An analysis of early Dada experimental practice in photography and film with reference to Roland Barthes's Camera lucida and Derrida's theory of spectrality. The chapter considers the legacy of Dada experiments with still and moving images in the work of post-war filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard.

Heidegger places Wagner’s will to the total work of art at the centre of the long 19th century. Nietzsche’s and Mallarmé’s responses to Wagner reflect all the ambiguities of modernism’s myth of absolute creation: the dreams of a new mythology and a new community are shadowed by the knowledge that the gods are nothing more than our fictions. Nietzsche and Mallarmé continue and critically interrogate the two distinct lineages of the total work of art deriving from German romanticism and the (...) French Revolution respectively, at the same time as they anticipate the contrary constructions of the sacred in society in Le Bon and Durkheim. (shrink)

This paper argues that, by allowing recognizable patterns of human action to emerge through the intimidating foreignness of a linguistic medium, narrative deserves a privileged place in language education. To overcome the inhibiting effect of strangeness, and thus facilitate the adoption of a foreign language by new users, it helps if the listeners embark upon a regression toward the narrative origins of their familiarity with the world as articulated in their mother tongue. Harking back to the early childhood comfort of (...) being held conjointly by a story-telling nurse and a linguistic substitute of the amniotic liquid, narrative acts as indispensable companion of our estrangement in general—linguistic, or otherwise. The argument brings into play the Greek notion of paideia, in which disciplined training and childish amusement converge, in an effort to accommodate the conclusion that the intellectual version of self-growth—including acquisition of foreign languages—benefits massively from the good old nurturing of narrative, its time-revered nurse. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene por objeto destacar la relevancia de una noción de “muerte impersonal” en el horizonte de una indagación no antropocentrada de lo biopolítico. En tanto no se rige por la teleología del principio antrópico, la filosofía contemporánea considera lo impersonal como una resistencia al biopoder, aunque suele concentrarse en los avatares del concepto de Vida. Aquí, avanzamos en el examen de los rasgos de la muerte impersonal en dos pensadores cuyas obras resultan fundamentales para estas líneas de trabajo (...) contemporáneas. En Nietzsche, analizamos la cuestión de la “muerte libre” y la imagen de la ceniza, dando cuenta de las posibilidades que allí se vislumbran para una reivindicación de lo impersonal. Luego, subrayamos sus semejanzas y derivaciones en los conceptos blanchotianos de “momento deseado” y “tiempo muerto”. (shrink)