Kavšek, Moder (eds.), The Resilience of History. The Yugoslav Wars thorugh Art. Ljubljana: Maska., 2024
The central question of this chapter is the relationship between war and its representation on st... more The central question of this chapter is the relationship between war and its representation on stage and in literature. It takes a close look at the case of three dramatic texts written in the 1990’s known as the Balkan Trilogy by Dušan Jovanović, a renowned Slovenian theater director and playwright. These plays address the war, survival and exile in Yugoslavia by way of a detour through the myths of Antigone and Sisyphus, and with the help of a reference to Bertolt Brecht’s classic anti-war play Mother Courage, a play that itself speaks about the horrors of a recent war through the detour to an older one. What is the purpose of such detours? Why is it necessary to speak about the horrors of war through the prism of myth or historical distance? The claim is that it is neither an attempt to domesticate the horror and to offer us some kind of relief from the present trauma, nor a means to confer an air of historical importance to the ostensibly prosaic contemporary events. Instead, the author argues that the explicit staging of the war trauma is the only way to encounter its radically opaque kernel. Far from alleviating the pain, such stagings allows the community to engage with and begin working through the collective trauma.
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Books by Gregor Moder
In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies) –regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.
Substance and Negativity
GREGOR MODER, WITH A FOREWORD BY MLADEN DOLAR
Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates surrounding the issues raised by Hegel’s readings of Spinoza, from the Lacanians and Deleuzians to the Althusserians and Heideggerians.
Hegel and Spinoza have inspired generations of scholars and sparked two of the most influential philosophical traditions that persist in theoretical debates to this day. Just as German Idealism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries legitimated itself through its attempt to transcend the determinacy of Spinoza’s system by reserving within it a place for the freedom of the subject, so one may also say that the twentieth-century French materialism of Althusser, Deleuze, and others legitimated itself by deploying Spinoza as the champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This alternative, or rather a mutual theoretical rejection, is perhaps nowhere quite as evident as in the controversies between contemporary Deleuzians and Lacanians.
Contemporary materialist philosophy is either Spinozist or Hegelian—it either abolishes the concepts of the subject and negation, arguing for pure affirmation, that is, the vitalistic production of differences, or it makes a case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death. Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity both traces the historical elements of the alternatives and explains contemporary discussions as its variation, persuasively demonstrating throughout that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast, but together: as Hegel AND Spinoza.
Papers by Gregor Moder
determines it as a rhetorical denegation of rhetoric—“I am no orator, as Brutus is”—, similar to the procedure Socrates uses in Plato’s Symposium. In addition, Anthony authorizes himself vicariously, not speaking in his own name, but in the name of the dead master, as the voice of Caesar’s wounds. The author discusses this rhetorical procedure as a case of the theatricality of the very figure of the master. Discussing the role of death as “the absolute master” in Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave/bondsman, as well as in Hegel’s concept of historical repetition, this articles suggest that the split between Caesar as a living individual and Caesar as the name of the master captures not only the point about the theatricality of the master, but also the difference between what Hegel called a world-historical individual and his idea of the monarch as suggested in his Philosophy of Right.
Right that philosophy always comes too late to instruct us as to what
the world ought to be from a dual perspective. In the first move, Hegel’s
intervention in the field of political philosophy is compared to that of
Spinoza, who similarly criticized philosophers who describe men from
a moralist perspective and thus fail to write a political theory because
they “conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be”
(Political Treatise). Similarly, Marx writes that a proper historical enterprise sets out from “real, active men,” and demonstrates that “morality,
religion, metaphysics, and the rest of ideology” (The German Ideology)
depend on the material processes of those real, active men. In the second
move, the article discusses Hegel’s concept of history and philosophy’s
late arrival from the perspective of the metaphor consistently used not
only by Hegel and Marx, but also by critics such as Louis Althusser:
the metaphor of stage performance. The aim of this contribution is to
tackle the intricate relationship between thinking and acting by way of
a detour through the metaphor of theatricality.
in a passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and follows Lacan’s suggestion
that it should be explained through a reading of sonnet 20, dedicated to
a beautiful youth and his “addition.” The main part of the article’s argument
revolves around the interpretation of the sonnet as an example of
a joke, pointing to other similar examples in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It
Hot and Sigmund Freud’s book on Jokes. The article claims that the split
between the political and the natural body of the king is not a simple
distinction between the office and the person, but rather the concept of
incommensurability of the symbolic order and the human being. The
Lacanian term for the inscription of the symbolic order into the texture
of the body is phallus, which happens to be the very same curious object
that is at the center of Shakespeare’s sonnet 20.
In researching the object of comedy, the contributions gathered here encounter comedy as a philosophical object: instead of approaching comedy as a genre, the book engages with it as a language, a medium, an artifice, a weapon, a puzzle or a trouble, a vocation and a repetition. Thus philosophy meets comedy at the intersection of various fields (e.g. psychoanalysis, film studies, cultural studies, and performance studies) –regions that comical practices and theories in fact already traverse.
Substance and Negativity
GREGOR MODER, WITH A FOREWORD BY MLADEN DOLAR
Gregor Moder’s Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity is a lively entry into current debates surrounding the issues raised by Hegel’s readings of Spinoza, from the Lacanians and Deleuzians to the Althusserians and Heideggerians.
Hegel and Spinoza have inspired generations of scholars and sparked two of the most influential philosophical traditions that persist in theoretical debates to this day. Just as German Idealism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries legitimated itself through its attempt to transcend the determinacy of Spinoza’s system by reserving within it a place for the freedom of the subject, so one may also say that the twentieth-century French materialism of Althusser, Deleuze, and others legitimated itself by deploying Spinoza as the champion of anti-Hegelian materialism. This alternative, or rather a mutual theoretical rejection, is perhaps nowhere quite as evident as in the controversies between contemporary Deleuzians and Lacanians.
Contemporary materialist philosophy is either Spinozist or Hegelian—it either abolishes the concepts of the subject and negation, arguing for pure affirmation, that is, the vitalistic production of differences, or it makes a case for the productiveness of concepts of the negative, nothingness, and death. Hegel and Spinoza: Substance and Negativity both traces the historical elements of the alternatives and explains contemporary discussions as its variation, persuasively demonstrating throughout that the best way to read Hegel and Spinoza is not in opposition or contrast, but together: as Hegel AND Spinoza.
determines it as a rhetorical denegation of rhetoric—“I am no orator, as Brutus is”—, similar to the procedure Socrates uses in Plato’s Symposium. In addition, Anthony authorizes himself vicariously, not speaking in his own name, but in the name of the dead master, as the voice of Caesar’s wounds. The author discusses this rhetorical procedure as a case of the theatricality of the very figure of the master. Discussing the role of death as “the absolute master” in Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave/bondsman, as well as in Hegel’s concept of historical repetition, this articles suggest that the split between Caesar as a living individual and Caesar as the name of the master captures not only the point about the theatricality of the master, but also the difference between what Hegel called a world-historical individual and his idea of the monarch as suggested in his Philosophy of Right.
Right that philosophy always comes too late to instruct us as to what
the world ought to be from a dual perspective. In the first move, Hegel’s
intervention in the field of political philosophy is compared to that of
Spinoza, who similarly criticized philosophers who describe men from
a moralist perspective and thus fail to write a political theory because
they “conceive men not as they are, but as they would like them to be”
(Political Treatise). Similarly, Marx writes that a proper historical enterprise sets out from “real, active men,” and demonstrates that “morality,
religion, metaphysics, and the rest of ideology” (The German Ideology)
depend on the material processes of those real, active men. In the second
move, the article discusses Hegel’s concept of history and philosophy’s
late arrival from the perspective of the metaphor consistently used not
only by Hegel and Marx, but also by critics such as Louis Althusser:
the metaphor of stage performance. The aim of this contribution is to
tackle the intricate relationship between thinking and acting by way of
a detour through the metaphor of theatricality.
in a passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and follows Lacan’s suggestion
that it should be explained through a reading of sonnet 20, dedicated to
a beautiful youth and his “addition.” The main part of the article’s argument
revolves around the interpretation of the sonnet as an example of
a joke, pointing to other similar examples in Billy Wilder’s Some Like It
Hot and Sigmund Freud’s book on Jokes. The article claims that the split
between the political and the natural body of the king is not a simple
distinction between the office and the person, but rather the concept of
incommensurability of the symbolic order and the human being. The
Lacanian term for the inscription of the symbolic order into the texture
of the body is phallus, which happens to be the very same curious object
that is at the center of Shakespeare’s sonnet 20.
pedestrians and transform them into active participants of a street performance. This is what enables us to compare the transformative operation of street theater to what philosopher Louis Althusser described as the operation of ideological interpellation. In the first part of the paper the author discusses several ways of separating these two interpellations, drawing from
examples by Robert Pfaller, Mladen Dolar, Slavoj Žižek and Blaise Pascal. In the second part of the paper, the author discusses examples of the Slovenian group Laibach, interventions by Rebel Clown Army and the standing man protests in Turkey, arguing that artistic practices can be subversive with respect to the dominant ideology, when they are able to occupy the position of ideology’s blind spot.
Key words: Lubitsch, Chaplin, phallus, beard, bust, plumed helmet"
facing personal, individual mortality. To counter this, a radical ontological reading is attempted, one that implies, to an extent, also a reading of the Heidegger of the fundamental ontology against the Heidegger of a type of “existentialist theology”. The author consistently pursues the idea of reading the key concepts of angst, end, death, and time by analysing them as concepts that enable us to see the nothingness, the void at the core of existence. The conclusion of the paper underscores this formal ontological orientation of the book with the help of two little known concepts developed by Franz Brentano in the course of his studies of the continuum."
Key words: negativity, comedy, torsion, lacuna, contraction