In the congress in Kiel, 1938, celebrating the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Thomas Hobbes's birth, a crucial shift in the field of Hobbes studies was articulated. The phase of Hobbes studies personified by Ferdinand Tönnies, who was the first to apply methods of textual criticism to the study of Hobbes's works, was succeeded by a phase dominated by Nazi intellectulas. Whereas most of them used Hobbes in order to formulate political differences among themselves, Carl Schmitt centered his interpretation of Hobbes on political mythology. Schmitt's influential interpretation of Hobbes is here for the first time set in the context of the preceding studies of Hobbes's life and work, on the one hand, and of the Nazi occupation of the field of Hobbes studies, on the other.
COBISS.SI-ID: 37681453
Aims of the monograph are explained: to affirm concepts of the aesthetic avant-garde, the aesthetic revolution, and of the three avant-gardes. The pivotal concept is the aesthetic avant-garde which supports the differentiation and the break between avant-gardes that limited themselves to the sphere of art and those that reached into “reality” and that support the differentiation between stylistic changes and the passing into “life.” The author supports his views with Rancière's concepts of aesthetic revolution, aesthetics and politics. He also refers to P. Bürger, T. de Duve, A. Flaker, F. Schlegel and F. Schiller.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38502957
The article focuses on the question of discontinuity and continuity from the perspective of the relationship between repetition and ending, and examines two possible modalities of this relationship. First, the modality in which the perspective of the end functions as an internal condition of repetition: the conviction that we can end something if we really want to is what makes possible the continuation of the very thing we want to end. And second, the modality in which the end is inherent to repetition, and where we are thus dealing with a “repetition of the end”, a repetition of discontinuity.
COBISS.SI-ID: 41031725
The monograph consists of two main parts. The first part presents a systematic study of the Cartesian cogito that focuses mainly on a comparison between Descartes’s own deduction of cogito in Meditations and the so-called anticipations of the cogito argument in St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. The second part of the book analyses the relationship between Foucault’s theory on biopolitics and pornological art. What binds together these two apparently very different topics is the concept of the grotesque. The book namely shows that – within the shear kernel of the cogito argument (and as its condition) – there persists a grotesque dimension: an essential exchange of roles between the subject and the object. Taken as a historico-political category, the concept of the grotesque, however, also represents one of the key components of the genesis of Foucault’s biopolitical theory. A-cogito is a concept that, on one hand, articulates the grotesque kernel of the cogito, and on the other, presents an attempt at its repetition within the field of biopolitics.
COBISS.SI-ID: 287929600
This paper examines a conceptual shift in the articulation of the relation between the subject and the Other in psychoanalysis as well as in the field of politics and takes as its point of departure a distinction between a demand at the level of having, a want-to-have, a demand which is alienating in so far as it confirms the Other, and a demand at the level of being, a want-to-be, a demand which separates since it brings the Other into question. Based on this analysis, the author shows how, in the times of the Other which does not exist, characterised by the hegemony of the capitalist discourse, only an act in which its consequences are inscribed in its very structure constitutes a way out of a discourse that knows no closure, and such precisely to the extent to which this act is capable of bringing about a modification of both the status of the subject as well as that of the Other.
COBISS.SI-ID: 38889005