Abstract: In this essay, the author considers intertextuality in contemporary musical work, conceptualizing it not only as a critical category and as an artistic convention, but also as an aesthetic strategy. Listening for texts, as it were, opens the work for influences and gives it new purposes. The multiple texts, which are mutually interdependent, alter each other’s…
Abstract: This paper explores the role of music as a communicative tool between the human and the posthuman. It utilizes the theories of embodiment and performativity of Karen Barad and Deniz Peters, as well as the perspectives of Continental Realism and contemporary phenomenology (Serres, Merleau-Ponty, Harman, and Morton). The examples are drawn from a range…
Abstract: In 1870, Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883) wrote an essay to celebrate the centennial of Beethoven’s birth. In this essay Wagner made the case that music is, unlike any other object we create or are attentive to in experience, in an immediate analogical relationship with the activity of the Schopenhauerian “will” and is always enlivened. By drawing on this idea,…
Abstract: The essay presents an attempt at characterizing contemporary music’s culture by identifying a dialectical tension between “modern” and “postmodern” currents in it. After initial considerations on the manifold usages of the term “postmodernism,” five composers’ approaches will be analyzed: John Cage, Philip Glass (and other minimalists), Bernhard Lang, Mauricio Kagel and Johannes Kreidler. However different…
Abstract: Violence occupies a regal position in the work of de Sade. It manifests itself in two forms: sexual persecution (excesses, manias, perversions, cruelty) and enlightened reasoning (unabashed promotion of naturalism, rationalism, hedonism and atheism). De Sade uses his most precious instrument as a semblance, by creating a magic spectacle of a gothic novel, and as truth, when he presents himself as a metaphysician…
Abstract: In this paper, I seek to clarify, criticize, and expand upon the ambiguous-yet-influential concept of divine violence introduced by Walter Benjamin’s “Zur Kritik der Gewalt”. I proceed in three parts: in the first, I outline Benjamin’s argument about the cycle of mythical violence and divine violence’s special role as an interruption of that cycle. Next, I explicate Spinoza’s key…
Abstract: Through myths that pattern and repeat we figure the world to ourselves. The desire to be done with myth, to surpass mythic thinking in favor of a “more” rational way of thinking, is but one way of perpetrating violence in the guise of similitude. The rejection of muthos by logos is itself a form of violence, with significant ramifications. The…
Abstract: It seems that the first two decades of the twenty first century demonstrate political mythology to be still functioning in the political life of the West. In this context, it is interesting to view the recent publications of Hans Blumenberg’s Nachlass: Präfiguration (“Prefiguration,” 2014) and Rigorismus der Wahrheit (“Rigorism of Truth,” 2015), as they reveal…
Abstract: One of the major questions emerging in present-day reflections on politics is related to violence and its relation to institutional order and law. In the paper, an issue of concern for a very particular form of political conflict, that is, civil war, is addressed. Violence in politics, and particularly its specific form, that is, stasis (civil…
Abstract: In this article, I make an attempt to elucidate the problem of violence in Foucault’s genealogy that, following Nietzsche’s genealogy, seems to be based on the concept of a conflict of forces. Thus, the war of forces that constitutes history is the first dimension in which the presence of violence can be described in Foucauldian philosophy. The second dimension refers…