Favored - Forever? A Critical Dialogue on America and Germany. Today and Tomorrow

The contingencies of military decisions and their outcomes have always shaped the course of literary history, determining even the languages in which it has been conducted. But modern literature takes a new bearing on its determinant military contingencies. This paper describes a modern literary scene that self-reflexively attributes to literature the potential to suspend these determining military events, and so to communicate the unactualised possibilities contained in past contingencies, even those that have been violently foreclosed. It is a scene of interested observers, adrift in a boat, who listen for the sounds of a distant naval battle. Having first located this scene's classical antecedents in Aristotle, I then track it through three pivotal and distinctively modern moments of literary self-periodization. In each instance, the scene is differently configured, articulating a specific conjuncture of war, textuality and literary self-definition. It appears in John Dryden as the setting of a modern critical dialogue on theatre, with James Montgomery as a Romantic definition of the poetry of sound in a lecture series on literature, and with Joseph Conrad as the narrative frame of a modernist tale within a tale. But the same scene re-echoes in all three – the scene of literary inscription as one in which, contingently, a war neither did nor did not take place, a battle was and was not fought.

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The Birth of Foucault’s Method: Epistemology/ Phenomenology, Psychology/Psychiatry

Philosophical Literary Journal Logos ◽

10.22394/0869-5377-2019-2-25-47 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 25-50

Keyword(s):

Scientific Practice ◽

Critical Dialogue ◽

Georges Canguilhem ◽

History Of ◽

The Subject ◽

Archaeological Method ◽

Psychiatric Discourse ◽

Archaeology Of Knowledge ◽

Epistemological Views ◽

Environment Evolution

This paper analyzes Foucault’s early thinking (from 1954 to 1957) as it bears on psychology, anthropology and psychiatry. The author maintains that Foucault’s texts from that period can be mined for the origins of the Foucault methodology, early indications of its scope, and its first applications. Although Foucault opposed a phenomenology of epistemology and allied himself with the latter, a close reading of his early work reveals a paradoxical synthesis of phenomenological and epistemological views. The influences of Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Binswanger were decisive here.Foucault adopted the “practice-to-theory” vector from Canguilhem and grounded the history of psychology and psychiatry on the study of essential oppositions: normal - pathological, personality - environment, evolution - history. Merleau-Ponty’s theory allowed him to demonstrate that the ontological perspective of psychology and psychiatry does not match the subject of their research, which is the person and their experience. Foucault’s application of Binswanger and the idea of existence is to problematize the boundaries between psychology and psychiatry and their identity as sciences while formulating the problem of pathology and normality as crucial to their identification. He also considers mental illness as one of the forms of experience. Foucault thus goes beyond the boundaries of psychology and psychiatry to develop his archaeological method. In the Order of things and the Archaeology of Knowledge he makes two philosophical maneuvers: in the first, he rejects the subject; in the second he abandons the continuity of history. Foucault’s early psychological and psychiatric discourse is then the first harbinger of his trespassing the boundaries of disciplines and schools, combining perspectives, and scrutinizing the foundations of scientific practice. A critical dialogue with his own earlier thought is the source of Foucault’s birth as a philosopher.

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Solidarity of the shaken: from the experience (Erlebnis) to history

Studies in East European Thought ◽

10.1007/s11212-021-09421-6 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Michaela Belejkaničová

Keyword(s):

Twentieth Century ◽

Political Violence ◽

Critical Dialogue ◽

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin ◽

Ex Nihilo ◽

Post War ◽

Opening Up ◽

Usual Pattern

AbstractIn his Heretical Essays, Jan Patočka introduces the concept of the solidarity of the shaken. He argues that it emerges in the conditions of political violence—the frontline experience (Fronterlebnis). Moreover, Patočka brings into discussion the puzzling concepts of day, night, metanoia and sacrifice, which only further problematise the idea. Researching how other thinkers have examined the phenomenon of the frontline experience, it becomes obvious that Patočka did not invent the obscure vocabulary ex nihilo. Concepts such as frontline experience, sacrifice and the metaphors of the day and night were commonly used by thinkers in the inter-war and post-war eras in their examination of community (Gemeinschaft). This study aims to reconstruct the idea of the solidarity of the shaken as contextualized within a broader scholarly debate on the concept of community (Gemeinschaft). Through the critical dialogue between Patočka’s works and the works of Ernst Jünger and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, this study will portray how Patočka, in his discourse on the frontline experience, follows the usual pattern of overcoming one’s individuality, transcending and opening up to the constitution of solidarity. This paper will argue that Patočka defined the solidarity of the shaken in an attempt to revive the positive aspects of a community and break with the regressive (if not sinister) uses to which it was put in the twentieth century.

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Religion at Play

Pneuma ◽

10.1163/15700747-04001033 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 40 (1-2) ◽

pp. 17-36

Author(s):

Wolfgang Vondey

Keyword(s):

Charles Taylor ◽

Modern World ◽

Critical Dialogue ◽

Secular World ◽

History Of ◽

Secular Age

Abstract Pentecostals do not fit the dominant narrative of a secular age constructed by Charles Taylor. Instead, Pentecostalism is a religion at play that engages with the secular without accepting its authority. A critical dialogue with Taylor’s foundational proposal of the central conditions of premodern life that have made room for our modern secular world demonstrates how and why these conditions are not met in Pentecostalism. The article then identifies the alternative mechanisms in place in Pentecostalism as a form of religion at play manifested in an enchanted worldview, sociospiritual attachment, the festival of Pentecost, the transformation of secular time, and a porous cosmos. A close examination of the notion of play in Taylor’s narrative illuminates in more detail the ill fit of Pentecostalism in the history of a secular age and reveals that Pentecostalism represents a condition of religion that resolves the tension between sacred and secular and that challenges the dominance of “secular” and “religious” as uncontested ideas of our modern world.

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Breath, Breathe, Breathing: Communication in/as Acts of Social Justice (A Metaphorical Performative Assemblage)

Culture Studies &#x2194 Critical Methodologies ◽

10.1177/1532708617727755 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 18 (5) ◽

pp. 314-325

Author(s):

Bryant Keith Alexander ◽

Timothy Huffman ◽

Amber Johnson

Keyword(s):

Social Justice ◽

Communication Studies ◽

Human Communication ◽

Critical Dialogue

This performative essay is a redrafting and extension of a critical dialogue following a public presentation on the nature and importance of communication studies. The dialogue is framed by using the metaphor of breathing, as it relates to particular links between human communication and communication activist research.

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