Game of Thrones: Cultural Pessimism as a Winning Formula

In the narrative of Game of Thrones, a fantasy television drama, well-known elements of fantasy-media products successfully blend with their new forms. These elements connect to a specific emotional regime which refers directly to the emotional cultures of contemporary societies through its pessimistic coloring. Cultural pessimism stems from the complex, problematic situations in Europe and America which shape the context in which the television drama originated, and provides a glimpse into the social and political subconsciousness of these societies. The article attempts to reveal these situations by studying the actions and motivations of the drama’s characters, as well as the dramatized means and social framework of the action. The analysis shows that Game of Thrones can be read as a form of a cultural reworking of the experiences of the social and political upheavals in European and American societies. Cultural pessimism is a recipe for the success of this serial drama, but ultimately there is little that can counteract the destructive attitudes that dominate the cultures of contemporary Western societies.

Hermeneutics of the other

The article primarily addresses different philosophical views of otherness (Levinas, Waldenfels, Liebsch) and tries to question them from a hermeneutic perspective. Above all, the conceptual radicalism of the asymmetrical relationships is criticized through the hermeneutic approach, understood not as mere strategy of appropriating the other or the stranger, but as an open process of understanding, in which the heterogeneity of those involved is subject to constant change, but is nevertheless always maintained. On this basis, the cultural-philosophical, but also social and political relevance of the opposition between cultural pessimism and cultural optimism is called into question.

Dunkle Welten: Kulturpessimismus in Bron/Broen Staffel II

The article examines the relation of structural, thematic and cinematographic means in the second season of the Danish/Swedish TV-series Bron/Broen and sets them in relation to the claim of „double storytelling“ of a good story and a political or ethical message. After an attempt at visualizing the complexity of the plot construction, the focus is directed toward an analysis of the medialisation of crime as well as its detection. Scandinavian society is depicted as a surveillance state which the series does not explicitly question. The brutal crimes committed in the name of an ecological cause are presented as an outcome of extreme violence and personal evil, which turn the alleged social criticism into cultural pessimism and depict a very dark picture of the world.

Shils and Oakeshott

Michael Oakeshott and Edward Shils are thinkers similar in many respects. They both belonged to the intellectual current of the post-war anti-totalitarianism that was characterised by the opposition to the idea of regulating society by planning, by the rejection of ideological politics, and by the perception of similarity, if not identity, between the left-wing and right-wing radicalisms. They both occupied the conservative-liberal slot within the broad anti-totalitarian spectrum, combining their adherence to freedom and minimal state with their deep appreciation of tradition. At the same time, their different intellectual temperaments led them to opposite directions. Beneath Oakeshott’s apparent conservatism one often discovers an emancipatory and optimistic disposition grounded in his Romantic appreciation of radical individuality. Shils’ respectable liberalism, by contrast, often results in cultural pessimism and social conservatism.

Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de (1816–82)

Although best remembered as the author of Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, Gobineau’s main literary activity was as a novelist and writer on Asia. Even though his thesis that racial mixing was the main cause of the decline of civilizations came to be widely accepted, as did his conviction that the White race alone was capable of civilization, his cultural pessimism was not so widely shared. Gobineau understood his work as an answer to the philosophies of progress because it established that the fall of civilizations was inevitable. However, subsequent generations invoked his name in their attempt to justify radical social programmes designed, for example, to restore a racial purity that Gobineau himself believed to be neither possible nor desirable in the sense in which they understood it.