Essayism

Collection of essays and video archive on contemporary video essayist practices and theories.
Nora M. Alter, Christa Blümlinger, Steve Fagin, Hito Steyerl, Walid Ra’ad, Jan Verwoert, Maurizio Lazzarato / Angela Melitopoulos, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Rinaldo Walcott and others.

The unhappy youth is a constant subjetc in Pier Paolo Pasolini's essays, mainly when the writer is interested in understading the social and cultural changes that are happening in Italy during the 1970s. The intention of this presentation is to show how Pasolini comunicates and makes reference to this youth, creating a particular way of making journalism.

In contrast to the tendency in recent research to understand essayism as a »mode« or »attitude of thinking«, or as collective term for texts similar to essays, this article proposes to conceptualize essayism as the insertion of a special kind of reflective passages, which process uncertain knowledge, into fictional works of literature. The article discusses several aspects of the fictionalization of such reflections, namely aspects of the theory of fiction and linguistic pragmatics as well as hermeneutical aspects. For various reasons, which depend on the attribution of the reflective passages to a heterodiegetic narrator or characters , the fictionalization of reflection leads the reflective passages to oscillate between an assertive (i.e. fact-stating) reference to reality and a meaning internal to the work of literature.

Cet ouvrage s’intéresse à trois romans – A la recherche du temps perdu de Marcel Proust, Die Schlafwandler (Les Somnambules) de Hermann Broch et U.S.A. de John Dos Passos – très marqués par la présence de théorie, au point qu’ils ont semblé remettre en question « l’équilibre traditionnel de la forme romanesque », alors qu’il est possible de démontrer, au contraire, la nature fictionnelle de passages généralement considérés comme « de l’essai » (ou « de la philosophie ») par les critiques.L’ouvrage envisage tout d’abord les raisons de cette assimilation, par une comparaison entre des essais publiés dans les domaines allemand, américain et français au cours des années 1910-1930 et les passages essayistiques des trois romans, pour conclure que les points de convergence ne permettent pas de considérer que ces passages théoriques relèvent d’un genre différent de celui de l’œuvre qui les accueille. Cet ouvrage propose alors de voir les séquences essayistiques comme des essais fictionnels, dont la fictionalité est mise en lumière par un examen des lois, de l’interaction entre passages diégétiques et essayistiques, des exemples empruntés à la diégèse par les séquences essayistiques, ou encore par la mise au jour d’une instance unique et fictionnelle prenant en charge récit fictionnel et discours essayistique. S’éclairent alors les enjeux de l’essai fictionnel, qui apparaît nécessaire, dans A la recherche du temps perdu, Die Schlafwandler (Les Somnambules) et U.S.A., en raison de son rapport à la modernité et à l’époque, de son mouvement vers la totalisation et de sa faculté à approcher la connaissance, par sa nature fictionnelle même.

Das Wort „Essay“ stammt aus dem Wort „Versuch“ (essai, saggio, exagium). Versuch wiederum hängt mit Experiment (experimentum) und somit auch mit Erfahrung (experientia) zusammen. Adornos Philosophie, so erklärt ihr Autor selbst, ist eineder Erfahrung, als Kritik soll sie "ungegängelte Erfahrung“ ermöglichen (Negative Dialektik). Seine Essays sind somit unmittelbar exemplarisch für die Form seiner Philosophie — einer Philosophie, die gegen das System drängt, das Nichtidentische möglichst gewaltfrei zum Ausdruck zu bringen sucht. Der Essay wird zur vornehmlichen Form des Antisystematischen, des zugleich Vernünftigen und Widerspenstigen an der Philosophie. Im Seminar werden Essays von Adorno zur Philosophie, Gesellschaft, Kultur, Literatur, Musik und Erziehung gelesen und diskutiert sowie mit der Form des Essays experimentiert. So wird das Seminar durch konkrete soziale und kulturelle Fallanalysen (etwa zu Jazz oder Freizeit) zu grundlegenden metaphilosophischen Fragestellungen durchdringen.

Contemporary society is characterized by processes of fundamental change (keywords: multiple modernities, globalization, mobilization, individualization, transgression of cultures and identities). At the same time, the production of knowledge undergo swift transition and pluralization. By way of discussing sociology’s history as well as some of its non-scientific interfaces, this article deals with the possibilities and problems of sociology within such a context. The general point of departure is classical and contemporary sociology of knowledge. Recurrent references are Asplund, Foucault, Lukács, Mannheim, Musil, Simmel, Weber. The article begins with a discussion on the emergence of sociology. Sociology is seen as a part of the classical modern discourse, which was also expressed by other sciences on modern culture as well as the essay and the novel. They all shared ”hermeneutic horizon”. The discussion continues by considering in detail some matters concerning the relations between sociology, the novel, and the essay: ”essayism” as style of thought; interpretation and creation of realities; language and figuration; theory and fiction. Although there are (and should be) fundamental differences between sociology, the novel, and the essay, relations are also characterized by similarities and proximities. In a ”postdisciplinary” age, this should be considered not as a problem but as a prospect or vision.

Il contributo propone un approccio rovesciato alla produzione di Italo Calvino, mettendo la figura del saggista davanti a quella del narratore. Fedele alla missione educativa che Gramsci affida agli intellettuali marxisti, Calvino fin dal Dopoguerra ha chiara la necessità di costruire una «nuova letteratura», ma unicamente per metterla al servizio di una «nuova società», come spiega nella Presentazione a Una pietra sopra (1980). Quella creativa è quindi solo un’opzione tra le altre, che entra in crisi quando la società porta alla ribalta un nuovo tipo di pubblico, non più disposto a frequentare la letteratura dell’impegno e ad accettare che sia la politica ad agire da collante culturale. A partire dagli anni Sessanta, Calvino affina di conseguenza gli strumenti teorici per ristabilire un dialogo con il lettore post-ideologico, tenendo per certa la convinzione che la letteratura possiede una carica conoscitiva non inferiore ad altre forme di sapere. Approfittando di una generale crisi del romanzo, Calvino rimescola il catalogo dei generi, ibridando sempre più spesso la fiction e il saggismo, individuato come canale preferenziale per coinvolgere il pubblico nell’atto critico che è sentito come necessario a ogni operazione letteraria. Come caso di studio emblematico si prenderà Il castello dei destini incrociati (1973), un libro concepito alla stregua di una verifica delle suggestioni offerte dallo strutturalismo e dalla semiotica, nel quale però la teoria letteraria, la meta-narrazione e la narrazione finiscono per trovare un modo inedito di valorizzarsi a vicenda.

Die Logik des essayistischen Gedankens analysiert die Wege ästhetisch vermittelten freien Denkens zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Zweitem Weltkrieg anhand der paradigmatischen Textform des literarischen Essays – eine Gattung, welche die Widersprüche zwischen Wissenschaft und Literatur, Logik und Ästhetik, Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit in sich vereint.

Um die originäre Denkbewegung dieser Form der Reflexionsprosa nachzuzeichnen, entwickelt die vorliegende Studie Kategorien und Analyseinstrumente zur Interpretation des Essayistischen im Sinne einer selbstständigen Poetik mit selbstreflektiertem Ausdruckswillen. Dabei wird nicht nur auf die Möglichkeit struktureller Binnendifferenzierung hingewiesen, sondern auch die Entstehung der essayistischen Poetik vor dem Hintergrund philosophischer Ideengeschichte beleuchtet. Anhand beispielhafter Einzelinterpretationen werden die entwickelten Kategorien veranschaulicht und die Beziehungen zwischen den bedeutendsten italienischen Essayisten aufgezeigt.

"Si la plupart des critiques proustiens perçoivent les passages théoriques d’A la recherche du temps perdu – en particulier « L’adoration perpétuelle », dans Le Temps Retrouvé, ou les développements de Sodome et Gomorrhe sur l’inversion – comme des moments contrastant fortement avec la diégèse, ils les désignent indifféremment par de nombreux vocables et les considèrent simplement comme non-fictionnels. L’attention des commentateurs se concentre de préférence sur les effets produits par l’insertion de ces passages, sur le rapport avec les théories proustiennes du Contre Sainte-Beuve, avec celles de philosophes antérieurs ou contemporains, sans s’interroger directement sur le statut des séquences théoriques, sur leur nature, qui semblent aller de soi.

La confusion qui règne dans la manière de désigner les théories de la Recherche devrait pourtant attirer notre attention [...]"

Between myopic empiricism and baseless speculation unfolds the essay. Thus, Robert Musil, a great philosopher of the essay, discussed it as a tension between “precision” and “soul.” His contemporary Viktor Shklovsky, a fellow Modernist and trailblazing essayist, displayed both tendencies in scholarly and creative work. He referred to the soul with precision, discussing its pitch [stroi] (in his essay on Rozanov). Shklovsky also wrote about literary evolution while transgressing the boundaries of the precise and demonstrable in such  rarely corroborated statements as “art develops by the logic [razum] of its technique.” One may also find these two trends in the essays of Shklovsky’s fellow Formalists of the Opoyaz group—Boris Eikhenbaum and Yuri Tynianov. The latter boasted in a letter to Shklovsky: “We dispensed with the Geist of the Germans.” (The Formalists saw Geist as an elusive and impressionistic category, dangerous to empiricism.) Yet it is Tynianov’s famed essay, “The Interval” [Promezhutok], that foregrounded (intellectual) intuition, subjectivism, the going beyond the palpable (the very definition of meta-physics), or philosophical faith, as one may call it. We see this when Tynianov, like Shklovsky, without bringing in sociology, speaks about the demand of the epoch. The demand changes from one epoch to another but we cannot track down this change to the point of predicting it (in Tynianov’s words, when literature is commissioned to discover India, it discovers America). We cannot predict it due to the “optical laws” of the interval in artistic evolution, i.e., we do not see the coil spring of history; however, we have to believe that it exists. Similarly, in My Chronicle [Moi vremennik] and elsewhere, Eikhenbaum discusses the regularities of unpredictable history. Finally, equally revealing is such Opoyaz category coined by Tynianov as that of a “literary fact,” when every contemporary can tell a text that is artistic from a text that is not, based on the sensibility of that epoch. The dichotomy of Shklovsky, Tynianov, and Eikhenbaum’s thinking manifests itself in the Opoyaz Formalism’s conflicting orientations: the literary system (konstruktivnaia ustanovka) vis-a-vis the systemic violation of the system (ostranenie, defamiliarization). This duality also underlies the very definition of the essay. I argue that the very uniqueness of Opoyaz theory is that it was a form of essayism.

Arhiivid ja allumatus: Visuaalkultuuri muutuvad taktikad Ida-Euroopas / Archives and Disobedience. Changing Tactics of Visual Culture in Eastern Europe
Koostanud Margaret Tali ja Tanel Rander

“Arhiivid ja allumatus: visuaalkultuuri muutuvad taktikad Ida-Euroopas” on rahvusvaheline kogumik, mis uurib arhiivide rolli Ida-Euroopa siirdeühiskondade visuaalkultuuris ja sellega seotud avalikus diskursuses. Kogumik on oluline märk Ida-Euroopa diskursuse ja ühiskogemuse teadvustamisel.
Kogumik kaardistab valitud teoreetilisi ja loomingulisi positsioone ja kriitikaid ning käsitleb arhiividena eelkõige kunstiinstitutsioone, muuseume, foto- ja videopanku. Arhiivi käsitletakse seejuures kui valitsemisviisi ja identiteedipoliitika vahendit, mis kontrollib väärtussüsteemi, inimeste käitumist, keelekasutust ja subjektiivsust. Selline lähenemine arhiividele lähtub eeldusest, et arhiivid mitte üksnes ei säilita ja ei koonda dokumente ja pilte, vaid kujundavad ja loovad diskursiivselt nii objekti kui subjekti positsioone ühiskonnas. Arhiivi ja allumatuse mõisted pakuvad lähenemisnurga, mille kaudu avada mineviku mõtestamise ja kinnistamise viise.

Kaastööd aitavad lugejal mõista seda, kuidas teadmisi toodetakse ja taastoodetakse, kuidas neid muudetakse ning millist rolli mängib selles visuaalkultuur. Kogumik koondab kriitilisi positsioone, mis avavad kuraatori, kunstniku ja arhivaari vahelisi suhteid; arhiivide seoseid aja ja selle neelamisega ning mahavaikitud ja välistatud sooliste ja teiste sotsiaalsete identiteetidega; kategoriseerimise ja kriminaliseerimise rolle; ning mõisteid, nagu estetiseerimine ja politiseerimine, oma ja võõras, kummituslikkus, jälgimine ja vastuarhiivid.

Kogumik on eesti ja inglise keeles – mõlemas kokku 12 artiklit, mis on jaotatud kolme osasse: 1) Postsotsialismi arhiivi apooriad; 2) Kontrolli olemus ja selle mehhanismid; 3) Vastuarhiivid ja allumatus. Lisaks sisaldab kogumik pildimaterjali kirjeldatavate kunstiprojektide kohta.

Kaasautorid: Tina Bastajian, Marina Gržinić, Oliver Laas, Andrej Kurnik, Vesna Madžoski, Achille Mbembe, Eléonore de Montesquiou, Anu Pennanen, Marko Raat, Tanel Rander, Margaret Tali ja Anna-Stina Treumund. Autorid esindavad nii dokumentaalfilmi, foto kui visuaalse kunsti valdkondi. Koostajate teadlik taotlus on olnud nende ühiskonnas diskursiivselt eristatud valdkondade kokku toomine.

Koostanud Margaret Tali ja Tanel Rander

This chapter considers the writing of Claude Cahun, and in particular Disavowals (1930), as a philosophical testing of the boundaries both of the written word and of the self. Adopting Pierre Mac Orlan's designation of the textual fragments in Disavowals as 'poem-essays and essay-poems', the chapter demonstrates how Cahun's work dialectically engages the realms of the poetic and the philosophical in order to provide a radical commentary on the intimately personal as well as on aspects of society, politics, culture, and gender in the early twentieth century-a commentary that still holds relevance for the twenty-first-century reader.

Nella comunicazione si esplorano le tracce interpretative insite nel ragionamento di Guido Ceronetti intorno all’opera di Cristina Campo, che vi assumono reversibilmente notevole rilievo, potendo influire anche sulla sua impronta specifica. Si ravvisano così le similitudini nella loro attitudine saggistica, per un’inclinazione verso un’espressione che si presenta precisa nel suo significare poetologico e al contempo contrassegnata da una spiccata valenza filosofica e da un anelito liricheggiante (si confrontino i volumi ceronettiani "Il silenzio del corpo" e "Un viaggio in Italia"). Viene altresì focalizzata la comparsa di connotazioni simbolico-tematiche convergenti, nonché di echi intertestuali riverberanti (Dante, Manzoni, Leopardi, Čechov ecc). Un’analoga configurazione riflessiva si evidenzia da uno studio comparato del sapere tradizionale in "Difesa della luna", precedentemente apparso su "Conoscenza religiosa". D’altro lato, la poematicità tratteggiata da Ceronetti riguardo al "Cantico dei Cantici" trova corrispettivo dialettico nei versi dell’autrice, anche altrove oggetto della sua analisi quanto al costituirsi della coscienza lirica campiana. Una presentazione in forma di handout è prevista dalla comunicazione.

In this essay we try to recall that the history (but also the present) of Hungarian sociology or sociography is often represented as a ‘crisis-history’, and the question often arises of whether it can say anything relevant about the past and present, about the thing we call ‘reality’ or ‘life’. It is also a resurfacing charge that Hungarian Literature is in a crisis, too – that it doesn’t say anything ‘valid’ or ‘realistic’ about Hungarian society. Nevertheless, here we examine whether Hungarian literature can inspire sociologists by showing topics which could be perhaps considered as taboos, and whether it can or could contribute to the formation of historical memory. Furthermore, we give a sketchy overview of its points of contact with social sciences, first of all with sociology and sociography, as well as with politics, and the role that professionals in these areas assign to themselves. It is done in a context in which humanities and arts are often charged by political actors of being useless. Some time ago, sociology and sociography were considered dangerous (as well as ‘bourgeois’) because of their critical stance, as disciplines that needed to be controlled. On the other hand, Hungarian writers are regularly accused of not dealing with Hungarian ‘realities’, while their role in the intellectual sphere is rapidly diminishing.

At the time of his death, Roland Barthes was writing a novel entitled Vita Nova, which remained unfinished. The aim of my book is to trace the steps of Barthes’ final uncompleted project, to reveal how this consideration of the novel genre as a creative process actually became a re-consideration of his own work. My work examines a new way of looking at essay writing, placing it between critical and narrative discourse. The book's first part is entitled “L’aura del romanzo” and is in two chapters: “L’abito del critico” and “Vita Nova e il simulacro del romanzo”. It focuses on Barthes’ statements during his lecture course La préparation du roman at the Collège de France, and on the schemes of his novels. The aim of this first part is to demonstrate the intertextual nature of the Vita Nova project. The second part is entitled “Una strana indole del saggio” and contains two chapters, “Lessico d’insieme: saggistica e narrazione” and “Prove d’intersezione: la trilogia dell’ultimo Barthes”. It examines some concepts derivable from Barthes’ final work and analyzes his later ideas on genre contamination. Additionally, the book offers a chronological appendix of edited and unpublished texts, held in the Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine’s archive, in Caen (France).

Schon der junge Adorno (1931) stellt explizit die Nähe seines Denkens zu dem heraus, was er, in Opposition zur prima philosophia (etwa bei Descartes oder Husserl) und zu ihrer «schatzgräberischen Obsession mit Fundamenten», «philosophischen Essayismus», eine spezifische Konfiguration 'kleiner Formen' - Darstellung und Dargestelltes gleichermaßen betreffend - nennt. Diese Essayform, wie sie auch noch Adornos spätere Texte bestimmt, gibt einen strengen philosophischen Anspruch auf die Form des Systems nicht einfach preis, sondern nimmt ihn - im Gegenteil - spekulativ ernst. Entsprechend kann Adorno von der Form des Essays sagen, sie verwirkliche das, was Hegels spekulative Logik intendiere. Neben Hegels spekulativer Logik, so zeigt sich, stellt hierbei auch der Leibnizsche Monadenbegriff eine zentrale Referenz dar.
Es ist das Hauptziel der vorliegenden Argumentation, anhand Adornos Charakterisierung der Essayform deren spekulativen Gehalt zu artikulieren und kritisch zu befragen. In den Blick genommen werden hierbei auch entsprechende 'kleine Formen' bei Benjamin und Bloch.

Det kritiska verket står inför ett epokskifte. På väg in i den postdigitala offentligheten möter vi förhållanden där bekanta kategorier, som vi lärt oss att betrakta som dikotomier, inte längre utgör varandras motsatser. I kölvattnet träder nya hybridformer och gränssnitt fram. Framtidens kritik är ett essäistiskt utforskande i två delar av den offentliga kritiken i skärningspunkten mellan estetik, ekonomi och teknik. I essäerna »Kritiken om 100 år« och »De blödande nätverken« reflekterar författarna över allt från redaktionen och medborgarkritik till Augmented Reality och digital aktivism. Med förord av Magnus William-Olsson.

The article uses the example of redemption discourse to describe the increasing fictionalisation of reflection which can be observed in the first third of the 20th century. The works of Georg Lukács, Hermann Broch and Robert Musil reveal three stages of the fictionalisation of this reflection, which are characterised by increasing distance to a non-fictional discourse oriented primarily toward truth: (a) radicalisa-tion, accompanied by the relativisation of ideas of redemption, (b) narrative functionalisation in the direction of the construction and characterisation of fictional characters, and (c) the 'mummification' of the redemption discourse. The article then goes on to describe and categorise different types and dimensions of the relativisation of reflection in fictional texts.

This paper is focused on literary research of philological nature, scientifically grounded, that is at the same time multidisciplinarily validated from a theoretical standpoint and hence directly applicable to analogous artistic realms, such as visual arts, music, architecture, theater, spectacle, multimediality. Through close interpretative methodological approach, the present paper furnishes a variety of examples among the corpus of literary texts written by artists of diversified profiles in modern Italian cultural panorama, ranging across the spectrum of literary genres in the broadest sense, in a vast array of forms, from whence is made possible and deduced the acquisition of critical and aesthetic notions indispensable for such purpose. This presentation therefore focalizes propulsive cultural influences of artists’ books and illustrations, as well as musical arrangements of literary works, and correlational philosophical knowledge if invested in such interdisciplinary sense, from which can be derived that these texts possess analogous literary attributes, and thereby present thematic topoi and intersections, or conforming stylistic features. Contemporary works of art are thus envisaged if having literary resonances, and analyzed accordingly from previously unexplored angolations, while always tackling Italianistic topics in art matters, whether their provenance is iconographic, illustrational, architectonic or musical. Likewise, it is elaborated how to pursue research modes that are particularly fertile for bringing to light previously unpublished writings, as well as how to present these cognitions to the general public by approaching scientific results. The presentation is also attentive to various possibilites of application of these insights in a multitude of professional fields.

A partire da alcune considerazioni teoriche sul valore della parola riflessiva inserita in un contesto mimetico, l’intervento propone di collocare all’altezza dell’opera di Tolstoj il punto di origine del romanzo-saggio inteso come forma chiaramente riconoscibile, in cui la frattura dell’illusio narrativa e l’intromissione di una discontinuità saggistica esibita vengono a comporre un progetto estetico chiaro, sollecitato da un bisogno simbolico radicato nella modernità occidentale degli ultimi due secoli, e quindi leggibile in un’ottica di media durata.

This article analyzes the relationships between the writing of history and the experience of time in Brazil, c. 1870-1940. The focus of the analysis is the historical essay, arguing that this kind of essay was a privileged discursive modality for dealing with the problems of temporal order that featured that historical moment, characterized by a deep questioning about the paths taken by the Brazilian republic, by a distortion of the ideal of progress that defined, since the nineteenth century, the features of the modern concept of history, and, finally, by a desire to renew interpretations focused on the development of the nation. A Disoriented Time In 1924, the Brazilian literary critic Tristão de Athayde 1 complained that we were living in a society pressed by time, "in which all phases of civilization coexist, from the savage at the last degree of decay, to the Mediterranean and subtle intelligence, isolated or withered in the excessive and still primitive tropics." And, he added, "from all of this emanates the feeling of the ephemeral and a continuous premonition of death" (De Athayde 1924, p. 239). The idea of coevalness of the "civilized" with the "savage" indicates a widespread perception of historical time that was common to many writers since the end of the nineteenth century. Moreover, it points to the perception of a crisis The American Sociologist

Il presente saggio si pone l’intento di delucidare gli assidui esempi dotati di accentuato valore iconologico, che sono insiti nella scrittura suggestiva e interdisciplinariamente poliedrica della letterata italiana moderna Cristina Campo, costituendovi l’espressione di una sensibilità affinata per le arti visive. Così verrà determinato quello che accomuna la strutturazione ideativo-stilistica del discorso critico dell’autrice, incentrato su canonici motivi figurativi, alle sue ricerche propriamente letterarie, risultanti in una trasposizione narrativa o lirica di particolari elementi iconici. Da un siffatto confronto si deduce che, nel cercare corrispondenze tra letteratura e figuratività, lei frequentemente dimostra interesse per la rappresentazione iconografica nell’epoca rinascimentale e barocca, cercando un aggancio con la modernità. A tale fine comparativo, si prende spunto da alcuni incisivi saggi contenuti nel volume campiano di carattere critico, "Sotto falso nome". Sotto il profilo contenutistico, ne danno prova gli episodi riguardanti le peculiarità degli affreschi masacceschi, come anche di certe composizioni pittoriche di Leonardo, oppure dell’espressività visiva di Raffaello, con ulteriore riferimento all’arte applicata nel caso dello studiolo di Gubbio dei Montefeltro. L’analisi verterà analogamente sul fatto che vi è sottesa un’interpretazione che si riallaccia alla vena creativa nella parte restante dell’opus della Campo, trovando riflesso nel suo principale libro di saggistica autoriale "Gli imperdonabili" e nella corrispondenza. L’autrice focalizza pure la valenza figurativa di determinate scene nell’opera artistica di Goya di cui sono reminiscenti alcuni suoi versi lirici. E si presta attenzione complessivamente alla presenza del racconto ecfrastico in questa prosa e dell’immagine visiva nel registro versificatorio, traducentesi nella caratteristica simbologia, nonché alle scelte grafiche di copertina (Hugo van der Goes).