After a brief introduction to the history of the Husserl Archives I focus on the methodological specificities in studying Husserl’s work on the basis of his manuscripts and of his archives. In a second step I expound on the effects that the current shift from an analogous to a hybrid analogous and digital archives is producing in the self-understanding of the practices of our institution. Particularly, developing digital technology means that the Husserl Archives are entering a new phase in respect (...) to how archival and editorial impulses will affect the presentation of Husserl’s writings. Finally, I offer some perspectives about how the planned virtual platform, which will give direct access to his manuscripts, is designed to promote a new understanding of Husserl’s specific process of philosophical writing, of his unique wording of thoughts. (shrink)

Starting from the peculiar tension between figure and writing in Walter Benjamin’s philosophical thought, my contribution aims to define the relevance of manuscripts, schemes, fragments and annotations for the definition of philosophical textuality. Analyzing Benjamin’s writings belonging to this genre, as well as the fragmentary observations belonging to Novalis’ Allgemeines Brouillon and Nietzsche’s Posthumous Fragments, the processual dimension of philosophical thinking will be emphasized. In this theoretical context the processual moment of textuality can be put in tension with the moment (...) defined by the work in its insular completeness. Finally, one wonders if the most appropriate form of philosophical thought in our era of digital production and transmission of knowledge does not really lie in the flow dynamics of textuality. In conclusion, it will remain to be clarified how the autographic moment of philosophy can be thought of in the digital age of knowledge. To this last extent, a good example would be eventually given by Walter Benjamin’s archive in Berlin that contains in fully digitalized form both edited texts and manuscripts. (shrink)

Philosophical poetry has had a long and distinguished history in different cultural traditions. These traditions have always interacted to some extent, but today the barriers between them have largely broken down. Savitri, an epic in English by the early twentieth-century Indian philosopher and poet Sri Aurobindo, is a notable outcome of the confluence of Eastern and Western civilisations. Based on a creative reworking of a legend from the Sanskrit epic, the Mahābhārata, it incorporates in its neo-Vedantic vision aspects of the (...) worldviews represented by the great philosophical poems of ancient, medieval and modern Europe. As vast in scope as any of these works, Savitri took shape over much of the poet’s life in a way comparable to Goethe’s Faust. A study of the stages of its composition reveals much about the author’s artistic, intellectual and spiritual development and gives insight into the poem’s autobiographical dimension. (shrink)

Philosophical texts regarded as «inspired» present special difficulties for textual editors and intellectual historians that can be mitigated by the study of archival documents. The works of the philosopher and yogī Aurobindo Ghose are considered important contributions to twentieth-century Indian literature and philosophy. Some of his followers regard them as inspired and therefore not subject to critical study. Aurobindo himself accepted the reality of inspiration but also thought that inspired texts, such as the Bhagavad Gītā, contain a temporal as well (...) as an eternal element. Aurobindo’s papers are preserved in the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Archives, which took shape during the 1970s. Editions of Aurobindo’s books published between his death in 1950 and 1977 were issued without consulting his manuscripts, early editions, etc., and therefore contain transmission errors, subjective emendations, etc. The editors of texts issued after 1977 followed the established methodology of textual criticism and so eliminated many obvious errors. Some of Aurobindo’s readers refused to accept the new editions, and agitated for the restoration of the earlier texts, going so far as to file legal cases against the editors and the administrators of his ashram or spiritual community. A nuanced approach to the editing of texts regarded by some as inspired must take the sentiments of readers into consideration while insisting on scholarly rigour. (shrink)

Over two hundred years after Immanuel Kant’s death, the first full, critical, and digital edition of his last manuscript is currently being completed by the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. This edition stands in institutional continuity with Wilhelm Dilthey’s monumental Akademieausgabe of Kant’s writings that was grounded in Dilthey’s lastingly influential concept of the national, literary-philosophical archive. The new edition showcases Kant’s dynamic writing process as a matter of investigation in its own right. As I argue here, it brings into view (...) the constitutive role of the archive for both texts and interpretative practices. A historical perspective that links the legacy of the Akademieausgabe with the digital edition of the Opus postumum highlights the changing role of the archive in emphasising or de-emphasising the manuscript’s resistance to certain appropriations and stylisations of Kant as a thinker. (shrink)

Does photography in its various facets lead to alienation or integration? This article is based on a Eurasian survey among photography students from India and Europe. After working definitions of the central terms, it looks at aspects that students have mentioned in connection with alienation – including the view of photography as a barrier or intruder and the adoption of an external perspective on the own culture through photography, up to an individual escape through photography. With regard to integration, photography (...) can open the gates to new experiences and allow growth and identity work, offer a common form of expression and go hand in hand with empathy and knowledge, which matches some aspects of Indian art theory. All in all, the answers of the Indian and European students were quite similar. It turns out that the more reflected people are about photography, the more they can benefit from it. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon is principally known as a great theoretician of race relations and decolonization, in particular through the two main books he published during his lifetime Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. What is less known is that he was in parallel a pioneering psychiatrist and an early and recognized theoretician of ethnopsychiatry. A volume of about a thousand pages of texts either difficult to access or presumed lost was recently published, following more than a decade (...) of research in archives located in different parts of the world. It reveals first the importance and originality of his thought as a scientist, and secondly the importance of this dimension of his work for the understanding of his political texts. This is shown on two points: 1) the role of violence in the decolonization process, when compared with Fanon’s texts on psychiatric internment, the phenomenon of agitation and the alternative model of social therapy and 2) the use of «identity» as cultural foundation for newly decolonized states, which he strongly criticised, when compared with Fanon’s systematic questioning of any personal «constitution» in his psychiatric and ethnopsychiatric work. (shrink)

This essay argues that Antony and Cleopatra’s pitting of Egypt against Rome is a cipher of aesthetic resistance to modern rationality. The coordinates are Adornian. Antony’s and Cleopatra’s complex identities elude the disenchanting, nominalist machinery in which diffuse indeterminacy necessitates conceptual imposition. Here, the individuals are essentially dramatized: sensate, embodied selves composed and expressed in relations of passionate recognition. The lovers’ deaths, and especially Cleopatra’s self-conscious theatre, rewrite the ascetic, dominative, and pseudo-theatrical rationality of Octavian Rome. The protest, the passion (...) and singularity, lives mainly through its expressive emphases – such as hyperbole – and the re-functioning of the very dominative roles and norms being opposed. This reflects the restricted but critical – aesthetic – status of early modern drama, and specifies its opposition to the deepening attack on sensate knowing in its world. (shrink)

The idea that Derrida kept silent on Marx before the publication of Spectres de Marx, in 1993, has become a commonplace in Derrida studies and in the history of Marxism and French 20th century political thought. This idea has often been accompanied by a certain representation of the relationship between deconstruction and dialectical materialism, and fed the legend of deconstruction’s «apoliticism» – at least before what some have called Derrida’s «ethicopolitical turn», usually dated in the early 1990s. Against this narrative, (...) this essay analyzes Derrida’s notorious «silence on Marx» before Specters of Marx from the perspective of the archives. Archival research transforms the narrative: Derrida’s «silence on Marx» was only «relative». Beyond the scene of publications, archives reveal another scene: multiple engagements with Marx and Marxist thought, marked and remarked in many archival documents – more particularly in a series of early seminar notes from the 1960s and 1970s. How does this archival scene transform our interpretation of Derrida’s «silence»? (shrink)

The article intends to retrace, from a historical-philological point of view, the main steps of Walter Benjamin’s unfinished research and works, conducted during his later years, dedicated to Charles Baudelaire. Setting Benjamin’s translation of the Ta-bleaux parisiens as the first result of his interest for the poet, the text delves into the composition process of The Arcades Project, from which the idea of a book on Baudelaire then takes shape. The article examines the crucial stages of this second project’s development (...) through the correspondence between Benjamin and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer especially: from the 1935 exposé for The Arcades Project to The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire, to the 1939 essay On some Motifs in Baudelaire. The focus is set, in particular, on the dialectical-constructive method that guides Benjamin in the composition both of the Passagen-Werk as of the Baudelaire-Buch and the essays. Finally, the article looks back over the transmission history of the project on Baudelaire, intimately bound to the one of the Passagenarbeit: the vicissitudes and findings of various manuscripts, of which the complete restitution of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe is soon expected. Therefore, the peculiar relationship between philology and philosophy of Benjamin’s experimental method is then examined further in depth; the configuration of the research object’s monadic structure according to a historical perspective, albeit in the context of a work that remained unfinished. (shrink)

Starting from the concept of Digital Earth, the article questions the effects that Google’s geo-spatial applications have produced on our daily relationship with information, and the way we experience the spaces around us. Its aim is twofold: on the one hand, I intend to examine the implications that bring Google’s digital maps closer to the invention of the print or telescope; on the other hand, I intend to explain, through a medio-anthropological investigation, how the map, as a medium of perception, (...) falls not only de facto, but also de jure, into the field of aesthetics. (shrink)

The paper describes the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s writing of text alternatives as it manifests itself in his manuscripts. Decided, undecided and cancelled alternatives are distinguished. Moreover, Wittgensteinian types of marking his text alternatives are described: this includes marking by writing the alternative phrase in parallel above line; marking change of order; separation markers; explicit comment; marking the alternative phrase by putting it between brackets or, most famously, double slashes. Finally, the phenomenon of bound text alternatives in Wittgenstein’s writings is discussed.

Is there a specificity peculiar to the “Foucault archives” that makes them a sensitive object for philosophical and critical thought today? Can we use the “Foucault case” to reflect more broadly on the question of the philosophical archive / archives – what does the creation of archives for philosophers imply in terms of the reception and re-actualisation of their thought? In this article, we will start with a description of the multiple Foucault archives existing today and the history of their (...) composition, as well as an initial discussion of their possible uses. We would then like to start from the concrete, material experience of the archives in order to ask a question that is more than methodological, ethico-political: would there be a “good use” of the archives of and by philosophers? More specifically, is there a “Foucaultian exception” which would require the Foucaultian, and probably philosophical, archives to be used in a broad sense, in a “different” way? We will plead for the construction of an ethic which is rather an “aesthetic” of the philosophical archives: the ability to bring out through the work on archives not something like “the good and true identity” of their author, but points of diffraction, unexpected faces, new writings. (shrink)

At the time of his sudden death in 1977, the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka left a large philosophical legacy with no will and testament. For the last 43 years, the editors of his Collected Works have been reconstructing a unified and thematically articulated oeuvre from the more than 10,000 pages found in his drawers and boxes. It should in the end include not only the texts published during Patočka’s lifetime but also his many unpublished manuscripts, fragments, variations, drafts of unfinished (...) philosophical projects, notebooks and letters. After demonstrating in which sense the death of the author coincides in Patočka’s case with the birth of his oeuvre, the article aims to show that the unity of Patočka’s work is not something given, but rather something to be artificially reconstructed, in an always disputable fashion, since the internal coherence of its various thematic divisions is necessarily itself a matter of ongoing interpretation. (shrink)

The paper seeks to outline the relationship between Geschlecht III and Derrida’s published texts devoted to the mark «Geschlecht» in order to detect the general strategy followed by Jacques Derrida into the construction of his archive during his lifetime. Indeed, we suppose that his archive has to be build in accordance with his deconstructive statements about the classical conception of the archive: a totalizing closure of a textual production able to trace it back to the unity of an ideal identity. (...) In particular, the paper aims to focus on a passage at the end of Jacques Derrida’s Geschlecht III, where the question of the animal in Heidegger comes in the foreground and in a way that is slightly different from what we already know through Derrida’s published Works and could impose a re-reading of its «entire» work. (shrink)

In this paper, we would like to illustrate how the conception of a third genre, “artidesign”, can represent: 1) The relationship between the cultural and conceptual contribution of craftsmanship and the consequent aesthetic and phenomenological implications of the size of the workforce in the three thematic areas of art, craftsmanship and design. 2) It should be a real system that is becoming concrete through the logic of design, production and consumption.

This article aims to investigate the reasons that push an author to rewrite a great classic, if the motivation of marketing is not pertinent. In the rewriting practice there are works that arise from deeper expressive needs and it would be completely wrong to explain them through purely opportunistic reasons; in fact, it is possible that the author uses the mask of the well-known character to express, by rethinking it, some complex, unexpressed, uncomfortable or difficult aspects of himself or society. (...) We will try to show the plausibility of this hypothesis through the analysis of one of the most successful rewritings of the Liaisons Dangereuses by Laclos, Le Mauvais genre by Laurent de Graeve, trying at the same time to highlight one of the implications related to the connection between fiction and truth. (shrink)

Reflections upon artistic activities as technique require an exhaustive examination in aesthetics. This paper provides an attempt to sketch out a possible connection between skills related to making art and aesthetic thinking. By means of phenomenological insight, the function of technique is pursued consistently with the considerations of technique as subordinate to a global performative skill or as its development into a general principle. This framework ends in accounting for the notion of craft and its relationship with art. Further, craft (...) encompasses the scope of technique in all its manifestations, since the boundaries of art are broadened to reach the most comprehensive outlook of human activities. While in Formaggio this task is accomplished through the idea of artistry, Pareyson expounds the features of an art theory within the unitary notion of formativity. Finally, the function of technique accounts for an ethical implication of human doing. (shrink)

In contemporary human and social sciences, it has become almost a commonplace to attribute to objects and artefacts the features of personhood and subjectivity. In the last decades, significant attempts have been made, in different disciplines, to show how things and material realities have the power to act upon the world and to transform human cognition as well as social processes. In order to describe the transformative power of things, scholars have then recurred to the semantic sphere of action and (...) will, to stop seeing agency anthropocentrically as a solely human property, by recognizing to inanimate entities, if not intention and desire, at least the role of social «agents» or «actors». By focusing on the recourse to the notion of «agency», I will single out some of the internal tensions that still inhabit this scientific trend, and, by drawing on the notion of «performativity», introduced by J.L. Austin and developed by Judith Butler, I will suggest a way to develop further the entanglement between material culture and the construction of identity. (shrink)

Speaking generically of crafts from an economic point of view means referring to a field that encompasses different sectors and professions, an agglomeration of very different activities in terms of economic structure, performance and needs. This paper, however, aims to analyse only some of the artisan worlds, i.e. traditional trades, art & crafts which, even if manifesting themselves today in new ways, interest us more than others because of the genius loci they have subsumed. This is because this is the (...) main feature that allows us to count on their survival in a present and in a future in which even large industries are looking with great interest at limited and customized production, and where not only major companies but also local and regional entities are rediscovering activities closely related to the “sense of place”, such as crafts, and including them in their identity branding policies. After an introductory look at the role of craftsmanship today in the “creative economy”, the paper describes the problems facing this productive and cultural sector today and outlines the challenges for the near future. (shrink)

Bauspiel: ein Schiff by Alma Siedhoff-Buscher is one of the most important toys of the twentieth century, designed and built in 1923 when the designer was part of the Bauhaus Woodcarving Workshop. Having become an icon of an entire era, a symbol of a design utopia, Siedhoff-Buscher’s Bauspiel remains an object that makes us wonder not only for the fascination it emanates, its perennial aesthetic relevance that still legitimates its production and marketing up until nowadays, but for the strength of (...) its evidencing and its ability to force us questioning ourselves about who a child is, and therefore, obviously about who the man is. Mimesis, game, toy thus become the dimensions that Bauspiel manifests to the highest degree, in which anthropological questioning and aesthetic analysis are intertwined in the same research. (shrink)

Society Must Be Defended is a collection of Michel Foucault’s courses at the College de France in 1976. In this volume, Foucault discusses the emergence of a new technology of domination called biopower. It is a power that is not “individualizing”, but “massifying”, that is directed at man as a member of a “species”. Biopolitics exerts control over relations between the human races. Yet, some critics claim that Foucault’s biopower does not address colonial societies and problems. This paper argues that (...) Foucault’s theory of biopower could be applied to the postcolonial discourse, too. To trace Foucauldian biopower in postcolonial literature, the authors of this article have focused on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. In this paper, the plot and the dialogue of Forster’s novel is studied based on Foucault’s theory of biopower as discussed in his Society Must Be Defended. It is concluded that in Forster’s novel, it can be noticed that the English power, which dominated early twentieth century Indian society, employs biopower to subjugate the Indian population. The English officials control India not merely by means of disciplinary institutions, but by manufacturing norms for an entire race which are explainable in terms of Foucault’s theory of biopower. (shrink)

The entwining of the craft worker’s body both with the materials of her artistic process and with the craft object itself is central to an understanding of craft aesthetics. This paper addresses embodied craft in Lia Cook’s weavings, which foreground the artist’s body and the embodying dynamics of woven art. Cook’s work is read in relation to the Lady of Shalott, a fictional textile artist portrayed in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem by that name, and the painted versions of it by (...) William Holman Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelite artists. Cook’s work emerges as an elaboration upon Pre-Raphaelite ideas for the digital age, and a useful model for understanding the embodied dynamics of craft aesthetics. (shrink)

This article discusses multisensorial aesthetic experience of environmental materiality via a craft process. The locally situated study investigates the interrelations of humans and environment through soil. In focus is how craft practitioners use their material sensitivity to reflect the idea of interdependency in the context of the contemporary environmental discourse. This is done through presenting an artistic research project in which craft is used to explore the human imprint in a particular geological environment, the Venice Lagoon. The case study Traces (...) from the Anthropocene: Working with Soil combines environmental research methods of contaminated soil and artistic research in the field of ceramic art. Craft making provides an embodied way to engage with the local environment. The cultural value and environmental disruption of the lagoon area forms a context for reflecting the aesthetic experience to better understand how we are active participants, in continuous flux with our material environment. (shrink)

Between the first and the second volume of The History of Sexuality there is a gap of eight years in which Foucault did not publish anything except interviews. Analyzing some of those interviews, the article reconstructs the reasons that lead Foucault to abandon the thematization of power’s constraints imposed on the subject and start to elaborate an ethics in which the subject can be rid of him or herself thorough a care of pleasure. Arguing how this change does not represent (...) for Foucault a denying of his previous work but its evolution, the article shows that, despite Foucault’s attempt to establish a discourse other than psychoanalysis, his ethics of sexuality unwittingly returns to the “force” that psychoanalysis recognizes as animating sexuality. (shrink)

The academic databases such as Scopus or Web of Science are commonly used to measure performance of universities, departments, and even single researchers. However, to what extent such databases can represent real outcomes of aforementioned units especially in the field of art and humanities where local languages and cultural phenomena play an important role is not clear. This article focuses on understanding how research in this field, as seen through the case of aesthetics in non-English speaking countries, Finland in particular, (...) is represented through major academic databases. This question is tackled by applying a data mining approach. First, we identify major academic databases, and afterwards test what is the proportion of Finnish aesthetics presented in those databases. Our approach allows us to critically look into representation of local art or humanities related research in general academic databases, and understand to what extent we can trust those sources in representing real pictures of the field. Results strengthen the well-known fact that most common academic databases draw a rather poor picture. In more particular this article shows that there are certain factors that influence analysis of the field: spread data, multilingual content, non-standard categorization, variability of venues, different publishing patterns, and unsuitable impact metrics. However, our results propose that alternative databases can be formed from university or meta-data databases. We also provide further directions for designing of such databases. (shrink)

In the 1960s Goffredo Parise made use of a series of interesting similes in order to describe men and women of his time. The similarity between human being and animal makes room for comparisons with objects, that would mean the end of the traditional physiognomy. Can this rhetorical choice be considered a lucid and visionary anticipation of post-humanism?

To overcome the art-craft dualism, a root and branch reform of a traditionally hegemonic view on human activities is needed. By focusing on Gilbert Simondon’s fundamental claims, the article aims to display the most important consequences of a more in-depth understanding of poiesis, especially in relation to its reintegration with the sphere of praxis and collective ethos and to its connections with the idea of creativity. The field of production will lastly be associated with the concept of “living practice”, regarded (...) as important for the definition of a contemporary poietics. (shrink)

This contribution proposes how beholders may internally process unfinished works of art. It does so by considering five of Michelangelo Buonarroti’s interrupted sculptures and pointing out their empathic and imaginative potential. The beholder focused on the surface, I propose, is inclined to mentally simulate the artist’s gesture that drafted the sculptures through the visible graphic signs of the chisels. This inner simulation takes place within the activation of various brain networks, located in the brain’s motor system. Renaissance authors associated the (...) observation of the unfinished to learning and, as this article shows, this assumption seems to find confirmation in recent neuroscientific studies on mirror neurons and imitation learning. In this way, the empathic engagement established between the beholder and the work of art observed – as well as the role played by embodied simulation and imagination in this kind of visual perception – clarifies how the incompleteness can also have that pedagogical function recognised by Giorgio Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini. (shrink)