The aim of the present text is to analyse the function of philosophical fictions in French 18th-century philosophy. These fictions are based on the idea of an innocent gaze, cast on our own culture and perception; such a gaze is often connected with a figure of alterity: a child, a stranger, a blind or deaf person etc. The author argues that this gaze, in fact, is most often refracted, that is to say, it is a gaze of the philosopher himself who only imagines the alterity in question. This principal thesis is illustrated by examples taken from two realms: the theory of perception (Condillac’s statue) and the theory of education (Rousseau and Mme de Genlis).
In this study I devote my attention to the significance of the work of the Marquis de Sade in the field of political philosophy. The first part focuses on the definition of the basic principles of de Sade’s politically-orientated reflexion, examining above all the theory of the moral and affective solitude of the human being, and, derived from this, the relativism of all moral judgement. In the second part I indicate - primarily on the basis of the text Yet Another Effort, Frenchman, If You Would Become Republicans - the consequences that flow for human society from these basic postulates: the impossibility of making a social contract and the arbitrary division between sovereign individuals and victims. In the concluding part of the text I attempt to show the extent to which de Sade’s thought is relevant from a certain kind of contemporary political philosophy: I concentrate here on Balibar’s conception of “the inconvertibility of violence”; on Ogilvie’s concept of “man as a write-off”, and also on the concept of bio-power as it is formulated by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality, and later by Giorgio Agamben in Homo sacer.
The aim of the present paper is to analyse briefly the complicated references to musical composition in the work of Claude Levi-Strauss. In his monumental tetralogy entitled 'Mythologiques', Levi-Strauss considers the musical composition as a paradigm for structural analysis of myths. In this respect, the author compares Levi-Strauss' position with that of Pierre Schaeffer whose project of the 'concrete music' is strongly criticised by Levi-Strauss. In the second part of the text, Levi-Strauss' structural analysis of Wagner's operas are examined, as well as the criticism addressed to Levi-Strauss by Jean-Jacques Nattiez - universalist pretension and vagueness of the method based upon binary oppositions seems to represent weak points of Levi-Strauss' impressive effort to set new bases for human sciences.
In the present text, the author focuses on Sartre’s influence on the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Sartre’s text that seems to have represented a major source of inspiration for Robbe-Grillet’s writing is a short 1939 essay entitled „Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology“, where Sartre refuses the idea of knowledge as an absorption of objects in subject’s interiority. In the second part of the present paper, the author offers a close reading of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy to support this view, concentrating in particular on the problem of affectivity.
In the present article, the author examines the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s thought in the realm of gesture studies and sign language linguistics. Merleau-Ponty’s reflection on the gestural nature of language, as presented in Phenomenology of Perception, represents a remarkable starting point for both gesture studies and deaf studies, insofar as it stresses the interrelatedness of the subject, his or her gestural expression and the world the subjects inhabits. In the second part of the paper, examples are presented to support the central thesis: Jürgen Streeck’s research on gestures in the natural environment and the example of Kata Kolok, a Balinese village sign language, and its particular way of treating spatial relations and structures.
In the present study, the author focuses on the phenomenon of involuntary memory, as treated, most famously, in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He, nonetheless, attempts to trace a “pre-history” of the notion in question by making reference to one particular passage to Rousseau’s Confessions that perhaps does not name the phenomenon of involuntary memory in an explicit manner, but certainly does treat a concrete experience that seems strongly reminiscent of Proust’s later and more sophisticated analyses. In the second part of the paper, he attempts to show that literature is not the exclusive domain in which involuntary memory becomes a crucial topic. He presents a “musical” analogy of involuntary memory by comparing Proust’s writing to the Wagnerian notion of leitmotif.
The aim of the paper is to reconsider Barthes' theory of textuality, as presented in his 'The Pleasure of the Text'. Barthes' approach is based on the rejection of the 'referential' or 'realistic' theories of literary text: the Barthesian pleasure is drawn from the texture of the text itself rather that from its alleged referential character. In this sense, the author's suggestion is to return to the notion of representation rejected by Barthes, even though this representation should not be identical with the reference in the classical sense of the word. The notion of 'weak representation', suggested by the author, does not mean a return to a naive conception of realism. It rather implies that the referent would be a fantasmatic rather than 'realistic' entity. The notions of representation and reference are exemplified by the interpretation of Richardson's 'Clarissa' and Hardy's 'Tess of the d'Urbevilles'.
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