Inkarnieren

Das von den Herausgebern verfasste Editorial zur vorliegenden Ausgabe der ZMK 8/1 (2017)

The paper discusses the concept of courage, starting from the question of how it is possible that a category, which seems to permeate the history of philosophy, currently loses its relevance and influence. It identifies the reason for this in the Aristotelian definition of courage as a male and military virtue, and subsequently confronts it with a new definition, trying to imagine what female courage could be like.

In the years following the First World War, commissioned by the German Museum in Munich, the projection planetarium was developed as an immersive model of the universe at the Zeiss plant in Jena. In it, a long history of celestial globes, armillary spheres, astrolabes, and mechanical planetaria resonated, which had served as astronomical demonstration objects since ancient times. For the first time, however, this task was associated with a simulation of man’s spaciotemporal being-in-the-world.

How is it that the flagship store of a technology company presents itself as a public art hall, while the branch of the Louvre in Nord-Pas-de-Calais looks like the user interface of an iPad? The paper provides an analysis of the Louvre Lens and illuminates the project in terms of its stunning aesthetic similarities in material language, structure and atmosphere to recent Apple Stores. Furthermore, it attempts to decipher the cultural and mental- historical codes and argues that an epistemology is developing here which comprehends the world as a simultaneous symbolic system.

The essay discusses the question in which sense there are continuities between the pre-Soviet, the Soviet, and the post-Soviet phase of Russian culture. It discovers in the rejection of the bourgeois value system an important constant factor. Even if originally rooted in the specific orthodox Christian sensibility, it helped prepare the Soviet revolution and survived even after 1991. From the Song of Igor’s Campaign to Tolstoy’s dramas, Eisenstein’s films and his film theory, and Maxim Kantor’s iconic interpretations of the late Soviet Union and its aftermath the essay tries to unveil crucial features of Russian culture.

Jean-Luc Nancy im Gespräch mit Natalie Eder, Lilly Kroth und Martin Eleven.

Dieses Programm ist rein militärisch und lässt die politische und soziale Frage vollständig außer Acht, denn dafür ist hier kein Raum. Es ist im Übrigen selbstverständlich, dass die Revolution zum Nutzen der Arbeit gegen die Tyrannei des Kapitals vollzogen wird und dass sie die Gesellschaft auf der Grundlage der Gerechtigkeit wieder errichten muss. …

»Wir sind keine Blanquisten und keine Anarchisten, obwohl wir Blanqui für einen großen Revolutionär halten«, schrieb die RAF in ihrem Manifest Das Konzept Stadtguerilla von 1971 und offenbarte mit diesem Verweis bereits die ganze Ambivalenz ihrer Unternehmung.1 Die geforderte Organisierung von bewaffneten Widerstandsgruppen in der Bundesrepublik bemühte sich zugleich um Anschluss und Distanz gegenüber jener revolutionären Tradition zur Zeit des Zweiten Französischen Kaiserreichs, die ihr ein gutes Jahrhundert vorausging und unzertrennlich mit einem Namen verbunden ist: Blanqui. …

Just as the theological notion of incarnation, the media-aesthetic term ›embodiment‹ implies a transition from an immaterial principle to something genuinely material. Aesthetic embodiments are increasingly discussed under the keyword ›reenactment,‹ which aims to re-experience a historical situation and thus make it more accessible. Reenactments, however, do not have to be bound exclusively to such a logic of identity; instead, they can also produce excessive, hypermimetic effects, as can be shown with reference to the obsession rituals of the Hauka and their cinematic adaptation in Les Maîtres Fous by Jean Rouch.

Studies in 18th century poetics and aesthetics of the monstrous have so far been concerned almost exclusively with the paradigm of ›feminine imagination.‹ This paper, in turn, focuses on Holbach’s and Diderot’s theories of ›monstrogenesis‹, which articulate a radical break with the model of imagination, similarity and authorship. One of their most interesting aesthetic consequences is the new thinking of monstrosity as it appears at the end of the 18th century in Goya’s paintings.

The paper compares two fetishistic experiments with puppets of the 20th century. On the one hand, there is Oskar Kokoschka’s much discussed attempt to replace the lost Alma Mahler with a life-size doll. On the other hand, the paper treats the secret books of Swiss hermit Armand Schulthess, populated by hundreds of erotic women, which are artfully glued, sewn and folded together. However different the underlying fetishistic ritual may be, the two groups show a fundamental agreement: In both cases, the process of incarnating becomes a chain of operations, translating the image into the register of a mimetic ontology of transformation.

Spoils – intentionally reused architectural fragments – refer to something that no longer exists and re-present it materially. As a former part of the absent, they refer back to their original objects in their new context. They embody abstract concepts, authorization and authentication. In the examples presented, different ways of referring to the original monuments are discussed, ranging from formal references to excessive embodiment and complete loss of shape.

The rejection of mimesis, understood as a depiction’s claim on imitation of nature, has been a characteristic feature of modern aesthetics and epistemology since the end of the 19th century. At the same time, there are also dispositives, such as habitat dioramas, which creatively maintain the traditionally mimetic ideal in the space of knowledge-building institutions such as museums of natural science. These supposedly anachronistic dispositions are reflected in media-philosophical terms with regard to their dimensions of mimesis production and are related to Adorno’s understanding of mimesis.