The Politics of Literature

2009

Munera. Rivista europea di cultura, 2019

I would like to start from a historiographical hypothesis, and then enunciate a theoretical thesis. The historiographical hypothesis starts from an observation: the variegated and impressive return of the category of humanism to the intellectual scene in the twentieth century has had a fate that paralleled the emergence of the category of the symbol in many fields of knowledge. The hypothesis I would like to present is that these two developments may not be independent at all; common reasons and concerns could underlie both: reasons and concerns that move in the direction of the search for a new epistemological and anthropological paradigm. According to this hypothesis, the vast and manifold experience of the symbolic – epitomized in the category of the symbol – has been one of the anomalies that have thrown into crisis an established and traditional epistemological and anthropological paradigm, thus triggering a revolutionary process. The theoretical thesis says that the symbol, which – according to my hypothesis – represented one of the “anomalies” that sent a classic epistemological and anthropological paradigm into crisis, can also act as a generative category of a new and more satisfying paradigm.

1998

Studia Gilsoniana, 2018

The author considers the problem of civilization. He defines civilization as a determinate form of man’s group life, or man’s culture in its social dimension. According to the author, a plurality of civilizations is generally accepted; in civilization, one can see the foundations for the functioning of law, politics, social life, and family life; civilization also plays an essential role in the religious life of man, just as religion plays a role in civilization. The author discusses the following topics: the biological theory of civilization, the historical theory of civilization, the sociological theory of civilization, the political-science theory of civilization, the civilization of death and the civilization of love, and the historical-philosophical theory of civilization.

2021

Anthropological studies and their results, both theoretical and applied, have a high degree of worldwide visibility in the field of printed and digitized publications, 2 as well as on the web. 3 Various fields of social and natural knowledge-understood as the relationship of human beings with their environment-also called the science of culture (Herskovits, 1992: 255-67), give rise to diverse interpretations, depending on the worldview of the authors and in accordance with political interests, in actions to unite, divide or dominate human groups, social sectors or entire peoples living together in common spaces or limited by geographical or political-administrative "borders".

an expert in literary theory, South-American literature, and culture, partly in 1995 and in 1999, this book revisits the central propositions of the life-work of this French-born theorist with a view to his contribution to a theory of the origins of culture. Following Michel Serres's suggestion to see Girard as the Darwin of the human sciences, the core aim of this genealogy of cultural evolution is to "propose a new anthropological paradigm" (7). The proposition of a new anthropological paradigm is not self-evident. Girard's enquiry has been concerned with nothing less than the structuring principle(s) for the cohesiveness and the disintegration of societies. Grounded in the textual analysis of commonalities between great literary texts, mythologies, but also the biblical texts, it has spanned literary criticism, comparative mythology, and the anthropology of religion. The nature and the scope of this project did not grow out of an established epistemological tradition but have evolved in conjunction with Girard's eclectic intellectual and spiritual trajectories, which are traced in the first chapter of the book (44-5). After his training as a historian at the École des Chartes in Paris and his emigration to the United States in 1947 he successively taught at the Universities of Indiana, Johns Hopkins, State University of New York at Buffalo, and Stanford before taking his retirement in 1995. His first book Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (1961, translated as Deceit, Desire, and the Novel in 1965) argued that the romantic idea of human authenticity was a fake. He claimed that a number of extraordinary novelists (Stendhal, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, or Cervantes) reveal the truth that human relationships are relational and structured by reciprocal desires that imitate the desires of others. Subsequently, Girard spent more than a decade of intense research into myths, rituals, and the anthropology of religion, which culminated in the publication of La violence et le sacré (1972, translated as Violence and the Sacred in 1977). The claim here was that the coherence of a culture must be traced back to underlying sacrificial acts. Such concrete occurrences of collective violence can still be recognised in myths and ritual practices. The interview based book Des choses cachées depuis la fondation du monde in 1978 (translated as Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World in 1987) whose first section was entitled 'Fundamental Anthropology' constituted the first systematic application of Girard's mimetic theory as an explanatory framework to the process of hominisation, i.e. the transition from animal to human beings. A further central idea was that Christianity created an epistemological and practical alternative to sacrificial violence by taking sides of the victim. This was the first book to find an important readership among the wider public but was shunned by academic circles.

In this paper we will attempt to give a social interpretation of material culture through the comprehension of the symbolic nature of artefacts and the meanings of things in cultural process. It is shown that cultural things are objects by which people tried to affect and influence their immediate environment. Such things, which acquired a social sense through becoming a focus of human activity and included in symbolic activity, began to play a cultural role as an important means of overcoming of social conflicts. Authors consider the different aspects of existence of things in culture by the material patterns and in the limits of current theoretical knowledge. It is distinguished such concepts as thing, object, subject and artefact in cognitive analysis of material culture. Moreover it is necessary not only to distinguish thing as object, but also to show thing as sign and symbol of human relations. The sense of thing is wider than self-thing as one is not only matter, but also thing is that we are thinking about it, how using it and how understand it. An anthropological approach to interpretation of material objects enables to explain the thing as carrier and image of human qualities, i.e. personages of culture. The data show that things as important means of cultural changes must be carefully considered in context of urgent tasks and challenges of globalizing culture.