Re-presenting histories

This article rereads Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni’s short film Brutality in Stone (1961) in light of more contemporary scholarly interest in the architectural ruin. This leads to an analysis that challenges, or recasts cinematic assumptions about the past. I begin my analysis through attention to Brutality in Stone’s radical strategies of montage, marriage of archival stills and newly-shot documentary moving images, merging of real and imagined, past and present, sound and image. These formal strategies are observed through the lens of theories of ruin, Kluge’s own writings on cinema and history, the references to the historiography of Nazi architecture, and contemporary theories of ruination in architecture. I then reveal the film as a type of counter-memory, promoting a critical awareness of, rather than espousing an ideologically motivated enthusiasm for the histories and memories of the past as they have been represented in architectural monuments, cinematic and historical narratives. Specifically, a contemporary reconsideration of Brutality in Stone contributes to rethinking the relationship to the ongoing lessons of German history and its cinematic representation in the contemporary moment. Keeping alive the memories of the past has never been more urgent as we move into an historical moment when memories of the Nazi past are becoming ever dimmer.

Intersecciones entre Texto e Imagen: Alexander Kluge y el Tratado Iconográfico

There is a field of intersection between text and image that throughout the history of cinema has been configured as a space of subtle architectures where the typographic sign (the letter) and its sound emission (the voice) in conjunction with the image, they form a terrain of new audiovisual grammars, a space for experimentation in the creation of meaning and original associations.Alexander Kluge's work is undoubtedly a special case in forcing this relationship between the dimensions of text and image, not only because he has dedicated much of his work to both disciplines, that of writer and that of filmmaker, but because in this space of intersection of the written word and the fluorescence of the image, a renewed dialogue emerges around the meaning of history and the always enriching links between the archive, the document, the function of memory and a critical view of the Present.This article emphasizes the semiotic characteristics of this relationship between text and image in Kluge's work, as well as his peculiar conception of the audiovisual treatise.

March genocide in archive documents (based on extraordinary investigation commission member A. Y. Kluge’s report)

This article deals with the massacre held by bolshevik-dashnak armed forces against Azerbaijanis in Baku in 1918. We must give due to the first young Government of the Republic of Azerbaijan, in the most complicated and hardest conditions of its existence and activities as quickly and discreetly reacted to these events and had taken concrete steps. In this article it is mainly shown the report to the Chairman of the Extraordinary Investigation Commission by Alexander Kluge, the member of that commission.

Social inclusion, a challenge for deliberative democracy? Some reflections on Habermas’s political theory

This article explains how the issue of inclusion is central to Habermas’s theory of democracy and how it is deeply rooted in his conception of a political public sphere. After recalling Habermas’s views on the public sphere, I present and discuss various objections raised by other critical theorists: Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Nancy Fraser, Axel Honneth and Iris Marion Young. These criticisms insist on the paradoxically excluding effects of a conception of democracy that promotes civic participation in the public debate. Negt, Kluge and Fraser develop a Marxist line of analysis that question who can participate in the public sphere. Honneth and Young criticize in various ways the excluding effect of argumentation: are unargumentative speeches excluded from the public debate? I show how Habermas’s model can provide some responses to these various objections by drawing inspiration from his treatment of the gap between religious and post-metaphysical world views.