201. Passages and the episteme of Crossing a Threshold : About the Reading of What Was Never Written Down, but the Body Inscribed in the TextMonika Jaworska-Witkowska, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: This text is an attempt to collect traces of readings on the hermeneutics of the city as a space dense with meanings that require discernment in a completely unusual phenomenology, and not just the topography of the city. The modern humanities have greatly contributed to an understanding of and searching for discourse of such places/non-places, passages, alleys, and labyrinths, in which the body each time feels different and forces a different description than a neutral one or an indifferent one. It is not without significance that we have long known that sometimes the “genius loci,” as well as our fear, alienation, or, on the contrary, domestication, and captivation truly reign. This article is a survey of my readings and fascinations that arose thanks to them. Walter Benjamin’s reflections on passages are the basis of my discourse. I also use the accomplishments of outstanding Polish humanists, creatively fitting into this perspective.
Keywords: reading, passages, flâneur, labyrinth, city, body, text, episteme
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 51; Downloads: 16
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202. Beauty and the Beast : The Dark Sides of LoveConstantinos V. Proimos, 2022, original scientific article Abstract: My paper departs from the classic French fairy tale authored by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve about a handsome prince turned into a hideous beast by a magic spell that only love could break. The Beauty is a beautiful, young, albeit poor woman who eventually falls in love with the Beast and frees the prince from him. By pairing beauty with ugliness and attraction with repulsion, the fairytale allows introspection into the phenomenon of love, which is the natural and appropriate response to Beauty, according to Plato. I am reading the story of the Beauty and the Beast together with Alexander Nehamas’s Neoplatonist book Only a Promise of Happiness. The Place of Beauty in a World of Art trying, first, to establish who the Beauty is as the sovereign and who the Beast, and then inquire into the adventurous liaison of the couple. Finally, I argue that beauty not only promises happiness, as Stendhal’s famous quote states, but also threatens its lovers with misery, frustration, and disorientation. Furthermore, in all love affairs, beauty alternates with ugliness, i.e., the one replaces the other, exactly as the Prince becomes the Beast only to turn again into a Prince, ad infinitum, thus representing desire and its psychic palimpsest.
Keywords: Alexander Nehamas, beauty, love, beast, Plato, Jacques Lacan
Published in DiRROS: 25.10.2024; Views: 46; Downloads: 16
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