_Adaptation_ is the film this article is about. The rules of electronic articles require that it be quoted with underscores. 'Adaptation' is the subject and title of this articleand so should be indicated with inverted commas. Adaptation, without underlining and without quotation marks, is just adaptation, the thing itself. And here comes the question: what is Real Thing Itself? _Adaptation_ addresses the question of what the real, the primary, is, and its relation with that which is secondary -- with the (...) many interpretations, versions, understandings, adaptations. (shrink)

This article explores the ethics of physical and verbal interpersonal relations which express themselves as displacements and intersections of genres in Pedro Almodovar’s film Speak to her . Ethics must be understood here in the strict sense of care for the self, which always presupposes care for the other. I will argue that the film suggests the demetaphorisation of corporeal experience as a path towards ethical relations between people. I argue too that the film proposes a feminisation of the masculine (...) as a step towards a higher level of humanism and mutual comprehension. (shrink)

This article explores the "New Man" as a politically and philosophically charged ideologeme at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s in Germany and Russia. It argues that approaching the New Man as an allegory in Walter Benjamin's sense of the term is helpful in understanding its status at the crossroads of the political and utopian discourse of modernity. This article analyzes the New Man as utopian allegory to reassess some of the current categories in more (...) recent debates on political utopianism. (shrink)