The article is an interpretation of the traditional figure of the hermeneutic circle made from the perspective of John D. Caputo’s radical hermeneutics. It begins with a recapitulation of the most important modern positions on the hermeneutic circle, which postmodern hermeneutics radicalizes, noting the impossibility of its closure or fulfillment. Movement in the postmodern hermeneutic circle takes place not between the parts and the whole, but only between the different parts. Thus, one might say that this circle is twisted, and this has a dual meaning. It evokes Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of a phrase from Hamlet, “time is out of joint”, but it also plays with the meaning of the twist, which can be understood as a Verwindung: the impossibility of the transgression beyond modern hermeneutics.
"Tlen" [Oxygen] by Ivan Vyrypaev is a multi-plane text with a successful marriage of universality and topicality and local colors. The thematic layer of the text is made by both the image of the modern world disturbed by conflicts as well as the image of the post-Soviet Russia. The provocative deconstruction of the biblical rhetoric exposes an axiological chaos and epistemological loss of the human, and the incessant reinterpretation of notions and judgments becomes a gesture of description and cognition of the world.
The article investigates Merleau-Ponty’s late thought from the position of Derrida’s deconstruction, focusing on the possibility of thinking otherness in the framework of embodiment. We examine the thought movements in The Visible and the Invisible which open up such possibilities, as well as those which close them down. The basis for this investigation is a comparison of Derrida and Merleau-Ponty in relation to the thinking of Husserl, de Saussure, and Hegel. We demonstrate, above all, how Derrida’s deconstruction occupies a middle position between Merleau-Ponty and Hegel. In conclusion we outline an ambivalence which is to be found throughout Merleau-Ponty’s final work.
In his "Encyklopedia duszy rosyjskiej" Wiktor Jerofiejew performs a brutal vivisection of his nation’s cultural memory. The key concepts of history, power, nation, and fatherland gain a new erudite interpretation. Consistent in uncovering totalitarian discourse, Jerofiejew demythologizes opinions and prejudices, deconstructs ideas, concepts and attitudes. While bringing to life the portrait of Russian mentality and their national character, he proposes hierarchy but never accepts taboos. Consequently, "Encyklopedia" does not appeal to popular tastes. It is a multifaceted “miniature gallery”, a bitter diagnosis of the essence of Russianness and the condition of Russian culture.
The usual way of characterising the notion of “musical postmodernism” is set out by the following claims: (1) a postmodern musical work corresponds to the postmodern worldview; the notion in question is closely connected with the etymology of its name (“postmodern” means, in any case, “of an era after a modern one”); (3) the characterisation of the postmodern worldview (and, thus, of a postmodern piece of music) ought to conform to the beliefs of the classics of the postmodern thought; (4) the postmodern repertoire includes mainly the works created after about 1970; (5) the most important features of these compositions are euphony, aleatoric indetermination, polistylistics, and repetitiveness. The notion governed by the claims (1) – (5) is highly unclear and provides little help for understanding musical phenomena. In order to make it more precise, the basis of its definition should be modified and the three following claims accepted: (A) a postmodern musical work is a musical representation of the postmodern worldview; (B) the existing musical repertoire contains some postmodern works; (C) a correct definition of musical postmodernism should enable to qualify at least some of the given composi-tions as postmodern or not. The conditions (A ) – (C) and the analysis of the postmodern worldview seem to suggest that a postmodern musical work is such of a precariously integrated structure. A postmodern work represents the undermining (“deconstruction”) of the crucial idea of the com-posing practice: the piece of music arises from the integration of sounds, not of a simple aggregation of them. The musical “deconstruction” can emerge when some of the important portions a work or certain aspects of it exhibit larger degree of integration than the work as a whole. It seems that some compositions by Ives and the final movement of Chopin’s Sonata in B minor Op. 35 are postmodern in the sense pointed above.
The aim of the article is the psychoanalytical interpretation of Jewish Museum building in Berlin - the example of deconstractivism in architecture, as well the urban space of Berlin and the history of Germany and the Berlin Jews as manifested in the space of the city. Starting with the notion of anamorphosis, the works by Jacąues Derrida and Peter Eisenman and using Daniel Liebenskind's building of the Jewish Museum as an example, the author of the article shows the connection between deconstructivism and the urban space of Berlin. The em-phasizes the importance of empty spaces, or spaces devoid of something, for both the city space of Berlin, and the Museum's architecture, where the empty space is the space devoid of the Berlin absentees - the Jews. The description refers to formal features of deconstructivist architecture and the features of the museum building while the interpretation is rooted in Lacanian psychoanalysis and his three orders: the Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary, as well as in his concept of the mirror stage in the development of the human psyche.
The paper supplements the research on the latest Paweł Mykietyn's work. It broadens the spectrum of problems related to the technique of deconstruction in his works and allows for a better understanding of the structure of the Concerto No. 2 for cello and symphony orchestra. The main research method is descriptive analysis, bringing Paweł Mykietyn's musical language closer to the harmonic material, textural systems, agogic-metric structures, and the concept of form. The analysis is based on the score of the 2nd Concerto for Cello and Symphony Orchestra, published in 2019 by the PWM Edition in Kraków. The structure of the paper includes: introduction, three paragraphs and a summary. The characteristics of Paweł Mykietyn’s work contained in the introduction will allow the reader to become familiar with stylistic tendencies at various stages of the composer's work. The section devoted to the genesis and reception aims to present the history of the creation of the analysed work, as well as its contexts and resonance. The analytical sketch in the context of the issues of time and form will allow to present selected aspects of the compositional technique.
The author reads Adam Mickiewicz’s [Urywek Pamiętnika Polki] in the context of symbolic space of a house “from the basement to the attic” suggested by Gaston Bachelard. Fe-nomenological doubts of French critic provoke questions concerning “beloved space” and “shelter” in Mickiewicz’s text. Deconstrucion that leads to accepting Ludwisia’s perspective reveals vertical dimension of the house and enables to designate places for figures living there. The most important belongs to a modest servant girl.
In this paper, I discuss the interpretation of the method of deconstruction in David J. Gunkel’s Deconstruction (MIT Press 2021). I focus on the relationship between deconstruction and truth. I hold that the concept of truth is indispensable for deconstruction since truth introduces correctness conditions for the deconstructive method. However, I claim that truth, being essential and primitive for deconstruction, is fundamentally inaccessible for being analyzed by the latter.
The Polish version of the article was published in “Roczniki Humanistyczne,” vol. 59 (2011), issue 1. The article is the editor-in-chief’s comment to the discussion between Agnieszka Czechowicz and Paweł Bohuszewicz as presented in the current issue of the journal. The author defends philological methods in studying early modern literary texts and expresses her scepticism concerning any methods questioning and negating the fundamental epistemological difference between what is being studied and a researcher himself.
This essay argues that Luther’s “metaphysics” is present in Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie (Contributions to Philosophy), a text many consider to be Heidegger’s second magnum opus. I argue that Luther’s “metaphysics” is present in Heidegger’s Contributions in primarily two ways: (1) there is a Lutheran structure (of existential categories) that Heidegger appropriated not only in Being and Time, but also much earlier in his lectures on St. Paul from the 1920s, of responding to a call and converting in anxious anticipation toward a futural not-yet (what Heidegger calls “the last god”); and (2) Contributions’ project concerns overcoming metaphysics, which involves first thinking through to metaphysics’ conditions for possibility, which means recognizing the “ironic nature” of beyng via what Heidegger calls “thinking concealment,” the logic of which originates in Luther’s attacks on not only Greek metaphysics, but upon Judaism and the Mosaic law as well.
According to many researchers and theoreticians mentioned by Davis J. Gunkel we live today in digital culture of “mash-up”, which is at the same time configurable convergence culture. Therefore in the contemporary world the concept of remix enjoys such great popularity. It is in sampling and remixing that “the cultural logic of networked global capitalism” should be sought. However, the mentioned terms occur mainly in the disputes over copyright laws and freedom of the access to culture. For Gunkel this aspect is not a key one. In Of Remixology he suggests a departure from the current way of thinking about remix in terms of an original and a copy, innovation and derivation, authorship and plagiarism. Instead, Gunkel proposes the third way of thinking, where his companions become such theoreticians as Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek.
The author provides reflections upon the influence of postmodern literary tendencies on a fable. Contemporary metamorphoses of a fable are characterised by an attempt at deconstructing the genre, connected with various strategies of intertextual play with literary tradition (autoreflection, metaliterature, metatextuality, intertextuality, astiche, collage, parody etc.). This process is demonstrated on the example of the chosen postmodern fables written by Grzegorz Kasdepke, Marta Guśniowska, Agnieszka Suchowierska.
The author of the article puts the question whether the concept of the Nietzsche’s theory was an expression of his philosophical views. Whether the reader will find in the works and a biography of the unambiguous answer to this question. Presented text contains interpretations inspired by Derrida’s deconstructionism: in the main part of the article the author presents independent interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, according to which the man in the act of passion reconstructs and reflects doctrine of Eternal Recurrence which draws attention to the affirmation of life.
In this paper I intend to discuss some notions encountered in Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting (1978) immediately linked to the manner in which the art object2 is understood and addressed, its limits, what it does/does not include/exclude, what it touches upon—if we can use such formalist terms in a deconstructive framework. These notions have perhaps formed in the past decades the art object, even though there is no frequent reference of Derridean deconstruction in texts regarding art.3 The ones I will mostly refer to are the parergon, the frame and the abyss. I intend to support that Derrida has not just doubted the limits between ergon and parergon but has also illustrated in an almost painterly manner the abyss and the parergon, thus reframing fields of aesthetics, philosophically and visually.
Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), master of the deconstructionist method and recognized as one of the greatest thinkers of our time, was in his youth, before beginning his career as a philosopher, a footballer who played this game with the Italian prisoners in Algiers, his birthplace, during World War II. In a 1991 interview, when he was 60, Derrida narrated in detail his childhood dream of becoming a professional football player, confiding that all of his philosophy and thought had been inspired by sport and the game of football. Starting from this biographical note, the aim of my study is to demonstrate, first of all, how Derrida's whole philosophy and technique of deconstruction really has its roots in the concept of sport. The French-Algerian philosopher understood sport as a cultural structure based on the concepts of play, game, body, rules, and all of the oppositional pairs deriving from différance and from the tensions it generates. Secondly, the study tries to show how sport is for Derrida a metaphor of life and its meaning, suspended between being and nothingness; a place and a field in which human beings act, learn and educate themselves, deconstructing, as in a text, the values and prejudices of their lives and understanding, through sport itself, their roles and responsibility toward themselves and the community in which they live.
This article analyses John Banville’s novel Shroud as the protagonist’s autobiography which both follows and resists the confessional mode. Axel Vander, an ageing famous academic and champion of deconstruction, faces the necessity to confront his real self, although he spent his entire academic life contesting the concept of authentic selfhood. Alluding to the infamous case of Paul de Man, whose deconstructionist theories have been reinterpreted in the light of the revelation of his disgraceful wartime past, Banville’s novel presents a man who veers between the temptation to fall back on his theories in order to uphold a lifelong deception, and the impulse to reveal the truth and achieve belated absolution. The article examines Vander’s narrative as an attempt at a truthful account of his life, combined with the conflicting tendency to resist self-exposure. Despite the protagonist’s ambivalent and selfcontradictory motivations, his account of his life belongs to the category of confessional writing, with its accompanying religious connotations. It is argued that the protagonist’s public denial of authentic selfhood is linked to his private evasion of moral culpability.
"Meeting" is one of these concepts, which in the most recent philosophy have received significant meaning. In some interpretations it is the instruction to "meet" – so to establish the unmediated relation with the Other – is the factor, which allows to break free from the pressure of the "Hegelian bite" and problems resulting from it. It turns out that the ennoblement of the subject made by the German idealism in fact limited the reality only to its exteriorisation – and thus put into question the possibility of reaching the reality, including the reality of other people. "Meeting" would be the bridge thanks to which this reach (again) becomes possible. However, it seems that speaking about the "meeting" we still too rarely think about the prerequisites, which must be met, so that the subject can open itself to accept the Other. This is an important analysis because, first of all, it allows to judge whether the whole project of the postphenomenological philosophy can be defended in the practical perspective, and secondly – it is a key indicator that allows the further development of the human thought. It turns out that for the elementary human experience the "meeting" is not an excess, and the opening to what is unusual is the natural element of the existence of human cultures. And this instruction should be used in today's philosophizing – in order to overcome the basic aporias of modernity with its edge.
The paper focuses on the reception of Derrida’s Archive Fever among (new) media theorists and its relevance for the ongoing discussions in that academic field. Although this Derrida’s text is often described as the one in which he provides a statement on the pervasive revolutionary impact of new media, its reception among media theorists remains scarce. Several media scholars that tackle the text, however, have an ambivalent stance on it: they appreciate some of Derrida’s theses, but regard them largely obsolete. The first part of the paper analyzes these critiques and argues that many of the objections on Derrida’s behalf are caused by the misinterpretation of important features of the deconstructive thought. In its second part, the paper firstly deals with certain weaker points of Derrida’s reflection and then proceeds to examine his insights pertinent to the problems of contemporary media theory that were neglected in earlier reception. Finally, paper reaffirms the claim about the need for a more profound exchange between the deconstruction and media studies, albeit one that would avoid the examined shortcomings.
This study is based on the assumption that literary interpretations are explicitly or implicitly influenced by some philosophical system as a general system of thought. In this way, different literary interpretations often hide more general philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, this study tries to show that the interpretation of the given work of art need not be conceived only as application of the general philosophical approach; interpretation of the work of art, as argued in this essay, can in significant ways also show the philosophical approach itself. The subject of this study is the case of Henry James’s short story “The Figure in the Carpet.” This essay includes an analysis of how Tzvetan Todorov, Joseph Hillis Miller, Wolfgang Iser and of Pascale Casanova interpret the story and how they use its dominant image of a “figure in the carpet” for illustration of their own theoretical and philosophical approach.
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