Search results for ""Author Bernhard Waldenfels""

Roland Fischer was inspired by the current political and social events relating t o the topic of refugees to create a collective portrait consisting of over 1,000 separate photographs. Central questions about identity and solidarity, which are the subject of discussion in the socio - political debate, are raised and treated in an artistic manner. The term “refugees” is removed from its abstract context and real people appear in the viewer’s field of vision, complete with name. As regards motif and topic, a collective portrait like this one, for which the artist mounted 1,000 individual por traits, hovers between the individual and the collective. While refugees and migrants are perceived primarily as an abstract collective and an indeterminate mass, especially as a result of the reporting in the media, Roland Fischer and his art project poin t out that this collective is comprised of many individuals with personal, individual fates.

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Tanja Stähler and Alexander Kozin’s elegant translation of Bernhard Waldenfels’s Phenomenology of the Alien (Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden) introduces the English readership to the philosophy of alien-experience, a multifaceted and multidimensional phenomenon that permeates our everyday experiences of the life-world with immediate implications for the ways we conduct our social, political, and ethical affairs. With impressive erudition Waldenfels weaves in xenological themes from classical philosophy, contemporary phenomenology, literature, linguistics, sociology, and anthropology to address the boundaries of experience that unite and separate human beings, their collectives, their perceptions, and aspirations. While the debate has long raged in German-speaking circles, Waldenfels’s work is largely unavailable to the English-speaking audience, with the only other translation being The Order in the Twilight (1996). Phenomenology of the Alien is a superb introduction to both xenological phenomenology, and the the question of the alien as it has been unfolding in contemporary thought.

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