Robert Sinnerbrink
Planet Melancholia: Romanticism, Mood, and Cinematic Ethics
Key words: Melancholia, von Trier, film-philosophy, film aesthetics, mood
Lars von Trier's Melancholia offers a fascinating exploration of cinematic romanticism and the aesthetics of cinematic moods. It presents a devastating portrait of melancholia, dramatizing the main character Justine's [Kirsten Dunst's] experience of a catastrophic "loss of world" that finds its objective correlative in a sublime cinematic fantasy of world-annihilation. In this article, I analyse some of the aesthetic and philosophical strands of Melancholia, exploring in particular its use of romanticism and presentation of cinematic mood. Von Trier explores not only the aesthetics of melancholia but its ethical dimensions, creating an art disaster movie whose sublime depiction of world-destruction has the paradoxical effect of revealing the fragility and finitude of life on Earth.
Robert Sinnerbrink
Planet Melanholija: Romantika, razpoloženje in filmska etika
Ključne besede: Melanholija, von Trier, filmska filozofija, filmska estetika, razpoloženje
Lars von Trierjeva Melanholija ponudi fascinantno raziskovanje filmske romantike in estetike filmskih razpoloženj. S pomočjo dramatizacije katastrofične izkušnje »izgube sveta« glavne junakinje Justine [Kirsten Dunst's], nam predstavi uničujočo podobo melanholije, ki najde ustrezni konec v sublimni filmski fantaziji izničenja sveta. V pričujočem članku analiziram nekatere estetske in filozofske sklope Melanholije, še posebej Von Trierjevo raziskovanje uporabe romantike in predstavitve filmskega razpoloženja. Von Trierer ne raziskuje namreč zgolj estetike melanholije, temveč tudi njene etične razsežnosti, s čimer ustvari umetniški film katastrofe, katerega sublimna upodobitev uničenja sveta ima paradoksni učinek razkritja ranljivosti in končnosti življenja na Zemlji.
330 Knox Peden
Cube-Shaped Planet
Key words: Anthropocene, Paul Bowles, Immanuel Kant, space, time, aesthetics
References to the Anthropocene and the ontological shifts it has putatively wrought abound in humanities scholarship today. This essay looks at several works of fiction and criticism - chiefly Paul Bowles's 1949 novel, The Sheltering Sky - in order to advance a series of claims about the difficulty of representing the relationship between nature as a domain of causality beholden to natural laws and another, nominally human or rational domain comprising actions, intentions, and variously justifiable or unjustifiable reasons. It is mainly interested in exploring the desires that motivate efforts to represent this rela-
tionship in contrastive ways and insists in the end on the central place of representation in rendering such dilemmas intelligible and their presuppositions contestable.
Knox Peden
Planet v obliki kocke
Ključne besede: Antropocen, Paul Bowles, Immanuel Kant, prostor, čas, estetika
V današnjih humanističnih vedah ne manjka sklicevanj na antropocen in ontološke premike, ki naj bi jih ta domnevno sprožil. Esej se osredotoči na več fiktivnih in kritičnih del -predvsem na roman Paula Bowlesa The Sheltering Sky iz leta 1949 - zato da bi podal vrsto trditev glede težavnosti predstavljanja razmerja med naravo kot področjem kavzalnosti, ki se podreja naravnim zakonom, na eni strani ter nominalno človeškim ali razumskim področjem, kamor sodijo dejanja, namere in različni upravičeni ali neupravičeni razlogi, na drugi strani. Predvsem pa ga zanima raziskovanje želja, ki motivirajo prizadevanja po kontrastnih načinih reprezentiranja tega razmerja in na koncu vztraja na ključni vlogi re-prezentacije, ki naredi upodabljanje takšnih dilem razumljivo, njihove predpostavke pa problematične.
Justin Clemens
Syllable as Syntax: Stephane Mallarme's Un Coup de des
Key words: Stephane Mallarme, Un Coup de des, Aristotle, Alain Badiou, Edgar Allan Poe, counting
I-
w
m <
Un Coup de des is one of the masterworks of modern literature, and a kind of summa of ^^ Stephane Mallarme's lifework. It could not have been better served by writers and thinkers: on the one hand, it immediately transformed the field for working poets as different as Paul ^^ Valery and Christopher Brennan, as for so many more thereafter; on the other, a strong lineage of European philosophy registered the poem as an event for thought, encompassing Maurice Blanchot, J.-P. Sartre, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques 331 Ranciere, Alain Badiou, J.-C. Milner, Quentin Meillassoux, and many others. Confronted by this sequence of commentaries by poets and philosophers, a contemporary reader could be forgiven for experiencing a methodological and intellectual impasse. How could one add to this sequence of readings except as a supernumerary number that could always be another? Yet how could one also not feel that the sequence itself demands another numbering or enumeration of the operations of the poem? This paper sketches out a sequence of hypotheses regarding the foundations of Mallarme's poem in a new relation that he forges between syllables and syntax.