Volume XXII (2017), no. 2

Albert the Great aimed to construct a universal system of sciences based on the Aristotelian works. In his undertaking, Albert had to face a double challenge. On the one hand, he faced the issue of the natural philosophy (physica) as a science of universally valid principles, as the science of changeable bodies. On the other hand, Albert had to argue for the inclusion of the study of the intellect, which does not have any corporeal instrument, within natural philosophy. In this paper, I shall argue that Albert solved these two problems by applying the principle of finality. The medieval author justified the status of the natural philosophy as a universal science as well as the possibility to study the intellect within the natural philosophy from the perspective of their causa finalis.

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The research on the first international journal of comparative literary studies has usually foregrounded only one of the founders of the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, namely Hugo von Meltzl. This Romantically biased image of the sole founding father suppressed all the research questions regarding the extremely large and complex network of collaborators. The focus on the scholarly pool of wide geographic, cultural and ethnic variety of 120 collaborators could reframe our basic questions regarding the emergence and transnational transmission of early institutional comparative literary knowledge, but it would also lead to a more focused analysis on the way networking and various types of transnational networks produced diverse forms and notions of comparative literature. This paper investigates only one type of cluster/network and its consequences within the first international journal of comparative literary studies; it focuses on the role of ethnic and cultural hybridity, and its impact on imagining transnationality and comparative literature in the ACLU.

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The present study is a hermeneutical analysis of the primary meanings (signa propria) and the secondary meanings (signa translata) in the novel Suflet japonez (Japanese Soul) (published in 1937 and republished in 2004), written by General Gheorghe Băgulescu (1890–1973), an interwar diplomat and a writer with an impressive reputation. Given the fact that the hermeneutical mechanism can define the aesthetic value of a text, by trying to capture a final meaning (if there is one), the present study wishes to explore the cohesion of the narrative unity in this historical novel, which was well known at the time but has now been forgotten. My interest was for the Romanian author’s motivation for his choice of a subject, for the first time in Romanian, of the Japanese legend (chūshingura) of the 47 rōnin (wandering samurai with no lord or master) who end their lives after they had avenged their master who had been condemned to death through cunning schemes, a theme that has bestirred great interest in Japan and worldwide. The present analysis tries to explore the means through which Gheorghe Băgulescu approached this subject, by questioning whether this historical novel (published before James Cavell’s Shogun in 1975) managed to surpass the pattern-situations, in order to create an original literary space.

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The paper dwells upon the crisis of literary sociology in Romanian criticism in the decade(s) after the demise of Socialist Realism. Viewing it as a paradox within the research commandments of a communist regime, the study relates this crisis both to the decline of the Marxist-Leninist frame in post-Stalinist, Soviet-emancipated Romania, and to the rising fame of French Structuralism. Some relevant case studies are chosen to highlight the development of Romanian sociological criticism, its difficulty to make amends with the dogmatic past and to swiftly move on to the next level.

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The popularity of Slavoj Žižek is on a continual rise ever since the outbreak of the global financial crisis. This fact seems readily understandable, since he is the representative of a view directed against banks, big capital, and exploitation. Žižek is among those contemporary, anti-postmodernist philosophers, who think that political consequences can be drawn from the Christian message, and that contemporary political philosophy is in need of Christianity. In his work The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), following Alain Badiou, Žižek traces a parallel between the American global domination of our time and the late Roman Empire, also a “multiculturalist” global state in which ethnic groups were held together by a non-substantial link (in this case not by capital, but by Roman law). Therefore, what we need today, according to Žižek, is the gesture that would undermine capitalist globalization from the standpoint of a universal Truth, as Pauline Christianity did to the global Roman Empire. The postmodernist multiculturalism critiqued by Žižek tolerates the otherness of the Other by eliminating its very essence. According to the (multiculturalist) ethics of tolerance, respect is formal, empty, and devoid of substance: the moral position turns into not judging/not evaluating – e.g. you can do anything you want if it does not concern me –, morality turns into its own opposite.

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The paper discusses the relation between technology and the female body in one of the most controversial books written by the Japanese writer Haruki Muramaki, 1Q84, starting from cyberpunk fiction and its perspective on the human body as one of the research directions put forth in my doctoral thesis Fenomenul Science fiction în cultura postmodernă (The science fiction phenomenon in postmodern culture). Somewhere between science fiction and realistic literature, the novel 1Q84 approaches one of the most interesting issues of the contemporary world: the post-human condition. The discussion of the post-human condition implies a dual perspective. On the one hand, it implies the dissolution of ontological limitations that favour information over matter, understanding consciousness as an epiphenomenon, the body conceived technologically as “adjustable” through an intelligent implant (the cyberbody). On the other hand, the posthuman condition creates a tension that renders problematic the traditional conflict between Nature and Culture, leading to a fictional conceptualization of the human entailing the Biology–Technology relation. With this dual perspective in mind, the prefix post in post-human necessarily implies an evolution to a new order of the human (not necessarily a superior one) in a sort of biological avant-garde. Instead, the paper advances the concept of BQdy for use in Haruki Murakami’s case, offering not a new, evolution-based order of the human (the female body) but a different order or condition which, in the wQrld of 1Q84, is transformed  into a bQdy.

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