User account

Humanities

Fragility is the only thing I really know about me
Fragility is the only thing I really know about me

Claire Denis

“Fragility is the only thing I really know about me”

I am not a very balanced person. I am fragile and sad – almost as described in Triste Tropiques by Claude Lévi-Strauss. I feel both those adjectives, I grew up with them. I was aware of my fragility even when I was very young – a baby, learning to walk, living somewhere in Africa and already feeling that the number of white persons was very small compared to the number of black persons and also noticing that most of the...
ABO DE
  • film d'auteur
  • identity
  • autofiction
  • subjectivity
Current Texts

Dieter Mersch

Digital disrupture

We really need an analysis of algorithmic conditions and their paradoxes and ambiguities that gives them an adequate framework and horizon. But instead we currently seem to be finding an algorithmic solution of the algorithmic, much as digital solutions are being offered for the problems of the digital public sphere, in the way that IT corporations, for example, use exclusively mathematical procedures to evaluate and delete “fake news,” inappropriate portrayals, or the violation of personal rights. This tends to result in a circularity that leaves the drawing of boundaries and raising of barriers solely to programming, instead of restoring them to our ethical conscience and understanding of what the social could mean today. The machine, by contrast, remains alien to any mechanical limitation—just as its inability to decide lies in the impossibility of self-calculation. The nucleus of digital culture should instead be sought where the cultural of culture is located:...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
Current Texts
From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

From xenolinguistics to cephalo­pods

OPEN
ACCESS
  • communication
  • science fiction
  • utopia
  • semiotics and semiology
  • linguistics
  • communication media

 

Topics
  • Color and meaning

    Color and meaning

    Who is afraid of Red, Yellow, Blue…?

    • image and imagery
    • color
    • semiotics and semiology
    • monochrome
    • chromatics / colour science
  • Observing the Spectator

    Observing the Spectator

    • observer
    • gaze
    • optical illusion
    • mirror
  • Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    Wissen-Nicht-Wissen

    • poetology of knowledge
    • experiment
    • poetics
    • potentiality
    • astonishment
    • ignorance and non-knowledge
    • epistemology
    • literary studies
    • idleness
    • history of knowledge
  • Autofiction—Metafiction

    Autofiction—Metafiction

    • Theory of fiction
    • fiction
    • memory
    • autobiography
    • autofiction

 

We need more planetary dimensions!
We need more planetary dimensions!

Rosi Braidotti

Nomadic Subjects

My life-long engagement in the project of nomadic subjectivity rests on a specific cartography of our globalised times, marked by large-scale and technologically-mediated transformations of our social, economic and political universes. I start from the assumption that, as a result of these upheavals, traditional forms of self-representation, familiar cultural points of reference and age-old habits of thought are being re-composed, albeit in contradictory ways. Our historical context is marked by the schizoid structure of technology-driven advanced capitalism, as Deleuze and Guattari...
OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • feminism
  • globalization
  • identity
  • Europe
  • capitalism
Current Texts

Andreas L. Hofbauer

The yoke of being, noteworthy dis-position

It wasn’t nature and its dangers that forced domestication and enabled the economic shrine. Temple and funerary cult, sacrifice and distribution of the meat—for Homer all sacrificial animals were still hieria, holy creatures—and the containment of wildness led to symbolic and socio-cultural change, which became the vector and motor of sedentary, food-producing communities. It wasn’t sheep, goats, or cattle that were domesticated first; it was the zoon logon echon itself that bowed to the self-created yoke of the cult. Why, we don’t know. Beyond this it’s important that unlike plants only very few species of animal can be domesticated, and that this shouldn’t be confused with taming. Economic significance develops as an epiphenomenon. It transforms from possible human sacrifice to animal sacrifice to the distribution of meat in early “Greek” antiquity, then to the obeloi (skewers with varying amounts of meat, as tokens for the priests’ or judges’ portion; even...

OPEN
ACCESS
DE
  • money
  • ethnology
  • economization
  • anthropology
Current Texts

Jean-Luc Nancy

Ζένοι και Zah και Zuh

Ξένος extraneus του έξω όχι του μέσα (intraneus) όχι της οικίας unheimlich όχι του heim όχι της εστίας της άλλης πλευράς της πόρτας – fores, foreigner όχι υπερβολικά στον ρυθμό, odd όχι κανονικός όχι συνήθης σπάνιος ιδιάζων seltsam παράξενος besherat γενναίος κομψός απρόβλεπτος στραβός verschroben

λοξός αναπάντεχος εξαιρετικός εκπληκτικός

 

Είναι εκπληκτικό πόσες λέξεις εκφράσεις τρόπους διαφορετικούς έχουμε για να μιλήσουμε για τον παράξενο ξένο τον ausländer τον έξω από τη χώρα και όχι «pays avec nous» όπως λέγαμε κάποτε στη Γαλλία «c’est un pays à moi» για να πούμε κάποιος από το χωριό μου τη γειτονιά μου την περιοχή μου την πατρίδα μου

OPEN
ACCESS
FR FA DE