The Scandal of Self-contradiction

The Scandal of Self-contradiction
Author: Luca Di Blasi
Publisher: Series Cultural Inquiry
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2012
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3851326814

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was both a writer and filmmaker deeply rooted in European culture, as well as an intellectual who moved between different traditions, identities and positions. Early on he looked to Africa and Asia for possible alternatives to the hegemony of Western Neocapitalism and Consumerism, and in his hands the Greek and Judeo-Christian Classics morphed into unsettling multistable figures constantly shifting between West and East, North and South, the present and the past, rationality and myth, identity and otherness. The contributions in this volume, which belong to different intellectual and disciplinary fields, are bound together by a fascination for Pasolini's ability to recognize contradictions, to intensify and multiply them, as well as to make them aesthetically and politically productive. What emerges is a "euro-eccentric" and multifaceted Pasolini of great interest for the present.

Pasolini after Dante

Pasolini after Dante
Author: Emanuela Patti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2018-10-24
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 1317196147

What role did Dante play in the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)? His unfinished and fragmented imitation of the Comedia, La Divina Mimesis, is only one outward sign of what was a sustained dialogue with Dante on representation begun in the early 1950s. During this period, the philologists Gianfranco Contini (1912-1990) and Erich Auerbach (1892-1957) played a crucial role in Pasolini’s re-thinking of ‘represented reality’, suggesting Dante as the best literary, authorial and political model for a generation of postwar Italian writers. This emerged first as ‘Dantean realism’ in Pasolini’s prose and poetry, after Contini’s interpretation of Dante and of his plurilingualism, and then as ‘figural realism’ in his cinema, after Auerbach’s concepts of Dante’s figura and ‘mingling of styles’. Following the evolution of Pasolini’s mimetic ideal from these formative influences through to La Divina Mimesis, Emanuela Patti explores Pasolini’s politics of representation in relation to the ‘national-popular’, the ‘questione della lingua’ and the Italian post-war debates on neorealism, while also providing a new interpretation of some of his major literary and cinematic works.

The Scandals of Translation

The Scandals of Translation
Author: Lawrence Venuti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2002-09-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1134740638

Translation is stigmatized as a form of writing, discouraged by copyright law, deprecated by the academy, exploited by publishers and corporations, governments and religious organizations. Lawrence Venuti exposes what he refers to as the 'scandals of translation' by looking at the relationship between translation and those bodies - corporations, governments, religious organizations, publishers - who need the work of the translator yet marginalize it when it threatens their cultural values. Venuti illustrates his arguments with a wealth of translations from The Bible, the works of Homer, Plato and Wittgenstein, Japanese and West African novels, advertisements and business journalism.

World Literature After Empire

World Literature After Empire
Author: Pieter Vanhove
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2021-07-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000415473

This book makes the case that the idea of a "world" in the cultural and philosophical sense is not an exclusively Western phenomenon. During the Cold War and in the wake of decolonization a plethora of historical attempts were made to reinvent the notions of world literature, world art, and philosophical universality from an anticolonial perspective. Contributing to recent debates on world literature, the postcolonial, and translatability, the book presents a series of interdisciplinary and multilingual case studies spanning Europe, the United States, and China. The case studies illustrate how individual anti-imperialist writers and artists set out to remake the conception of the world in their own image by offering a different perspective centered on questions of race, gender, sexuality, global inequality, and class. The book also discusses how international cultural organizations like the Afro-Asian Writers’ Bureau, UNESCO, and PEN International attempted to shape this debate across Cold War divides.

Badiou Dictionary

Badiou Dictionary
Author: Steven Corcoran
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 636
Release: 2015-07-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0748669655

From Antiphilosophy to Worlds and from Beckett to Wittgenstein, the 110 entries in this dictionary provide detailed explanations and engagements with Badious's key concepts and major interlocutors.

Over and Over and Over Again

Over and Over and Over Again
Author: Cristina Baldacci
Publisher: ICI Berlin Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: Art
ISBN: 3965580280

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 Power of Tolerance

The Power of Tolerance
Author: Wendy Brown
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 113
Release: 2014-04-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231170181

We invoke the ideal of tolerance in response to conflict, but what does it mean to answer conflict with a call for tolerance? Is tolerance a way of resolving conflicts or a means of sustaining them? Does it transform conflicts into productive tensions, or does it perpetuate underlying power relations? To what extent does tolerance hide its involvement with power and act as a form of depoliticization? Wendy Brown and Rainer Forst debate the uses and misuses of tolerance, an exchange that highlights the fundamental differences in their critical practice despite a number of political similarities. Both scholars address the normative premises, limits, and political implications of various conceptions of tolerance. Brown offers a genealogical critique of contemporary discourses on tolerance in Western liberal societies, focusing on their inherent ties to colonialism and imperialism, and Forst reconstructs an intellectual history of tolerance that attempts to redeem its political virtue in democratic societies. Brown and Forst work from different perspectives and traditions, yet they each remain wary of the subjection and abnegation embodied in toleration discourses, among other issues. The result is a dialogue rich in critical and conceptual reflections on power, justice, discourse, rationality, and identity.

Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou's Philosophy

Dilemmas of Truth in Alain Badiou's Philosophy
Author: Giosuè Ghisalberti
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2023-01-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3031182960

This book on Alain Badiou’s philosophy begins with a central theme: the attempt to trace how Badiou has replaced the tradition of critical theory and negation with an affirmative support of his four generic procedures (art, science, love, and art) as inseparable from his revitalization of both the subject and the concept of truth. By defining four procedures as conditions of philosophy, Badiou makes the attempt to establish each as inter-related and systematically necessary to make a new proposal for thought. The fidelity to Badiou’s project for the 21st century, however, requires a fundamental examination: are his four truths complicated by an inescapable dilemma? And if so, can the four truths be retained, as a whole, or does the individual reader have to make a decision that will alter Badiou’s project and conclusions? By presenting the dilemmas of his thought, the scholarly reader will be in a position to then pursue the necessary study to come to their own conclusions and, by doing so, become sufficiently free to resist the many coercions of social and political life in liberal democracies today.

The Politics of Nihilism

The Politics of Nihilism
Author: Nitzan Lebovic
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2014-09-25
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1623562562

Contemporary politics is faced, on the one hand, with political stagnation and lack of a progressive vision on the side of formal, institutional politics, and, on the other, with various social movements that venture to challenge modern understandings of representation, participation,and democracy. Interestingly, both institutional and anti-institutional sides of this antagonism tend to accuse each other of "nihilism", namely, of mere oppositional destructiveness and failure to offer a constructive, positive alternative to the status quo. Nihilism seems, then, all engulfing. In order to better understand this political situation and ourselves within it,The Politics of Nihilism proposes a thorough theoretical examination of the concept of nihilism and its historical development followed by critical studies of Israeli politics and culture. The authors show that, rather than a mark of mutual opposition and despair, nihilism is a fruitful category for tracing and exploring the limits of political critique, rendering them less rigid and opening up a space of potentiality for thought, action, and creation.

War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments

War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments
Author: Umut Yıldırım
Publisher: ICI Berlin Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2023-09-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3965580523

War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.