scholarly journals Benjamin’s Profane Uses of Theology: The Invisible Organon

Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 93
Author(s):  
Francisco Naishtat

Invisible, but suggestive and fruitful; deprived of any reference to doctrine or ultimate assertive foundations, but nevertheless used in Benjamin like written images, crystallized as “images of thought”; as doctrinally mute as it is heuristically audible, Benjamin’s use of theology reminds us of the ironical use that Jorge Luis Borges himself made of theology and metaphysics as part of his own poetic forms. As such, these images of thought are located both in the place of philosophical use and in the one of methodological cunning or Metis, across the various levels of the corpus: a metaphysics of experience, literary criticism, philosophy of language, theory of history and Marxism. Therefore, accepting that criticism (Kritik) is the visible organon and the object of Benjaminian philosophy, is not theology, then, its invisible organon? What seems to be particular to Benjamin, however, is the agonistic but nevertheless heuristic way in which he intends to use theology in order to upset, disarray, and deconstruct the established philosophy, and specially its dominant trends in the field of the theory of history: historicism, positivism, and the evolutionary Hegelian–Marxist philosophy of history. In this article we try to demonstrate how this theological perspective is applied to a Benjaminian grammar of time. We conclude agonistically, confronting the resulting Benjaminian notion of historical past against Heiddeger’s own vision of historical time.

rth | ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-71
Author(s):  
Helio Rebello Cardoso Júnior

This article focuses on the one of the many outcomes of the so-called rebranded philosophy of history, namely, the continuity-discontinuity issue. Eelco Runia’s, Noël Bonneuil’s and Paul A. Roth’s conceptions of historical time will be analyzed as representative of this subject in the landscape of the theory of history from 2010 on. The authors sampled not only provide the evidence that historical discontinuity remains alive as a theoretical and historiographical challenge, but they also disclose different arrays to think the relationship among past, present, and future, and historical transformation. The concepts of historical time analyzed recall Foucault’s discontinuously-base model of thinking historical time and add to it different varieties of historical discontinuity. Moreover, the continuity-discontinuity issue in the new backdrop involves operation of translating time into space (spatialization of time). As a result, the discontinuously-based model of historical time’s main characteristics will be summarized and its strength as a heuristic tool for further analyses of the concepts of historical time is outlined.


LingVaria ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2(32)) ◽  
pp. 259-279
Author(s):  
Mateusz Kowalski

Can History and Philology Competently Address Their Tasks without a Close Connection with Philosophy, Namely Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Language? The thesis by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay published here is probably the oldest of the texts by the Polish linguist. The text was submitted in 1864 as a part of the logic and philosophy course taught at the Warsaw Main School by Henryk Struve. It clearly shows an attempt by the young researcher to embark on a scholarly path, which turns out to be far from the one Baudouin de Courtenay took later in his academic activity. The future linguist argues here in defence of linguistics as a so-called physical science (a natural skill, as he often calls it in his dissertation), thus contrasting it with philology and history.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1Sup1) ◽  
pp. 228-237
Author(s):  
Yuliia Laskava ◽  
Volodymyr Bondarenko ◽  
Olena Shulga ◽  
Mykola Stasyk ◽  
Olga Stadnichenko

An artistic interpretation of historical facts is quite relevant in the literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society. Prose works on historical themes are valuable and interesting in that they create an illusion for readers to be present in a certain period of historical time, and it is the artistic modeling of events that makes priceless facts of history completely disappear. The historical past is an inexhaustible material that word artists have been referring to for centuries, creating the best examples of fiction. Prose texts of historical subjects are perceived by each next generation in a new way, historical events and phenomena are interpreted from different angles, the activities of famous figures of the past are widely covered. Non-fiction literature is a kind of literature that is on the verge of artistry and documentary. The main non-fiction genres are a diary, autobiography, biography, memoirs, confession, letters, etc. On the one hand, non-fiction literature claims to recognize the author’s subjective truth about him in her texts; on the other hand, only the reader can either, demonstrating full confidence in the author, call this text documentary, or admit the presence of poetry and aesthetics in the work and tilt the scales in the direction of artistry. The material for observation and research of the phenomenon of artistic modeling are works that allow us to trace the most common, in our opinion, models of correlation of historical and artistic consciousness in postmodern literature and non-fiction of a post-totalitarian society.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
María Inés Mudrovcic

In this paper, I intend to show that different ways of describing, representing or thinking about human affairs presuppose different types of consciousness of temporality. This proposal is embedded in the fruitful concept ‘régimes d’historicités’, which was coined by F. Hartog. Within this context and in regard to historiography and the philosophy of history, I will try to show that these disciplines and concepts, coined by these fields of study, are only possible in a temporal order governed by the future. Within this context, I will examine historiography, understood as the discipline which makes sense of human past and other disciplines, including the analytical or narrativist philosophies of history, which have yielded concepts such as the ‘historical past’, ‘historical consciousnesses’ and ‘historical time’.


Author(s):  
Yemima Ben-Menahem

This chapter examines three stories by Jorge Luis Borges: “Funes: His Memory,” “Averroës's Search,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Each of these highlights the intricate nature of concepts and replication in the broad sense. The common theme running through these three stories is the word–world relation and the problems this relation generates. In each story, Borges explores one aspect of the process of conceptualization, an endeavor that has engaged philosophers ever since ancient Greece and is still at the center of contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Together, Borges's stories present a complex picture of concepts and processes of conceptualization.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
Hamdi Hameed Yousif

One of the post-modernist approaches to literary criticism is the queer criticism which has not been evaluated properly. Queer criticism can refer to any piece of literary criticism that interprets a text from a non-straight perspective. Therefore, it includes both lesbian and gay criticism. The aim of this paper, therefore, is to trace the social and political reasons behind the emergence of Queer criticism in the late twentieth century till it acquired momentum in the twenty-first century. After trying to define the terms related to the Queer criticism, the paper tries to examine the poetics of queer (gay and lesbian) literary works and to point out the main characteristic features of this critical approach by identifying the criteria and the textual evidence by which a literary work is labeled queer. It, also tries to shed light on the common features between queer criticism and feminism, on the one hand, and queer criticism and the deconstructuralist approach on the other hand. The final section of the study is a critique which points out the negative aspects of this approach.


2019 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
María Ángeles Llorca-Tonda

The aim of this paper is to analyse the literary criticism that Mme d'Épinay consecrates to the Correspondance littéraire of Grimm and Meister. The epistolary framework in which the critical articles studied are presented deserves particular attention, since it allows us, on the one hand, to establish the different functions developed by Louise d'Épinay in the circle of Grimm's collaborators, and, on the other hand, to highlight the dialogic structure that will dominate the literary style of Mme d'Épinay. El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar la obra de crítica literaria que Mme d’Épinay consagra a la Correspondance littéraire de Grimm y de Meister. El marco epistolar en el que se presentan los artículos críticos estudiados merece una atención particular, ya que nos permite, por un lado, establecer las diferentes funciones desarrolladas por Louise d’Épinay en el círculo de los colaboradores de Grimm, y por otro lado, poner de manifiesto la estructura dialógica que dominará el estilo literario de Mme d’Épinay.


Author(s):  
Marta Dynel

AbstractThis article gives a comprehensive theoretical account of deception in multimodal film narrative in the light of the pragmatics of film discourse, the cognitive philosophy of film, multimodal analysis, studies of fictional narrative and – last but not least – the philosophy of lying and deception. Critically addressing the extant literature, a range or pertinent notions and issues are examined: multimodality, film narration and the status of the cinematic narrator, the pragmatics of film construction (notably, the characters’ communicative level and the one of the collective sender and the recipient), the fictional world and its truth, the recipient’s film engagement and make believing, as well as narrative unreliability. Previous accounts of deceptive films are revisited and three main types of film deception are proposed with regard to the two levels of communication on which it materialises, the characters’ level and the recipient’s level, as well as the intradiegetic and/or the extradiegetic narrator involved. This discussion is illustrated with multimodally transcribed examples of deception extracted from the American television seriesHouse.In the course of the analysis, attention is paid to how specific types of deception detailed in the philosophy of language (notably, lies, deceptive implicature, withholding information, covert ambiguity, and covert irrelevance) are deployed through multimodal means in the three types of film deception (extradiegetic deception, intradiegetic deception, and a combination of both when performed by both cinematic and intradiegetic narrators). Finally, inspired by the discussion of Hitchcock’s controversial lying flashback scene inStage Fright, as well as films relying on tacit intradiegetic, unreliable narrators (focalising characters) an attempt is made to answer the thorny question of when the extradiegetic (cinematic) narrator can perform lies (through mendacious multimodal assertions) addressed by the collective sender to the recipient, and not just only other forms of deception, as is commonly maintained.


Philosophy ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 64 (247) ◽  
pp. 67-78
Author(s):  
Christopher Cherry

My concern is to understand how it is that contemplation of the past— better, of this or that preferred past—evokes in some people an impression which is distinctively weird. It is unmistakable; and anyone who has felt it will soon know what I am talking about. What is the impression, and whence the impressionability?To help identify my concern (and make it seem less eccentric) I shall let it emerge from some highly selective remarks about an issue in philosophy of history which is, by contrast, familiar and respectable: the debate between constructionists and realists. We cannot conceivably have direct acquaintance with, direct access to, the past; by their very nature, past events are over and done with and so unavailable for inspection. This much both camps agree on. However, they differ massively over what follows from this truth. For the constructionist concludes that what he calls the ‘real past’, what actually happened, can play no part whatsoever in historical thought. It is necessarily hidden, and we can have no inkling of it. What, and all, the historian can sensibly claim to know is the ‘historical past’, something which is constituted by and exists only in relation to his thought. Against this, the realist maintains that of course historians do not, necessarily or even typically, constitute the past; rather, they construct accounts of it which will be true if they conform to it as it actually was and false if they do not. And he charges his opponent with a number of fundamental confusions: mistaking accounts of historical events for the events themselves, confusing epistemological matters with ontological, and worst of all equating knowledge with direct perceptual awareness. Now, the realist is, in basics at least, fairly obviously right. And his criticisms are reinforced when we note that constructionists tend to combine with their vision of the impenetrability of the ‘real’ past the thesis that we undoubtedly know that there is a real past, with real people and real events. However, this piece of knowledge must for him, like that of an intelligible world for Kant, ever remain contentless, ‘factually vacuous’.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Freytag

This work undertakes a systematic reconstruction of the debates that took place over the course of several decades up to the beginning of the 21st century between Derrida on the one hand and Searle and Habermas on the other. It shows that the linguistic theories and the theories of communicative understanding developed by Searle and Habermas are based on inferences from the contingent individual case to the general. Searle draws ontological, Habermas anthropo-political conclusions, both with essentially naturalistic signatures. Derrida, on the other hand, raises epistemological objections and consequently develops a metaphysics of free subjects for whom conversation cannot necessarlily be presumed. The explicit dedication to ethics in Derrida's late work is due to his insight that the possibility of language and understanding is due to silence. Derrida's lasting merit lies in enriching the philosophy of language with a secretology. This study has been awarded the Kant Prize of the Institute of Philosophy of the University of Bonn and the "Prix de la République Française", awarded by the French Embassy and the University of Bonn.


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