THE HUMANISM CRISIS

Angelaki · 2025-03-04

Current generations are experiencing a sense of crisis as had not been felt for a century. But unlike the geopolitical tensions of the interwar period, today’s crisis is manifold. In the past, common wisdom dictated a return to the lost virtues. The contemporary world is out of joint, and the experience of displacement affects fundamental life categories, such as the security of home, understood both spatially, as the place one belongs to, and temporally, as the time of freedom, which modernity identified with the future. But the future now seems to evaporate or, what is the same, to run off into meaningless dilation. The twenty-first century’s assault on old-world structures and the rise of the network society have induced unprecedented cultural obsolescence. And nothing has been so displaced from the core of modern education as the humanities, which have been uprooted from their foundation in the classics.

The Witness’s Brew. On Imposture and Impostor Hunting

2023-07-10

Joan Fuster: de professió, assagista

2023-02-07

Número monogràfic dedicat al centenari del naixement de Joan Fuster, amb col·laboracions de Xavier Pla, Antoni Furió, Gustau Muñoz, Joan Ramon Resina, Toni Mollà, Enric Iborra, Francesc Viadel, Salvador Vendrell, Teresa Muñoz Lloret, Ernest Belenguer, Ferran Archilés, Pau Viciano, Antoni Rico, Josep L. Gómez Mompart, Jan Brugueras, Joan F. Mira, Martí Domínguez, Juli Capilla, Xavier Antich, Enric Balaguer, Enric Bou, Margarida Castellano, Antoni Defez, Anna Esteve, Maria Àngels Francès, Tobies Grimaltos, Pere Antoni Pons, Joan Ramon Resina, Mercè Rius, Quim Torra, Joan Manuel Tresserras i Josep Ballester.

Theo Angelopoulos

2022 · 2 citations

• Philosophy

The cinema of Theo Angelopoulos is celebrated as challenging the status quo. From the political films of the 1970s through to the more existential works of his later career, Vrasidis Karalis argues for a coherent and nuanced philosophy underpinning Angelopoulos’ work. The political force of his films, including the classic The Travelling Players (1975), gave way to more essayistic works exploring identity, love, loss, memory and, ultimately, mortality. This development of sensibilities is charted along with the key cultural moments informing Angelopoulos’ shifting thinking. From Voyage to Cythera (1984) until his last film, The Dust of Time (2009), Angelopoulos’ problematic heroes in search of meaning and purpose engaged with the thinking of Plato, Mark, Heidegger, Arendt and Luckacs, both implicitly and explicitly. Theo Angelopoulos also explores the rich visual language and ‘ocular poetics’ of Angelopopulos’ oeuvre and his mastery of communicating profundity through the everyday. Karalis argues for a reading

Introduction

2022-01-20

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to explore the relation between culture and the emergence and maintenance of that all-encompassing regulatory tool in modern and contemporary society. David Murillo’s contribution about the ever-present role of debt in shaping social conditions suggests implicit parallelisms between these two fields of social regulation. Although he does not raise the point explicitly, it is hard to oversee that economism supersedes more than replaces religion as general dispenser of norms and behavioral regulator. Christian Moser recalls Adam Smith’s assertion of the interpenetration of language, trade, and contract, which Smith traced back to the human capacity for rational exchange. Whether the economy has become a self-enclosed, autonomous signifying system or remains a subsystem of the broader cultural system that is coextensive with the artificial environment of human invention is in the end a moot question.

Luchino Visconti

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2022-01-01

Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) was one of Europe’s most prestigious filmmakers, who rose to prominence as part of the Italian neo-realist movement, alongside contemporaries Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. Famous for his elegant lifestyle, as friend of Jean Renoir and Coco Chanel amongst others, his vibrant technicolour dramas are also known for their decadence and stunning display of aesthetic mastery and sensory pleasure. Looking beyond this colourful façade, however, Resina explores the philosophical implications of decadence with a particular focus on three films from the late phase in Visconti’s production, Damned (1969), Death in Venice (1971), and Ludwig (1972). From the incestuous relationship between decadence and power to decadence as an outcome of straining toward formal perfection, Resina uncovers the unity and philosophical cohesiveness of these films that deal with different subjects and historical periods. Reading these films and their decadence in light of the time of filming and Visconti’s

The Short, Happy Life of the Novel in Spain

Princeton University Press eBooks · 2022-04-12

The Troubles of Production

2022-01-20

This chapter examines Ezra Pound’s economic theories as a response to the misery of the Great Depression and his attempt to promote his peculiar theory of money for adoption by the Italian fascist government. For all their extravagance, Pound’s schemes to provide economic stimulus and ensure the production and circulation of goods present similarities to aspects of policy in contemporary financial capitalism, particularly in his view of the detachment of the financial from the real economy, in which products are made and exchanged. His ideas for money that can be created by political fiat and can’t be capitalized bears some resemblance to such contemporary practices as the limitless printing of money and the introduction of negative rates by central banks. Similarly, Jean Baudrillard responded to the world crisis in the 1970s with a critique of production and what he saw as capitalism’s planning of scarcity. When Baudrillard turned to primitive exchange, he saw a process the exact reverse of capitalism. This essay explores the economic thinking of these two cultural theorists, paying attention to their views on postcapitalist economies without regard to the problem of production, which is either already solved, in Pound’s view, or rendered immaterial, according to Baudrillard, by the conversion from the limitless production of commodities to an unceasing exchange of signs mirroring the endless reciprocity of primitive exchange.

Between Logos and Myth: Anecdote and Category in Eugeni d’Ors’s Novella Gualba, la de mil veus

2022-03-21

Cultures of Currencies

2022-01-20

Introduction Joan Ramon Resina 1 What Does Money Signify? The "transvaluation of values" taking place in the relation between currency and language. Jan Söffner 2 The Cultural Currency of Semiocapitalism. On the General Law of Gift Exchange. Philipp Kleinmichel 3 Social Reconfigurations of Debt-Ridden Societies. David Murillo 4 Money, Society and Trust: Lessons from Crisis. Gabriela Badica 5 Rural Continuities in the Urban Revolution. Ethics of Work, Labor and Pay in the West African Savannah. Till Förster 6 The Bonfires of Money. Capitalism, Memory. and Iconoclasm. Germán Labrador 7 The Libidinal Investments of the Social Field. Elsie Mitchie 8 Unpredictability as an Economic Value Simona Škrabec 9 "Cultural Economy" and "Cultural Economics": Epistemological and Political Consequences of a Fatal Intertwinement. Giovanni Leghissa 10 "I have sworn an oath, that I will have my bond": Money. Law, and Pre-Legal Liability in Shakespeare and Kleist. Christian Moser 11 The Alchemy of Money. Money As a Standard of Value. Bruna Ingrao 12 The Troubles of Production. Ezra Pound and Jean Baudrillard on the Symbols of Exchange Joan Ramon Resina