| 1. |
- Katz Thor, Rebecka, 1982-
(författare)
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Beyond the Witness : Holocaust Representations and the Testimony of Images
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In a time when the very last Holocaust witnesses will soon be gone, a possible route for commemoration is to ask what testimony images can give. This book seeks to answer the question of how images can bear witness by examining them as multifaceted entities produced, reproduced, and resituated in conflicting political and historical situations. In three archive-based films by Harun Farocki, Yael Hersonski, and Eyal Sivan, the moving image is reactivated and reinterpreted. Footage produced as internal Nazi propaganda and the video recordings of a politically charged trial in the aftermath of the Holocaust have accrued new meaning. The archival status, context, and conditions for production, and the means of representation, offer a framework for an analysis through which the testimony of images can be understood.
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| 2. |
- Dahllöv, Mats, 1986-
(författare)
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Det absoluta och det gemensamma : Benjamin Höijers konstfilosofi
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is the first interpretation of Benjamin Höijer’s philosophy of art. Höijer (1767–1812), who was a Swedish representative of German idealism, is considered one of the brightest thinkers in the history of Swedish philosophy, although to this day he has been largely neglected. His writings offer one of the first systematic philosophies of art in the history of Western philosophy. In focus are the two themes of metaphysics and politics, and the thesis strives for an exploration of the speculative concept of the absolute – a key term of Höijer’s work. The method is twofold: a hermeneutical one, which concerns a careful reading of Höijer’s text and a contextualisation of his thought, and a more productive one, which seeks an activation of concepts and themes in Höijer. The study underlines the connection of his concept of the absolute to its supposed opposites: the relative, multiplicity, change, sensuality, and the common – the second main term of the thesis. For Höijer, one of the most important manifestations of the absolute in the world is the work of art. The thesis investigates how artistic creation, artworks, and aesthetic experience can be understood in relation to Höijer’s concept of the absolute and considers what new perspectives on art follow from this. Art also has an essential connection to politics, morality, and society in Höijer, and the thesis explores how his reflections can be understood as a profound critique of modernity. The quest for a better society through cultivation is at the heart of Höijer’s philosophical work. By focusing on Höijer as a political thinker, the thesis also offers a political reading of his metaphysics. The organism, a central concept of his metaphysics and philosophy of art, is interpreted in relation to a vision of a free and equal society. By focusing on the concepts of suffering and compassion – essential to the emergence of thought, society, and art in Höijer – the study furthermore reads his metaphysics as relational and sensuous. Thus, in this first interpretation of both Höijer’s philosophy of art and several of his central metaphysical works, a unique idealism unfolds.
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| 3. |
- Enström, Anna, 1986-
(författare)
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Sinnesstämning, skratt och hypokondri : Om estetisk erfarenhet i Kants tredje Kritik
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis considers Immanuel Kant’s notion of sensibility in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). It directs attention to sensibility’s function in Kant’s conceptualisation of aesthetic experience and thereby shows how the central role of sensibility in the third Critique contributes to a deeper understanding of aesthetic experience. This is done through a close reading of two philosophical key terms – Gemüt and Stimmung – and two specific phenomena – laughter (Witz) and hypochondria – carried out in conversation with three works of art: Max Neuhaus’ public sound piece Times Square (1977), Sarah Lucas’ installation Au Naturel (1994) and Nazlı Dinçel’s film work Leafless (2011). Taking departure from the framework offered by Kant’s critical philosophy and his anthropological writings, I argue that the analyzed concepts and phenomena on the one hand call on the importance of sensibility in Kant’s aesthetics, and on the other show that we still need Kant to grasp present questions and central motives in contemporary art.
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| 4. |
- Gorgis, Mirey, 1982-
(författare)
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Allt är våld! : En undersökning av det moderna våldsbegreppet
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This study critically examines the intense scholarly interest in violence of recent decades. Consequently, the thesis' main objective is to is to answer two questions in particular: why violence? and why now? First and foremost, this objective is pursued through three separate but interrelated studies. Prior to these, the thesis sets out to affirm the importance of Marquis de Sade and Michel Foucault in thinking violence. First, it is in the literary works of the Marquis de Sade, rather than in Machiavelli or Hobbes, that we find the first traces of a conceptual understanding of violence. Second, drawing on de Sade, it is Foucault who provides the fertile ground from which the field of contemporary violence studies basically springs – in spite of the fact that he himself never devoted any special studies to violence, nor actually developed a specific concept of violence. Part 1, “Literature”, provides a brief overview of the contemporary study of violence as well as a discussion of two thoroughly influential texts in the field: Hannah Arendt’s On Violence (1970) and Giorgio Agamben’s “On the Limits of Violence” (1970). This part surveys the questions of violence specifically posed within the field, with the further purpose of identifying and dissecting common tropes and recurring arguments important to its formation. I make the claim that two notions in particular are utilized to construct violence as a new field of knowledge: the notion of technology and the notion of history. Part 2, “Experience”, consists of a historical interlude in which one of the objectives is to put the hypothesis of the presumably transhistorical and immutable nature of human violence to the test. This is achieved by a close reading of the philosophical texts of Plato as well as the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. In this part I argue that, in a strict sense, there is no true concept of violence as such in classical Greek antiquity. Instead, we find a multiplicity of embryonic “pre-concepts” that, unlike the various concepts of today, are thought entirely on the basis of relations, rather than on the basis of the objects of violence. The question of violence in classical Greece is, in short, approached in terms of who? rather than what? – pointing toward a promising possibility still open for exploration today. Part 3, “Concepts”, returns to the European discussions of the 1960s and 1970s investigated in part 1, but rather than examining the questions of immediate concern in the respective texts of the period, I approach today’s heightened interest in violence in light of a set of overarching problems, such as the risk of atomic annihilation, political unrest, the fear of propaganda, and brain washing. By way of these problems, I show that, running counter to the philosophical sources on which it draws, the contemporary concept of violence achieves a surreptitious re- institution of the substantial and autonomous subject otherwise believed to be dead. In conclusion, the paradoxical function of the contemporary concept of violence is thus to allow for the return of the kind of subject relentlessly attacked by the radical European thought of the 1960s and 1970s, the same thought which allowed for the invention of the concept in the first place. In this sense our age, in which, it would appear, “everything is violence”, is also an age where a kind of “bia-centrism” provides us, paradoxically, with the last conceptual stronghold for substantial subjects and stable identities.
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| 5. |
- Selberg, Anna-Karin
(författare)
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Politics and Truth : Heidegger, Arendt and the Modern Political Lie
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In 2016, the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” the word of the year. In the ongoing debate about post-truth it is generally assumed that facts and truth have ceased to be relevant to politics. However, questions are seldom raised about the role of truth-claims in politics, why facts matter in political contexts, or what we even mean with words such as fact and lies in politics. A general aim of the present study is to shed light on these questions. Not, however, by engaging directly in the debate about post-truth, but by investigating the relation between politics and truth in the philosophical work of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.In 1945 Arendt suggested that fascism had invented a way of “lying the truth”. She later came to call this invention the modern political lie, seeing it as one of the key elements that crystallized into totalitarianism. The study explores the paradoxical relation between politics and truth in totalitarian movements, which can reinvent itself in non-totalitarian forms in contemporary democracies. Parts of Arendt’s analysis are implicit but can be made explicit against the background of Heidegger’s political writings. Heidegger is not an advocate of the modern political lie, nonetheless his writings from the 1930s, while a member of the National Socialist party, reflect aspects of the paradoxical relation between politics and truth in totalitarian movements. Studying Heidegger and Arendt together can therefore shed light on the specific problems that Arendt addressed regarding truth and lying in politics. The study investigates the relation between politics and truth in Heidegger and Arendt respectively, but also the relation between their works. It shows that there is a proto-political aspect already in Heidegger’s early articulations of truth as aletheia and explores the central role of truth in his political writings from the 1930s. Against the background of Heidegger, Arendt’s works on the modern political lie are analyzed. The study also investigates the concept of truth developed by Arendt in works after The Origins of Totalitarianism, arguing that it should be seen partly as a response to the modern political lie.
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| 6. |
- Carlemalm, Victoria, 1973-
(författare)
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Mellan dröm och verklighet : Skildringar av tid, trauma och sexualitet i Antanas Škėmas novellistiska prosa
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The subject of this dissertation is the representation of temporality, trauma and sexuality in Antanas Škėma’s fiction. The chapter “Temporal structures” examines temporal order in the writer’s novella “Isaac” according to Genettes narratology. The analysis reveals deliberately inserted mechanisms in the construction of the text, which disrupt the narrative investigation. A survey of temporal structures exposes invented events in the text and the definitions of “factual reality” and “imaginary reality” are introduced. The narrative analysis results in a hypothesis that Škėma’s text has been constructed as an imitation of human memory and as a representation of the factual reality outside the text. The chapters “Representation of trauma” and “Representation of sexual perversion” use Freud’s trauma theory and sexual theory as a method. Trauma appears to constitute the construction of the narrator and his urge to distort temporal links between the narrative and the story. When the narrator in Škėma’s “Isaac” focuses on the depiction of sexually perverted consciousness, the text affects the reader by forcing him to break off his horizons of expectation. The depiction of rape in Škėma’s fiction links the themes of sexuality and power and of sexuality and trauma. The writer detaches the representation of sexuality from the definition of love: sexuality, portrayed in the analyzed texts, appears to create its own norms. This is one of many ways to transform the depiction of sexual perversion into a social norm in Škėma’s narrative. The chapter “Škėma’s Autobiography and literary critics” provides a re-reading of the writer’s autobiography and his journalistic texts. The chapter ”Publication and reception of Škėma’s fiction” provides a compiled reading of earlier research and a survey of the writer’s books published in exile.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Lundqvist, Anne, 1954-
(författare)
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I begjærets tjeneste : Strindberg og Lacan på scenen
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the Service of Desire is an interdisciplinary study that combines psychoanalysis with aesthetic materials. The dissertation aims to analyze five of August Strindberg’s dramas within a theoretical frame provided mainly by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The interpretations are, however, also supplemented with some specific philosophical perspectives. The Father, Miss Julie, Playing with Fire and The Dance of Death are studied as theatrical performances. The Father and Playing with Fire were directed by Staffan Valdemar Holm and staged at The Royal Dramatic Theatre Dramaten in Stockholm in 1997 and respectively 2002. Mademoiselle Julie was performed at the Comédie de Genève in Switzerland in 1988 and La Danse de mort was staged at the Comédie-Française in Paris in 1996. The stage director Matthias Langhoff was responsible for the two French-speaking productions. Creditors (1888) is analyzed as drama text. The method of study is to establish a reciprocal connection between Strindberg’s texts and Lacan’s theories, which makes it possible to demonstrate their multiple points of intersection. The different chapters expose certain Lacanian concepts in relation to the fictive protagonists. Through this procedure Strindberg’s characters, on as well as off-stage, are unmasked as typical Lacanian subjects; they owe their being to a certain nonbeing. As a consequence, the traditional stories about the characters are inverted, in particular the women’s narratives. Because they are working in the service of desire, they are also opposing the patriarchy as a social system; transgressing the rules of decorum. Rejecting hegemonic ideals and the oedipal taboo as the final point, the women search for a personal truth of their own. Thus, the dissertation proposes the Lacanian psychoanalysis as a relevant and effective means of examining cultural and social structures, whether the characters are acting on a stage or wandering between the covers of a book.
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| 9. |
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NORLIT 2009, Codex and Code: Aestethcis, Language and Politics in an Age of Digital Media : Stockholm, August 6-9, 2009
- 2010
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Proceedings (redaktörskap) (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of the conference was to develop the study of Comparative Literature through Nordic collaboration both in its own discipline and in Modern Language and Cultural studies. As the title for the conference suggests, the principal question for the conference was the challenge that the study of literature encounters in an age of digitalization and globalization. It was our aim to encourage discussion of how literary studies respond to the ongoing changes in media and technology, politics and economy. Many have argued that the Humanities currently are in a state of crisis. We believe that the discipline seldom has found itself in such an interesting and fruitful historical moment. Several of these questions have surfaced duringearlier media system changes, in particular during Romanticism and Modernism, which provided the conference with an historical frame. The conference Codex and Code also addressed questions of authenticity and originality, identity and gender, literary genres and reading practices, media and materiality, culture and popular culture, language and history, world literature, work aesthetics, translations, and canon formation.
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