An article was recently published in Appraisal, the journal of the British Personalist Forum, on two films by Ingmar Bergman with questions of anxiety, alienation, and creativity. When the main character of Hour of the Wolf pursues his art at the expense of his romantic relationship is his calling a liberating or demonic force? More: British Personalist Forum’s website.
An essay discussing Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse’s notion of the immanent writer in relation to film (A Clockwork Orange and Naked) was recently published by Vernon Press in a collection edited by Simon Smith and Anna Castriota: Looking at the Sun: New Writings in Modern Personalism. Get a 10% discount on the volume by using code 10PCAGNODH on checkout from the publisher’s website.
We have now posted these two video essays on the Ereignis web-site:
To Alain Badiou salvation and redemption are meaningful terms to us even today. Badiou reads Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger to throw light on salvation as an event that allows reality to enter into our world.
Friedrich Nietzsche was against democracy and against egalitarianism, which is the view that people are in some sense equal. How we should read Nietzsche in an age when egalitarianism is taken for granted?
Professor Sigmund Loland, former principal of Norway’s Elite sports college, has praised the book dressage and illusio: sport, nation and the new global body:
… enters directly into current philosophical and social scientific questions regarding sport – nation – body, and anchors the debate in strong, theoretical currents … rich in perspective and original analysis.
The book is available from amazon.com. More information here.
Follow this link to get to the blog that predated this site. There you’ll find summaries and links to essays, poems, short snippets on sundry philosophic topics, movies, language, and so on. Read about Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Spinoza, Foucault, Berkeley, Bourdieu, Descartes; read a poem by Sonnevi in translation. Plus video links, original texts, you name it. See you there!
This essay on video refereeing in football was published by the Norwegian weekly Morgenbladet 21 July in Norwegian.
New book by Torgeir Fjeld out on Scholars’ Press. Among the key questions raised in this book are:
Nationalism and globalization shape the way we consider our bodies as mediatized by sport. Pierre Bourdieu claimed that mass-mediated spectacles render us passive. This book-length study of sports in schools and in the global media asks if Bourdieu’s view was too simplistic. Do not also sports enable us to imagine ourselves in new ways?
An in-depth study of current debates in media studies, philosophy and sports, this volume is suitable for students, scholars and everyone engaged in contemporary issues that reach beyond the commonplaces of everyday chatter. Available now from amazon.com. More information about the book here.
This video is a recording of a paper presented at a conference dvoted to Søren Kierkegaard at the University of Gdansk, Poland, in April 2013. The paper discusses the notion of leaps that we find in Kierkegaard and makes links to Pascal and the recent work of Giorgio Agamben on power. The key question is how it is that we find ourselves unable to act meaningfully in the present conjuncture.
This peer-reveiwed paper discusses, among other things, the notion of Messianic time (Walter Benjamin), which is to be understood as a temporality where the moment of redemption is an ever-present potentiality. First, it can be considered as a psychological time, or a mind time, that is governed by traumatic encounters. This sense of time is rendered as a strictly logical time in the work of Jacques Lacan. Second, it is a time of grace, in the sense that it is governed by necessity. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists went to great length to refute the dominant notion of grace as sufficient. If there is an instance that determines events, then the means by which this instance governs can only be a necessary cause. Finally, the work of Benedict Anderson, and particularly a later article in his corpus, is reconsidered. Here, Anderson argues that the effects of globalization have to some extent rendered the temporal linearity of nationalism obsolete. It is therefore apt to consider what a time after nationalism will be like.
This article investigates how it is that we tend to settle for negative liberties (liberation from obstructions, hindrances or impediments to our desires) even though we are fully aware of the limitations of such freedoms, and how a peculiar technique of governance – what we shall refer to as clandestine or hidden acclaim – underpins an emergent form of social domination, so-called ‘acclamative capitalism’.
In this peer-reviewed essay, the implication of Pierre Bourdieu’s insight that sports are ways of knowing with the body that are to a large extent taught silently, transferred from the teacher to body of students, often without ever reaching the level of verbal utterances is under scrutiny. The body produced through the Physical Education curriculum is increasingly enmeshed in what Pierre Bourdieu referred as the “cult of the natural and authentic.” Such a body enables a more autonomous cultural field of sport compared to nationalism’s epic body, since it no longer places nations in a necessarily antagonistic relation to each other. Instead, the impure and unnatural pose as new opponents of the sporting body. Sports increasingly function to signify excessive and ineffable aspects of our existence. Bourdieu’s notion of illusio shows how sport participants can arrive at this understanding through an experience of the seductive character of sports.
In this essay, the notion of acephalic knowledge is discussed as a possible point from which to launch ideological critique. Acephalic knowledge is situated in a body that is without head and without heart, i.e. it is a kind of knowledge that is prior to reason and emotion. As Slavoj Žižek states, it provides a «thou art that», or a kind of recognition that the subject cannot but accept since it articulates the very kernel of the subject’s being. When we are stripped of our emotional and intellectual defenses – when we are placed in a state of subjective destitution – we are in a position to recognize this kind of knowledge. Here we ask if mass mediated sports can provide an experience of such subjective destitution.