The paper follows three figures of the irreversible in Kafka. The first one appears at the level of Kafka’s biography and is structured around a specific moment, the night he wrote The Judgement at one sitting. In this figure, we trace a turnaround in his literary style and concept, which Kafka himself detected and after which his literature obtained all its typical characteristics. In the second figure of the irreversible, we analyse Kafka’s Metamorphosis. By way of a close reading of the first few paragraphs of the text, we develop a specific concept of irreversibility and show that irreversibility is a consequence of a complex relationship between continuity and discontinuity, and not a simple function of the intensity of change. In the last section, on the basis of reading Kafka’s novels, we follow the third figure of the irreversible, the end as a specific space and field of irreversibility. Proceeding from Heidegger’s observation of the dual – temporal and spatial – meaning of das Ende, we conclude that this structure necessarily implies that Kafka’s novels are not only unfinished, but also unfinishable. In 2014 the revised English version is to be publisher in "Critical Engagements".
COBISS.SI-ID: 34749741
In the first part of the contribution, the author delineates the problem of the end in Beckett’s oeuvre, suggesting that this problem is inseparably connected with the question regarding the status of irreversibility. It is precisely this emphasis, which originates in Beckett’s essay on Proust, that enables a redefinition of the problem of the end as the irreversible beginning. In the second part, the contribution focuses on The Lost Ones and its specific variant of a spatial exposition of the problem.
COBISS.SI-ID: 36503597
The contribution discusses the problem of a group in view of Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Combining some of Freud’s fundamental theses and current political problems, we develop the basic features of a group as a group: a group as a group represents society as a whole; it is necessarily ambivalent and acts as a subject of thought. We do this primarily by drawing on Freud’s specific definition of the relation between individual and social psychology and his universal methodological decision on the primacy of observation over speculation.
COBISS.SI-ID: 35609645
The article discusses the American animated series South Park, starting from the basic formula: South Park = Eric Cartman. The only – and not merely the best or the most appropriate – approach to understanding the specific structure and impact of the series as a whole is to focus on a single character, that of Eric Cartman. It is argued that he is the character that within the series functions as its concrete representative, as an element that is not only part of the series, but »is« the series. In the second part the article provides an analysis of three episodes dealing with three figures of Cartman's doubles. In the third part it poses the question on the possibility of continuation of the series after its inner ending, namely after the staging of the essence of its artistic procedure.
COBISS.SI-ID: 34748973