Search

The theoretical problem Bensaïd tries to confront from the 1990s onwards is the problem of the categories that are necessary to account for the traumatically new experience of history opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth century. Hence the necessity of new answers to these fundamental and inexhaustible questions: How are we to understand history in its relation to human practice and to politics? Can we talk of ‘necessity’ in history, of ‘laws of history’, of ‘determination’, or ‘determinism’, or of modes of causality operating within it? How are we to conceive the notions of ‘historical possibility’, of ‘conflict’ and ‘struggle’? Bensaïd’s contribution will focus on a dialectical notion of temporality that implies a primacy of politics over history and a break with the traditional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an internally homogeneous and fully-sovereign collective force.

This article focuses on two sets of images sparked by the assassination of the Iranian ruler Nasir al-Din Shah in 1896—photographs of his murderer Mirza Riza Kirmani as a prisoner and photographs of his execution—as a significant episode in the history of photography in Iran. These images are more than mere illustrations of a historical event. Rather, they mark an important semantic shift both politically and photo-historically. These photographs thus allow us to interrogate how photographs visualized power relations in late Qajar Iran, and also how their deployment evolved in the rapidly changing social and political field. The photographs of Mirza Riza Kirmani should also be understood in the context of legal and penal reforms of the period, as they make visible the changing perceptions of the criminal as a particular historical subject.

Religious studies cannot agree on a common definition of its subject matter. To break the impasse, important insights from recent discussions about post-foundational political theory might be of some help. However, they can only be of benefit in conversations about “religion” when the previous debate on the subject matter of religious studies is framed slightly differently. This is done in the first part of the article. It is, then, shown on closer inspection of past discussions on “religion” that a consensus-capable, contemporary, everyday understanding of “religion,” here called Religion 2, is assumed, though it remains unexplained and unreflected upon. The second part of the article shows how Religion 2 can be newly conceptualized through the lens of Ernesto Laclau’s political theory, combined with concepts from Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, and how Religion 2 can be established as the historical subject matter of religious studies. Though concrete historical reconstructions of Religion 2 always remain contested, I argue that this does not prevent it from being generally accepted as the subject matter of religious studies. The third part discusses the previous findings in the light of postcolonial concerns about potential Eurocentrism in the concept of “religion.” It is argued that Religion 2 has to be understood in a fully global perspective, and, as a consequence, more research on the global religious history of the 19th and 20th centuries is urgently needed.

Hayden White inaugurated narrativism in philosophy of history when he effected a productive displacement of earlier epistemological discussions around the relationship between narration and historical knowledge: White identified the problem of narrative in history with the problem of the use of figurative language in the representation of the past. Thus, he enabled a new way of thinking philosophy of history’s object of study by paying attention to an aspect of historical practice he considered wrongly overlooked: the writing of history. His formal theory of the historical work needs no introduction. Instead, this paper aims at reclaiming the fundamental philosophical legacy White has left us in his latest work on middle voice writing. First, I will frame White’s thought as a response to what I call the paradoxical nature of historical narrative, as Louis Mink and Roland Barthes understand it. By presenting our narrativist past as White’s ironical and liberating stance on historical narrative, I will show how he identified figuration as the paradoxical resource and constrain of historical writing. Secondly, I will elaborate on his latest inquiries into middle voice writing as pointing the way into the future of philosophy of history. Thus, I will claim that the notion of middle voice writing that White adopted from Roland Barthes should be read from the point of view of performativity theory in order to reassess the philosophical nature of historical writing now considered as the performative self-constitution of the historical subject.

Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682), the well-known landscape painter, produced some cityscapes as well. In those days he lived on the south side of Dam-square in Amsterdam. From his window he could see a part of that square and the Damrak. In this article the author proves, using history and observing the civic guard procession together with the colours of their flag, that his Mauritshuis-cityscape ("View on the Dam square, fig. I), now in the Amsterdam Museum, is not just a cityscape, it´s much more. The day Ruisdael chose for his subject matter, August 15th 1672, was an important day in local history. Romeyn de Hooghe too, chose that very day for an etching (The Atlas van Stolk Collection, Rotterdam, fig.5). Concluding, Ruisdael´s painting has a special, historical subject : Amsterdam has chosen in favour of the prince of Orange.

Historical explanation after Hempel came to be discussed in terms of a contrast between nomic explanations and rationalizations, and later between cause and narrative. This period can be taken as an historical parenthesis, in which the notion of cause narrowed and the notion of historical understanding as empathic dropped out. In the present philosophical landscape there are different models of cause available, especially in the causal modeling literature, and a revived appreciation, through the philosophy of mind and in light of such discoveries as mirror neurons, of empathy. The newer causal modeling literature foregrounds the problem of confounding or overdetermination, but solves it in ways inimical to historical explanation. Empathy, however, represents an alternative solution, available to the historian, in which causal relevance can be assessed and established in terms of its role in the reenacted experience of the historical subject. This suggests the idea that the art of history is using historical evidence to show what people might have thought and felt under past circumstances, in ways that engage our capacities to mind-read – capacities established by cognitive science.

In his afterword to Capital , Marx defines his method as a dialectical one. In so doing, he explicitly recognises Hegel as 'the first to present dialectics general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner'. Hegel recognises that scientific knowledge, as the 'science of manifested spirit', starts from 'empirical, sensuous consciousness', an 'immediate knowledge', therefore, a knowledge which emerges from practice. Marx presents the point of departure of the dialectical development by stating, 'The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities", its unit being a single commodity'. The capitalist mode of production is itself a contradiction in constant development towards its own supersession through the complete socialisation of labour. The specifically capitalist form of developing the productive forces of social labour consists in the progressive socialisation of private labour. Keywords: capitalist mode of production; dialectical knowledge; Hegel; Marx; social labour

After 1949, there were many changes in the creative circumstances of authors of "modern" fiction. Mao Dun had plans for writing a novel, perhaps conscious of the difficulty of doing so in the contemporary literary environment, he ultimately abandoned the attempt. During the "contemporary" period, the selection of subject matter for fiction was of special importance. "Subject matter", or theme, was related to the degree to which the "truth" of the essence of social life was "reflected", or mirrored, in literature, and was also related to the establishment of the "direction of literature". In typology of fiction, this period tended toward a concentration on the "two extremes" of the novel and the short story. In a contemporary age in which the stress was placed on the direction of literature, the fundamental tone of works, and style of a unitary nature, it was unavoidable that fictional forms also moved towards unity. Keywords: contemporary literary environment; fiction; Mao Dun; revolutionary historical subject matter

The Argonautica of Valerius Flaccus opens with a conventional-looking praeteritio that contrasts the chosen mythic narrative with a more overtly historical subject in this case, the recent conquest of Jerusalem by Titus. The mythic narrative of the Argonautic saga takes on aspects of a cultural commentary by importing key societal constructs and tensions from contemporary, late Flavian Rome. The amphitheatre was a cultural institution that assumed heightened importance during the Flavian period and that, in the wake of the construction of the Colosseum, fully captured the popular imagination. Thus the prominence of the amphitheatre as a narrative element in the Argonautica can be seen as a natural interpenetration of epic discourse and contemporary cultural idiom. This chapter argues that, through its amphitheatrical recasting of mythical narrative and its presentation of elite spectacle in this setting, Valerius' epic attempts a provisional recuperation of the arena as a space for aristocratic self-fashioning. Keywords: amphitheatre; Argonautica ; Colosseum; elite spectacle; Flavian Rome; Jerusalem; praeteritio ; Valerius Flaccus; Valerius' epic