The imaginary landscapes of Anselm Kiefer and Jacques Derrida intersect at a very specific point. The motif of grey is present both in the painting activity of the German artist and in the textual body of the French theoretician. I have attempted here to analyse some particular images and a few fragments of text in order to show the importance and the function of grey in contemporary culture. The colour I deal with is unusual as it refers to some of the most pertinent topics of our history and art. The grey - both in the works of Kiefer and in the booklet of Derrida entitled Feu la cendre - is the trace of destruction, the sign of perishing and the colour of ashes. It is impossible to discuss the history of the 20th century without this very specific reference which is both visual and conceptual.
The experience of Minimal Art tells us that a visual object can confront us with absence. The minimal objects are absent - they do not recall any past, they do not refer to any story that might be their source. At least this is the very first impression...But this situation does not make all the utterances concerning these objects impossible. It is rather the opposite - the absence of story, the negation of history is the beginning of another way of writing about art.
The article investigates the discourse of contemporary visual culture studies informed by the paradigmatic shift in the field of humanities, known as pictorial turn. Drawing upon the concepts outlined by William J. Mitchell and Mieke Bal, the author argues against the possibility of ahistorical simplifications that might occur when thinking in terms of pictorial turn comes into a growing prominence within the discipline. Certain comparison is drafted as a warning; employing the field of visuality as the universal theoretical basis, without taking into account the specificity of the historical experience, would be parallel to the poststructuralist hegemony of textuality. Similar argument addresses the examples of discourse on visuality built upon models of primarily textual analysis. Therefore, the author emphasizes the necessity to reach out to the earlier modern theory on visual culture proposed by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, who were investigating the themes (or emplying the methods) that has been largely overlooked and / or shifted to the margins.
The unnamed science proposed by Aby Warburg is an intellectual project within whose range images are treated as complex cultural phenomena. The Mnemosyne Atlas, its most radical fragment, is critically valuable not only vis a vis the limits of the history of art as a discipline but also the hierarchy that defines visual art. For this reason, there exists a need for a political analysis of the Atlas that would take into consideration the significance of the ”moment of the new exchange” programmed by Warburg on the modern scene of the visual.
The article is concerned with changes in the humanities in relation to the increasing presence of posthumanism as a methodological perspective (a change in the direction and method of conducting research) and an ontological perspective (a change in the overall way of thinking about the world). The text is a case study of the work of Emanuele Coccia, an Italian philosopher who embodies the posthumanist way of thinking in a particularly expressive way. The article concerns the posthumanist critique of modernity and as well as contemporary alternatives to modern hierarchies of knowledge: it deals with the revaluation of sensuality, the emphasis on horizontality and continuity, the necessity of overdetermining knowledge by ecological thinking, as well as with the weakening of the critical perspectives.
PL
Artykuł dotyczy zmian w humanistyce związanych z coraz wyraźniejszą obecnością posthumanizmu jako perspektywy metodologicznej (zmieniającej kierunek i sposób prowadzenia badań) i ontologicznej (zmieniającej całościowy sposób myślenia o świecie). Tekst jest studium przypadku prac Emanuele Cocci, włoskiego filozofa, który w szczególnie wyrazisty sposób wciela w życie posthumanistyczny sposób myślenia. Artykuł poświęcony jest przede wszystkim posthumanistycznej krytyce nowoczesności i współczesnym alternatywom dla nowoczesnych hierarchii wiedzy: dowartościowaniu zmysłowości, akcentowaniu horyzontalności i ciągłości, konieczności naddeterminacji wiedzy przez myślenie ekologiczne, wreszcie osłabieniu pozycji krytycznej.
The article investigates the discourse of contemporary visual culture studies informed by the paradigmatic shift in the field of humanities, known as pictorial turn. Drawing upon the concepts outlined by William J. Mitchell and Mieke Bal, the author argues against the possibility of ahistorical simplifications that might occur when thinking in terms of pictorial turn comes into a growing prominence within the discipline. Certain comparison is drafted as a warning; employing the field of visuality as the universal theoretical basis, without taking into account the specificity of the historical experience, would be parallel to the poststructuralist hegemony of textuality. Similar argument addresses the examples of discourse on visuality built upon models of primarily textual analysis. Therefore, the author emphasizes the necessity to reach out to the earlier modern theory on visual culture proposed by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin, who were investigating the themes (or emplying the methods) that has been largely overlooked and / or shifted to the margins.