Few developments have been carried out entirely within the Ministry's own Establishments; almost all have required continuous co-operation between the Ministry and Industry. In the past the methods of management and collaboration and the relative responsibilities of the Ministry and Industry have varied with time, with the type of equipment to be developed, with the size of the development project and so on. But over the past ten years there has been a growing awareness of the need to put some system into the complex business of translating a requirement into a specification and a specification into a product within reasonable bounds of time and cost.


Philosophy ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 58 (224) ◽  
pp. 215-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen R. L. Clark

Philosophers of earlier ages have usually spent time in considering thenature of marital, and in general familial, duty. Paley devotes an entire book to those ‘relative duties which result from the constitution of the sexes’,1 a book notable on the one hand for its humanity and on the other for Paley‘s strange refusal to acknowledge that the evils for which he condemns any breach of pure monogamy are in large part the result of the fact that such breaches are generally condemned. In a society where an unmarried mother is ruined no decent male should put a woman in such danger: but why precisely should social feeling be so severe? Marriage, the monogamist would say, must be defended at all costs, for it is a centrally important institution of our society. Political community was, in the past, understood as emerging from or imposed upon families, or similar associations. The struggle to establish the state was a struggle against families, clans and clubs; the state, once established, rested upon the social institutions to which it gave legal backing.


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.


2003 ◽  
pp. 33-59
Author(s):  
Danilo Basta

Fichte's theory of the state, comprising and integral part of his practical philosophy, is built on the key premises of his metaphysics. Therefore the clarification of this problem in Fichte's later philosophy intends to point, on one hand, to a representative metaphysical project of the state with great speculative power, and on the other to a way of thinking about the state which is today taken to be anachronistic, unscientific, outdated, and hence worthy of being mentioned as a "negative example". Though these qualifications should not be totally discarded or questioned in advance, revisiting Fichte's late metaphysics of the state is philosophically productive even in our times. Nowadays it can be extremely helpful to anyone who has not yet been trodden over by a scientific political science and whose cognitive interest is still sufficiently open for a strongly philosophical consideration of the state, who wishes to philosophically enrich or sharpens his/her view of the state. Although Fichte's theory of the state is unified and coherent, it underwent - especially in its last phase - a significant transformation. It was so much visible that the state is relegated to the background even terminologically. In Fichte's later philosophy the keyword is no longer the state but the "realm of freedom". The state is here talked about intentionally, as it were, always with a glance aimed at this realm, at the possibility and prospects for its establishment. Although this terminological and cognitive primacy of the realm of freedom pushed the state into the background, it was not denied any importance. On the contrary, on the way to freedom the state is for Fichte an important point of development that must be passed. And precisely in this transiency lies its inevitability. .


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