The aim of the paper is the comparison of the conceptions of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, which should serve as a basis of the further contemplation of the relationship between the thinking and experience. The shared critical view of the phenomenological interpretation of experience leads both philosophers to an alter- native conception, in which experience transcends thinking and in face of such an experience the reality is an alterity. However, the experience of alterity, which under- lines the wholeness and (...) temporal unity of all human thinking, is conceived differently, resulting in different conceptions of subjectivity: With Levinas the domi- nating role is played by humankind as the opposite of the nonhuman, while with Blanchot the dichotomy is dissolved. His conception is thus a challenge to conceive the experience, thinking and reality beyond the human/nonhuman dichotomy. (shrink)

This article is an account of a lecture-performance presentation held in the context of “Contradictions as a Method,” an international Bertolt Brecht symposium that took place in November 2019 at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. As three speakers engaged with theatre in different ways, we were inspired by the dialogical structure of Brecht’s play Buying Brass and staged a similarly structured conversation. This conversation imitated and transposed the form in which thespians and the philosopher meet in Brecht’s original (...) text. However, we decided not to perform characters from the play, but to speak from our own professional perspectives. Consequently, we focused on the current problems in theatre that we have met within our professional engagement, not specific problems mentioned in the original play. Yet, during the rehearsals, it came to light that there were many overlaps between the themes and characters of Brecht’s Buying Brass and the discussion of our live conversations. Therefore, we decided to use explicit references to some parts of the original Buying Brass play in our staged lecture-performance. (shrink)

This book explores the complex and multi-layered relationships between democracy and play, presenting important new theoretical and empirical research. It builds new paradigmatic bridges between philosophical enquiry and fields of application across the arts, political activism, children's play, education and political science. Play and Democracy addresses four principal themes. Firstly, it explores how the relationship between play and democracy can be conceptualized and how it is mirrored in questions of normativity, ethics and political power. Secondly, it examines different aspects of (...) play in urban spaces, such as activism, aesthetic experience, happenings, political carnivals and performances. Thirdly, it offers examples and analyses of how playful artistic performances can offer democratic resistance to dominant power. And finally, it considers the paradoxes of play in both developing democratic sensibilities and resisting power in education. These themes are explored and interrogated in chapters covering topics such as aesthetic practice, pedagogy, diverse forms of activism, and urban experience, where play and playfulness become arenas in which to create the possibility of democratic practice and change. Adding extra depth to our understanding of the significance of play as a political, cultural and social power, this book is fascinating reading for any serious student or researcher with an interest in play, philosophy, politics, sociology, arts, sport or education. (shrink)

[Dream, body and spirit. The topology of experience].

Three speakers engaged with theatre in different ways got inspired by the dialogical structure of Brecht’s Buying Brass and staged a similarly structured conversation. This conversation imitated the way how thespians and intellectual met in Brecht’s original text, but it was thematically focused on the current socio-cultural context. The research question was: How can we today make use of Brecht´s dialectic methodology in order to re-think the institutional situation of theatre as a starting point of social transformation? Which contemporary philosophies (...) can help in this re-thinking? Is theatre interested in them and is there any transformational potential in the opposite direction: from the theatre practice to the philosophical accounts of the contemporary world? The fragment collection under the title Buying Brass, unfinished and unedited by Brecht himself, anyhow belongs among the most extensive and sophisticated of Brecht’s treatises on theatre. It questions theatre in its very being, in its social and cultural function and in its epistemological potential. Staging a conversation of agents with different interests, attitudes, desires and functions in the theatrical apparatus, Brecht succeeds to provide a plastic methodology that tackles theatre dilemmas without reducing them to a one-dimensional view. The very format of a dialogue is congenial with theatrical practice and has a history among philosophers since Plato. Philosopher Denis Diderot as well as theatre practitioners Konstantin Stanislavsky and Richard Boleslavsky have presented their ideas for a rejuvenation of theatre in the format of written dialogues. Contradictions and objections are made manifest and also shown as anchored in a specific working role or institutional function. Moreover, the dialogue format allows and recognizes the imperfections, fallacies and misunderstandings of human conversations, as relevant aspects of contingency. And this contingency is of importance when we consider systemic, institutional or networked social situations. Thus, concerning the different background of the three presenters, we found the dialogue between us a relevant format, because it allows the realism of misunderstanding of each other as well as misrepresenting our selves. The three speakers choose different entries to the dialogue format, depending on their respective professional roles. This momentum of role-taking, reductively labeling oneself and each other as representatives of institutional functions, would also add a non-all dimension to the event of performing our dialogue: what was not said was somehow still inferred by suspicion or imagination. This approach has also an ambition to renew the customary way of paper presentations at research conferences and symposiums. (shrink)

The main aim of this paper is to shed light on two somewhat underappreciated theories, which, by drawing attention to the embodied and relational nature of the self, both went beyond the disembodied and individualist paradigm long before most current leading approaches in the field. The paper first considers the routes out of the crisis of this paradigm proposed by care ethics. The first part focuses mainly on Carol Gilligan’s relational account of subjectivity, which served as an inspiration for the (...) development of care ethics as a moral theory, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of her account. In the next step, the paper sets out to compare the view of the self deployed by care ethics with Donald Winnicott’s account of the transitional area of play. The paper argues that both care ethics and Winnicott’s theory make it possible to understand human subjectivity as at the same time dependent and mature, ambivalent and integrated, vulnerable and responsible, relational and non-arbitrary. Winnicott and care ethicists jointly demonstrate that it is neither an absolute symbiosis with others, nor a total separation from them, that is decisive for the well-being of an individual and a social field. Rather, it is beneficial and morally desirable to cultivate concrete interpersonal relationships in the area of complex relationality. The paper concludes that the crisis of the disembodied and individualistic paradigm of the self cannot be overcome by an uncritical emphasis on the positive function of relational, embodied and supra-individual aspects of human existence. Though essential, these aspects are at the same time complex and developmentally conditioned. (shrink)