(2010). On the Meaning of Life in the age of the Most Meaningless Death. Angelaki: Vol. 15, The Unbearable Charm of Fragility Philosophizing in/on Eastern Europe, pp. 67-85.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 27.2 (2003) 471-475 [Access article in PDF] Cosmopoiesis. The Renaissance Experiment, by Giuseppe Mazzotta; xvi & 106 pp. Toronto Italian Studies/Goggio Publication Series. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001; $35.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. There is a sense in which this (most recent) book by Giuseppe Mazzotta might be seen as having been born out of his previous book The New Map of the World: The Poetic Philosophy (...) of Giambattista Vico (Princeton University Press, 2000). For there is something unmistakably Vichian in Mazzotta's "reading" of the Renaissance as it has been revealed in his Cosmopoiesis. As a matter of fact, it is in the "Preface" to his book that Mazzotta explicitly gives a number of reason why Giambattista Vico's philosophy of history could be taken as a valuable and quite promising starting point for a better understanding of "the Renaissance experiment": "The first is that he theorized art as poiesis or making and as the work of the imagination. The second reason is that he lucidly understood the Renaissance as the ambiguous time of both extraordinary achievements and inexorable decadence. The third reason is that Vico obliquely suggests how we can move beyond the limits in our current understanding of the Renaissance" (pp. xv-xvi). Mazzotta is deeply sympathetic with this cluster of Vichian insights, which insights will constitute, so to speak, the primum movens behind his own interpretative approach to the Renaissance world, and he takes as his major task in Cosmopoiesis to creatively develop and boldly expand them.The book is actually a collection of four ample essays (resulting—largely—from the Goggio Lectures the author delivered at the University of Toronto in the fall of 1999): "Poliziano's Orfeo: The World as Fable"; "Ariosto and Machiavelli: Real Worlds/Imaginary Worlds"; "Adventures of Utopia: Campanella, Bacon, and The Tempest"; and "The Ludic Perspective: Don Quixote and the Italian Renaissance." All of these essays are "variations on the same theme," attempts at putting under a careful scrutiny one of the most fascinating aspects of the European Renaissance: the topic of "the invention of the world and the notion of making through utopias, magic, science, art, and the theatre. These are the imaginative elements that characterize the paradigm shift from the Middle Ages to the modern ages ushered in by the Renaissance" (p. xiii). [End Page 471]As such, the Renaissance marks, in Mazzotta's view, the spectacular emergence of the myth of world-making (cosmopoiesis), a myth with a tremendously wide success, a myth that was eventually to become one of the very foundations on which our own world is built. When Dr. Faust, in his quite unorthodox work as a translator, was looking for an "appropriate" equivalent of Logos, as it appears in St. John's Gospel, he unreservedly dismissed the Word (das Wort), only to embrace the deed: Am Anfang war die Tat ("In the beginning there was the deed"). Making, in the most general sense of the word (and along with the numerous symbols, representations, and values associated with it), is not for the modern man a cultural trait among others, but it is, so to say, a matter of life and death, a question of self-definition andultimate identity. For making is not only about the world one lives in (world-making), about conferring upon it a new content, or a new meaning, appearance, etc., but—maybe more importantly—making is also about the very identity of the one who lives in that world (self-making), about her or his most intimate constitution. Mazzotta considers that in order for a historian to understand exactly man's position in the world at a given moment in history s/he has to take seriously into account the deeper, sometimes obscure, theological and metaphysical presuppositions hidden behind—and, actually, making possible—the current, immediately visible cultural representations: "The modern world is no longer, as it was in the Middle Ages, a book that pre-exists us and whose signs we seek to decipher in the light of precepts drawn from biblical hermeneutics. The modern world [...] is made by human... (shrink)

The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism unfulfilling. The "crisis of religion" is itself a form of religious life. A sense of complex, subterraneous interaction between religious, heterodox, secular and atheistic experiences has thus emerged, which makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating to study, and this is what Religion in Contemporary European Cinema does. (...) The book explores the mutual influences, structural analogies, shared dilemmas, as well as the historical roots of such a "post-secular constellation" as seen through the lens of European cinema. Bringing together scholars from film theory and political science, ethics and philosophy of religion, philosophy of film and theology, this volume casts new light on the relationship between the religious and secular experience after the death of the death of God. (shrink)

Tradução para o português do capítulo 'Philosophy as Palimpsest: Archetypal Knowledge in Siris', retirado de: The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment. Fordham University Press, New York, 2006, p. 40-56,.

Existe já uma grande quantidade de literatura dedicada à presença na filosofia inicial de Berkeley de alguns assuntos tipicamente platônicos (arquétipos, o problema da mente de Deus, a relaçáo entre ideias e coisas, etc.). Baseados em alguns desses escritos, nas próprias palavras de Berkeley, assim como no exame de alguns elementos da tradiçáo platônica num amplo sentido, sugiro que, longe de serem apenas tópicos isolados, livremente espalhados nos primeiros escritos de Berkeley, eles formam uma perfeita rede de aspectos, atitudes e (...) modos de pensar platônicos, e que, por mais alusivos ou ambíguos que esses elementos platônicos possam parecer, eles constituem um todo coerente e complexo, desempenhando um papel importante na formaçáo da própria essência do pensamento de Berkeley. Em outras palavras, sugiro que, dadas algumas das ideias apresentadas em suas primeiras obras, foi de certo modo inevitável para George Berkeley, em virtude da lógica interna do desenvolvimento de seu pensamento, chegar a uma obra táo abertamente platônica e especulativa como Siris (1744). (shrink)

This essay proposes a close look at the tradition of martyr-philosophers in the Western world and advances the claim that the death of these people has a distinct philosophical significance. For various reasons, these philosophers place themselves in limit-situations where they cannot use words anymore to express themselves, but have to turn their own flesh into a radical means of expression. Their dying thus becomes an extension of their work, and the image of their violent deaths comes to be regarded (...) as an inseparable part of their heritage. First, I discuss Socrates as the founder of the tradition of “philosophical deaths” in the West; his gradual “taming” of death in Plato's Apology is discussed in some detail. I then introduce a modern case of “Socratic death,” that of Jan Patočka. Finally, I map out the cultural and social mechanisms, as well as some of the phenomenological preconditions, presupposed by the notion of “philosophy as an art of dying.”. (shrink)

Traduçáo do artigo "'God is dreaming you': Narrative as Imitatio Dei in Miguel de Unamuno," artigo publicado originalmente Janus Head –Interdisciplinary Studies in Continental Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts , Volume 7, Issue 2.

Cinema has a long history of engaging with the theme of sacrifice. Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. It is on screen that the new grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Sacrifice can provide stories of loss and mourning, betrayal and redemption, death and renewal, destruction and re-creation, apocalypses and the birth of new worlds. The contributors to this (...) volume are not just scholars of film but also students of religion and literature, philosophers, ethicists, and political scientists, thus offering a comprehensive and interdisciplinary approach to the relationship between cinema and sacrifice. They explore how cinema engages with sacrifice in its many forms and under different guises, and examine how the filmic constructions, reconstructions and misconstructions of sacrifice affect society, including its sacrificial practices. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities. (shrink)

This article introduces the topic and offers an overview of the issue. The author argues that despite the dismantling of the Iron Curtain in 1989 there is still a gap of indifference that separates Western from Eastern Europe when it comes to the exchange of ideas and the dissemination of knowledge. While East European intellectuals most often feed themselves on West European authors, intellectual fashions and cultural products, their Western counterparts pay comparatively little attention to what comes, intellectually, from the (...) East – as though the traffic of ideas between Eastern and Western Europe is only one way. On closer inspection, however, this may be due in part to a sense of existential fragility, insecurity and dislocation that characterizes the “East European mind” itself. The author traces briefly this characteristic in the works and opinions of such authors as Czesław Miłosz, Arthur Koestler, Milan Kundera, Krzysztof Kieslowski and Mircea Eliade. (shrink)

The volume draws attention to the unknown and unexplored areas, trends and ways of thinking under the communist regime. It demonstrates how various bodies of knowledge were produced, disseminated and used for a wide variety of purposes: from openly justifying dominant political views to framing oppositional and non-official discourses and practices.

The main focus of this special issue is on marginality, a multifaceted concept that requires a cross-disciplinary approach. The papers selected here deal with marginality in the formation of the epistemic canon (?the mainstream?) and the production of knowledge in the humanities and social sciences. By employing the vocabulary of marginality (?marginal,? ?margins,? ?luminal,? ?threshold,? as well as dichotomies such as ?minor-major,? ?center-periphery?), we propose a shift from a discussion of the canon in terms of just one category of ?marginals? (...) (a certain race, class, gender etc.) to considering this complex concept in terms of a plurality of players and factors related to marginality broadly defined, some of which have little or nothing to do with power structures and dichotomies. Marginality is thus conceived of as an epistemic category and not as a power status. (shrink)

Despite philosophers’ growing interest in the relation between philosophy and literature in general, over the last few decades comparatively few studies have been published dealing more narrowly with the literary aspects of philosophical texts. The relationship between philosophy and literature is too often taken to be "literature as philosophy" and very rarely "philosophy as literature." It is the dissatisfaction with this one-sidedness that lies at the heart of the present volume. Philosophy has nothing to lose by engaging in a serious (...) process of literary self-analysis. On the contrary, such an exercise would most likely make it stronger, more sophisticated, more playful and especially more self-reflexive. By not moving in this direction, philosophy places itself in the position of not following what has been deemed, since Socrates at least, the worthiest of all philosophical ideals: self-knowledge. This book was originally published as a special issue of The European Legacy. (shrink)

Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe charts the intellectual landscape of twentieth century East-Central Europe under the unifying theme of 'precariousness' as a mode of historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects them somehow from a collapse into (...) nihilism. An interdisciplinary study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has been long overdue. Not only is it charming and worth studying in its own right, but with the re-integration of the 'new Europe' into the 'old' one and the emergence on the 'Western' European intellectual scene of many authors from the 'East,' such a culture will also shape the European mind of the 21st century. This volume decodes and explores this culture of 'precariousness' from the complementary angles of philosophy, political theory, intellectual history and literary studies. Expert contributors look at a wide range of topics, from philosophical martyrdom to collective suffering to geographical fatalism, and explore the works of key authors in the field including Cioran, Kołakowski, Kertész, Bauman and Žižek. This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: The Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. (shrink)

In this article I consider George Berkeley's Alciphron from the standpoint of the literary techniques and rhetorical procedures employed, as evidence for placing this composition within the tradition of Christian apologetic rhetoric. The argument develops around three main issues: 1) Berkeley's employment of the traditional rhetorical tool of attacking his opponents using their own weapons; 2) Berkeley's resort to a perennial tradition of pre‐Christian or non‐Christian wisdom, in order to validate his Christian‐theistic claims; and 3) Berkeley's ‘argument from utility’ . (...) These three theses are discussed in light of the history of Christian apologetic rhetoric, with references to the works of St. Augustine, St. Justin Martyr, Origen, St. Thomas Aquinas and other Christian authors. (shrink)

:Given its capacity to stimulate the imagination and resonate across a wide spectrum of human experiences, sacrifice has always attracted filmmakers. From Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc to Pasolini's Mamma Roma to Tarkovsky's Sacrifice to many of Ozu's films to Kar Wai Wong's In the Mood for Love or to Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves and Bruno Dumont's La Vie de Jésus, to give just a few examples, sacrifice has nourished, informed and shaped filmmaking. Sacrifice is a (...) fundamental human act, and cinema has always, in some way or another, danced around it. Yet that's not all. In a world like ours from which the gods have mostly withdrawn, but people haven't stopped feeling the need to believe, in an important sense film has taken over the myth-factory. It's on screen that the post-Christian grand narratives are sketched, the new myths rehearsed, and the old ones recycled. Our contemporaries may no longer be church-goers, but they go to the movies religiously. And the sacrificial theme makes.. (shrink)

:This article has a dual purpose. On the one hand, I propose a Gnostic reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique. In this interpretation, the figure of the puppeteer, who is eventually revealed to be the maker of the film's story, stands for the Gnostic demiurge. He creates puppet-people only to discard and sacrifice them when he is done performing. On the other hand, I use the film as a springboard for launching a broader philosophical conversation, existentialist in (...) nature, on the notion of world as farce. Participants in this conversation are figures such as Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky and Cioran. Weronika's sacrifice is discussed from these two complementary standpoints. (shrink)

One of the greatest merits of Costica Bradatan's book is that it explores a cluster of topics that represent the untold, the unuttered, almost the unutterable in contemporary philosophy: death, dying, sacrifice and self-sacrifice. Ours is a culture of 'happy endings' and, in this respect, most philosophers of today are the spokespersons of their time. Bradatan is a dissenter. His book approaches death head-on. Indeed, what makes this project fascinating is the fact that, while the book purports (...) to be about 'dying for an idea,' it in fact sings praise to life. Death, in Bradatan's view, is something that brings new meaning to life, a renewed intensity to the act of living. Simon Critchley, New School for Social Research, New York, USA. (shrink)

Costica Bradatan proposes a new way of looking at the influential 18th-century Anglo-Irish empiricist and idealist philosopher. He approaches Berkeley's thought from the standpoint of its roots, rather than from how it has come to be viewed since his time. This book will interest scholars working in a wide variety of fields, from philosophy and the history of ideas to comparative literature, utopian studies, religious and medieval studies, and critical theory.This other Berkeley read and wrote alchemical books, daydreamed (...) of "Happy Islands" and the "Earthly Paradise" and depicted them carefully, designed utopian projects and spent years trying to put them into practice. Bradatan discovers a thinker deeply rooted in Platonic, mystical, and sometimes esoteric traditions, who saw salvation as philosophy and practiced philosophy as a way of life. This book uncovers a richer Berkeley, a more profound and spectacular one, and, it is hoped, a more truthful one. (shrink)

Este livro propõe uma nova maneira de olhar para a filosofia do bispo e filósofo irlandês George Berkeley (1685-1753), mais conhecido pela negação da existência da matéria e pela defesa do idealismo e de teses empiristas. O autor, Costica Bradatan, aborda o pensamento de Berkeley do ponto de vista de suas raízes e influências em vez de como ele passou a ser interpretado posteriormente. Como o título sugere, o livro constitui um retrato alternativo de Berkeley, diferente da imagem (...) predominante formada a partir de uma leitura de tendência analítica, que privilegia as suas obras da juventude, especialmente o Tratado sobre os princípios do conhecimento humano (1710) e os Três diálogos entre Hylas e Philonous (1713). Este outro retrato de Berkeley procura mostrar um filósofo que leu e escreveu livros sobre alquimia, que elaborou projetos utópicos e buscou as “ilhas felizes” e o “paraíso terrestre”. Bradatan procura mostrar que a nova atitude de Berkeley em relação ao mundo material ecoou a teologia dualista dos cátaros; que seu pensamento estava enraizado nas tradições platônicas, místicas e esotéricas; que ele via a filosofia como uma espécie de salvação e a ser praticada como um modo de vida. Bradatan retrata um Berkeley muito mais rico e realista, um pensador mais profundo e espetacular. Além de ser um estudo sobre o pensamento de Berkeley em particular, com análises das suas últimas grandes obras, Alciphron, ou o filósofo minucioso (1732) e Siris (1744), o livro é um excelente exemplo da compreensão do pensamento de um filósofo à luz da história da filosofia. Este livro é de interesse para estudiosos que trabalham em uma ampla variedade de campos do saber, desde filosofia e história das ideias até literatura comparada, estudos utópicos, estudos religiosos e medievais e teoria crítica. (shrink)

The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving (...) from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. (shrink)

The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving (...) from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy of Pauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement. (shrink)

Harry M. Bracken - The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 177 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Harry M. Bracken Arizona State University Costica Bradatan. The Other Bishop Berkeley: An Exercise in Reenchantment. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. pp. x + 227. Cloth, $55.00. This new book on Berkeley attempts to add a new perspective on Berkeley's continuing importance. (...) In this review, I will comment only on the author's main intention "to do justice to the historical truth, as far as this is possible, by pointing to.. (shrink)