Abstract: This article examines contemporary Ukrainian war literature as a site where the experience of war reveals a fundamental breakdown of meaning, knowledge, and selfhood. Analyzing works by Artur Dron, Artem Chapeye, Artem Chekh, and Oleksandr Mykhed, it argues that war produces an irreducible gap between mediated knowledge and lived experience, akin to the philosophical…
Abstract: The essay is a reflection on Isabella Hammad’s book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (2024). The essay’s approach is to follow the four themes that reflect the title and the subtitle of the book and to draw out what is unsaid from what is said by Hammad. The unsaid reflects my conceptual and historical…
Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to explain this extraordinary historical moment – through the crises that constitute the malaise of modernity and the root cause of this malaise – modernity’s flight from the ascetic norms. But although worthy, this historical method cannot explain why history appears to be hastening. To explain this,…
Abstract: This article explores Arnold Berleant’s environmental aesthetics with a focus on his innovative use of music as a model for aesthetic experience. Berleant challenges the dominant Kantian framework of disinterested contemplation by proposing an aesthetics of engagement – an immersive, participatory, and multisensory approach rooted in the everyday. Music, in Berleant’s theory, does not exist as a fixed…
Abstract: The article analyzes three cases through which the avoidance of stigmatization is revealed in very different modes of auto-narration. Each case suggests that the narrators intuitively use a strategy of modal shift: they find ways to resist the metaphorization or universalization of their lives by highlighting the modality of contingency. The article draws primarily…
Abstract: The essay is an introductory reexamination of the notion of realism in film by way of returning to the writings of André Bazin. In a moment when the relation between images and the physical world appears increasingly unstable, Bazin’s phenomenologically inflected understanding of reality offers a productive framework for reconsidering how films engage with the…
Abstract: This article approaches style as an ontological aporia: the condition of appearing that cannot be grasped either as a property of an entity or as Being itself. Beginning from the etymological constellation of stilus/stylus and στῦλος, it reconstructs a tension between writing and architectural space, and shows how visible mappings of space (peristyle, hypostyle) articulate a schema…
Abstract: This paper analyzes the social media trend “Do it for the plot” through Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity. Although the trend frames itself as enriching, its emphasis on isolated and casual actions conflicts with the ethical depth that a narrative identity entails. Drawing on Ricoeur’s ethical aims outlined in Oneself as Another, the paper…
Abstract: A Heideggerian conception of our narrative self-understanding is compared to Paul Ricoeur’s more familiar version. Where Ricoeur’s threefold mimesis conceives of literary texts as configuring unformed temporal experience and mediating between a writer’s and reader’s understanding, the Heideggerian approach holds our orientation toward our temporal existence to be already narrative in form, though usually implicit; working…
Abstract: This paper explores some of Hegel’s key philosophical commitments concerning biographical narrative, drawing on the narrative aspects of his philosophy of agency in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Philosophy of Right. The important philosophical claim that lies behind both works is that the self is precisely what it does – or,…