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Resistance
(2019)
The term 'resistance', as it appears in the writings of Walter Benjamin, marks the attempt to think a politics that emerges out of a certain experience of history and time. This entry shows that 'Widerstand' is conceived here principally as a resistance against the course of a catastrophic history - a desire for time to cease its flow and come to a standstill.
Restrain
(2019)
The re- of 'restrain' - not the more common iterative 're-' but a mere, if semantically obscure intensifier - marks a temporal paradox: the restraint that prevents a force from reaching its 'telos' is not only a delay, but the intervention of a separate, autonomous, and anti-teleological regime of time. The article reads the biblical figure of the 'katéchon', 'the withholder', as an expression of this paradox and as symptomatic of a political-theological ambivalence essential to the foundation of Western political thought. If the 'secular order' or 'worldly government' has the function of withholding both the ultimate salvation and the final outbreak of chaos, then it sustains itself only by postponing any determination of its value or effect.
This essay interprets Dante's "Commedia" as an 'open work' (Eco). It grounds its open-endedness in its representations of interruption: from fictional obstacles in the protagonist's path in the "Inferno" to the narrator's anxiety over unfinishedness in the "Paradiso". Taking its cue from Boccaccio's creative rewriting of Dante's life, the essay resists the pressure of 'total coherence' embedded in (and often projected onto) the "Commedia", in order to reclaim the material vulnerability of the text and of its author.
This article shows that 'tension' cannot be conceived as a specific object of an analysis for which one could determine a precise field of enquiry. Instead, it establishes tension as a specific mode or angle of approach with which any given contingent object or set of objects can be explored. The wideness of its applicability and the specificity of its angle suggest that research on tension can help to unfold a better understanding of a classical ontological question concerning the essential value of actions and relations in the definition of what a thing is. The text follows this line of argumentation by pairing contemporary philosophical sources and specific aesthetic and political examples. Suggesting the possibility of an open classification of different modes of tension, it clarifies the extent to which the essential definition of a thing is bound to the contingent analysis of its transformations.