Roland Végső opens up a new debate in favour of abandoning the very idea of the world in both philosophy and politics. Opening with a reconsideration of the Heideggerian critique of worldlessness, he ...traces the overlooked history of worldlessness in Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou.
The article argues for a revaluation of the politics of traumatic historical narratives by reconsidering the structure of the Freudian death drive. It claims that the drive is best understood in ...terms of the mutual imbrication of nostalgic and traumatic repetitions. This theoretical argument provides the foundation for an analysis of the structure of the so-called “post-Communist subject.” Relying on Giorgio Agamben's eschatological definition of photography, the article concludes with a discussion of a photograph that captures a symbolically significant moment of the 1956 Hungarian revolution: the destruction of Stalin's statue in Budapest on October 23, 1956.
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4.
All ears Szendy, Peter; Végső, Roland; Szendy, Peter
2017, 2016-12-01, 20161201, 2016
eBook, Book
An archeology of auditory surveillance combined with an analysis of representations of spying in works of literature, music, and film that provide philosophical reflections on the drives that animate ...listening: the drive for mastery and the death drive.
On Acosmic Realism Végső, Roland
Filozofski vestnik,
01/2021, Volume:
42, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In order to be able to raise the question of the “world” today in an effective way, we have to reactivate the Goethean categories of Weltliteratur and Weltschmerz for a critique of our own historical ...moment. We need to understand the phenomenon of Weltschmerz as a symptom of the impossibility of Weltliteratur. Going beyond the context of the original formulation of these categories, we could argue that something akin to the historical phenomenon of Weltschmerz emerges every time the ideological constitution of the world threatens to fail. Today, we live in an age of a generalised state of cultural disorientation that has produced its own Weltliteratur, which includes a wide range of discourses about the “world” – from officially endorsed theories of economic globalisation, to scientific treatises on the Anthropocene, environmental protest movements, philosophical pamphlets, all the way to world-historical conspiracy theories. Yet, an anxiety concerning the impossibility of world-formation in general is also recorded in these documents. In order to be able to capture our contemporary Weltschmerz, the article turns to the young Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the task of this age is to produce an “objective” (rather than subjective) Weltschmerz. However, the most effective tools to conceptualise this objective Weltschmerz come from the traditions of philosophical acosmism. It is a notable philosophical development of our times that some elements of the acosmic tradition have recently resurfaced in speculative realism. Thus, speculative realism could be described as a possible site of our contemporary Weltschmerz: its acosmic metaphysics is repeatedly tamed by a mournful longing for the world.
The Conspiracy of Objects Végső, Roland
Filozofski vestnik,
12/2020, Volume:
41, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The task this essay set for itself is a reconsideration of the status of the “object” in contemporary forms of philosophical realism that postulate “flat ontologies.” I argue that the theoretical ...construction of the “object” often comes about in these ontologies through a fetishistic disavowal that effectively makes these objects speak. As a result, the construction of the generalized field of objectivity (according to which everything that exists is an object) passes through a double articulation. On the one hand, since contemporary realism defines itself as a rejection of all forms of linguistic idealism, it also tries to shift the focus away from human language as the primary medium of the construction of objectivity. On the other hand, however, this demotion of language proceeds in these works simultaneously with the elevation of the concept of “translation” to an ontological principle: these non-linguistic objects exist through their perpetual translations of each other. The fetishistic disavowal at work in realism (we know very well that objects do not speak, yet we act as if objectivity had to be construed as a field of translation) introduces the modality of fiction into the very heart of objectivity. This fictional dimension constitutive of objectivity can be described through an engagement of the Kantian notion of “purposiveness.” I argue that these translations that supposedly constitute objectivity rest on the fundamental presupposition that guides the entire Kantian system: we must presuppose purposiveness even where we can detect no evidence of it at all. Hence, today, the theory of the “democracy of objects” must be supplemented by its necessary correlate, a theory of the “conspiracy of objects.”
Georges Bataille Rodolphe Gasché / Roland Végső
2012, 2012-10-24, Volume:
440
eBook
This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and ...philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs "low materialism." Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new "science" of phantasms.
The Naked Communist argues that the political ideologies of modernity were fundamentally determined by four basic figures: the world, the enemy, the secret, and the catastrophe. While the "world" ...names the totality that functioned as the ultimate horizon of modern political imagination, the three other figures define the necessary limits of this totality by reflecting on the limits of representation. The book highlights the enduring presence of these figures in the modern imagination through detailed analysis of a concrete historical example: American anti-Communist politics of the 1950s. Its primary objective is to describe the internal mechanisms of what we could call an anti-Communist "aesthetic ideology." The book thus traces the way anti-Communist popular culture emerged in the discourse of Cold War liberalism as a political symptom of modernism. Based on a discursive analysis of American anti-Communist politics, the book presents parallel readings of modernism and popular fiction from the 1950s (nuclear holocaust novels, spy novels, and popular political novels) in order to show that, despite the radical separation of the two cultural fields, they both participated in a common ideological program.
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10.
Infinite Judgment Végső, Roland
Central European Cultures,
12/2023, Volume:
3, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The article uses the idea of “infinite judgment” (borrowed from the field of logic) to reflect on the narrative techniques employed in Ádám Bodor later works, with a special focus on the novel The ...Birds of Verhovina (2011) and the collection Nowhere (Sehol, 2019). In a formal sense, the idea of infinite judgment breaks down the duality of the so-called positive and negative qualities of logical judgments (assertion and negation) by introducing a negative predicate into the structure of a positive proposition. Applying the same logic to Bodor’s prose, we can also grasp it as a poetic principle: the process of fictional world-creation does not follow the logic of either negation or affirmation and, through a subtle logical negation, opens up a series of infinite possibilities. This rhetorical strategy, in turn, becomes the appropriate vehicle for the articulation of a specific type of historical experience that we could designate as “potential history” (in opposition to the “actual” history of Eastern European dictatorships in the second half of the twentieth century). Bodor’s prose forces a confrontation with this potential history through narratives of transience and historical transformation whose ultimate horizon is human extinction.
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