Book Review The Mark of the Sacred by Jean-Pierre Dupuy

In The Mark of the Sacred (2013) the French economist and philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy sets out on a journey across the vast terrain of human rites, rituals, sacrifices and violence that constitute an essential and unneglectable part of human history. For Dupuy this history is first and foremost a history of limits, borders, and transcendence

The Roleless Role of Man

In a world increasingly governed by data-analytics and algorithms and with the continued development and sophistication of machine-to-machine technologies and communication, the very significance of human labor and human praxis is today being questioned and tested in radically new ways. Decentered and displaced from his previous position as the main gatherer and interpreter of information, man´s hitherto exclusive role in the monitoring and administration of his environment is emphatically challenged by automation and ubiquitous computation. While these technological developments undoubtedly provide still greater precision and efficiency, they also prompt a series of less instrumental and more existential questions: What happens to human self-perception and self-valorization as machines take over the channels of communication? Where does man situate himself in an environment increasingly beyond his grasp and outside his possibilities of apprehension? On the threshold to tomorrow´s big data-land these are among the questions that arise with still greater pertinence and urgency

This Time as Romantic Fiction: Monarchism and Peasant Freedom in the Historical Literature of B. S. Ingemann 1824–1836

This article examines the relationship between the monarchy and the people as represented by one of the foremost Danish Romantics, the poet B. S. Ingemann (1789–1862), in the historical literature he published in the years when Ingemann wrote his Danish history, the so-called ‘myth of an original peasant’s freedom’, is also inherent in Ingemann’s novels and poems. Drawing on the literature of the Danish historian Peter Frederik Suhm, Ingemann embraces and ‘recycles’ the idea that historically an ancient constitution existen in Denmark to ensure that the peasant was on equal terms with the nobility and the clergy. No decision could be made without the consent of the commonality. The article stresses that this idea had an enormous impact on Danish society, both as a cultural indicator and as an actual political tool, not least in the crucial years following the French Revolution

AN APORIA OF POSSIBILITY: ON TECHNOLOGY AND THE LOSS OF MATERIALITY OF ART

Numerous art historians and art critics have announced the death of art. From Arthur C. Danto´s Hegelian analysis to Hans Belting´s Kantian reading, art's fate seems sealed and its potentials exhausted. These approaches either claim that art has become pure idea and is thus no longer art but philosophy, or that art has so lost itself in the myriad of it's possibilities that the artistic schools, periods and traditions which once provided it's stability has vanished . In the following article, the crisis of contemporary art is analyzed from a third and strictly material perspective. Drawing on the thinking of André Leroi-Gourhan, the article proposes to look at art´s current crisis as a direct result of the changed relations between the human and matter or between the hand and materiality, that modern technologies and processes of automation have produced. Where the human hand becomes increasingly superfluous, the ties to the material world that used to steer and guide artists is equally lost

HOLBEIN’S AMBASSADORS: ON THE TECHNOLOGICAL ABSTRACTION AND CONCRETIZATION OF DEATH

Although Hans Holbein´s painting The Ambassadors,1533, has been the object of much interest and research, thespecific importance of scientific instruments and technologyremains largely unexplored, or has played only a peripheralrole in the investigations. In this article an attempt ismade to analyze the significance of scientific instrumentsrepresented in the painting to the artistic practice andstrategies of Hans Holbein, especially in the creation of ahighly abstract and intellectual pictorial space. Drawingon the writings of Martin Heidegger and Norman Bryson,Holbein´s depiction of scientific instruments is discussedin relation to the impact of the sciences in early modernityand the production of new perspectives on the dimensionsof space and time

Den udtømte sandhed og den sande uudtømmelighed

The Exhausted Truth and the True Inexhaustibility What are the relations between images and truth? How can truth be represented? In the article “The Exhausted Truth and the True Inexhaustibility”, the German romanticist and philosopher Friedrich Schlegel’s theories concerning the great value and unmeasurable importance of the endless, the unintelligible, and the inexhaustible serves as the opening to a discussion of what is to be understood by the question of truth. Does truth pertain to the forever unsayable domains of the oblique and evasive – that which must remain outside the firm grasp of enlightenment and understanding? Or, on the contrary, is truth that which not only can be enframed, but also reproduced and represented? The discussion of this question brings forth a fundamental divide between Schlegel’s and Romanticism’s idealizations of the creative and vitalistic transgressions of the human limits of understanding and the boundaries set up in the names of enlightenment and knowledge. As argued in the article, this divide would also describe a discrepancy between, on the one hand, a contemplative search into the unknown depths of the world, and, on the other DEN UDTØMTE SANDHED OG DEN SANDE UUDTØMMELIGHED 43 PERISKOP NR. 18 2017 hand, the desire to bring into light, into form, and into image. The Information Age in which we are said to live today would appear to provide us first and foremost with the latter image of truth: The substitution of Romanticism’s inexhaustive image of truth with the true exhaustiveness of our image culture

På slagmarken med prins Otto – Kønsballade hos B.S. Ingemann i 1835

In his historical novel from 1835, Prince Otto of Denmark and his Time , the poet Bernhard Severin Ingemann (1789-1862) established the unknown, yet historical character, Prince Otto of Denmark (1310-1346) as the hero of the novel. This choice has puzzled critics ever since, due to the fact that Prince Otto seems less a potential king than his brother Valdemar IV (1320-1372) who actually became a king of Denmark. Georg Brandes (1842-1927) claimed that Otto mirrored Ingemann’s persona as weak and feminine, a “monk” not suited for kingship. In his ridicule of Prince Otto and Ingemann, Brandes reveals his ideas about gender, masculinity and femininity, but as this article seeks to show, such ideas are tied to time and place. Read from the distance of 2019, Ingemann’s feminine medieval hero might seem more modern and progressive than Brandes would have him. In this sense, the article is a piece of “queer medievalism”

Frejdigt kan en Kvinde opslå sin Ridderhjelm...

Anmeldelse af:  Tom Buk-Swienty: Løvinden. Karen Blixen i Afrika, Gyldendal, 2018

Katolicisme i Ingemanns danmarkshistorie: En større fortælling om Nord og Syd

This study presents a reading of Catholicism in the historical novels of the Danish author Bernhard Severin Ingemann, written between 1824 and 1836, in the light of the so-called Nordic Sonderweg. The idea of a Nordic Sonderweg has been propounded in historical studies since the early 1990s and has gained significance ever since. The main idea is that the notion of a free peasant class, combined with Lutheranism, played a crucial role in the rise of modern democratic societies. Nordic peasants – so it is argued – enjoyed more freedom and equality, were more trusting, and earned greater respect and prestige than their fellows in southern European countries, who were hampered by feudalism, coercion, and Catholicism. My main argument is that Ingemann, as a pastoral enlightener in the North, represents the idea of a Nordic Sonderweg in his novels too and that his conception of Catholicism can be understood in the light of this grand narrative

BONDEFRIHED OG ANDRE VERDENSBILLEDER IDEHISTORISKE STUDIER AF B.S. INGEMANNS DANMARKSHISTORIE 1824-1836

ABSTRACTPeasants’ Freedom and other Ideas of History:Studies in the Historical Literature of B.S. Ingemann 1824-1836Using a New Historicist approach this article examines four worldviews imbedded in a reading of B.S. Ingemanns historical literature which was published between 1824-1836 in the genre of two poems and four historical novels. The worldview of the author-subject (1), a worldview related to the relationship between the monarchy and the people, largely conceived within the so called ‘myth of an original peasants freedom’, a founding myth within Danish historiography (2), a worldview related to the defense of the Danish version of monarchism, in particular the thoughts put forward by the Danish lawyer Jacob Mandix (3), and finally a worldview related to notions of the ideal ‘Rechtsstat’, where Ingemanns literature is read within the context of the discipline “Law and Literature” (4). The article displays personal experiences with monarchism which becomes the primary object of investigation in the context of empirical analysis of prose fiction