9 1/2 Poetics for a Non-Fascist Life [or the importance of possessing the dead] (original) (raw)

Between the obscene and the mystical: the romantic as a solution to happiness

Is there, at the extreme, any relationship between obscene and mystical? This is our hypothesis, which we intend to explore through a small methodology that goes through the daily life of an anthropologist who likes to connect things, even the most abstruse, although sometimes it is dangerous, as it could be left with structuralism, systematism and truism. that reality offers you. The romantic is the solution to happiness and existence. DEVELOPMENT 1. We could, from now on, attribute a certain objective character to the obscene, what is beyond the scene, under the scene, in etymological terms. In fact, as the song says, they are "things in the world/to be seen from afar", as it harms the romanticism in a certain mechanical way that has to do with marriage, the social contract that different individuals practice among themselves to bond with each other. in the social web. But the obscene, let's not avoid the word, in order to reveal the truth about this relationship, has something perverse, contemplative, imaginative, playful, in the popular, traditional Portuguese sense, which delights and satisfies the soul and, in In a sense, it maintains an interest in a life that is being lived. The obscene does not require commitment, but it commits man as a social being, because neither the sea nor the land. two. So, what leads the subject, even as an anthropologist, to perceive the meaning in the relationship between obscene and mysticism? Shouldn't you be traveling, getting to know cultures, doing fieldwork in a village in Burma or Indochina? In fact, the connection that exists between one and the other registers (of the real), is the body, the body in exaggeration on one side and the body in suspension of the body, almost disappearing, but which still guarantees a certain immanence, so that it does not come out of this much, in terms of two

Melancholia as Destinerrance. On Resolution in Discontinuity and an Art That Could Come After Evil / Ekphrasis, 21(1)/2019, A Melancholic Exploration of Humanity (The Solitude of Man), pp. 40-58

Ekphrasis, 2019

This article is concerned with art's exploration through melancholia of a world in disaster. We will investigate how art as a form of melancholia-akin to Derrida's concept of destinerrance-is not only testifying to its limits, but employing its limits, denouncing and performing its border (as in parages). In relation and in dialogue with Adorno's negative dialectics, we investigate the possibility of non-dialectical art as a non resolving discourse speaking through its melancholia. We will question whether Godard's famous announcement of the end of cinema, Wagner's Tristan chord or Parsifal's much debated ending are a monument to what Adorno would call impossible openness, if they are subjected to closure or, on the contrary, they are rather a melancholic assignable nonplace, both necessary and impossible to find, which enables art to speak of its own impossible closure. How does the end of Wagner's Ring cycle announce and contain the end of the world in Lars von Trier's Melancholia? Does The Turin Horse end the world in a melancholia of waiting in vain? Is the continuous flow of water in Marguerite Duras's film Aurelia Steiner speaking of an impossible arrival? The letter the narrator is reading to us opens up and remains hanging in this liquid and seemingly calm environment. How does filming the waters of the river Seine relate to Bill Viola's statement that true art cannot separate life from death? Why is Auschwitz a border stone for how we understand and make art today? And how is Penderecki putting the pieces together in deconstructing both silence and sound? By raising all these questions this article reprises Badiou's interrogation of the ethical possibility of art in a context of reparations prescribed by Adorno to a post-Auschwitz world, through exploring a fundamental non-violence on the part of identity towards what is different from it in order to cause a difference to begin. Can art be a locus of making reparations? Our thesis is that through exploring discontinuity, dissonance or silence a place is being constructed for an art that is possible after Auschwitz.

A STRATEGY OF WANDERING AND FRAGMENTATION IN THE AESTHETIC-ARTISTIC RHETORICS OF MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY.

Da compreensão da arte ao ensino da história da arte, hoje.

This is especially relevant if you take into account that either with modernity or postmodernity aesthetic-artistic creations, as they reach a high degree of opening and/or undecidability, go the way of delectare. More than teaching and informing, more than moving, more than effectively and affectively communicating and achieving empathy, delectare, as a means to enchantment and seduction, demands a “commitment to appropriation” that can only come about when the text—the aesthetic creation—comes about and can be enjoyed fully, imaginatively, by the interpreter. Isn’t that what enchantment and seduction are all about? Ways to let in the charm, in almost narcissistic fashion, let ourselves pervade it as we give ourselves up to something that either seizes us or lets itself be seized, in an almost entirely free manner, accomplished without effort, almost happily? That is why I believe that deconstructive thinking is a form of creative hermeneutics, as it paves the ground for creation/fruition, reading/interpretation, accomplished in transit, open to all expectation. The territory knows no bounds; creation and fruition are ever in the process of becoming. The search for an orient is born of Nietzche’s philosophy before noon (1973:397). There is the art, then, of remembrance, appropriation, sharing and interrelationship of ruins and the rendering subjective of a creator’s memories, as well as those of interpreters/co-creators. These memories are as open as the future. As in myth and legend, memory with us is but a promise, a promise of memory lost or postponed; especially when remembrance of a first perception is attempted, or the first feeling, or the first memory of a past or a future that have not taken shape. I fully agree with Fernanda Bernardo’s take on L’autre Cap when she says: "…believing that you can answer the other…and before the other, to respond to their discourse by circumscribing it once and for all is…arrogant, disrespectful and unfair. This arrogance presupposes in the first place the possibility one has of answering for oneself, from oneself, from the entirety or ideality of one’s own identity. To answer for oneself would be to assume a knowledge of oneself, assuming that one ‘I think’, always identical to itself, would accompany all of one’s representations, and these would weave a systematic fabric, at one time homogeneous and potentially rendered subjective, of theses, critiques and themes, of which the subject would possess a total, intact, un-shrouded memory."

Romantic Bliss—or, Romanticism Is Not an Optimism

European Romantic Review, 2021

This essay proposes to rethink Romanticism through the concept of bliss. I suggest not only that bliss is a core Romantic concept but also, more speculatively, that Romanticism as project and as tendency is generated out of an antagonistic entanglement between bliss and the world of Western modernity. As the state of immediate fulfillment, free of alienation or negativity, bliss is what modernity at once promises and endlessly defers—and so bliss erupts in Romanticism against the modern world. In bliss, the world is dissolved as in water, consumed as in fire, so that nothing remains except the ecstasy of the world’s annihilation or termination. Romanticism seeks to inhabit the utopia of bliss immanently; however, the world re-mediates bliss into a long-lost past or an unreachable future, because it is through this re-mediation that the world reproduces and justifies itself. As a result, Romanticism falls into endless approximation, into nostalgia and longing—and bliss becomes infinitely not-yet, fragmented, defused by the world. This essay moves through German and British Romanticism so as to collect the scattered fragments of bliss, and to re-assemble Romantic bliss in its a-worldly immanence, its post-Copernican cosmic infinity, and its (often violent) clash with the world.

Love: the hidden mood in Being and Time

In this chapter, I show how and why Heidegger’s phenomenology is not only not devoid of love or eros, but rather that love is a mood that shows up in various forms at various places in his oeuvre. I provide a short literature review on the topic, and worke through the argument that a form of love is a hidden fundamental mood in BT, structurally implicated with angst. As I argue, the falling movement that eventually brings Dasein face to face with universal meaninglessness and angst is triggered by the love of God; angst is part of an affective economy that is subordinated to a desire for such love. In this context, eros is a necessary condition for the emergence of angst and the sense of meaninglessness. My argument relies on an analogy between the version of authenticity described in BT and the one Heidegger identifies in early Christian experience. My argument raises several questions that need to be addressed in the future. One question pertains to the so-called “detheologization” (Enttheologisierung) of BT, as well as BT’s relationship with metaphysics and its overcoming. More work also needs to be done in order to deepen our understanding of care and its connection to caritas and love or eros. According to my interpretation, the eros that forms part of the affective economy of BT is a type of love that is still caught up in metaphysics. This holds true for angst, too, as the two go hand in hand. According to the reading I propose, angst offers the condition of possibility for overcoming the metaphysics of presence; yet it still constitutes a historical phase of the metaphysical thinking it seeks to overcome. This characteristic becomes all the more evident once its dependence on metaphysical love is uncovered. This would also explain why Heidegger in his later work focuses on other fundamental moods, rather than on angst. Finally, the chapter helps clarify Heidegger’s own “theory of emotions.” While Heidegger never bothered to offer an “architecture” of emotional states and moods or any form of ordering of emotional phenomena, since that would amount to anthropology or psychology, his ontology did inherit pre-existing anthropologies and theories of emotion. If the argument of this chapter is right about the hidden presence of love in BT and a certain primacy of love over angst, this makes Heidegger rather conservative, since putting love first in the order of generation of the passions or affects was the established view among medieval philosophers. The chapter proceeds in three steps. The first section shows why the common view that Heidegger doesn’t say anything about love is wrong. In fact, some scholars have argued that one can reconstruct an alternative account of Heideggerian authenticity (Eigentlichkeit) founded on (interpersonal) love. This section includes a useful literature review on the topic. The second section looks at Heidegger’s earliest account of authenticity and angst, which appears in his interpretation of early Christian religious life, explicating the crucial role that love of God plays for the emergence of angst, thus revealing the irreducible structural interconnection between anxiety and love. The third section argues for an analogy between early Christian authenticity and authenticity in BT, and suggests that these two versions of authenticity share the same affective economy, which makes angst dependent on a particular form of love.