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- Cederberg, Carl, 1973-
(författare)
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Resaying the Human : Levinas Beyond Humanism and Antihumanism
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this reading a notion of the human is developed through an engagement with the work of French philosopher Emanuel Levinas. The argument is that, with the help of Levinas, it is possible for the idea of the human to be understood anew, for the notion to be ‘resaid’. This resaying of the human is performed in a critical appropriation of the philosophical tradition: Levinas’s work is shown not to be a new variation of the complacent ideology of humanism; the idea of the human is instead interpreted to be the bearer of the very movement of critique. This movement is articulated in terms of a transcendence of a discursive ‘economy of violence’. Critique does not establish a permanent position outside of violence, but is a movement that must constantly be renewed.Here Levinas is offered as a modern thinker of particular relevance for contemporary discussions surrounding the nature both of the political and of Human Rights. In addition one finds a systematic analysis of the major works of Levinas, unraveling how a notion of the human develops from within his philosophy.Levinas’s thought is placed alongside philosophical figures of his time, such as Heidegger, Sartre, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault and Derrida, as well as more recent political thinkers, for example, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière.
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| 2. |
- Itkes-Sznap, Gabriel, 1985-
(författare)
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Nollpunkten : Precisionens betydelse hos Witold Gombrowicz, Inger Christensen och Herta Müller
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation examines precision as an aesthetic concept and practice in texts by Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969), Inger Christensen (1935–2009) and Herta Müller (1953–). Although often referred to in contemporary criticism as a marker of aesthetic value, precision in literature has rarely been the subject of academic study. The dissertation relates the meaning of precision in literature to its meaning in and for the natural sciences and takes the conceptual dependence of the former on the latter as its point of departure. It presupposes a connection between scientific or mathematical precision and the concept of nihilism, and, in a further step, makes the claim that modern literary precision should be viewed in light of a history fraught by nihilistic destruction. Two poetological texts by the poet Paul Celan (1920–1970) are identified as places where the concept of precision in its double function – both scientific/nihilistic and literary/poetic – is explicated in a historically decisive way. Together, they are construed as an interpretative frame for the subsequent readings of Gombrowicz, Christensen and Müller. The idea of “the zero point” as a point of orientation for literary precision is mapped out by way of an interpretation of Celan’s notion of “the date”. Literary precision is presented as a form of sensibility, determined by and determining sensible particulars, rather than general and abstract rules. The close readings of Gombrowicz, Christensen and Müller, focus on formative passages in each of the writer’s works where such sensibility is brought to the fore. Each reading is structured around a trope – the antinomy in the case of Gombrowicz, the chiasm in the case of Christensen and the simile in the case of Müller. All three are shown to reflect the act of precision in practice, express its guiding sensibility and demonstrate that it is paradoxical in nature – it can, so it is argued, ultimately be understood as a precision of the imprecise.
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| 3. |
- Strandberg, Gustav
(författare)
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Politikens omskakning : Negativitet, samexistens och frihet i Jan Patočkas tänkande
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present investigation analyses the political thought of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka. It focuses on the question of how we are to understand political life: what are its distinguishing features and how we are to circumscribe it conceptually. According to Patočka the experience of politics is one characterized by a loss of meaning, a loss of a foundation or principle that could lend stability to our lives. It is an experience of a tremor by and through which the foundations of our experience are shaken.Philosophy’s political task is, however, not to provide any foundation for political life, but rather to address the question of why man is inclined to posit metaphysical foundations and why refuge in ideological principles is sought. Philosophy must instead engage with the groundlessness and negativity permeating human existence as such. In order to provide an analysis of human existence, and how this very groundlessness of existence is exposed in politics, Patočka calls for an “a-subjective phenomenology” that abandons the traditional notion of the subject and of subjectivity. An “a-subjective” phenomenological analysis is central for the present investigation. The author shows that it is only by and through Patočka’s a-subjective phenomenology that his political thought can be understood; out of his distinctive phenomenological analyses, the negativity, instability and groundlessness of human existence is brought to the fore. Politically, this negativity manifests itself in two phenomena, which, when taken together, constitute the very bedrock for politics: freedom and human coexistence. Human existence is neither stable nor self-sufficient. On the contrary, it is always already exposed to others, always already engaged in the self-transcending movement of its freedom. Freedom and coexistence are in this respect two interrelated expressions of the inherent negativity of human existence and two phenomena that, accordingly, occupy a privileged position in this study. The author seeks to show that it is by way of an in-depth analysis of freedom and coexistence that the question of politics can be addressed in the work of Patočka since they give testament to the trembling, unnerving, and disorienting nature of politics.
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| 4. |
- Lane, Tora, 1976-
(författare)
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Rendering the Sublime : A Reading of Marina Tsvetaeva's Fairy-Tale Poem The Swain
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present study is a reading of the folkloric fairy-tale poem The Swain (Mólodets) (1924) by the Russian Modernist poet Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941).The poem represents a high point in Tsvetaeva’s experiments with Russian folk art, and it is thoroughly folkloric in its theme, forms of writing and poetic language. At the same time, the poem can be linked to the attraction to folk art as a locus of the Sublime in literary tradition, which originates in German Romanticism, and finds its echoes in Russian Modernism. This study seeks to show that Tsvetaeva’s exploration of folk art in the poem was inspired by a quandary linked to the Sublime; namely the paradoxical question how to present in art what is too great to be represented.The poem is read as an image and an illustration of the poet’s understanding of the means of presenting the unrepresentable. Tsvetaeva renders the tale as an uncanny story about a horrifying elemental force. She seeks to avoid representation by bringing out the story in a poetic performance, which has the character of a lyrical drama, where the voices of the characters speak and sing in a direct manner. Within the canvas of the folkloric performance, the poet explores poetic language to render the Sublime. She experiments with secondary meanings in order to bring out a language, which at the same time is “secret” and “literal”, and where the element can be made present in its sublimity.
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| 5. |
- Rat, Ramona
(författare)
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Un-common Sociality : Thinking Sociality with Levinas
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present investigation develops the notion of sociality based on Emmanuel Levinas’s thought, and proposes an understanding of sociality that resists becoming a common foundation: an un-common sociality which interrupts the reciprocal shared common, and thereby, paradoxically, makes it possible. By engaging in the larger debate on community, this work gives voice to Levinas on the question of community without a common ground, a topic and a debate where he has previously been underestimated. In this way, the aim is to reveal new directions opened up by Levinas’s philosophy in order to think an un-common sociality.
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| 6. |
- Bornemark, Jonna
(författare)
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Kunskapens gräns, gränsens vetande : En fenomenologisk undersökning av transcendens och kroppslighet
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The limit between the proper and the foreign – how this limit is established, but also crossed and dissolved – has remained a crucial issue in phenomenology. Setting these questions in the context of the phenomenology of religion, this thesis develops an analysis of the relation between transcendence and body understood in terms of a certain limit. The introductory part is rooted in Edmund Husserl’s discussions of the concept of transcendence, which is shown to have an essential connection to the analysis of inner time-consciousness. Here we encounter a decisive limit to objectifying knowledge, which also comes across in his investigations of the body and its spatiality. The second part discusses Max Scheler’s critique of Husserl’s excessively objectifying view of knowledge, with a particular focus on Scheler’s understanding of love as a condition of possibility for any knowledge. Scheler is shown to have developed a new concept of transcendence that avoids the pitfalls of objectivism, although in his philosophy of religion he tends to downplay the importance of the body. The third part undertakes a reading of Edith Stein, who develops ideas similar to Scheler’s, though in a phenomenologically more nuanced fashion. Although her philosophy of religion also bypasses the body, Stein provides a more genuine access to the writings of the mystics, the analysis of which forms the core of the fourth and concluding part. Drawing on the work of the 13th century Beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg, this concluding chapter develops a phenomenological understanding of religion with an emphasis on transcendence and limit, while also retaining the centrality of our experience of the body. This means: a phenomenology of the limit is investigated, rather than a limit of phenomenology.
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| 7. |
- Kasprzak, Krystof
(författare)
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Vara - Framträdande - Värld : Fenomenets negativitet hos Martin Heidegger, Jan Patočka och Eugen Fink.
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The present investigation discusses the phenomenological concept of the phenomenon through an interpretation of the meaning of the negativity of the phenomenon in the philosophical works of Martin Heidegger, Jan Patočka and Eugen Fink. This negativity is thematised in terms of a loss and a privation that leads to a description of the appearing of the phenomenon as a sublime event, which exposes existence to an absence of meaning. A formulation of the absence in question as a dynamic movement of existence opens a new perspective on what it means to do phenomenology: phenomenological thinking does not begin with the immediate givenness of appearance, but through the trembling of meaning in the experience of a loss of the phenomenon.
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