EXPERIENCE OF READING GABRIELA KLEIN’S BOOK “PINA BAUSCH. THE ART OF TRANSLATION”

This article reviews a book by the German art historian and dance researcher Gabriele Klein, Pina Bausch. The Art of Translation, one of the first monographs on Pina Bausch to be published in Russian (see also the book published by Garage in 2021). The key concept of the book is the praxeology of translation, which addresses not the subject of translation, but the way it is performed. Thus translation is understood in a broad way as the transfer of the Wuppertal Dance Theatre event into the languages of the audience and critics, into other technical media, into other cultural and historical contexts. Particular attention is paid to the mechanisms of this transfer. The author of this book does not analyze the dramatic narrative of dance, as it is common in theatre studies, but explores dance as gesture delivered with the help of the latest technologies.

Imagination and Memory: Inter-movement Thematic Recall in Beethoven and Brahms

Like several of his predecessors, Brahms reintroduces themes from one movement into a later one in several of his instrumental works. Historical circumstances and changing historical consciousness affected a composer's use of thematic recall. For Beethoven (per Elaine Sisman) recalling an earlier theme provided the creative stimulus to move forward to the end of a piece, in accordance with the linear concept of history that defined Beethoven's Enlightenment world view. Brahms's use of inter-movement thematic recall often expresses a more wistful and melancholy view of the past and focuses on the ability of recall to provide a dramatic narrative. In his earliest use of cyclical return, the Op. 5 Piano Sonata (1853), the Andante second movement is echoed and transformed by the ‘Ruckblick’ fourth movement, as Brahms plays on the poetic inscription of the former movement to raise the specter of lost love and mortality. In a more complex web of thematic recall, the op. 78 Violin Sonata (1878) combines allusions to a pre-existing pair of interrelated songs from his Op. 59 with a newly composed, recurring instrumental theme to create a multi-layered, somber character in the piece. Both of those works draw on an earlier, romantic sense of yearning for return. Near the end of his career, however, the quiet emergence and eventual dissipation of opening material at the close of the Op. 115 Clarinet Quintet (1891) reflects Brahms's awareness of his place at the end of an artistic tradition, and thereby conveys a post-Romantic conception of history.

Sebastian Haffner’s Germanys

Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler: A Memoir appears in the twenty-first century as a kind of time capsule, offering a personal and political analysis forged during the 1930s, when the endgame of the Nazi regime was not yet visible. Haffner attempts to account for the historical precursors of Nazism, beginning with the Great War–besotted children of his own generation, now hungering for another dose of public excitement, and moving back to the mistaken nationalism of Bismarck’s 1871 Reich. Haffner’s general view of German character as incapable of democracy, reliant on strong leaders, but not essentially anti-Semitic, sits uncomfortably with his more personal horror at the Nazi invasion of individual privacy. Defiant analysis yields to tragedy as the memoir goes on to represent individual capitulations to Nazi tactics, including Haffner’s own. Reflecting our current dilemma, his dramatic narrative puts us vividly in mind of the angry, fearful, strident, hopeless, hopeful, and courageous elements that contend, unresolved, during an unpredictable rush of threatening world events.

We “Other Victorians”? Novelistic Remains, Therapeutic Devices, Contemporary Televisual Dramas

In reference to the work of Michel Foucault and to residual Victorian novelistic features, this essay explores the biopolitical dimension of contemporary televisual dramas, focusing on the popular crime genre as seen in The Sopranos (1999–2007), Breaking Bad (2008–2013), and The Fall (2013–2016). Emphasizing the confessional context of criminality and policing, we demonstrate how such shows rely on the conventions of modern psychological discourse in depicting criminals, thus foregrounding what Eva Illouz in Saving the Modern Soul (2008) has called the “therapeutic emotional style.” By updating aspects of D. A. Miller's conception of the policing plot in The Novel and the Police (1988), we argue that confession in contemporary televisual dramas exemplifies a cultural transition from power as force to power as communication. The ascendance of communicative power pathologizes aspects of masculinity and introduces a new dramatic/narrative device: the therapeutic couplet.

Flying toward Futurity: Spectacularity and Suspension

Corneille’s 1660 prequel to 1634’s Médée, La Conquête de la Toison d’Or is usually dismissed as political propaganda. Instead, this chapter considers the play’s technological innovations as part of its aesthetic and political work. An on-stage Medean presence pits two forms of temporality against each other, each performed by a different stage technology. The chapter explores technological innovations in set design and special effects, which offer contrasting experiences of time: rapid transformation versus narrative suspense. The chapter shows how the play changes the rules of dramatic narrative by challenging audience expectations of what will happen. This play offers, contra such conceptual historians as Reinhart Koselleck, an early example of the collision between pre-modern forms of history and more progressivist senses of temporality. This collision is shown to invoke the metaphor of suspension only to replace it with that of suspense, thus effecting a replacement that positions the threat of violence close at hand.

The Many Faces of Transcendental Realism: Willaschek on Kant’s Dialectic

After providing a brief overview of Marcus Willaschek's Kant on the Sources of Metaphysics, I critically reconstruct his account of ‘transcendental realism’ and the role that it plays in the dramatic narrative of the Critique of Pure Reason. I then lay out in detail how Willaschek generates and evaluates various versions of transcendental realism and raise some concerns about each. Next, I look at precisely how Willaschek's Kant thinks we can avoid applying the ‘supreme’ dialectical principle (for every conditioned there is a totality of conditions which is unconditioned) to the domain of appearances. Finally, I call into question Willaschek's efforts to appropriate the lessons of the Transcendental Dialectic without following Kant into transcendental idealism.

“I Am the One:” A Monist Looks at the Double Death and Life of Rabba bar Naḥmani

The rabbis portray two arenas in which Torah is studied. Above the terrestrial academy of the sages, the Rabbis posit a transcendent, celestial yeshiva. This dual system seems central to the rabbinic doctrine of retribution in a sequential afterlife. In contrast to the standard dualist reading and accepted dogma, I propose a monist’s reading of these aggadic texts, which sees a single arena of human action and endeavor, with multivalent significance. My starting point is the dramatic narrative of the persecution, flight, and ultimate death of one of the leading Talmudic sages, Rabba bar Naḥmani. These esoteric stories go beyond familiar taxonomies as modes of concealment. Not cyphers to be cracked, they offer a nuanced way of thinking about the world, accessible through narrative as an adaptive mode of transmission.