The monograph looks into different ways in which the figure of the end, in its various forms, structures our perception of reality and our inhabiting it. Far from constituting a homogeneous figure, let alone a concept, the term “the end” points in many different directions. The idea of the “end of history” constitutes the philosophical entry point of the book, and resonates in rather sharp contrast with the idea of the “end of the world”. The book examines the way in which the recent renewal of the latter idea, related to different kinds of catastrophe scenarios (including the ecological breakdown), seems to have put an end to the “end of history thesis”. History started running again, but where to? And where is our place in this newly awoken history?
COBISS.SI-ID: 302504960
What role can aesthetics as the philosophy of autonomous art assign to affect? Since Hegel, artistic autonomy has manifested itself as an indifferent form of appearance that “confronts us like a blessed god.” Is thinking art through affect thus necessarily the introduction of a heteronomy, a hidden economy that subverts the indifferent surface of autonomous appearance? The paper goes in the opposite direction by exploring the affectivity immanent to art’s very indifference. It discusses Hegel’s struggle to distinguish the divine indifference of the ideal artwork from the ironic indifference that indicates the end of art, Adorno’s observation that art is obliged to express suffering but can only do so in a medium that is essentially indifferent to it, and Ranciere’s reaffirmation of indifference as the specifically aesthetic power to affect by displacing the coordinates of sensible experience. Hegel and Adorno both affirmed the indifference of art, but also attempted to ground it in some kind of substantiality. For Ranciere, on the other hand, indifference is the only substantiality art can have.
COBISS.SI-ID: 46097197
This article examines Giorgio Agamben’s infamous rejection of the religious term Holocaust as a name for the extermination of the Jewish people. Agamben rejects this term (and eventually prefers the term Shoah) insofar as it implies a sacrificial exchange with the divine. He argues that, from the historiographical perspective, the Jews were not killed as sacrificial victims, but as (biopolitical) homines sacri. Yet, as Rey Chow noticed, in so doing Agamben also denies the redemptive potential of the term Holocaust, preventing the victims from finding a place in public memory. In fact, he overlooks the fact that the “Final Solution” also involved a plan for the erasure of all traces of the extermination itself, which the article reads via the medieval theological concept of Potentia Dei Absoluta, that is, as an anti-Aristotelian divine power to undo even the seemingly unalterable, objective order of the past. The article tries to challenge Agamben’s view with the help of László Nemes’s feature (not documentary) film Son of Saul. It argues that Nemes’s film is a unique example of a film about the Holocaust that avoids regression into positions that Agamben criticises. By challenging the divine “undoing” of history (the erasure of the extermination) by means of fiction, the film can be regarded as an example of a Benjaminian messianic redemption, which is not simply a redemption of the really existing yet repressed past, but rather its unrealised potential.
COBISS.SI-ID: 45060141