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The concept of fragmentarity not only constitutes the central idea of Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of music, but also the whole of his aesthetics, even of his entire ontology – which can already be characterized as a Marxist ontology of creative, utopian imagination. In spite of the fact that the focus of his musical interest was chiefly classical, tonal music and that, unlike Adorno, he gave relatively little attention to atonal and dodecaphonic music, we would like to show that Schönberg’s atonal music occupied, by way of the problem of fragmentarity, a specific place in Bloch’s socio-utopian ontology. At the same time, we want to highlight problematic aspects of Bloch’s concept of fragmentarity. This concept is perhaps overly connected with the aesthetics of romanticism, and its use to describe new music is in this way limited. The last part of the text is then a corrective of this position using the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, especially his aesthetics and some of his notes on the event nature of music. In fact, from the point of view of Levinas’ critique of ontology, Bloch’s fragmentarity too is overly connected with the idea of ​​totality, albeit only utopianly sketched. In the conclusion itself, we will then attempt to point out the possible combination of Bloch’s conception of new music as a fragment and Levinas’ event approach to music in the broader framework of the aesthetics of ambiguity.

In my article, I will discuss Gregory’s view of beauty from a theological-anthropological perspective, focusing on why beauty is deceptive and where the limits and boundaries lie between beauty as a theological category and beauty that becomes an idol and does not lead to God. The key question will be how beauty, whose source is God – the essential beauty – can be deceptive. I want to emphasise that although Gregory sometimes speaks about the deceptiveness of beauty, the ambiguity lies not in the beauty itself but in the ability or inability of the human being to discern the beautiful. Here I draw on the foundation of Gregory’s anthropology, namely the creation of human beings in the image and likeness of God. I will further analyse Gregory’s concept of the knowledge of beauty and its relationship to desire and passion in Gregory. I will conclude by reflecting on the moment when beauty becomes an idol that leads people away from the path of knowledge of the truly beautiful.

The article examines Lisa Larsen’s pioneering work as a photojournalist for Life Magazine in Poland, 1956-1957, contextualised by her experience as a Jewish exile from Germany in the 1930s. Reading her unpublished writings about Poland against the backdrop of her visual work reveals a woman who appreciated the ambiguity of photography and sought to shape the meaning of her work in a way that challenged the prevailing Cold War epistemologies of midcentury America, often espoused by Life and the Time/Life empire itself. As a woman, she was initially assigned entertainment and fashion work, but her drive to cover politics led her to US presidential campaigns, the Middle East, and the Bandung Conference of 1955. Despite her position as a woman in the world of men at a time when opportunities for professional success among women remained limited, no single full-length academic work on Larsen exists. Larsen left many extraordinary photos that document her extensive travels and experiences. In my article, I draw on her unpublished writings, as well as some published material and her photographs, to argue that through her writing about and photographic work in Poland, Larsen engaged in a subtle critique of the social relations in the United States.