In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.2 (2003) 31-45 [Access article in PDF] Antonio Gramsci on Surrealism and the Avant-garde E. San Juan, Jr. Surrealism provided me with what I had been confusedly searching for. I have accepted it joyfully because in it I have found more of a confirmation than a revelation. It was a weapon that exploded the French language. It shook up absolutely everything....A process of disalienation, (...) that's how I interpreted surrealism. 1In the spring of 1919, André Breton and Phillipe Soupault conducted various experiments in automatic writing. They converted themselves into machines to record the whispers of the unconscious, inspired by Rimbaud's urge for adventure in quest of cosmic knowledge and Lautreamont's conviction of art as a communal enterprise. To destroy bourgeois morality and class inequality, uphold the freedom of the imagination, and release the libidinal energies dammed up in the psyche, surrealism — Guillaume Appolinaire's term 2 — was invented from the nihilistic ruins of Dada to lay the groundwork for building a society founded on liberty and justice. In the same year the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci founded the innovative journal, L'Ordine Nuovo and advocated the factory council (modeled after the Russian Soviets) as the germ of an emergent communist society. Both initiatives were pathbreaking in challenging the orthodoxies of modernist bourgeois culture, politics, and philosophy.When Breton published his 1924 "First Manifesto of Surrealism" privileging dreams, the unconscious, the fantastic, and marvelous, Gramsci was the principal leader of the Communist Party of Italy spearheading the opposition to Mussolini's fascist takeover. Two years later, Gramsci was arrested and imprisoned until his death in 1937. In the Prison Notebooks that occupied him while in jail, Gramsci does not — as far as I am aware — refer to Breton or to surrealism directly. But in his scattered reflections on modern art and culture in general, and in his particular observations on Italian futurism (in particular, on Filippo Marinetti and Luigi Pirandello), we can [End Page 31] extrapolate the general approach Gramsci would take toward surrealism and avantgarde art as oppositional cultural practices. This exercise may clarify what a revolutionary Marxist position should be toward the philosophical or pedagogical category of the aesthetic within the field of cultural practice and artistic production, especially in the post-Cold War epoch of nation-state realignments and the reconfiguration of globalized finance capital in the new millennium.All commentators agree that Gramsci viewed the aesthetic as a category within the terrain of historical materialism and the political economy ofvalue in general. Artistic values are rooted in the social and material practices of a specific society which defines the limits of conventional artistic forms and the subject matter available to the artist. Vision or intuition and diverse raw materials (language, sounds, dance movements, and filmic images) are indissociable. Contrary to Benedetto Croce's emphasis on transcendental intuition, Gramsci valorizes the materialization of this intuition into perceptible, sensory structure, an architectonic whole produced by intellectual discipline and shaped by an integral worldview. In short, for Gramsci, the work of art is the historicization and objectification of vision/intuition.Gramsci's conception of Marxism stresses its intrinsic dialectical method, its emphasis on processes and relations within a social formation comprised of multilayered modes of production, given the necessarily uneven development of capitalism. This mode of historicizing life not only to interpret but to change it is a guide for collective action, not a dogmatic party line. "Man 'is' precisely the process of his actions," Gramsci writes, and "relative to what we have thought and seen, we seek to know what we are and what we can become, whether it is true and within what limits that we do 'make ourselves,' create our own lives and our own destinies." 3 Here, knowledge and action are oriented toward linking the past with the present in order to fashion the future. The chronotope of revolution is essentially a collage, more precisely a montage, of transformations that amalgamates contraries, oppositions, disparities.While Gramsci did not endorse Freudian theory completely except by... (shrink)

E. San Juan Jr. examines Peirce’s discourses on semiotics, ethics, and aesthetics and suggests their analogies with the radical critiques of Marx and other progressive trends.

Este escrito recoge algunas de las reflexiones que surgieron en torno a una investigación sobre el fenómeno del suicidio llevada a cabo en la localidad de San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Pueblo Mágico de Chiapas, de los años 2016 a 2018. Este trabajo fue posible gracias a una beca del CONACYT, destinada a cursar una maestría en Antropología Social en el CIESAS-Sureste. Durante este período de tiempo se realizó trabajo de campo en el seno de un grupo autogestionado y (...) de ayuda mutua para afectados por suicidio, así como entrevistas a profundidad con algunos de sus participantes. Ambas experiencias se relatan en las páginas siguientes. La estructura del escrito se da en tres niveles. Como nivel macro e introducción al fenómeno en cuestión, presentamos algunos conceptos propuestos por sociólogos y antropólogos contemporáneos, así como por algunos de sus primeros estudiosos dentro de la tradición occidental. En el nivel meso se relata la experiencia del trabajo de campo en el grupo autogestionado de ayuda mutua para supervivientes de suicidio en San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Finalmente, nos adentramos en el nivel micro en los entresijos de la experiencia del fenómeno de puertas adentro, recorriendo con tiento el camino propuesto por las voces recogidas en las entrevistas a profundidad. En las conclusiones se ofrecerán las reflexiones fruto de todas estas vivencias. (shrink)

This book looks at facets in the history of capitalism from the Enlightenment period, through the emergence of the American Empire in the Pacific, and to the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization. This re-telling of history is done by drawing from the works of E. San Juan, Jr., considered arguably one of the great contemporary cultural and literary critics of our time. In this author's view, San Juan's lifetime of works offer a living documentation of, among others, the history and (...) thought of the modern world highlighted by the rise of capitalism through the contemporary era of neoliberal globalization, and shepherded to its hegemonic status by what stands today as the preeminent empire of the United States. The book underscores the symbiosis between contemporary capitalism as an economic system based on accumulation on the one hand, and the American imperial state on the other, just as it revisits the colonial project that was carried out in capitalism's wake, the violence and subjugation inflicted on its victims, and how this colonial project has morphed into a new form of colonialism maintained and enforced through the rules and institutional mechanisms of what is popularly known as neoliberal globalization that also provides the ideological and legal rationale for the commodification and the ultimate grab of the global commons reminiscent of the classical, albeit cruder, form of colonialism. (shrink)

El artículo aborda el trabajo de un conjunto de filósofos chilenos, cuyo objetivo es mostrar que el pensamiento conservador ─y puntualmente la historiografía conservadora─ construye y transmite un imaginario nacional que, al sancionar la necesidad de una democracia tutelada, comparece como antecedente y justificación del golpe de Estado y la dictadura militar. Junto con exponer y discutir algunos de los supuestos del trabajo de estos autores, el artículo muestra que el mérito del mismo es poner de manifiesto que el relato (...) de la historia ─y la consiguiente construcción de memoria─ es el lugar de un diferendo, de un conflicto siempre abierto. (shrink)

Intercultural research poses critical ethical challenges. In 2019, in collaboration with more than 200 researchers from more than 30 countries, a group of researchers developed an ethical conflict analysis model that seems relevant for Latin America. The model proposes a flexible frame of reference where ethical challenges depend on four factors present throughout the research process: the place where the research is carried out, the people involved, the relevant ethical principles, and the precedents from previous research. This article discusses the (...) applicability of this model through two case analyses: one study with Indigenous peoples in Chile and the other with Latin-American migrants on the border between Mexico and US. (shrink)

The status of scientific knowledge in political liberalism is controversial. Although Rawls argued that the noncontroversial methods and conclusions of science belong to the kind of reasons that citizens can legitimately call forth in public deliberation, critics have observed that the complexity and elaborateness of scientific arguments drive them away from the spirit of public reason, i.e., that which should reflect judgments that are the product of general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense. In other words, scientific (...) claims remain as inaccessible as esoteric or religious reasons. This paper contends that this objection can be met by introducing a crucial assumption, drawn from W. V. O. Quine and the ‘naturalized epistemology’ tradition: that scientific reasoning and everyday reasoning are not two different epistemic categories but rather form a continuum. The former is just a filtered or refined version of the latter. Accordingly, evidence-based scientific reasoning is common to all citizens, regardless of their actual acceptance of specific scientific claims. Following the Quinean Assumption, political liberals may argue that, unlike religious or esoteric sources of knowledge, scientific reasoning is the expression of a cognitive operation that is fundamentally shared across comprehensive doctrines and politically reasonable individuals. (shrink)

Paul Ricoeur realizó su primera incursión sobre la temática del mal en su primer periodo, conocido como filosofía de la voluntad, que comprende especialmente los libros "Lo voluntario y lo involuntario", "El hombre lábil" y "La simbólica del mal!. Este estudio pretende presentar las claves internas a partir de las cuales Ricoeur realiza su investigación, analizando los conceptos fundamentales sobre los que gira y su posterior desarrollo. También busca incidir en los presupuestos antropológicos de los que parte, para después realizar (...) análisis de las consecuencias éticas que tienen dichos presupuestos. En este sentido se ha prestado una especial atención a la vinculación existente de la investigación de Ricoeur con la teoría del conocimiento kantiana y con la filosofía hegeliana.. (shrink)

Levinas est traditionnellement perçu comme une voix critique à propos de la pensée de la totalité de Hegel et, ainsi, comme un philosophe qui cherche à dénoncer la négation de toute différence dans la pensée de l’identité, que ce soit dans l’unité de la vie, de l’esprit, du savoir ou du concept. Or, le paradoxe de Levinas est de critiquer Hegel tout en réinterprétant et en s’appropriant certains de ses concepts fondamentaux. Plus particulièrement, c'est le cas avec la radicalisation de (...) la puissance du négatif. Il s’agit donc de s’interroger sur l’effort de Levinas pour développer une forme intrinsèque à la dialectique hégélienne que Hegel aurait entrevue sans développer dans sa philosophie, encore trop enracinée dans une métaphysique que Levinas tente de quitter. Ce faisant, il s’agit d’éclaircir si l’on peut même parler d’une dialectique négative lévinassienne. (shrink)

This article analyses an important category from Deleuze's philosophy – the notion of intensity – and explores its significance for Deleuze and the ways it can be used to think about poetic cinema. I use the concept of the intensive-image to define a cinematic style that dissipates narrative action in favour of more contemplative and sensory experiences, hence films that are able to turn onscreen reality into purely affective phenomena. The notion of intensity, I argue, does not allow us to (...) reply easily to the question about representation (i.e., “what is the film about?”), mainly because its images are indeterminate and flowing, combined in a multiple manner that excludes any simple reduction to signification. The general argument that follows, illustrated by a careful reading of key poetic texts, is that the focus on the intensive-image inspires readers to reconsider Deleuze's classification of the cinema into two separate periods as well as to understand the ways in which intensity finds expression in films that produce problems, displacements and provocations. In the words of Pasolini, this is the poetic film tradition which must be placed diachronically in relation to the language of the film narrative, a diachronism that, he says, would appear destined to be always more pronounced. In the last section of this article, I look at Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou (1929) as an early case of the poetic image and draw on key theorists and filmmakers who have discussed the cinema's power of affection and intensity. (shrink)

This paper presents a detailed contrastive frame semantic analysis of arriving events in English and Spanish, attested through a corpus study. The framework and methodology of our research follows the FrameNet II Research Project housed at ICSI. First, we present a formal description of the Arriving frame as a subframe of the Motion frame: arriving encodes a basic subpart of our conceptualization of motion, namely the transition from moving to arriving at a goal. Second, we carry out a cross-linguistic analysis (...) of this frame, based on a corpus study of English and Spanish arriving predicates. A first assumption would suggest that these two languages share a basic abstract frame description for arriving events. While acknowledging this, we yet show that at a lexical level the particular lexicalization patterns of each language influence the way speakers bring onto stage the different participants of the scene. We discuss this issue through a study of implicit frame elements, conflation and incorporation patterns, profiling, and deixis. Third, we briefly introduce the question of polysemy for those predicates that participate in the arriving frame. Arguably, the spatial meaning of arriving is the core sense from which a set of sense extensions derives, pointing to a wide range of independent frames (e.g. Cognition frame, Achievement frame, etc.) This fact can be attested in both languages in a parallel way. The different senses can be described synchronically in terms of frame semantics, while motivation for them is to be found in the cognitive processes of Metaphor (across frames), and Fictive Motion (within frame). (shrink)

Examinamos los alcances de la intuición en el pensamiento de Karl Jaspers, para lo cual nos apoyamos especialmente en su Psicologia de las concepciones de mundo, de 1919. Lo que le preocupa allí al pensador es cómo se conforma una concepción de mundo. Pues bien, ella se conforma, por el lado del sujeto, de actitud y, por el lado del objeto, de imagen de mundo. Lo decisivo, en todo caso, es la actitud, ya que es ella la que se da (...) a sí misma una imagen de mundo. Entre actitud del sujeto e imagen de mundo objetual hay las posibilidades de fisión-fusión-superación. A la actitud racional la caracteriza la fisión, ya que tiene una relación distante de oposición con el objeto, a la actitud mística la superación de la relación sujeto-objeto, y nuestra actitud intuitiva la fusión y una máxima cercanía con el objeto, en cierto modo, un hacerse uno con él. Al mismo tiempo, a la intuición la caracteriza la captación inmediata e instantánea de lo esencial de algo, y la acompaña el supuesto de la verdad que se devela con el descubrimiento, o más bien, la capacidad descubridora que también le sería propia. (shrink)

Eugen Fink propone 5 fenómenos fundamentales de la existencia humana, que son los siguientes: muerte, trabajo, dominio, Eros y juego. En el presente artículo nos ocupamos de dos de ellos: juego y muerte. A modo de destacar algunos de los rasgos primordiales de estos fenómenos -juego y muerte- cabe decir del primero que sobre todo destaca la fantasía, la ficción, y ambos relacionados a su vez con la estructura específicamente lúdica del como-si. De modo espontáneo el niño juega como-si fuera (...) policía, ladrón, rey, plebeyo, padre, madre e incluso niño, es decir, el niño transita con la mayor naturalidad a mundos ficticios. Y esto mismo hará posteriormente el actor profesional. Ello revela a la par el parentesco entre juego y arte. En el caso de la muerte, probablemente lo que más corresponde destacar es su carácter de fenómeno filosófico fundamental, dado que ella se asocia con la concepción del ser en tanto devenir, como que todo lo que es, está transido por el llegar a ser y dejar de ser. Y a la vez que la muerte tiene por lo mismo una peculiar cercanía con el ser, lo tiene también con la nada, y junto con ello, con la pregunta por el sentido. Eugen Fink proposes 5 fundamental phenomena of human existence, which are the following: death, work, dominion, Eros and play. In this article we are dealing with two of them: play and death. How to highlight some of the key features of these phenomena -play and death- it may be said of the first that stands out above all the fantasy, fiction, and both in turn related to the specifically playful structure of the as-if. Spontaneously the child plays as-if he was police, thief, king, plebeian, father, mother and even child, i.e. the child passes naturally to fictional worlds. And the same will do later on the professional actor. This shows at the same time the relationship between play and art. In the case of death, in the first place should be noted its condition as a fundamental philosophical phenomenon, since it is associated with the conception of being as becoming, which implies that everything that is, is determined by the coming to be and the passing away. Death has therefore a unique proximity to being, as with the nothing, and also with the question about meaning. (shrink)

Este artículo sugiere que los derechos humanos existen, que requieren fundamentación y que esa fundamentación debe ser objetiva para tener validez y legitimidad (debe ser verdadera). La clave para la fundamentación de los derechos humanos, aquí se propone, descansa en el concepto metafísico de naturaleza. El artículo concluye señalando el valor del diálogo, la comunicación y el consenso, si no para decidir cuál es la verdad, al menos para avanzar, a través de las contribuciones de todos, hacia el desvelamiento de (...) la verdad sobre la naturaleza humana. Los derechos humanos se ligan después al problema de la identidad política a través de la hermenéutica analógica. (shrink)

Desde el pensamiento ontológico de cautiverio que realizó Emmanuel Lévinas, es decir, desde su concepto de Il y a y su descripción de la experiencia más próxima al ser anónimo e impersonal, el insomnio, el presente artículo tiene el propósito de efectuar una conversación o un acercamiento con el pensamiento pesimista de Emil Cioran. Todo para graficar el horror de esta patología y de la importancia del sueño o el inconsciente frente a ella, presentado este, el inconsciente, como una salida (...) necesaria. (shrink)