Literature and Philosophy

Die Untersuchung versteht sich als Beitrag zu der in der Literaturwissenschaft, Philosophie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte geführten Debatte um die Darstellungsformen von Wissen bzw. das »Wissen der Literatur«, geht jedoch in zweifacher Hinsicht über diese hinaus. Zum einen zeigt sie, wie und warum die Forderung nach einer gegenüber wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnis alternativen, literarisch vermittelten Erkenntnis in einer bestimmten geistes- und kultur-geschichtlichen Konstellation virulent wird: in der Lebens- bzw. Weltanschauungsphilosophie von 1870 bis 1930 sowie im Werk Robert Musils. Zum anderen nimmt die Arbeit eine Akzentverlagerung vor. Im Mittelpunkt steht nicht die oft mit unbefriedigenden Ergebnissen diskutierte Frage, ob Literatur generell, sondern unter welchen konkreten Umständen ein bestimmtes literarisches Werk Wissen vermittelt. Die nicht zuletzt mithilfe von Begrifflichkeiten und Einsichten der Analytischen Erkenntnistheorie formulierten Bedingungen, unter denen dies der Fall ist, ermöglichen schließlich exemplarische Analysen von Musils schriftstellerischen Versuchen, eine »lebendige Erkenntnis« zu kommunizieren.

El libro aborda tres de los problemas fundamentales de la obra de Borges, a) la consideración de la lectura, y por ende la traducción, como el hecho más radical de la creación literaria; b) la invención artificial de la tradición o, como señala Borges, la invención de nuestros precursores y c) la radical apuesta creativa que se fundamenta en la consideración de que todo obra es un borrador. En este contexto, Borges aparece como el autor fundamental, junto con Kafka, de la literatura del siglo XX. Ambos, engloban al último autor moderno, al pensador y creador que a través de la literatura muestra la indeclinable formación del yo y su condena o nostalgia infinita por la comunidad desaparecida.

The problem of evil is not only a logical problem about God’s goodness but also an existential problem about the sense of God’s presence, which the Biblical book of Job conceives as a problem of aesthetic experience. Thus, just as theism can be grounded in religious experience, atheism can be grounded in experience of evil. This phenomenon is illustrated by two contrasting literary descriptions of aesthetic experience by Jean-Paul Sartre and Annie Dillard. I illuminate both of these literary texts with a discussion of the 18th Century philosopher Lord Shaftesbury’s concept of ‘enthusiasm’.

À mi-chemin entre philosophie morale et métaphysique de la liberté, cet essai se propose de méditer la possibilité d’une « éthique de la conviction » pour notre temps, et de réinventer ses coordonnées en la liant de manière indissoluble à la question du « monde ». Plaidant pour un universalisme de la réécriture et de la traduction perpétuelles, la réflexion menée dans ces pages utilise les ressorts de la fiction et de la narration, mobilise les mémoires de l’esclavage et du colonialisme, et investit la thématique de la catastrophe, afin de restituer au sujet moral une puissance d’invention et de création dans et pour le monde commun, là-même où le premier fait l’épreuve mélancolique d’une perte de sens abyssale. Tout au long d’un parcours exigeant qui nous entraine de la philosophie kantienne et fichtéenne au cinéma dramatique de Jeff Nichols, en passant par la tragédie de Heinrich von Kleist, le roman lyrique de Toni Morrison et le roman grotesque de Sony Labou Tansi, l’essai cartographie à nouveaux frais l’expérience vécue, pathique, d’une volonté inconditionnelle, et à proprement parler « folle », de liberté dans et pour un monde en droit habitable et partageable. Il situe son enquête – et ses propositions – dans l’aller-retour entre la liberté problématique, voire catastrophique, du sujet, et l’horizon indéterminé du monde, sous la menace constante de l’aliénation ou même de la privation de l’une et de l’autre.

Atti del Convegno su Leopardi tenuto all'Istituto Italiano di Cultura di New York nel 1998, con interventi di Edoardo Sanguineti, Alessandro Carrera, Franco Ferrucci, Giorgio Ficara, Sergio Givone, Thomas J. Harrison, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Paolo Possiedi, Massimo Riva e Charles Wright.

Niniejsza praca ma na celu przedstawienie teorii mitotwórczej J. R. R. Tolkiena, z perspektywy jej wymiaru duchowego. Od czasów antycznych teorie, tudzież filozofie, opierały się na myśleniu abstrakcyjnym i miały za zadanie wyjaśnienie ówczesnemu człowiekowi otaczającej go rzeczywistości. Nie inaczej było z Tolkienowską teorią, na potrzebę której ukuł swój termin Mitopoeia. „Duchowy wymiar Tolkienowskiej Teorii Mitotwórczej” – tłumacząc tytuł tej pracy na język Polski – przekłada się na wiele sfer życia Tolkiena. Pierwsza z tych płaszczyzn, to przypisywany mu przez niektórych krytyków program filozoficzny. Na tym wymiarze skupia się pierwszy rozdział tej pracy: „The Philosophical Disenchantment.” Jednak jak sugeruje tytuł, stanowi on zaledwie tło wszelkich dalszych poszukiwań, gdyż oferuje badaczom Tolkienowskiej myśli jedynie jej racjonalizację i demitologizację. Życiowa pasja Tolkiena, filologia komparatywna, daje wystarczające zrozumienie jego fenomenu, a przynajmniej zdaniem kilku krytyków. Niezaprzeczalnie stanowiła ona inspirację, a zarazem była narzędziem, którego Tolkien użył podług swej ogromnej wiedzy z zakresu językoznawstwa. Pomimo, iż w tej pracy „Comparative Philology” jest omawiana w drugiej kolejności, to właśnie ta dyscyplina była źródłem znajomości filozofii u Tolkiena. Podążając krokami Tolkieniany nie można jednak na tym poprzestać. Trzeci wymiar, jakże metafizyczny i filozoficzny w swych założeniach i implikacjach to odkrycie Owena Barfielda, znajomego Tolkiena. Barfield odkrył Teorię „Jedności Semantycznej,” co Tolkienowi przyszło łatwo przyjąć do wiadomości: język jako narzędzie może również być transcendentny, ze względu na swe początki. Dla Tolkiena była to jedna z tych rzeczy, która pozwoliła mu uwierzyć w smoki. „Philological Philosophy: Let There Be Dragons” – jest zatem łącznikiem między dwoma światami. Jednakże Tolkien nie był byle fantastą, oderwanym od ziemi. Teoria Barfielda, obudziła w nim nadzieję. Pomimo to, tak jak każdy rozsądny i racjonalny człowiek Tolkien musiał dowiedzieć się, „czy to prawda.” Potrzebował czegoś, aby idee odnieść do nie tyle rzeczywistego doświadczenia, ile prawdy. Prawda, bowiem wyzwala. Mimo nieustannego negowania jego wiary, to właśnie ona umożliwiła mu dalsze rozważanie tych teorii. I nie da się inaczej wytłumaczyć jego mitotwórstwa, jak przez uznanie jego wiary. Miłości do Boga, która była tak głęboka, że aż sięgała wiedzy teologicznej. Tego, między innymi, tyczy ostatni rozdział tej pracy: „Myth Becomes Truth.”
Liczba stron: 51

The opening stage direction in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) is a simple one-line sentence: ‘A country road. A tree’ (2006 1). This ostensibly situates the protagonists in the midst of a journey, yet famously, it is one that seems without a clear purpose, progress or end. The country road where Gogo and Didi find themselves is a circular one. The protagonists are forever unable to move beyond their present state, trapped in an uncertain journey that appears to lead nowhere. In this way, Beckett reappraises the travel motif albeit producing a reversal of its conventional significance, in an effort to challenge the teleology of this archetype. Many absurdist playwrights and prose authors of the twentieth century echo Beckett’s efforts through the use of a variety of circular narrative forms. Aiming to destabilise the logic and World-view implicit in the linear teleological narrative structure of the hero’s quest (as theorised by Joseph Campbell), these texts exemplify that in literature, as in any journey, it is the journey itself, rather than its aim or end (telos), that is most important. Moreover, the circular form of these texts explicitly avoids ‘the end’ degrading ‘the way into a means’, as Beckett himself writes in Murphy. This paper will look at a range of European circular narratives, both in drama and prose, in order to explore the ways in which they challenge the teleology of the journey, by turning the path of their roads into circular ones. The analysis will refer to works such as Raymond Queneau’s The Bark Tree (1933), Fernando Arrabal’s Fando and Lis (1957), and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s The Erasers (1953) and In the Labyrinth (1959), as well as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Can literary fictions convey significant philosophical views, understood in terms of propositional knowledge? This study addresses the philosophical value of literature by examining how literary works impart philosophy truth and knowledge and to what extent the works should be approached as communications of their authors. Beginning with theories of fiction, it examines the case against the prevailing ‘pretence’ and ‘make-believe’ theories of fiction hostile to propositional theories of literary truth. Tackling further arguments against the cognitive function and value of literature, this study illustrates how literary works can contribute to knowledge by making assertions and suggestions and by providing hypotheses for the reader to assess.

Through clear analysis of the concept of the author, the role of the authorial intention and the different approaches to the ‘meaning’ of a literary work, this study provides an historical survey to the cognitivist—anti-cognitivist dispute, introducing contemporary trends in the discussion before presenting a novel approach to recognizing the cognitive function of literature. An important contribution to philosophical studies of literature and knowledge.

Critics have long argued over the nature of Wordsworth's sublime. Is it egotistical or impersonal? Does he write about history or evade history? Is his lens ideological or unmediated? This essay weighs in on the debate by outlining a uniquely literary sublime.

While critical commentary on Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944) has been various and divided, few have questioned its seismic importance for the development of Western Marxism. Strangely though, in view both of the recognized importance of this text and the expanding contemporary appreciation of Adorno’s work, Dialectic of Enlightenment has regularly generated negative commentary and critical animosity. In view of this critical context, the aim of this paper is not to mount a global defense of Dialectic of Enlightenment, but rather to reconstruct certain parameters of the book that are missed in the common criticism that Horkheimer and Adorno relinquish the project of enlightenment and lapse into indeterminate ahistorical generalization. I argue that the mutation in Marxist thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, to be properly understood, needs to be seen as intrinsically involved with the particular linguistic turn developed in this text. The revised project of enlightenment it elaborates hinges on a reflection on the language of the epic and the novel and a series of textual operations that are central to this reflection: reporting, description, stylization, parody, reading. In this this way Dialectic of Enlightenment anticipates Adorno’s later thinking about and through the language of the epic and the novel, which plays a fundamental if generally underappreciated role in his work. These textual operations become intrinsic to a revised conception of what it means to think historically, to imagine historical difference and progression, in the wake of the purported ruin of systems of enlightenment thought, after the demise of any margin of critical difference offered by cultural criticism and artistic reflection, and after the foundering of the revolutionary aspirations of the European left. This reconception of enlightenment thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment follows from the claim that intrinsic social contradiction is no longer operative as a driver of historical development, and a corresponding recognition that forms of thought predicated on negation and contradiction have lost their critical purchase. Where received modes of Marxist and Hegelian dialectic may have been appropriate for an ostensibly liberal phase of capitalism, in which social contradictions propel historical development, in the ruins of this historical phase, thought is challenged to develop modes that integrate the manifest irrationality of its social context. This paper attempts to describe certain of these modes in its account of various textual operations developed in Dialectic of Enlightenment, operations that contribute to this text’s reimagining of what thought might look like in the middle of the twentieth century.

Il senso del segreto si compone di approfondimenti tematici su cinque filosofi che hanno indagato la questione del segreto e della segretezza, attraverso un confronto – spesso esplicito, talvolta latente – con l’opera di Marcel Proust. Da Walter Benjamin a Georges Bataille, da Maurice Blanchot a Jacques Derrida, passando per Gilles Deleuze, il volume mette in chiaro l’influenza che la Recherche ha esercitato sulla filosofia del Novecento, disegnando anche un affresco sul rapporto tra filosofia e letteratura, due discipline che indagano lo stesso ordine di questioni con voci e consistenze irriducibilmente diverse.

Lässt sich die politische Problemlage unserer Zeit literarisch erfassen? Was ist die Rolle von Literatur im globalen Kapitalismus? Lässt sich ein dauerhafter Arbeitszusammenhang von Autorinnen und Autoren organisieren? Diesen Fragen widmete sich im April 2015 eine Schriftstellertagung unter dem Titel „Richtige Literatur im Falschen?“, die im Literaturforum im Brecht-Haus stattfand. In Zentrum stand die Frage nach dem Verhältnis zwischen Literatur, Engagement und kapitalistischer Gesellschaft. Der Band „Richtige Literatur im Falschen?“ zeichnet die Tagung dokumentarisch nach und präsentiert darüber hinaus aktuelle Statements der Beteiligten. Mit Beiträgen von Ann Cotten, Annett Gröschner, Joachim Helfer, Jan Loheit, Thomas Meinecke, Norbert Niemann, Helmut Peitsch, Monika Rinck, Kathrin Röggla, David Salomon, Stefan Schmitzer, Erasmus Schöfer, Ingo Schulze, Ingar Solty, Enno Stahl, Thomas Wagner, Michael Wildenhain und Raul Zelik.

In To the Lighthouse, the epistemological questions that the philosopher Mr Ramsay ponders seem incomprehensible to Lily Briscoe, the artist. And yet, her painting process clearly explores these same questions by other means. This invites a reading of Lily’s aesthetic project with philosophy, and more specifically, this paper argues, with phenomenology. Points of convergence and divergence between Virginia Woolf’s description of artistic creation in this novel and the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are therefore examined, in particular, the relationships between perception and knowledge, subject and object, visible and invisible, and presence and absence. While phenomenology sheds light on certain aspects of Lily’s painting process, the representation of this process also interrogates certain phenomenological principles, notably by staging the paradoxical capacity of an irremediably absent past to shape and structure present perception in a painting that is also an elegy.

Жанр романтической сказки имеет своей задачей восстановление прав и полномочий символа. Этой задаче служит обращение к мистико-герметической традиции как носительнице «силы символа». Мы рассматриваем сказку Андерсена «Снежная королева» как пример свободного использования языка мистической, и прежде всего, алхимической, традиции в
собственных целях.

Talvez não seja errado dizer que o conceito de humanidade é concomitante à constatação, por nossos ancestrais mais remotos, de que havia uma diferença fundamental entre eles e as outras classes de seres que compunham o seu ambiente mais próximo, tais como as pedras, as plantas e os animais privados do dom da fala. Tanto é que mitologias das mais diferentes origens, em relatos sobre o aparecimento dos seres humanos, apontam, de algum modo, para a especificidade desses diante das outras coisas. Isso não impediu, no entanto, que, em narrativas posteriores à mencionada constatação, a auto-compreensão da humanidade enquanto diferente do restante dos seres se apresentasse como que entrelaçada ao ambiente natural que a circundava, o que durante muito tempo terá sido mesmo uma característica evidente em inúmeros relatos míticos. Um estágio ulterior dessa experiência, é a consolidação paulatina da crença de que a diferenciação entre humanos e não-humanos se dá especificamente pelo fato de que aqueles são dotados de racionalidade stricto sensu enquanto esses não o são. A consolidação desse ponto de vista, num processo longo e tortuoso, veio a desembocar na consciência da distinção entre relações humanas baseadas pura e simplesmente na força e aquelas mediadas pela razão enquanto âmbito através do qual a concórdia e a compreensão preferencialmente poderiam ser alcançadas e, onde isso não fosse possível, alguma forma de compensação seria proporcionada à parte ofendida numa contenda ou, na pior das hipóteses, seria infligida punição à parte ofensora.

Language Lost and Found takes as its starting-point Iris Murdoch's claim that "we have suffered a general loss of concepts." By means of a thorough reading of Iris Murdoch's philosophy in the light of this difficulty, it offers a detailed examination of the problem of linguistic community and the roots of the thought that some philosophical problems arise due to our having lost the sense of our own language. But it is also a call for a radical reconsideration of how philosophy and literature relate to each other on a general level and in Murdoch's authorship in particular.

REVIEWS
“This fascinating book offers a valuable explication of Murdoch's relentless attempts to reveal what is missing in contemporary moral philosophy and culture. Greatly influenced by Kierkgaard, Wittgenstein, and Simone Weil, the complexity and messiness of ordinary life, and with one's deepest commitments-many of which cannot be accessed, or altered by means of arguments intended to defend philosophical "positions." Forsberg (Univ. of Uppsala, Sweden) makes excellent use of the work of Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and Stephen Mulhall, who show how one might avoid the tendency of philosophers toward "deflection" from the "difficulties of reality." These are difficulties that people have when language fails in the face of experiences that refuse reduction to the abstraction of the clearly defined concepts sought after in philosophy--what Murdoch called its "dryness." Novelists like what it is like to struggle with the deeply confusing, distressing issues of the present without stepping aside from the emotional intensity of the encounters. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--”
(S.A. Mason, Concordia University, Choice)

“A fair bang in the philosophy of literature ... Forsberg's addition to this scene is brilliant and necessary ... This [book] will reverberate.” 
(British Journal of Aesthetics)

“This is one of the most philosophically sophisticated contributions to these interlinked issues that I have come across in the last decade; the care, charity and ease with which Forsberg contests and dismantles one of the most influential current readings of Murdoch (that advanced by Nussbaum) is enough on its own to make it clear that standards in this area have just been raised.” 
(Stephen Mulhall, Professor of Philosophy, New College, University of Oxford, UK)

“Can we lose our moral concepts? Can our culture and our understanding of the human occlude the background that alone makes sense of the ideals we want to live by? Niklas Forsberg argues that this is a basic insight of Iris Murdoch's philosophy. Moreover, this gives us the key to understanding the relation of Murdoch's philosophical writings to her novels. The latter hold a mirror to our lives, in which we could potentially become aware of this loss. This book is full of philosophical insight, not only about contemporary moral thinking but also about the relation of literature to philosophical thought.” 
(Charles Taylor, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, McGill University, Canada)

Esta nota crítica analiza la perspectiva que Martha Nussbaum presenta sobre la emoción de la ira en su último libro Anger and Forgiveness. Resentment, Generosity, Justice (2016). Para ello sitúo esta obra en el contexto del proyecto filosófico de la autora y señalo algunos cambios y continuidades en su análisis de la ira; después reviso a la luz de este nuevo libro algunas de las críticas que, centradas en la reivindicación de la ira, ha recibido su propuesta de una cultura política centrada en las emociones “humanizadoras”.

Haiku Enlightenment undertakes a complex and comprehensive odyssey through the world of haiku, exploring primarily the dynamics of the “haiku moment”, that instant of spiritual interpenetration when the ego involuntarily surrenders in favour of a spontaneous symbiosis of observer and observed, mind and matter. Other aspects of haiku discussed in the book include the spiritual and formal characteristics of authentic haiku as well as the possible benefits, both personal and general, that can ensue from the writing and sharing of haiku. In addition, the type of situation – almost boundless, as we learn – susceptible to the generation of a haiku moment, and the optimal psychological and practical approach best calculated to ensure an abundant and rich haiku harvest are duly treated. In support of his views the author quotes from an astonishingly eclectic and fascinating range of secondary sources, and reproduces a great quantity of illustrative haiku from Japanese as well as Western masters.

In diesem Buch wird Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes als ein literarischer Text gedeutet, der seine Überzeugungskraft aus der Lektüre anderer Texte schöpft. Untersucht werden die politischen und ästhetischen Konsequenzen dieser Interpretation. Das dialektische Philosophieren ist ein Bedürfnis, die vergangenen Gedankensysteme – die Texte – in ihrer eigenen Logik als mangelhafte aufzuweisen und zu überwinden, um dadurch die letzte spekulative Synthese zu etablieren. Aber dieselbe Operation macht – so die Hauptthese des Buches – das Spekulative selbst verwundbar, das damit in seiner unselbständigen Verfassung und in seinem Scheitern aufgewiesen wird. Die im Buch dargestellten Gesten des Anleihens und der Affinität sind nicht nur für Hegels Stil prägend. Sie können auch das Dialektische selber neu bestimmen – als eine verschwindende, fast unmögliche Stimme, eine Bemühung, aus der Verschränkung unvereinbarer, konfligierender Diskurse einen Sinn zu gewinnen.

With its innovative narrative structure and its controversial explorations of race, gender and empire, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a landmark of 20th century literature that continues to resonate to this day. This book brings together leading scholars to explore the full range of contemporary philosophical and critical responses to the text. Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Contemporary Thought includes the first publication in English of philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's essay, 'The Horror of the West', described by J. Hillis Miller as 'a major essay on Conrad's novel, one of the best ever written'. In the company of Lacoue-Labarthe, leading scholars explore new readings of Conrad's text from a full range of theoretical perspectives, including deconstructive, psychoanalytic, narratological and postcolonial approaches. Drawing on the very latest insights of contemporary thought, this is an essential study of one of the most important literary texts of the 20th century.

http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/conrads-heart-of-darkness-and-contemporary-thought-9781441101006/

È un libro di filosofia della conoscenza che si muove liberamente tra filosofia e letteratura. La luce, intesa come supporto della scrittura (si scrive nella luce, "incidendo" la luce) nonché come metafora della conoscenza stessa, è indagata in quanto categoria filosofica a partire da Platone fino a Goethe, Hegel, C. S. Peirce e Merleau-Ponty. Al tema della luce si affiance quello del principio antropico, altrimenti detto organicismo logico, che vede nell'autocoscienza umana lo strumento ideato dalla natura per pensare se stessa. La formulazione letteraria più precisa e insieme più problematica di tale principio si trova in vari scritti narrativi e saggistici di Italo Calvino.

Revisiting La città del sole in light of recent scholarship on Campanella’s naturalism and with recourse to key works of his philosophy, I examine how his utopia systematically re-writes Plato’s ideal city from the Republic by simultaneously drawing on and naturalizing a set of key Platonic figures. This transformation serves as an implicit response to criticisms of the utopian project made by Aristotle and Machiavelli; it is also a means of taking distance from the hermetic impulse at work in much of Renaissance Neoplatonism. The City of the Sun can thus be seen as replicating Kallipolis’ rigid order and its connection to absolute truth but simultaneously grounding that order in an empirical naturalism that allows the ideal society to become open.

ABSTRACT: Calling on the abundant recent bibliography of writings on both the philosophical themes running through Shakespeare’s dramas, and on the theme of friendship in early modern Europe, the essay enquires into the relationship between Hamlet and Horatio. It emphasizes traditionally recognized sources, such as Cicero’s essay De amicitia, but above all refers to a little recognized source in the works of the ancient Roman poet Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), whose very name recalls that of Horatio. The final part of the essay concentrates on the theme of princely power and courtly servitude, pointing to a source for Shakespeare’s treatment of this theme in Machiavelli’s The Prince.

This article compares two novels: Moyshe Kulbak’s Montog (“Monday”) and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy. Each novel ends with the death of its protagonist, figured as both a senseless act and the apotheosis of its hero’s self-reflexive, ironic rejection of community, faith, and purpose. Drawing on theories of Hannah Arendt, this comparison proposes to read the two narratives and their preoccupation with incarceration, institutionalization, revolutionary activity, religion, and the family as profound yet oblique parables on the nature of privation, resistance, and commitment in the multiple senses. Indeed, by arguing on behalf of a “politics of failure,” this comparison proposes a methodology for reading Beckett and Kulbak postcolonially that in turn invites further consideration of the postcolonial status of expatriate Irish and early-Soviet Jewish cultures, respectively. This essay creates for the two narratives a community of elective affinity that neither author would have envisioned for himself, and thus demonstrates that their respective critiques of ideological progress—via their shared strategies of parody, linguistic marginality, and exile—fulfill an explicitly political function.

W artykule szczerość i nieszczerość traktowane są jako pojęcia retoryczne. Autor stara się uniknąć błędnego utożsamiania szczerości i prawdziwości oraz retoryki i poetyki, a także równie błędnego utożsamiania szczerości i performatywności oraz retoryki i manipulacji. W analizie zastosowano całe spektrum odmian (nie)szczerości, które okazują się przydatne w badaniach tekstów literackich (przywołano wiele przykładów z literatury rosyjskiej i żydowskiej). Wyjaśniono również dlaczego czytelnik postrzega i uznaje szczerą wypowiedź za mityczny, mimetyczny i metaforyczny obraz prawdy.

Una lettura del saggio di De Sanctis sulla Fedra di Racine, contro Wilhelm Schlegel, fra Hegel e Blanchot / A Reading of De Sanctis's Essay on Racine's Phèdre, against Wilhelm Schlegel, between Hegel and Blanchot / Une lecture de l'essai de De Sanctis sur la Phèdre de RAcine: Contre Wilhelm Schlegel, entre Hegel et Blanchot

J.M. Coetzee's The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus typify the concerns of his later writings. These concerns are crystallized around the concept of life and the dynamic relation between a post-secular valorization of life as sacred and the risk of sacrifice inherent to any attempt to both count, or account, for life. This dynamic is not simply thematized. Rather, through what I am terming Coetzee's literary thinking, the ethico-political import of ‘life’ in Coetzee's late works is bound up with the question of their meaning as literary works. Accordingly, Coetzee's literary thinking helps to address the interaction of life and form that is at the center of debates about affect and the body, animal and posthuman life, and the formal distinctiveness of the literary work.

Words Underway offers the first full account of the important contributions the Continental tradition has made to the philosophy of language. The book examines the vital work of a range of thinkers, including Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot, and Kristeva. In it, I argue that Continental theorists are particularly helpful in recognizing our unique potential for becoming alienated from some discourse. At the same time, I argue that Continental philosophy of language tends not to treat the alienated relationship to language as something absolute. For most Continental theorists, at least, language is a living system, that is, a system maintained by undergoing constant expansion and transformation by language users. The book goes on to explore the attention Continental theorists have given to the way that forms of political power, for example gender dynamics in communication, can sometimes thwart this process and thus reinforce alienation. This book will transform the reader’s sense of what the philosophy of language is about and will attract the attention of students and scholars of both philosophy of language and the Continental tradition.

"The article seeks to study Beckett’s (in)famous abstractionism in the light of his engagement with the discursive borderline of philosophy and literature with recourse to Alain Badiou’s texts on Beckett and his meditations on the philosophy-literature interface. Through a close textual reading of a series of Beckett’s late prose-texts, I argue that Beckett as a creative writer appropriates the reflexive locus of subjective thought which philosophy tries to claim as its exclusive belonging. This goes contra to Badiou’s idea of philosophy being  sutured to literature. In this problematic dialogue of the two discourses, Beckett’s obsessive abstractification renders the concrete as a remainder in the rigorous process of subtracting all particularities to arrive at a generic locus of thought. Beckett’s abstractionism is processual and non-absolute. It consists in the appropriation of the philosophical thought which thinks itself
without an object and as its own subject."

This essay affords the first extensive reading of T.S. Eliot’s marginalia to F. H. Bradley’s ‘Appearance and Reality.’ I draw attention to a shift in Eliot’s way of doing philosophy over the course of his year at Merton College, Oxford, 1914-1915; a shift that had consequences for the ways in which Eliot read or re-read Bradley. Drawing on Heather Jackson’s work on marginalia, I argue that Eliot’s notes on Bradley provide a window on this act of reading. In particular, I suggest that Eliot’s quibble with Bradley’s use of the word “transmute” – evident in the marginalia – opens up an extended conversation between the two authors and within which “Tradition and the Individual Talent” can be located. I offer not so much a new account of Bradley’s influence on Eliot as an enriched picture of the manner in which influence can be said to be exerted.