Is what is taken for critique today genuinely self-questioning or merely the confirmation of the moral consensus? In the neoliberal culture of the audit, has critique been deprived of its role as check on ideology? And does preference for impact-oriented research produce political compliance rather than independent critical thought?
The outset for the paper is the widespread notion that literature is better suited than philosophy for understanding and relating experiences of evil. A problem with this supposedly post-metaphysical notion, exemplified by an essay written by María Pía Lara, is that it implies a metaphysical conception of an inherent goodness in literature. To find a more critical approach, the paper turns to Theodor W. Adorno and his comments on poetry after Auschwitz. From his perspective evil is just as present in the interior of every artwork, as in society in general - literature is no less evil than anything else. Due to its material character, however, every artwork does harbour a possibility of understanding and reconciliation that philosophical thinking lacks. Finally, two examples are used to illustrate Adorno’s points: Michael Haneke’s film Funny Games, and the Swedish novel Äldreomsorgen i övre Kågedalen by Nikanor Teratologen. Both could be seen as two extremely cruel narrations of evil, totally lacking all reconciliation. The point is that a reconciliation can be found in the interior of the works, however. In that way, the two works demonstrate a sensibility of the immanent violence of their own form.
What does it mean that the author increasingly turns into a commodity? The article contains a discussion of some academic responses – taken from celebrity studies and autofiction studies – to this tendency. The texts discussed share an effort to rethink authorship, but nonetheless the implicit result is a reinforcement of a traditional, romantic notion of the author. Above all there is a lack of reflection on subjectivity in the authorship discourse, where concepts like “author”, “subject”, “self” often are treated as synonymous. In that sense the academic responses are part of the commodification they ought be studying. On another level this commodification could be understood as an expression of a more general crisis of subjectivity: there is a need of stories about autonomous subjects just because of a more extensive desubjectivation. Finally the article turns to Theodor W. Adorno and Jacques Rancière in order to find a more dynamic and apt understanding of subjectivity.
There’s a saying that sport is just a game, meaning that it’s not that important if you lose. Although it is easy to dismiss this as a false statement, the essay argues, with the German philosopher Theodor W Adorno, that it is the fact that sport is a game, a play, that gives it a critical potential. Like all games sport has the power to reveal that what we regard as real and necessary could be different. Sport has the potential to release rationality itself from its forced instrumentality – in that sense it resembles art. However, since sport is captive in a larger instrumental project this potential can’t be realized. In Adorno’s perspective, a child’s play is different in that sense: it opens itself to a “beyond” in the most mundane things, which thus disclose a dangerous promise that everything might be different.
The article is an attempt to show that Lars von Trier’s film Dogville (2003) may be understood as an effort to break down the pact of goodness between the viewer and the film. Every work of art, the author argues, implies a silent contract between the subject (the viewer, reader, etc.) and the object (the film, book, etc.), saying that no matter how horrible the story depicted is, the aesthetic experience is ethically edifying to the subject. Drawing on the French philosopher Alain Badiou, the author contends that this implicit ethics is reactive and nihilist: the goodness of art depends on a more fundamental idea of evil. The discussion circulates primarily around a crucial moment in the end of the film, when the whole setting is turned around, and the merciful victim becomes a cold blooded executioner. One way to understand this moment is to say that von Trier rips the ethical contract, with a very confusing result. What von Trier tells us is, in a way, that we’re all stuck in a rudimentary fiction of goodness, which is kept up by contrasting narratives of evil.
This article is a discussion of Theodor W. Adorno's comment, in the beginning of 'The Essay as Form', that interpretations of essays are over-interpretations. I argue that this statement is programmatic, and should be understood in the light of Adorno's essayistic ideal of configuration, his notion of truth, and his idea of the enigmatic character of art. In order to reveal how this over-interpreting appears in practice, I turn to Adorno's essay on Kafka. According to Adorno, the reader of Kafka is caught in an aporia: Kafka's work cannot be interpreted, yet every single sentence calls for interpretation. This paradox is related to the gestures and images in Kafka's work: like Walter Benjamin, Adorno means that they contain sedimented, forgotten experiences. Instead of interpreting these images, Adorno visualizes the experiences indirectly by presenting images of his own. His own essay becomes gestural.
The article tries to question the premises of the critical subject. Is critique, understood as a subjective judgement, still possible, or have we reached a medial and political situation where this is no longer an option? The article turns to Horkheimer and Adorno and confronts their ideal of a critical theory with the criticism directed to it from Peter Sloterdijk. Somehow the critical thinking which the Frankfurt School inaugurated seems to have taken two directions today: either a cynical, resigned one, or an activist one. The article argues that both may be understood as attempts to preserve the subject, in the same way as Adorno was accused of by Sloterdijk. In that perspective, the possibility of critique may appear to be non-existent. However, if critique is understood, with Luc Boltanski, not as an activity performed by an individual critic, but rather by an institution, by society, the situation appears in a different light. This is, the article argues, the necessary step to take: to liberate criticism from individualism, and understand the individual critic not as the origin of critique, but as its medium.
Love has traditionally been understood either as an objective, transcendentforce, or a subjective ability. Through a number of steps,the article argues that both these options have lost their credibility due to changes in the media through which love is performed. First, the article demonstrates how the attempts,in the life sciences, to explain love biologically or physically reproduce a traditional romantic ideology. Then, the implications of the inflation of explicit love declarations, and the consequences of internet dating, are discussed. What these examples amount to is the fact that the medium is brought to the fore. A consequence of this is that the romantic ideology is strengthened, while the premises of romantic love – the autonomous subject and the transcendent objectivity – are weakened or even dissolved.
The article confronts contemporary ecocriticism with Adorno’s concept of natural beauty. If ecocriticism may be understood as a reaction to climate change – the gravity of the situation turns the academic into an activist – a fundamental question often remains unanswered: why should we turn to art if we are facing ecological disaster? The article then presents Adorno’s answer to this question, an answer that is closely tied to his theory of natural beauty. A crucial point in Adorno’s discussion of nature is that we no longer have access to it. We are stuck in a second nature which deprives us of all contact with first nature. But the closest we can get to this absent nature is art, and more precisely natural beauty, which contains both a memory of something lost, and a promise of something yet to come. Therefore the aesthetic experience is a moment where the subject may approach something unknown – something which is not subject, not human – in a non-dominating way. In that sense art may be our best option to get out of the anthropocentrism which prevents us from even understanding the current situation. After a comparison with contemporary theorists like Timothy Morton and Claire Colebrook, the article finally turns to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice in order to illustrate what the strange combination of memory and promise in natural beauty may look like in practice.
The article analyses the constitution of subjectivity in Ruben Östlund’s film Force Majeure (2014). At the centre of attention stands the male protagonist who is uncapable of reconciling his inner nature with the external expectations. If the film may be un-derstood as a critique of existing middle-class conventions, it also reproduces a highly conventional ideal of the self-identical subject. The article argues that this confusion or irony is an expression of a Cartesian subject – still prevalent in the film – in crisis. A neglected aspect of Descartes’ theory is that the autonomy of the subjects presupposes the existence of God. The problem for Östlund’s char-acters is that there is no God. Still, they act as if he, or as if any au-thority might, legitimize their subjectivity. Thus, the whole existence becomes a series of performances. The idea of an inner nature cor-responds with the notion of an outer nature. The latter is certainly very present in Force Majeure, but at the same time this nature is constantly problematized. On an allegorical level, the film may thus be read as a comment on the Anthropocene, a state where we no longer know neither what “nature”, nor “culture” is.
Förmodligen har ingen bok påverkat skandinavisk litteraturvetenskap mer, under de senaste fem åren, än Toril Mois Revolution of the Ordinary: Literary Studies after Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell. Den statusen gör det angeläget att reflektera både över dess styrkor och eventuella brister. Varför är det en viktig bok? Och vilka invändningar väcker den, fyra år efter utgivningen? Det var också ungefär så uppdraget löd inför det seminarium som först föranledde den här texten: peka ut något positivt, något oklart och något negativt i Mois bok! Eftersom den är så innehållsrik, och eftersom den handlar om frågor som upptagit mig under lång tid, var svårigheten snarast att begränsa sig.