Ex Occidente Lux. From Phenomenology of Myth to Geopolitics and Ontology and Vice Versa in the Late Works of Janko Janeff

Janko Janeff’s book Southeast Europe and the German Spirit (1938) is analyzed through the lens of a fundamental Thracian-Dionysian- Orphic myth, i.e. the birth of being or of light from non-being/nothing/ darkness. It is shown how its geopolitical and ontological/theological consequences are to be drawn accordingly to that purely phenomenological premise concerning the supposed Indo-European Renaissance on the Old Continent as per the views expressed by the author.

From Academic Anthropology to Esoteric Religion

Carlos Castaneda has been studied mostly as a fraud anthropologist, novelist/philosopher and a contributor to the emerging phenomenon of neo-shamanism. Instead, this article focuses on Castaneda’s individual philosophy and religious system as developed in his written works. A threefold classification is proposed—early, transitional, and late works, complete with chief characteristics of each. The analysis shows how Castaneda slowly drifted from the scholarly style through stress on the narrative to full-fledged religious texts. These changes also reflect on Castaneda’s personal life; from academic ambition through public scandal ‘debunking’ his counterfeit works to the formation of a little new religious movement, of which Castaneda was a charismatic leader. Unlike most scholarly analyses of Castaneda that focus mainly on the early writings, this article takes into serious consideration his late works and shows that it was here that the author fully developed as a religious thinker and guru.

Shelley and the Heart’s Echoes

Shelley’s life and work are characterized by elements which repeat and echo through the ten years of his writing career. This feature is explored through various perspectives including Shelley’s use of rhyme and metre, his habit of dense allusiveness, and his tendency to revisit poetic forms. His interest in Platonism and metempsychosis is discussed, and his related preoccupation with the commonalities and affinities in human experience between individuals and across time. There is detailed consideration in these contexts of some relatively lesser-known late works including the poems to Jane Williams, and the fragments of the ‘Unfinished Drama’, which explore in highly original and challenging ways the notion of repetition and echoing in personal relationships, and through time.

Using Georges Bataille in Art History: Informe, Figuration and Politics

<p>The theories of the French intellectual Georges Bataille have had a significant influence on much recent arts practice and criticism. Bataille’s later work (c.1937–1962), however, is often overlooked in cultural practice and theory. In this later period his thought becomes richer; no less transgressive, no less excessive, and indubitably more philosophical. This thesis will argue the importance of using the chronological range of Bataille’s writing. In particular, it will redress the critical neglect in art history of his later work. The selective use of Bataille’s early work, especially the informe, in the American art history of Rosalind Krauss will be critiqued. The thesis will deploy concepts developed extensively in two late works, Inner Experience and The Accursed Share, to discuss the practice of two visual artists that do not figure in the type of methodology that Krauss adopts; the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon and the Swiss installation artist Thomas Hirschhorn. Inner Experience, a work revolving around the theme of ‘limit-experience’, will be the catalyst in an analysis of the works of Francis Bacon. This thesis will demonstrate that although Bacon was an avowed atheist, he ventures to capture a sacred and impossible moment in his painting that parallels the “movement of contestation” in “inner experience.” The conception of economy developed in The Accursed Share derives from the germ of Bataille’s economic theory, first outlined in the 1933 essay “The Notion of Expenditure.” Thomas Hirschhorn’s practice and his desire to “work politically” will be examined from the perspective of Bataillean expenditure and the notion of general economy.</p>

Using Georges Bataille in Art History: Informe, Figuration and Politics

<p>The theories of the French intellectual Georges Bataille have had a significant influence on much recent arts practice and criticism. Bataille’s later work (c.1937–1962), however, is often overlooked in cultural practice and theory. In this later period his thought becomes richer; no less transgressive, no less excessive, and indubitably more philosophical. This thesis will argue the importance of using the chronological range of Bataille’s writing. In particular, it will redress the critical neglect in art history of his later work. The selective use of Bataille’s early work, especially the informe, in the American art history of Rosalind Krauss will be critiqued. The thesis will deploy concepts developed extensively in two late works, Inner Experience and The Accursed Share, to discuss the practice of two visual artists that do not figure in the type of methodology that Krauss adopts; the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon and the Swiss installation artist Thomas Hirschhorn. Inner Experience, a work revolving around the theme of ‘limit-experience’, will be the catalyst in an analysis of the works of Francis Bacon. This thesis will demonstrate that although Bacon was an avowed atheist, he ventures to capture a sacred and impossible moment in his painting that parallels the “movement of contestation” in “inner experience.” The conception of economy developed in The Accursed Share derives from the germ of Bataille’s economic theory, first outlined in the 1933 essay “The Notion of Expenditure.” Thomas Hirschhorn’s practice and his desire to “work politically” will be examined from the perspective of Bataillean expenditure and the notion of general economy.</p>

Collection of the Buddhist sculptures of Mongolia of the National Museum of the Republic of Buryatia

В статье впервые рассматривается собранная Национальным музеем Республики Бурятия коллекция буддийской скульптуры Монголии, связанной с именем Г. Дзанабадзара (1635–1723), основоположника монгольской школы в буддийском искусстве. В ходе изучения коллекции использовалась визуальная и сравнительная методика, а также знакомство с авторскими работами Мастера в музеях Монголии. В результате были выявлены три группы буддийских скульптур с характерными особенностями этой школы: цельное толстостенное литье, блестящая позолота, комбинированное золочение, особая техника освящения скульптур. Ярким украшением коллекции является авторская работа самого Дзанабадзара — скульптура Будды долголетия Амитаюса. Кроме того, около тридцати скульптур XVIII–XIX вв. представляют его школу. Третья группа скульптур состоит из поздних работ монгольских мастеров в виде реплик и подражаний. О коллекции монгольской скульптуры музея упоминалось в сообщении автора статьи на научной конференции в Монголии, посвященной 370-летию Дзанабадзара. Целью данной статьи является возможность ознакомить читателей с «эталонными» работами Великого Дзанабадзара и его школы, создавших базу для творчества следующих поколений художников. The collection of the Buddhist sculpture of Mongolia, which is related to the founder of the Mongolian school in the Buddhist art G. Zanabazar (1635–1723), is observed for the first time at this article. The process of research of the collection involved visual and comparative methods as well as conversance with the master’s works in museums of Mongolia. As a result, three groups of the Buddhist sculptures with special features of the school were fetched out: one-piece and heavy-walled casting, lucent gilding, special technic of sculpture consecrating. The collection cherry on top is Zanabazar’s own work — a sculpture of Buddha of longevity Amitayus. Furthermore, about thirty sculptures of 18th – 19th centuries represent his school. The third group of the sculptures consists of late works of Mongolian masters by way of replica and imitating. This collection of the Mongolian sculptures of the museum was mentioned by the article author at scientific conference in Mongolia dedicated to the 350th anniversary of Zanabazar’s birth. The article aim is to introduce to the readers the “reference” works of the great Zanabazar and his school, which prepared a basis for creation for the next generation of artists.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

Late Works (1933–1941)

This chapter traces the development of Woolf’s late feminist politics and aesthetic experimentalism, focusing on her penultimate and final novels, The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), and her anti-war pamphlet, Three Guineas (1938). It reads across these texts and Woolf’s wider writings from 1933–1941, including essays, unpublished drafts, and her fictional biography Flush (1933), to identify key strands of social and political enquiry in Woolf’s late works. The chapter pays particular attention to Woolf’s late analysis of the role of art in society and her evolving feminist-pacifist critique of the links between patriarchy, nationalism, fascism, and war. Rejecting a narrative of creative decline, the chapter highlights the productive relationship between political engagement and formal experiment in Woolf’s late works.

The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil

The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil uses an enriched tripartite model of Roman culture—touching not only the public and the private, but also the solitary—in order to present a new interpretation of Latin literature and of the historical causes of this third sphere’s relative invisibility in scholarship. By connecting Cosmos and Imperium to the Individual, the solitary sphere was not so much a way of avoiding politics as a political education in itself. As reimagined by literature in this age, this sphere was an essential space for the formation of the new Roman citizen of the Augustan revolution, and was behind many of the notable features of the literary revolution of Virgil’s age: the expansion of the possibilities of the book of poetry, the birth of the literary cursus, new coordinations of cosmology and politics within strictly organized schemes, the attraction of first-person genres, and the subjective style. Through close readings of Cicero’s late works and the oeuvres of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius and the works of other authors in the age of Virgil, The Solitary Sphere thus presents a radical reinterpretation of classical Roman literature, and contributes to the study of premodern culture more generally, especially for traditions that have taken antiquity as too fixed a point in their own literary, religious, and cultural histories.

Cicero Speaking with Solitudes

This chapter argues that the question of how one can “speak with oneself” (secum loqui) was central to Cicero’s personal, philosophical, and political projects throughout much of his career, and especially in his late works. Set against the background of scholarship on Cicero’s life and work, Petrarch’s interest in Cicero, and the wide arc of Cicero’s philosophical works, it studies Cicero’s dilations on the paradox of solitude—including Scipio’s adage, “Least alone when most alone”—in the years 46 to 43 BCE. It explores Cicero’s treatment of solitude in his letters (especially to Atticus) and in major works on either end of this period, works that rewrote social genres in solitary form: the Brutus and Orator, it shows, reimagined oratory in the deserted forum, while his Laelius de amicitia answered the question Aristotle had left hanging, and of great interest subsequently to Montaigne, whether persons can be friends to themselves.