Deadly Mirrors: Animal Death in Tommaso Landolfi and Stefano D'Arrigo

Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-90
Author(s):  
Damiano Benvegnù
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Killer Whale ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Mise En Abyme ◽  
The Human Condition

From Hegel to Heidegger and Agamben, modern Western philosophy has been haunted by how to think the connections between death, humanness and animality. This article explores how these connections have been represented by Italian writers Tommaso Landolfi (1908–79) and Stefano D'Arrigo (1919–92). Specifically, it investigates how the death of a nonhuman animal is portrayed in two works: ‘Mani’, a short story by Landolfi collected in his first book Il dialogo dei massimi sistemi (Dialogue on the Greater Harmonies) (1937), and D'Arrigo's massive novel Horcynus Orca (Horcynus Orca) (1975). Both ‘Mani’ and Horcynus Orca display how the fictional representation of the death of a nonhuman animal challenges any philosophical positions of human superiority and establishes instead animality as the unheimlich mirror of the human condition. In fact, in both stories, the animal — a mouse and a killer whale, respectively — do die and their deaths represent a mise en abyme that both arrests the human narrative and sparks a moment of acute ontological recognition.

The Language Animal and the Passive Side of the Human Condition

Dialogue ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-667
Author(s):  
NIKOLAI MÜNCH
Keyword(s):  
John Rawls ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Life Plan ◽  
The Human Condition

In some strains of current philosophy, there is a growing interest in the passive and receptive aspects of the human condition. This interest is often paired with a criticism that ‘Western’ philosophy unduly neglects those aspects because of an ‘agential bias.’ This criticism has also been directed against the philosophy of Charles Taylor. I try to show that this criticism has some force in principle but is not plausible in the case of Taylor. First, I analyse John Rawls’ hugely influential concept of a life plan and show how this ‘agential bias’ applies here. Second, I argue that such a bias does not apply to Taylor’s The Language Animal by showing how active and passive moments are interwoven in his concepts of articulation and narration.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Benatar
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Human Predicament ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Human Condition

Life’s big questions are introduced and an outline of the book is provided. It is suggested that while existential questions are momentous, they are not as hard to answer as many people think. It is proposed that the human condition is a predicament. The concepts of “pessimism” and “optimism” are clarified and discussed. Similarities and differences between the human and nonhuman animal predicaments are outlined, and it is explained why the book focuses on the former. Finally, the introduction engages the question whether pessimistic views, such as those defended in The Human Predicament, should be disseminated, given the danger that they may make people’s lives even worse.

Hannah Arendt’s Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-80
Author(s):  
Mimi Howard
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Theoretical Basis ◽  
Economic Thought ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Political Emancipation ◽  
Marxian Political Economy ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of political economy in the years prior to the publication of The Human Condition (1958). In the early 1950s her archival papers and diary entries display deep concern for a host of topics at the intersection of political and economic thought: labor, work, slavery, consumption, industrialization, and automation. Such interests, which were passed through the philosophical canon from Aristotle to Marx, would serve as the theoretical basis for many of the distinctions that define The Human Condition. When set within the context of midcentury debates around political economy, it becomes clear that Arendt conceived the distinctions not only to respond to the aporias of Western philosophy but also to contest contemporaries who put stock in dialectical materialist accounts of political emancipation. Understanding Arendt’s adversaries more clearly provides the chance to see her conceptual distinctions as interventions into concurrent attempts to revise Marxian political economy in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Kevin Barry’s Atlantic Drift

2020 ◽  
pp. 237-254
Author(s):  
Nicholas Allen
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Film And Television ◽  
Coastal Margin ◽  
Wet Weather ◽  
Story Writer ◽  
Music Film ◽  
The Human Condition

Kevin Barry is a short story writer, novelist, dramatist, and editor, with Olivia Smith, of Winter Papers, an annual anthology of contemporary Irish writing. His work is steeped in music, film, and television, and echoes with their influence. Underpinning this is an attachment to writers like Dermot Healy and John McGahern, both novelists whose importance to a writer like Barry makes all the more sense from a coastal, and an archipelagic, perspective. His binding theme is disappointment and his lyricism is braided into the tragic perspective his characters, and his narrators, have of the human condition, which is for the most part a tilting balance between anxiety and drink. These edgy narratives are often set in wet weather by the sea and as so often in this book, the coastal margin operates as a hydroscape in which the boundaries between innocence and experience fragment and shift.

The Primordial Affirmations of Literature

Janus Head ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Arthur A. Brown ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The World ◽  
The Human Condition

Stephen Crane’s short story “The Open Boat”—a tale “intended to be after the fact”—affirms Merleau-Ponty’s conclusion that “The perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence.” The story dramatizes and reflects on the men’s situation in the world, their inter-subjective experience against the background of non-human nature. In facing the imminent possibility of their own deaths as, for each of them, “the final phenomenon of nature,” the men become “interpreters” of what is primary in the human condition. The line between the world of the reader and the world of the story, like the line between consciousness and being, is less a line than a horizon.

scholarly journals Inspiracje neostoickie w „Sylorecie” Wacława Potockiego

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 259-272
Author(s):  
Elżbieta A. Jurkowska
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Literary Discourse ◽  
Important Place ◽  
The World ◽  
Proper Subject ◽  
The Human Condition

Classified among the short story-romance stream of Wacław Potocki’s works, Syloret occupies an important place in the poet’s epic legacy. Throughout the extensive digressive parts of this work, Lusatia-based writer spins erudite reflections on the nature of the world, the human condition, the essence of human fate, and explicates the thoughts of ancient philosophers (e.g. Seneca). Potocki turns to philosophical theories – above all to Christianised stoicism (neostoicism), which becomes the proper subject of his literary discourse. In the article the author undertakes research on the most important concepts of Stoic ethics (fortune, nature, virtue), to which the poet refers in his romance poem. An attempt is also made to answer the question of the seventeenth-century author’s use of an extensive characterisation of the principles of this philosophy. 

scholarly journals “Foran loven”

2016 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-278
Author(s):  
Aldona Zańko
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Franz Kafka ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
Universal Truth ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
The Human Condition

Abstract The novel The trial, telling the story of the groundless arrest and prosecution of the bank clerk Josef K., remains one of the bestknown and most influential works written by Franz Kafka. Depicting the pointless struggle of a man placed at the mercy of a remote, inaccessible authority, it gives a symbolic account of the human condition in the modern era, characterised by the lack of universal truth, estrangement, confusion and existential impotence. Grasping the very idea of existential modernity, the novel provides ongoing inspiration for a great number of modernist and postmodernist writers all over the world, including Scandinavia. In the article presented below, The trial is examined as an intertext within the genre of the Scandinavian short prose, as it unfolds at breakthrough of modernism and postmodernism. Starting with the literary and critical works of the Danish modernist Villy Sørensen, and moving forward throughout the Danish and Norwegian minimalism of the 1990's, the paper discusses a range of different aspects of The trial, as they reappear in the short stories written by some of the main representatives of the Scandinavian short story. In this way, the article elucidates the relevance of Kafka's novel as an intertext for contemporary Scandinavian short fiction, as well as draws attention to the dialogical dimension of the genre.

An Adolescent Girl Experiments with Sexuality: Rain (Christine Jeffs, 2001)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alistair Fox
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Adolescent Girl ◽  
Emotional Problems ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Core ◽  
Parental Neglect ◽  
The Human Condition

The analysis in this chapter focuses on Christine Jeffs’s Rain as evidence of a shift that had occurred in New Zealand society whereby puritan repression is no longer perceived as the source of emotional problems for children in the process of becoming adults, but rather its opposite – neoliberal individualism, hedonism, and the parental neglect and moral lassitude it had promoted. A comparison with Kirsty Gunn’s novel of the same name, upon which the adaptation is based, reveals how Jeffs converted a poetic meditation on the human condition into a cinematic family melodrama with a girl’s discovery of the power of her own sexuality at the core.

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