Messianica ratio. Affinities and Differences in Cohen’s and Benjamin's Messianic Rationalism

<p>In my paper, I intend firmly to criticize Taubes' interpretation of Benjamin's Theology as a modern form of Gnosticism (Benjamin as a modern Marcionit). In a positive way, I sustain rather the thesis that Benjamin's Messianism is in close connection with his conception of reason (“the sharpened axe of reason”) and, in particularly, with the paradoxical unity of Mysticism and Enlightenment, which, according to the famous definition of Adorno, distinguishes his thought. As a radically anti-magical and anti-mythical conception of the historical time, Benjamin's Messianism has to be considered as an original synthesis between motifs of the mystical tradition of the Jewish Kabbalah and motifs belonging to the rationalist tradition of the Jewish philosophy. Moving from Cohen's standpoint of a continuity between Maimonides and Kant, I consider therefore the affinity between his messianic conception of history and that of Benjamin. Both, Benjamin and Cohen, share, together with the reference to the a priori of the idea of justice, the reference to the Kantian connection between rationality and hope. Hence originates the non-eschatological Messianism of both. Motives of difference between Cohen and Benjamin’s messianic idea are to be found, conversely, in their different way to consider the idea of "the infinite task" and of its infinite fulfillment in the context of the historical time. Unlike the fundamentally ethical interpretation that Cohen gives of this relationship, Benjamin understands it ontologically in a monadological sense. This explains the constitutive relationship that exists, in Benjamin's philosophy, between Origin, Fragment and Revelation. In the light of this connection, Benjamin's messianic understanding of the historical time exceeds the Scholemian alternative between a restorative and a utopian conception of Messianism. Consequently, the Krausian motto “Ursprung ist das Ziel” (“The Origin is the Goal”) displays its truth in the idea of the messianic fragment or spark.</p

Introduction: Towards an Ethics of Gesture

The introduction to this special section of Performance Philosophy takes Giorgio Agamben’s remarks about the mediality and potentiality of gesture as a starting point to rethink gesture’s nexus with ethics. Shifting the emphasis from philosophical reflection to corporeal practice, it defines gestural ethics as an acting-otherwise which comes into being in the particularities of singular gestural practice, its forms, kinetic qualities, temporal displacements and calls for response. Gestural acting-otherwise is illustrated in a number of ways: We might talk of a gestural ethics when gesturality becomes an object for dedicated analytical exploration and reflection on sites where it is not taken for granted, but exhibited, on stage or on screen, in its mediality, in the ways it quotes, signifies and departs from signification, but also in the ways in which it follows a forward-looking agenda driven by adaptability and inventiveness. It interrupts or modifies operative continua that might be geared towards violence; it appears in situations that are suspended between the possibility of malfunction and the potential of room for play; and it emerges in the ways in which gestures act on their own implication in the signifying structures of gender, sexuality, race, and class, on how these structures play out relationally across time and space, and between historically and locally situated human beings.German Endowment Fund, Schroeder Fund, Department of German and Dutch, University of Cambridg

Alexander Kluge

Alexander Kluge is best known as a founding member of the New German Cinema. His work, however, spans a diverse range of fields and, over the last fifty years, he has been active as a filmmaker, writer and television producer. This book - the first of its kind in English - comprises a wide selection of texts, including articles and stories by Kluge, television transcripts, critical essays by renowned international scholars, and interviews with Kluge himself. It will be a valuable resource for students and scholars in the fields of film, television, and literary studies, as well as those interested in exploring the intersections between art, politics, and social change

The Case for Reduction

Critical discourse hardly knows a more devastating charge against theories, technologies, or structures than that of being reductive. Yet, expansion and growth cannot fare any better today. This volume suspends anti-reductionist reflexes to focus on the experiences and practices of different kinds of reduction, their generative potentials, ethics, and politics. Can their violences be contained and their benefits transported to other contexts?Introduction | CHRISTOPH F. E. HOLZHEY and JAKOB SCHILLINGER | 1–12The Case and the Signifier: Generalization in Freud’s Rat Man | IRACEMA DULLEY | 13–37Haptic Reductions: A Sceptic’s Guide for Responding to the Touch of Crisis | RACHEL AUMILLER | 39–61Disalienation and Structuralism: Fanon with Lévi-Strauss | CHRISTOPHER CHAMBERLIN | 61–89Black Box Allegories of Gulf Futurism: The Irreducible Other of Computational Capital | ÖZGÜN EYLÜL İŞCEN | 91–115Lines that Reduce: Biography, Palms, Borders | SAM DOLBEAR | 117–33Post-anti-identitarianism: The Forms of Contemporary Gender and Sexuality | BEN NICHOLS | 135–53Nothing Beyond the Name: Towards an Eclipse of Listening in the Psychotherapeutic Enterprise | SARATH JAKKA | 155–73Reduction in Computer Music: Bodies, Temporalities, and Generative Computation | FEDERICA BUONGIORNO | 175–90Reduction in Time: Kinaesthetic and Traumatic Experiences of the Present in Literary Texts | ALBERICA BAZZONI | 191–212Seeking Home: Vignettes of Homes and Homing | AMINA ELHALAWANI | 213–26Law Is Other Wor(l)ds | XENIA CHIARAMONTE | 227–50EXCURSUSOn the List | SAM DOLBEAR, BEN NICHOLS, and CLAUDIA PEPPEL | 253–61White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy | BEN NICHOLS | 263–65Proust List Impulse | SAM DOLBEAR | 267–70A List of Fears: Eva Kot’átková’s Asylum | CLAUDIA PEPPEL | 271–76How to Bake X Cake: Notes on the Recipe | IRACEMA DULLEY | 277–79Walking Away, Walking in Circles, Writing Lists | RACHEL AUMILLER | 281–83The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25

Over and Over and Over Again:Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory

Over the last twenty years, reenactment has been appropriated by both contemporary artistic production and art-theoretical discourse, becoming a distinctive strategy to engage with history and memory. As a critical act of repetition, which is never neutral in reactualizing the past, it has established unconventional modes of historicization and narration. Collecting work by artists, scholars, curators, and museum administrators, the volume investigates reenactment's potential for a (re)activation of layered temporal experiences, and its value as an ongoing interpretative and political gesture performed in the present with an eye to the future. Its contributions discuss the mobilization of archives in the struggle for inclusiveness and cultural revisionism; the role of the body in the presentification and rehabilitation of past events and (impermanent) objects; the question of authenticity and originality in artistic practice, art history, as well as in museum collections and conservation practices.The Reactivation of Time | CRISTINA BALDACCI, CLIO NICASTRO, and ARIANNA SFORZINI | ix–xiiFrom Re- to Pre- and Back Again | SVEN LÜTTICKEN | 1–16\EXPAND{-4} I. UNCOVERING THE HISTORICAL PAST, PERFORMING THE POLITICAL PRESENTThe Reenacted Double: Repetition as a Creative Paradox | ARIANNA SFORZINI | 19–27​“The Reconstruction of the Past is the Task of Historians and not Agents” : Operative Reenactment in State Security Archives | KATA KRASZNAHORKAI | 29–36The Collection of Jane Ryan & William Saunders: Reconstruction as ‘Democratic Gesture’ | PIO ABAD | 37–46Insistence: The Temporality of the Death Fast and the Political | ÖZGE SERIN | 47–55‘Interrupting the Present’: Political and Artistic Forms of Reenactments in South Africa | KATJA GENTRIC | 57–67Resounding Difficult Histories | JULIANA HODKINSON | 69–80Archival Diffractions: A Response to Le Nemesiache’s Call | GIULIA DAMIANI | 81–89Archival Reenactement and the Role of Fiction: Walid Raad and the Atlas Group Archive | ROBERTA AGNESE | 91–98II. AESTHETIC FORMS OF REHABILITATIONUnintentional Reenactments: Yella by Christian Petzold | CLIO NICASTRO | 101–11Everyday Aesthetics and the Practice of Historical Reenactment: Revisiting Cavell’s Emerson | ULRIKE WAGNER | 113–20Speculative Writing: Unfilmed Scripts and Premediation Events | PABLO GONÇALO | 121–29Reenactment in Theatre: Some Reflections on the Philosophical Status of Restaging | DANIELA SACCO | 131–40Re-search, Re-enactment, Re-design, Re-programmed Art | SERENA CANGIANO, DAVIDE FORNARI, and AZALEA SERATONI | 141–50In the Beginning There Is an End: Approaching Gina Pane, Approaching Discours mou et mat | MALIN ARNELL | 151–59Performance Art in the 1990s and the Generation Gap | PIERRE SAURISSE | 161–69III. RESISTANCE AND RECONCILIATION IN THE MUSEUMRe-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process | CRISTINA BALDACCI | 173–82Reconciling Authenticity and Reenactment: An Art Conservation Perspective | AMY BROST | 183–92UNFOLD: The Strategic Importance of Reinterpretation for Media Art Mediation and Conservation | GABY WIJERS | 193–203Unfold Nan Hoover: On the Importance of Actively Encouraging a Variable Understanding of Artworks for the Sake of their Preservation and Mediation | VERA SOFIA MOTA and FRANSIEN VAN DER PUTT | 205–18Living Simulacrum: The Neoplastic Room in Łódź: 1948 / 1960 / 1966 / 1983 / 2006 / 2008 / 2010 / 2011 / 2013 / 2017 / ∞ | JOANNA KILISZEK | 219–29‘Repetition: Summer Display 1983’ at Van Abbemuseum: Or, What Institutional Curatorial Archives Can Tell Us about the Museum | MICHELA ALESSANDRINI | 231–38‘Political-Timing-Specific’ Performance Art in the Realm of the Museum: The Potential of Reenactment as Practice of Memorialization | HÉLIA MARÇAL and DANIELA SALAZAR | 239–54‘We Are Gathering Experience’: Restaging the History of Art Education | ALETHEA ROCKWELL | 255–60Over and Over and Over Again: Reenactment Strategies in Contemporary Arts and Theory, ed. by Cristina Baldacci, Clio Nicastro, and Arianna Sforzini, Cultural Inquiry, 21 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-21

“You’re trolling because…” – A Corpus-based Study of Perceived Trolling and Motive Attribution in the Comment Threads of Three British Political Blogs

This paper investigates the linguistically marked motives that participants attribute to those they call trolls in 991 comment threads of three British political blogs. The study is concerned with how these motives affect the discursive construction of trolling and trolls. Another goal of the paper is to examine whether the mainly emotional motives ascribed to trolls in the academic literature correspond with those that the participants attribute to the alleged trolls in the analysed threads. The paper identifies five broad motives ascribed to trolls: emotional/mental health-related/social reasons, financial gain, political beliefs, being employed by a political body, and unspecified political affiliation. It also points out that depending on these motives, trolling and trolls are constructed in various ways. Finally, the study argues that participants attribute motives to trolls not only to explain their behaviour but also to insult them

Mehr(wert) queer - Queer Added (Value): Visuelle Kultur, Kunst und Gender-Politiken - Visual Culture, Art, and Gender Politics

The present publication discusses the critical potential of queer and queer-feminist visual and art politics. Queer political positions and aesthetic possibilities are differentiated and honed in the context of asking how visual arguments interact with legal and political discourses.Dieser Band diskutiert das kritische Potential queerer und queer-feministischer Bilder- und Kunstpolitiken. Im Kontext der Frage, wie visuelle Argumentationen mit rechtlichen und politischen Diskursen interagieren, geht es um Ausdifferenzierungen und Zuspitzungen queerer politischer Positionen und ästhetischer Möglichkeiten

Language making and ownership from the perspective of writing creoles

In this paper, I examine the ideologies and policies on writing creoles as examples of hitherto mostly unwritten languages and test cases for language making as defined by Krämer et al. (forthcoming 2022), also considering issues of language ownership. In socalled “Western ideologies” of what constitutes a language, writing plays an important role. Orthographies and the actors behind them are of interest as, for example, certain graphemes carry heavy sociopolitical connotations, which may emphasize the question of language ownership. I will briefly discuss the orthographies of four Western Caribbean English-lexifier creoles (Belize, Nicaragua, San Andrés-Providence, and Limón) and their evolution over the past three decades in order to address these issues. A useful point of comparison is constituted by the orthographies devised for Haitian Creole and Jamaican.</p

Errans:Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing

Today’s critical discourses and theorizing vanguards agree on the importance of getting lost, of failure, of erring — as do life coaches and business gurus. The taste for a departure from progress and other teleologies, the fascination with disorder, unfocused modes of attention, or improvisational performances cut across wide swaths of scholarly and activist discourses, practices in the arts, but also in business, warfare, and politics. Yet often the laudible failures are only those that are redeemed by subsequent successes. What could it mean to think errancy beyond such restrictions? And what would a radical critique of productivity, success, and fixed determination look like that doesn’t collapse into the infamous ‘I would prefer not to’? This volume looks for an answer in the complicated word field branching and stretching from the Latin errāre. Its contributions explore the implications of embracing error, randomness, failure, non-teleological temporalities across different disciplines, discourses, and practices, with critical attention to the ambivalences such an impossible embrace generates.‘Submit Your References’: Introduction | ARND WEDEMEYER | 1–18The Punakawans Make an Untimely Appearance: In Praise of Caves, Shadows, and Fire (or A Response to Plato’s Doctrine of Truth) | PRECIOSA DE JOYA | 19–47The Animal That Laughs at Itself: False False Alarms about the End of ‘Man’ | JAMES BURTON | 49–74Not Yet: Duration as Detour in Emmanuelle Demoris’s Mafrouza Cycle | ROSA BAROTSI | 75–92Incomplete and Self-Dismantling Structures: The Built Space, the Text, the Body | ANTONIO CASTORE | 93–112Camera Fog; or, The Pendulum of Austerity in Contemporary Portugal | MARIA JOSÉ DE ABREU | 113–40Rinko Kawauchi: Imperfect Photographs | CLARA MASNATTA | 141–58Inbuilt Errans: What Is and Is Not ‘Radical Indifference’ | ZAIRONG XIANG | 159–75Errant Counterpublics: ‘Solidarność’ and the Politics of the Weak | EWA MAJEWSKA | 177–99‘The Exile from the Law’: Keeping and Transgressing the Limits in Jewish Law | FEDERICO DAL BO | 201–31Errans: Going Astray, Being Adrift, Coming to Nothing, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Arnd Wedemeyer, Cultural Inquiry, 24 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-24