“You Won’t Even Know Who You Are Anymore”: Bakthinian Polyphony and the Challenge to the Ludic Subject in Disco Elysium

When approaches to the notion of the ‘self’ as it exists in the game have been discussed in game studies – for instance, through work in existential ludology or through discussions of agency – the ‘self’ in question, explicitly or implicitly, has tended to be the rational, stable, unified and coherent self of the humanist tradition. By fracturing the ludic subject into a set of contrasting and conflicting voices, each with their own apparent motivations and goals, Disco Elysium presents a challenge to this singular and unified understanding of selfhood. That this challenge is situated within the representation of a figure who, at face value, seems to represent the very locus of the authoritative, self-possessed subjectivity of humanism – not only a straight, middle-aged white man, but also a figure of police and colonial authority – strengthens the game’s critical slant. Drawing on theories of ludic and virtual subjectivity, this paper will approach Disco Elysium with a focus on this undermining of stable and unitary understanding of subjectivity. First, the game will be considered in relation to the tradition of film noir, and the way the genre both established and subverted the figure of the detective as the avatar of stable, rational, authoritative masculine selfhood. Next, its treatment of the theme of amnesia will be considered, drawing a parallel to Jayemanne’s (2017) reading of Planescape: Torment to examine how the loss of memory creates structures of discontinuity and rupture in the represented ludic self. Finally, Bakhtinian notions of polyphony will be invoked to address the game’s plurality of different voices not (as it is usually present) in a dialogue between individual subjects but within a single, fragmented subjectivity.

We Are Needed More Than Ever: Cultural Heritage, Libraries, and Archives

Libraries and archives as institutions of cultural heritage have a long history of and great expertise in collecting, securing, handling, and contextualizing masses of material and data. In the context of digital humanism, these institutions might become essential as a model as well as a field of experimentation. Questioning their own role as gatekeepers and curators, the digital transformation offers them the chance to open up – through both participatory initiatives and inclusive collecting. At the same time, however, it is a matter of preserving the library and archive as a place of encounter and personal dialogue in a human and humanist tradition.

Disruptions of Post-Qualitative Education Research: Tensions and Openings

This article speaks up for those who are feeling unheard as post-qualitative inquirers. It also speaks with hope, helpfully, to those in positions of supervision and mentorship to help student researchers work across post paradigms, becoming allies with those who are attempting to experiment with new theory, figurative forms, and processes. Addressing some of the tensions we have experienced between traditional qualitative and emerging post-qualitative researchers enables us to specifically name disruptions that block, silence, and misalign. We also share openings as possibilities that remain with the tension and do not offer advice or recipes to follow. This is exactly the type of reductive process that post-qualitative research is trying to circumnavigate. In the hullabaloo, this article is a clarion call for the academy to open up education research and make room for researchers who are unbounded by the invented rules of humanist tradition and familiarity.

World Literature as a Speculative Literary Totality: Veselovsky, Auerbach, Said, and the Critical-Humanist Tradition

This essay revisits critical-humanist approaches to literary totality that have largely been sidelined during the recent revival of world literature studies. While there has been no shortage of defenses of close reading in the face of distant reading and other positivist approaches, this essay argues that it is precisely the hermeneutic attention to particular works that has allowed critical humanists to think about literary practice within the most encompassing purview. For those in this tradition, “world literature” can never be a stable object but is a speculative totality. The essay discusses three exemplary critical concepts that assume a speculative epistemology of literary totality: Alexander Veselovsky’s “historical poetics,” Erich Auerbach’s “Ansatzpunkt,” and Edward Said’s “contrapuntal reading.” Each, it is argued, is grounded in the distinctive qualities of literary experience, a claim for which Theodor Adorno’s account of speculative thinking serves as a basis.

The Time of Contingency in International Law

The normative affirmation that international law could have been otherwise upholds material commitments to an actually-existing distribution of goods, which international law supports. To make this clear, this chapter begins by sketching a larger context by which the contingency of international law can be made legible. The larger context here pertains to a Western humanist tradition, following which international law relies on contingency to sustain a humanist fantasy of a temporal economic actor. The humanist fantasy includes an emancipatory pretension to political pre-eminence that is inscribed in its temporality, but at odds with its material, economic underpinnings. The pretension to pre-eminence corresponds historically with an ascendant normative regime that has succeeded as an economic programme but continuously failed as an emancipatory one. The frustrated emancipatory project is a complementary counterpart to the successful economic one. The former persists not despite but on the basis of failure and contradiction: in the face of historical failure, international law always already contains within itself the normative solution; its past failures are proof of future successes, a source of assurance and self-affirmation. When political ideals fail, specific temporal logics entangled with international law enable an affirmation of the subject who maintains those failed ideals, for no other reason than persisting as the same idealistic subject in the same material system that produced the failure. As a result, international legal practice redirects energy for social objectives into subjective self-affirmation, leaving other forces at work for political purposes.

“Nunc eo ingenio sum.” Philologie et écriture de soi dans les Variae lectiones de Marc-Antoine Muret

The collection Variae lectiones by Marc-Antoine Muret (1526-1585), which is part of the humanist tradition of miscellanea, is characterized by the prominent presence of the first person. This article proposes to study the relationship between philology and writing about oneself by examining the different kinds of ‟Iˮ used by Muret. Staking at the outset a claim to auctoritas, the ‟Iˮ of Variae lectiones refers above all to a scholarly and erudite persona, which the French humanist develops with the ambition of consolidating his personal reputation at a crucial period of his career in Italy. Finally, while writing as a philologist, Muret sometimes reveals himself through his readings of the Ancients, and hints at a more intimate ‟Iˮ which emerges in some accounts of episodes experienced.

The Recuperation of Humanism in the Context of the Martial Society

The humanist tradition developed in the Renaissance that not only cultivated the human spirit but applied its knowledge for the purpose of improving society across various humanist and scientific disciplines is not altogether extinct. Using the erudite Swiss physician and botanist Anton Schneeberger (1530–1581) as a founding father of sorts of modern humanist medicine confronted with war, I discuss the recuperation of humanism in the twentieth century, first in the thought of psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) who, under war circumstances, produced a work whose analytical acumen can still be used today, and subsequently in the creation of the discipline of narrative medicine that, unwittingly perhaps, echoes Schneeberger’s insight into the imperative of inserting storytelling into the practice of both patient- and physician-centered medicine. In the background of the argument is the existence of a new society, a martial society that functions as if there were war despite its ostensible state of peace.

Conclusions

The final section sums up the main innovative findings of this whole study. It points out how starting from the second half of the fifteenth century the development of a ‘thematic genre’ of literature on conspiracies was influenced by, but at the same time contributed to, the phenomenon of the literary fashioning of the profile of the ideal ruler, who now corresponded to the figure of a princeps. This literature also contributed to the creation of a new language and symbology of power through the multifunctional reworking of the classical legacy. This evolution culminated in Machiavelli’s attention to the issue of political plots in this work, with an approach that proves to be partly inspired by the previous cultural horizon, but already prominently projected towards an utterly new conceptual world. This analysis, besides providing a missing chapter on the background of Machiavelli’s work, more generally, underlines the significant contribution made by the humanist tradition, through its various literary expressions, to the development of modern political theories and to the history of our culture.

The Roman epigraphic collection of 17th century antiquarian Ferenc Lugossy from Petreștii de Jos (Cluj County)

The question of Roman epigraphic and antiquities collections in Transylvania is typically associated with the antiquarian activity of the local aristocracy during the 19th century, especially the “ruin parks” set up on their country estates. The beginnings of these antiquarian endeavours however date back to much earlier times, being linked to the circle of humanist church intellectuals active in Alba Iulia/Gyulafehérvár starting with the 15th century. The collection founded by Ferenc Lugossy, prominent member of the Transylvanian princely court during the second half of the 17th century, can be regarded as a later manifestation of the aforementioned humanist tradition, even though it was established at his estate in Petreștii de Jos/Magyarpeterd, situated at the foot of the Turda Gorge (Cheile Turzii/Tordai‑hasadék), rather than the princely capital. The sources indicate that we are dealing with one of the most important, if not the most important local Roman stone monument collections of the time. Documents also inform us that following the death of its founder – probably in 1692 – the collection swiftly began to disintegrate, and by the beginning of the 20th century it had completely ceased to exist, the monuments being either taken away or used as construction material by the locals. The present paper is an attempt to reconstruct the history and original composition of this important collection.