Search results for "aesthetics"
showing 10 items of 552 documents
Embodying the nation: The production of sameness and difference in national-day parades
2018
National-day parades constitute a common format of embodying the nation. Composed of numerous distinct bodies of persons with individual characteristics (being short or tall) and multilayered societal roles (being a nurse, a father etc.), parades primarily evoke an image of sameness, while they also display differences. Focusing on the preparation of the Burkinabè national-day parades, this paper explores practices of disciplining bodies and making them appear similar and/or different. We ask how national-day parades mirror and produce images of the nation and how they treat differences like sex, ethnic belonging and occupation. The paper highlights that performances of the nation, as prod…
Block 21 and the Pensabilità of the Representation of Auschwitz
2012
Abstract Building on the assumption that the Memorial in Honor of Italians Fallen in Nazi Extermination Camps (situated in Auschwitz I, Block 21) expresses the meta-reflexive inclination that strengthened the twentieth century (the capacity of that century to think of itself as a subject), this article aims to highlight and illustrate the dual philosophical significance of the Memorial. From the perspective of the philosophy of history, this philosophical significance, which has a symbolic value, leads us to investigate an organic and historically embodied conception of deportation. From the perspective of the aesthetics of memory, this philosophical meaning offers a new framework for the …
Schlock horror and pillow punches
2019
As an introduction to this special themed journal issue on violent clowns, this paper provides an overview of the 14 contributions that examine the comic appeal of violence in culture. It also ties...
Aesthetics and Bildung
2012
The article approaches the educational potential of aesthetics and the arts by reviving the notion of Bildung and suggesting an interpretation that emphasizes both its social character and the role of artworks and other aesthetic expressions. Bildung is a dialogic process where human relationships are crucial both for the exchange and the birth of insights. Artworks are described as images (Bilde), which act as intermediaries and points of reference in expressing, communicating and negotiating cultural values. In developing the argument, Immanuel Kant's analysis of aesthetic judgment is read together with his ideas on enlightenment, highlighting the social and political character of judgmen…
Becoming a Gamer: Performative Construction of Gendered Gamer Identities
2021
This article examines how women construct their gameplay identities in relation to the hegemonic “gamer” discourse. The article is based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with women who occupy central roles in the Finnish gaming industry. We deploy Judith Butler’s theorization of performative identity construction to examine how the women negotiate their identity in relation to the hegemonic gamer discourse, focusing on how they both embrace and resist the hegemonic, masculine constructions of gameplay. The study shows the dynamics surrounding the gamer identity. While women submit to the hegemonic gamer discourse, reproducing the masculine gamer notions to gain recognition as a viabl…
The “corporealization” of the nation: notions of the unclean and viscosity in the nationalist discourse of Spanish fascism
2017
ABSTRACTThe present article focuses on the particular case of the nationalist discourse of Spanish fascism during the Spanish Civil War and the immediate postwar period (1936–1941), in order to explore one specific aspect of it: the characterization of the enemy Republican nation that was to be fought against as unclean and viscous or sticky. The aim here is to analyse what meanings these references possessed and what they can tell us about the general processes of construction of discourses of identity. For this purpose, use is made of certain propositions developed by sociology and anthropology, as a basis upon which to develop the hypothesis that the use of the aforementioned references …
Kashubian Lake Calling
2020
This study leads the reader to some remote Kashubian villages, located on the shores of Lake Słupino, Poland. The residents of these villages have witnessed uncanny transformations of their once familiar lake in recent years. Through changes in color, odor and matter, Słupino has obtruded itself to call out the problem of pollution. How does the lake express itself? How does it affect the everyday life of the inhabitants? To approach the specific interaction between the lake and the inhabitants (thus non-human and human), the author conducted sensory ethnography and conversed with residents affected by the problem. The categories call, care and Stimmung are used to analyze the gathered empi…
Reframing belonging : affective localism and the early fiction of Reino Rinne
2017
ABSTRACTThe early fiction of a novelist and journalist born in the north of Finland, Reino Rinne (1913–2002), is illustrative of the post-war interest in a redefinition of cultural belonging. The aim of this article is to offer a reading of Rinne’s works that throws light on the way they exemplify a post-war articulation of affective localism. What is especially characteristic of the affective localism produced in Rinne’s early fiction is the deployment of certain narrative elements, realism as an aesthetic regime, tropes of spatial belonging and historical myths that are endowed with affective charge. A comparison between Rinne's first novel Tunturit hymyilevat. Kuvaus Lapista 1900-luvun a…
On Thinking the Tragic with Adorno
2016
This article seeks to provide a template for understanding the tragic dimension of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophy through a reading of his early collaborative work with Max Horkheimer, the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). While Adorno’s view has often been considered to be tragic, little has been done to reconstruct the tragic dimension of his thought. I argue that the view of the human condition, presented in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is founded on metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical convictions that have structural similarities with the positions held by theorists and philosophers of tragedy and the tragic. Since traces of these tragic elements can be found throughout Adorn…
Figuras de la ausencia. Narrativas y estéticas de la desaparición forzada en Chile
2022
En este trabajo se describen algunas de las operaciones de representación a través de las cuales se han generado, a lo largo del tiempo, narrativas y estéticas en torno al impacto de la desaparición forzada en Chile. A partir del análisis de textos poéticos, el artículo describe un paisaje social caracterizado por la presencia de nombres sin cuerpo y de cuerpos sin nombre. Analiza en relación con ello tres tendencias mayores en los intentos de dar forma al impacto de la desaparición, a través de la puesta en relación de imágenes fotográficas, textos literarios, propuestas artísticas y narraciones audiovisuales. En primer lugar, se acerca a aquellas estéticas que hacen de la ausencia del cue…