Estudios de Filosofía

Carl Einstein and Cubism as a Historiographical Method

2023-04-14T11:33:06-05:00

This work constitutes our first advance in the study of the work of the writer, art historian, critic, and German anarchist Carl Einstein. He proposes an analysis of the methodological, theoretical matrix on which he establishes his unique historiographical conception of 20th-century art, focusing on the period between the rise of the German expressionist movement and the avant-garde consolidation of Cubism. The proposed hypothesis maintains that Einstein finds in Cubism (especially in the works of Picasso, Braque, and Gris) a "method" for his model of critical historicization of twentieth-century art rather than an "object" of investigation.

The Obsolescence of Sensibility: Aesthetics and Politics in Ending Time by Günther Anders

2023-03-06T14:08:57-05:00

Günther Anders is still an almost secret thinker, even though his work has been progressively rediscovered in the last two decades. His reflections, moreover, are contained in a dispersed and varied work. That is why the purpose of these pages is pages is to reconstruct an aesthetical and political notion at the same time, present throughout it, to contribute to the discovery of a reading key that gives a unified image of this sparse set. It is about the idea of the sensible opacity of the contemporary world, which would have been camouflaged in various ways to prevent human beings from becoming aware of their situation as mere co-historical beings with the actual subject of history, technique. Through the analysis of its origin in his early writings on the philosophy of particular arts (literature, music, plastic) to its generalization as a critical key to read the dangers of the contemporary world (his and ours), we intend highlight the actuality of critical and materialistic thought that, arisen in the heat of events, has left a valuable legacy to think about our own present.

Hannah Arendt: Thinking between Past and Future

2023-02-22T15:46:28-05:00

This essay aims to analyze Arendt’s reflections on the activity of thinking. This activity is essential to understanding our present and reconciling ourselves with contingency and human fragility. Unlike the philosophical tradition that has vindicated contemplative thinking, Arendt recovers the lost treasure of reflective thinking through the portraits of thinkers, such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Walter Benjamin, Socrates, Immanuel Kant, and Franz Kafka. In dark times, when the public sphere is destroyed, the challenge of “thinking without banisters” implies an act of political resistance, by trying to examine the devastating reality, even if the answers are not what we would like to see and hear. Through reflective thinking, we can open up to the world and the drama of human freedom with its heterogeneities and destructive leaks.

Pragmatism and life. Interview to Richard J. Bernstein

2022-09-19T13:59:55-05:00

Interview to Richard J. Bernstein

The dissimilar in the similar: Mimesis and Reading in Walter Benjamin

2023-02-08T16:30:19-05:00

In this paper, we delimit the moments in which, in “Doctrine of the Similar” and in “On the Mimetic Faculty”, reading and Sprache (speech, language, language) are inseparably linked to the category of “non-sensuous similarities.” In this conception, the analogical-proportional representation of traditional mimesis is dislocated by a rhetori- cal conception of symbolic experiences given by different semiotic forms. Moreover, the idealist ground of the symbolic is relocated in the specific area of language, in which the perception of similarities is mediated by the instance of reading under the predominance of the dissimilar. Our fundamental purpose resides in exposing how this production of similarities, in contrast to those of the relational schematism of classical logicism and with the ground of idealistic determination of Kantian aesthetics, shows its paradoxical grounds in the mimetic reading.

Art between Fetishism and Melancholy in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory

2023-02-15T17:57:22-05:00

The article explores Adorno’s understanding of fetishism and melancholy as immanent to the artwork’s autonomous structure. In order to understand the relation between them, the Freudian understanding of fetishism and melancholy has to be considered along with the more explicit reference to the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. Analysing the implications of Adorno’s claim that commodity fetishism is at the origin of artistic autonomy, the article shows how it should be understood not only as a materialist demystification but also as a reaffirmation of art’s apparent self-sufficiency and its capacity to resist the commodification of society. Nevertheless—the article claims—thas this is only possible if art’s fetishism is dialectically opposed to its melancholy, through which art establishes a relation to the heterogeneous element of the lost object produced by its autonomous form.

The Spacialization Revisited: Extensive Type’s Characterization and Contradictions in Theodor W. Adorno

2022-12-15T15:14:01-05:00

As Adorno’s posthumous writings were released, a notable turn in his phi- losophy of music became noteworthy: by revealing an ambitious project on Beethoven, a quasi-axiomatic theory of musical time emerged, which seems to guide Adornian thought at very significant works and texts, as Philosophy of New Music. Sketched in three configuration types of musical time, this theory surprises with the so-called “ex- tensive type”. Adorno would then admit kinds of formal consistency (Stimmigkeit) that are not restricted to the ideal of development (Entwicklung) and assumes the possibility of a non-regressive spatialization, which contrasts with his own ontological definition of the medium. This paper discusses the contradictions of extensive type by presenting an analysis of the Archduke Trio op. 97, in the light of the well-known originary affinity between Beethoven and Hegel. At last, the text presents by which means and for what reasons the extensive type would lead Adorno to the last and most decisive modality of musical time’s configuration, the late style.

Archipelagic Thought and Decoloniality. Thinking with Édouard Glissant

2023-02-14T21:22:28-05:00

This article relates four concepts present in the thought of Édouard Glissant (poetics, optionality, exteriority, and unlearning) to show that they are also present in different authors of decolonial theory. These concepts lead us out of the framework of modern hypercriticism and allow us to enter into a philosophy of relation that opens up new possibilities for intercultural encounters. Through the constant recourse to the contrast between Glissant and the decolonial school, the text goes through its classic themes, such as the coloniality of power, knowledge and being, and decolonial pedagogy and feminism.

The Idea of colonial Industry in Jean Godefroy Bidima and the Critique of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga

2023-01-23T17:28:16-05:00

In this paper, I argue that the concept of culture industry developed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno had a decisive influence on Jean Godefroy Bidima’s critique of black African modernity. Drawing on some of his writings, I seek to demon- strate how Bidima’s philosophical endeavor inherits the concept of culture industry and applies it to the modern context of black Africa, where it is transformed into the concept of colonial industry. In both cases, the same critical perspective is at play, namely to formulate a broad critique of how cultural products (artworks in Horkheimer and Adorno, and philosophy in Bidima) are deprived of their substance to align with the mystification of the masses. The critique of the culture industry, which serves in Adorno as a fundamental criticism of the production of modern art and its decadence into mass production serves, revisited in Bidima, as a critique of the modern black African philo- sophical discourse. With the light provided by this connection, I propose a rereading of Bidima’s critique of Fabien Eboussi Boulaga, the latter being presented as a promoter of a “discourse of mastery” in black African modern philosophy.

Counterrevolution and Revolt, fifty Years later. Kant, Marx, and the Relevance of Herbert Marcuse’s aesthetic Dimension

2023-03-05T13:00:29-05:00

Recently, Critical Theory has been revisited due to the relevance of its critique of contemporary forms of alienation. This critique allows the unveiling of structural ele- ments of contemporary ways of life, offering an accurate analysis of the material and subjective causes of the current environmental crisis. An example of this contribution is Herbert Marcuse’s book Counterrevolution and Revolt, published in 1972. This article addresses the relationship between aesthetics and political ecology established in the main theses of Marcuse’s book. The objective is to present how Marcuse employs the German philosophical tradition, more specifically elements of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment and Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, to constitute a conceptual project of emancipation based on what he calls the aesthetic dimension. The article concludes by claiming that Marcuse’s critics and formulation entail a double requirement in which the field of Aesthetics has a central role.

Heideggerian Things. Perspectives about Things and the practical Occupation of Dasein in three Periods of Heidegger’s Work (1927-1951)

2023-01-17T14:52:46-05:00

In the following Work we will analyze and interpret three elaborations around the conceptions related to things, intramundane entities and the practical occupation of Dasein in the world, in three works corresponding to three moments of Heidegger’s elaborations: the first, from the time of Sein und Zeit and the other two, to a transition period and after the Kehre. In this framework we intend to demonstrate and circumscribe the implications of the change in perspective in both periods, which move from the centrality given to the practical and functional field of Dasein, to a markedly relational approach that is radicalized in his 1951 writing. This distinction allows us to identify and relate a displacement of the emphasis in the manual model of primary relationship with the world and in the ethical projections such treatments suppose.

Presentation No 68 (Esthetics and critical Theory)

2023-06-02T11:33:42-05:00

Presentation No 68 (Esthetics and critical Theory)

Siep, L., Ikäheimo, H, Quante, M. (Eds.) (2021). Handbuch Anerkennung. Springer VS

2022-08-03T15:46:38-05:00

In this review I present the approach, the structure and briefly the main ideas of the first chapters of this manual on recognition, chapters that are the ones that articulate the work. Synoptically, I then report the content of the articles that make up the book. The review ends with a brief assessment of the scope and importance of this manual for the subject it deals with, for its original presentation and the timeliness of its publication.