Articles

We are accustomed to thinking of death as the ultimate finality. Existential philosophy, including that of Martin Heidegger, has held death to be the absolute limit against which it is possible to think life. Even more so, he held, does death serve to define our humanity, since we, as a species, are the only ones able to contemplate our own finitude. In Morning and Evening the author, critic, and recent Nobel laureate Jon Fosse tears open a rift in the hitherto sutured fabric of liminality that distinguished existentialists from other philosophers, and that has divided humans from animals, and the living from the dead. In this essay we examine how this short text connects with and yet critiques Heidegger's view on liminality, and how it points to a perspective we cannot but call theological in its assessment of life, death, and our place between and beyond these worlds.

This essay presents Wolfgang Schirmacher's philosophy of education. As a "living philosopher" Schirmacher's thought should be regarded as standing at a critical and engaged distance to official, consecrated philosophy. Thus, Schirmacher's living philosophy is conceived as explicable both through scholarly essays as well as other kinds of academic praxis. Particularly relevant is his founding and then directing the programme in Media Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). At the core of philosophy there is a lacuna, a certain silence: the present text contextualises elements of Schirmacher's relation to the thought of Martin Heidegger as a necessary, productive silence and regards it as constitutive of any relation between master and student. Crucially, this essay seeks to ascertain how the philosophy programme at EGS can be perceived as a product of Schirmacher's philosophy. Analogous to the way the truths of a living philosophy can never be separated from the life – the form – of the philosopher, so the philosophy programme at EGS sought to integrate the form of each course with its critical content: Schirmacher's philosophy programme emphasised bringing up and bringing forth as much as the more traditional transmission of knowledge. Subsequently, this philosophy programme can be seen as a precise and logical outcome of Schirmacher's thought.

Ingmar Bergman's middle years – from the late 1950s to the early 1970s – were a period of great creativity, but also of irreparable destruction on a private and artistic level. This paper takes stock of a film immediately preceding his great international breakthrough (with Persona in 1966), namely The Silence (1962). Rendering, in Bergman's own words, "God's silence," the film also thematises absence, wordlessness, and the void in at least three additional senses: showing a child's entry into the Symbolic Order, The Silence demonstrates the absence that is constitutive of this passage; giving an account of a specific relation between a master and his apprentice, the film shows a concrete example of the wordlessness at the core of their communication. Moreover, as an attempt to seek out the paternal figure, the film demonstrates the necessary void at the core of the new order – a community governed by silent praise.

The present article reconnects two of Ingmar Bergman's films from the mid '60s to notions of anxiety, alienation and creativity. Shame, a film set in a village ravaged by war, provides the viewer with three senses of transversality: (1) as a crossing of the ego's boundaries; (2) as a sexual and political transgression; and (3) as an intervention of an abstract power. To Søren Kierkegaard, despair and anguish are key emotions to eclipse the sense of powerlessness brought about by depression and alienation. In Hour of the Wolf, the main character follows his calling to pursue his art at the expense of his romantic relationship. This summoning has an ambiguous character, since we cannot fully decide if it functions as a liberating or demonic force.

In his influential study Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson makes the claim that a novel conception of time is inaugurated by the introduction of nations: in contrast to the agrarian sense of time as cyclical and characterised by recurrence, the time of the nation is linear, homogeneous and empty. This notion of temporality is drawn from an earlier work by Walter Benjamin, who posits the linearity of traditional historiography with what he refers to as Messianic time, which is to be understood as a temporality where the moment of redemption is an ever-present potentiality. This essay sets out to delineate these three notions of time, and then goes on to discuss this third temporality in greater detail. First, it can be considered as a psychological time, or a mind time, governed by traumatic encounters. This sense is shown as a strictly logical time in the work of Jacques Lacan. Second, it is a time of grace, in the sense that it is governed by necessity. Blaise Pascal and the Jansenists went to great lengths to refute the dominant notion of grace as sufficient. If there is an instance that determines events, then the means by which this instance governs can only be a necessary cause. Finally, the work of Benedict Anderson, and particularly a later article in his corpus, is reconsidered. Here, Anderson argues that the effects of globalisation have to some extent rendered the temporal linearity of nationalism obsolete. It is therefore apt to consider what a time after nationalism will be like.

This essay discusses how spectacular sports are framed in a national, epic world of fathers, firsts and bests, and put to use in regulating desire by narrating the fundamental fantasies that hold the subject together. Spectacular sports provide allegories of the excessive body, and these embodied narratives are meticulously produced through an individualising training machine designed to deliver moments of excess. Sports produce phantasms of peak moments and phallic dominance, and symbolise a conquest of youth, women and the working population. We ask if the subject may experience a kind of subjective destitution by the loss of a fundamental fantasy from watching sports and what the effects of such an experience may be. Can televised football induce in the viewer a sense that these images are mistaken as objects of desire, and give rise to the truth effects of "full speech"?