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Ethics and the Politics of Truth. Hito Steyerl and Michel Foucault
Bierhanzl, Jan
The documentarist turn in visual art reintroduces the question of the relationship between a work of art and truth. However, rather than the truth of the work in the sense of mimesis or authenticity, it is the politics of truth. In a double entendre: documentary forms express power relationships but being themselves a political act they may represent resistance against the power relationships. This generally political approach to truth in art falls, in our opinion, within at least two philosophical-political traditions. The first is Marx and Marxism and the question of the relationship of a work of art to social circumstances. Regarding that Hito Steyerl explicitly espouses Michel Foucault, in step two we will try to refer the issue of the relationship between a work of art and truth to the three fundamental axes of Foucault’s thought — power, knowledge and the subject.
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Dynamics of Everyday Life in Dialogue with Emmanuel Lévinas
Jandová, Tereza ; Sokol, Jan (advisor) ; Bierhanzl, Jan (referee) ; Novotný, Karel (referee)
The main objective of this research is to look at the topic of everyday life from a dynamic perspective. The definition of everyday life that this thesis stands upon, i.e. the presence of a subject in the world with the other(s) outlines also two main sources of its dynamics: the world and the other. The essential aim of this thesis is to show that the different attitudes towards the world and the other in the works of Husserl and Lévinas consequently influence the understanding of the everyday life as such, as well as the requirements it imposes upon the subject. The chapter dedicated to Husserl presents his concept of the world as a horizon, the irreplaceable position of perception in our access to the world and the creation of the other within the subject itself. On the contrary, Lévinas stresses the separation of the subject and he understands the world and the other as inherently belonging to this never-ending process. The motive of dependence and responsibility of the subject for the other belongs to the most significant differences between the two philosophers. Whereas Husserl proposes us a subject in the world which he accesses via perception and in which he encounters the other, Lévinas shows us subject that is born to the pre-reflexive and intersubjective world from which he first has to...
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Roots of Existential Phenomenology of Simone de Beauvoir
Štěpánek, Daniel ; Fulka, Josef (advisor) ; Bierhanzl, Jan (referee)
The theme of our work is concentrated on basic sources of inspiration of french thinker, Simone de Beauvoir. As we are trying to show, ways of conceptualization of human existence, that are common to works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre, are main focus stones, on which is being build individualization of existential phenomenological thought of Simone de Beauvoir. Therefore, our interpretation is aimed on making visible those themes, that are most important as ilustrations of these interpretations. To achieve this goal we are using She Came to Stay, the first novel of Beauvoir, where we are seeing first manifestations of main themes of her later works.
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The impossible words. Reflexions around the space of literature
Carrasco, Mariana ; Dufourcq, Annabelle (advisor) ; Bierhanzl, Jan (referee)
Abstract. We propose to think in this study about the space of literature. The overcoming of other's otherness in our consciousness, triggers at the same time the birth of time in its movement towards the future, and the revelation of the incomprehensible. The other one would open a gap that reveals us the content of the impossible in immediate experience. The willingness to say this revelation ( the impossible in front of which we find ourselves ) becomes the guiding principle of writing. Yet, writing must use words and wordsoperate by implementing an idealizing reduction. Words are power: they abuse any object they thematize. The arising question is then, how to make words differ from their daily use and give up their murderer power, give up the possibility they say. The attempt of automatic writing (letting words be free) does not satisfy us . What we propose , instead, from Blanchot's reflexions, is a work on words , trying to remove them as words. This aiming the impossible work, however, can only be accomplished in a space where the other rules, and which we will access by losing ourselves. Key words:Blanchot, literary space, time, other, encounter/meeting, night, death, impossible.
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A fractal journey. Towards a symbolic phenomenology of the atomistic revolt
Molina García, Erika Natalia ; Novotný, Karel (advisor) ; Bierhanzl, Jan (referee)
Abstract. A fractal journey. Towards a symbolic phenomenology of the atomistic revolt. We propose the construction of a particular narration of atomism since its beginning with Democritus (460 BC.-370 BC.) until this day. Not intending to be thoroughgoing with such a wide history but aiming nevertheless to be rigorous, we open a path through the long life of this cosmological drive running in every field of science and philosophy by using a method that we call "symbolic phenomenology", in reference to our principles and themes, our limits and possibilities, to the gestures of our analyzes. The four Elements, the numbers, the u-topia, the earth and the expeausition (Skin-Show, Nancy, 2000) are consequently developed as symbols to gradually fill the notion of an atom whose meaning in the usual language has been deprived of its past and of the discontinuity that we identify as its source. By this intuitions we go forward and we discover what it could mean to have an atomistic approach to the world and which the last sprouts of this approach are: Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy. Both philosophers being in a constellation that indicates us a direction, a new philosophical possibility: The phenomenology of touch. Key words: atomism, symbolic phenomenology, fractality, phenomenology of touch, expeausition.
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Ethical signifying in late Levinas
Bierhanzl, Jan ; Novotný, Karel (advisor) ; Calin, Rodolphe (referee) ; Bensussan, Gérard (referee)
The paper here presented attempts to retrace the course of the ethical signifying. Although the main characteristic feature of this movement of signifying is the « for-the-other », we show that following the double phenomenological method called concretisation-andemphasis, Levinas accomplishes this movement by means of other features: « unique sense », « starting from the self », « despite oneself », « the other in the same », « I am an other », « for nothing » and « by the other ». The chapter II brings a borderline feature « one-for-all-the others » which articulates ethics with justice. It has an ambivalent status between brotherhood (responsability for the close neighbour and the distant one) and justice (relation between equals) and is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition for the genesis of language. Eventhough, this list is not exhaustive, but simply indicative. This paper is not anything more than a digression in the movement of ethical signifying, an infinite movement, which precedes diachronically every attempt to give an account of it and interrupts the sense that the author believes putting in words. Then the investigations here presented can be interpreted as different modalities of the Un-saying (Dédire in french) of the Said which consists in putting in evidence the exception of the...
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Language as ethics according to Levinas
Bierhanzl, Jan ; Kouba, Petr (referee) ; Petříček, Miroslav (advisor)
For Emmanuel Lévinas, language is a pure communication with exteriority, which precedes language as a system of differences and references. The paper here presented attempts to interpretate this primacy of pure communication as a prerequisite of such a theory of "signifying" which would be an alternative against the common structural approach to language as an apersonal system. The correlation between "signifying" and ethics, as would also be possible to describe the essence of language according to Levinas, furthermore implicates certain scepticism against a purely theoretical speech, which leads the author to a conception of philosophy as the wisdom of love. The final section of this paper brings a selection of texts from the work of Yves Aulas, a philosopher with mental disease, who remarkably exemplifies Levinasian method of ethical reduction of theory.
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