Suchergebnisse

-

<p align="center"> </p><p align="center"> </p>

-

The moment one imitates something, it sticks, it marks the imitator, there is
no innocent imitation. Imitation necessarily affects the one who imitates,
for better or (usually) for worse, and the making of a simple copy of
something necessarily affects the original. This is perhaps the briefest way
to describe Plato?s concerns about the nature of mimesis in the Republic. The
purpose of this paper is to give a brief account of looking at the mysterious
magic powers of mimesis and of attempts to counteract them. The topic is
massive, so the paper will concentrate on a few perspectives, starting with
the theatrical parable of St. Genesius, leading to Pascal and to Althusser?s
theory of ideology, then scrutinizing the ways in which modernity tried to
disentangle itself from mimesis (Brecht?s estrangement, Irigaray?s femininity
as mimesis, Badiou?s anti-mimetic stance, Freud?s account of magic and
Lacan?s account of enjoyment). What is the real of the mimetic spell which
has so vastly ramified aesthetic and political consequences? The paper
proposes a defense of mimesis, claiming that modernity, by relegating the
traditional art to the past of mimesis and representation, thereby maintained
a disavowed kernel of mimesis at its core.

The paper takes as its starting point the figure of the owl as the emblem of
philosophy, it looks at its history and takes up its most significant
philosophical use, the notorious passage where Hegel uses the owl as the
indication of philosophy?s necessary belatedness. This is the passage which
is usually taken as the point of indictment of Hegel?s position and the role
he ascribed to philosophy. Hegel?s adage ?What is rational is actual, and
what is actual is rational? is scrutinized in its various aspects,
particularly in view of its other version, ?what is rational must happen?.
The tension between the ?is? and the ?ought? is perhaps the clue to
understanding this adage, where Hegel doesn?t opt for the one or the other,
but aims at the paradoxical intersection of the two. Hegel?s adage is put in
contrast with Marx?s Thesis Eleven. The paper considers the concepts of the
rational, the actual, the belatedness/retroaction, the grayness and finally
the owl (and the part that bestiary plays in philosophy), thus trying to
circumscribe the task that should be assigned to philosophy.

The article examines the nature of sound by taking as its starting point Kafka's story "The Burrow," in which an animal, a badger, builds an elaborate and labyrinthine burrow as a bastion of protection against the outside. In this refuge it is disturbed by the intrusion of a sound of which it cannot find the origin. This situation is taken as a sound laboratory, where the nature of the sound and the subjective attitudes it implies are closely scrutinized. From this vantage point, the article pursues an analysis of sound and proposes to place sound at the pivotal point of twelve oppositions: wakefulness/sleep; inside/outside; cause/disruption of causality; floating/fixation, location/dislocation; time/space; one/multiple; duration/intermittency, sound/silence; subject/Other; reality/fantasy, meaningless/meaning; sound/voice; "being and time," "being and nothingness," "being and event"; and finally, the edge of modernity of which Kafka is the major harbinger. The article argues for a view in which sound, and the particular experience of sound in Kafka's context, can be taken as an ontological opening with ample ramifications in contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis.

Intro -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Foreword: Hegel or Spinoza? Yes, Please! - Mladen Dolar -- Note on Sources and Abbreviations -- Introduction. Hegel and Spinoza: The Question of Reading -- 1. Hegel's Logic of Pure Being and Spinoza -- 2. History Is Logic -- 3. Telos, Teleology, Teleiosis -- 4. Death and Finality -- 5. Ideology and the Originality of the Swerve -- Conclusion. Substance and Negativity: The Primacy of Negativity -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.