The paper is a modest attempt at a careful assessment of Werner Hamacher’s version of deconstruction as a reading strategy which centers upon the idea of the afformative caesura. In order to probe the potential and the possible limits of Hamacher’s strategy, the author presents a Hamacherian reading of one of Paul Celan’s poems, titled “Mauerspruch,” a poem brimming with references to Walter Benjamin’s work. In the first part of the paper the author shows the effectiveness of Hamacherian perspective. In (...) the second part, however, following suggestions of the poem itself, the author shows that the perspective should be extended in order to include two crucial categories: the category of the image and the category of memory. Thus, ultimately, the assessment of Werner Hamacher’s strategy results in a praise and a modest proposal of its amendment. (shrink)

The book is devoted to the thought of one of the 20th century's most interesting philosophers of religion. Heschel, a traditional Polish Jew who became a modern thinker, was also an impressive prophet of interreligious dialogue.

In the first part of the paper the author briefly revisits two of the most important traditions that stand behind the contemporary conceptualizations of affect: the Deleuzian tradition and the Lacanian one. Having pointed to the most important features of the two lines of thinking affect, as well as to certain difficulties that arise within them, the author proceeds to offer his own simple conceptual model that would be operative in thinking about film experience. The model involves feeling, emotion and (...) affect as three distinct phenomena; the concept of “ex-spectator” is introduced in order to account for the crucial difference between emotion and affect. In the second part of the paper, the model is tested against the later films by Quentin Tarantino. The films are presented as “affective”: by skilfully operating with “reflective images” they are able to deconstruct the subject of the ex-spectator into the split-but-real, affected self of the true spectator. (shrink)

The author begins by analyzing Walter Benjamin’s quarrel with George Kreis and the respective visions of culture advocated by both sides of the debate. Then, he offers a reading of a poem by Paul Celan in which the poet sides with Benjamin, but also makes his position more complex, ultimately offering a paradoxical figure of “the secret openness” or “open/public secrecy” as a remedy against the “mystery” of the Georgians. This idea can be seen as developed in Jacques Derrida’s understanding (...) of secrecy, which the author proceeds to analyze. The secrecy as a deconstructive rift in the public discourse, a split which tears it open, can be seen as opposed both to the undemocratic mystery and to the seeming openness of globalatinization. After considering the formal, political and religious aspects of secrecy, the author ends with showing how literature as such is the most powerful medium of Derridean secret. (shrink)

In the first part of the paper the author offers a frank reassessment of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He dismisses the Tractatus as philosophically irrelevant but points to the unshaken validity of the main tenents of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, especially the idea of speech acts being inevitably interwoven with extralinguistic, bodily practices. In the second part the author identifies radical limitations of Wittgenstein’s thought, which he tries to eliminate by combining it with Foucault’s understanding of power and Derrida’s understanding of iterability. (...) The latter link opens the path to viewing language-games as theatrical spectacles. In the third part of the paper the author illustrates the revised model of language-games/spectacles by relating it to two films, Scenes from a Marriage and Faithless. This connection enables the author to enrich the model with an affective dimension which comes to the fore in Bergman’s analysis of the breakup of a marriage. (shrink)

The paper discusses the possibility of a cinematic image which represents future catastrophes, while avoiding ideological entrapments and self-serving fantasies. Taking a Japanese ghost story and a brief note by Walter Benjamin as his dual starting point, the author first attempts to define the possible dangers inherent to the very idea of showing the future, the most important being the danger of the premature, cathartic discharge of the spectator’s anxiety in a sadistic/voyeuristic show. After discussion of the mechanisms of this (...) discharge, the author offers an analysis of a positive example, namely Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf. According to the analysis, Haneke manages to avoid the traps by constructing reflective images that make the spectators watch themselves as they are searching in vain for the cathartic images of the catastrophe. (shrink)