Description
Book SynopsisWhat is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side.
In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant's vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation.
By combining the Babylonian concept of the en
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We can now say that Sonja Neef’s thinking about and analysis of encounters in the era of globalisation was prophetic. When she wrote these essays, the sense of urgency about the care for the planet, and the importance of the intercultural encounters that the qualifier “Babylonion” habours, were not as keen as they are today. We miss her wisdom and insight, but at least we now have this book - a monument of sorts. * Mieke Bal, Professor of Cultural Analysis, Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), The Netherlands *
The Babylonian Planet rethinks human civilization in terms of its virtually planetary distribution in time and space. Its comprehensive narrative integrates millennial events of language, communication, mediation, and translation with significant and precisely denoted cultural forms and traces the intertextual lines of their historical transformations in the movement from globalization to planetization. * Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science, Texas Tech University, USA *
The Babylonian Planet reinvents cultural studies under the prism of planetarization by the use of a creative and convincing methodology, mixing issues as diverse as mythology and deconstruction or cosmos and globalization, while underlining the essential need to thinking translation culturally. The ultimate work of a great figure of cultural studies too quickly disappeared, whose perspective remains of an extreme topicality. * Damien Ehrhardt, Associate Professor, University of Paris-Saclay in Evry, France *
Table of Contents
Preface Chapter 1: The Babylonian Planet Chapter 2: Europe: Myth and Translation Chapter 3: On the Shores … of the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris Chapter 4: Outre Mér(e) : Jacques Derrida and the Mediterranean Chapter 5: The Southern Cross: Planetarism of Alexander von Humboldt and François Arago Chapter 6: Sublunar: Star Friendship in Orhan Pamuk‘s The White Castle Chapter 7: In Orbit over the Earth: The Constellation of a Suitcase. Chapter 8: Intergalactic: Universal Translation: Immanuel Kant, Spaceship Enterprise, and the Circulation of the Planets Chapter 9: Heaven on Earth: Paul, a Cosmopolitan? Finally: East Pole and West Pole References
