Konturen

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/23928

Konturen ("contours" or "outlines") — an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to the analysis of borders, framing determinations, and related figures of delimitation of all kinds.

These include theoretical and historical, practical and speculative, aesthetic, political, and methodological borders, among others. "Konturen" is a German word that derives from the French tour, tourner, terms that bespeak a turning, such as the turning of a French word into a German one (or the reverse). We publish innovative work that takes into account the contributions of recent philosophy and theory to an understanding of problematic discursive places of meeting, overlap, or disjunction. Konturen currently publishes one Special Issue annually, constituted through invited submissions and calls for papers.

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Now showing 1 - 20 of 107

Open Access
Abstraction and Empathy on the Eve of World War I
(University of Oregon, 2014) Simmons, William Sherwin
This essay considers continuities between the impetus towards abstraction within Jugendstil and Expressionism. Both Hermann Obrist and Franz Marc sought through empathy to intuit and image abstract forces at work within the materiality of the organic and inorganic natural worlds. Their creative practice and theoretical writings share much with Wilhelm Worringer’s discussion of the “expressive abstraction” found in the Gothic style, which unified the organic with the abstract. This essay explores the trajectories of this visual and textual discourse, paying particular attention to their nexus during 1914 in Obrist’s monumental sculptures at the Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne and the development of Marc’s paintings over the course of that year.
Open Access
The Aesthetic Hyper-Object in Experimental Short Film Practices: Lina Sieckmann and Miriam Gossing’s Art Documentaries
(University of Oregon, 2022) Ostmeier, Dorothee
Short experimental films by the German female director duo Lina Sieckmann und Miriam Gossing put domestic environments on cinematic display in new and challenging ways. The essay discusses the links between the films’ documentary agendas, surreal visual montages, and poetic feminine voice-overs. Selected films are placed into dialogues with Michael Renov’s concept of aesthetics in documentary film and Timothy Morton’s notion of the “hyperobject.” This theoretical framework highlights the tensions between the films’ powerful aesthetics and feminine queer desire as they decenter socially ingrained dualisms.
Open Access
Anxiety: The Uncanny Borderline of Psychoanalysis?
(University of Oregon, 2010) Weber, Samuel
Freud begins his well-known essay on the Uncanny with a disclaimer that raises the question of why he writes the essay in the first place. This text argues that the explanation is to be found in the shift his thinking was undergoing at the time, not only in moving "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" but also in rethinking its relation to Anxiety.
Open Access
Apostrophe's Double
(University of Oregon, 2018) Gölz, Sabine I.
“Apostrophe’s Double” is part of a larger research project studying the (often subliminal) strategies by which literary language writing controls its readership. Part I of the essay argues that the rhetorical trope “apostrophe” functions as one such interpellative apparatus that partitions our world and splits our practices. The trope’s operational distinction between authorized speakers / readers vs. ‘dummy’ addressees / targets sets in motion a hierarchical and divisive logic that empowers some and disqualifies others. Part II argues that there is a second version (or ‘turn’) of the figure of apostrophe that has been neglected altogether, one in which the ‘target’ responds not by turning to the interpellation but by turning away instead. This turn away is key to the poetics of certain strong women poets. Ingeborg Bachmann’s poem “Anrufung des großen Bären” (“Invocation of the Great Bear”) provides a lucid model of the transition from one to the other. Apostrophe is thus double: one establishes the apparatus, the other deconstructs it. Part III contrasts two radically divergent uses of language corresponding to these turns: Bachmann’s “Frankfurt Lectures” enact the radical change towards which her poem leads us. Jonathan Culler’s seminal article “Apostrophe” exemplifies the relation to language Bachmann frees herself from. Two subject positions emerge in the wake of this double apostrophic, each with its own constraints: one is empowered by the apparatus yet must remain subservient to it. The other reclaims sovereignty as a living being from the apparatus, on the condition of radically unrepresentable.
Open Access
Ascent, Descent, and Divergence: Darwin and Haeckel on the Human Family Tree
(University of Oregon, 2014) Gliboff, Sander
In their pathbreaking discussions of the human family tree in the 1860s and 1870s, Ernst Haeckel and Charles Darwin had to account for both the ascent of the species and its diversification into races. But what was the cause and the pattern of diversification, and when did it begin? Did we attain a common humanity first, which all the races still share? Or did we split up as apes and have to find our own separate and perhaps not equivalent ways to become human? Using texts and images from their principal works, this essay recovers Haeckel’s and Darwin’s views on these points, relates them to the monogenist-polygenist debate, and compares them to Alfred Russel Wallace’s 1864 attempt at a compromise.
Open Access
At the discretion of the (a-) thing: Derrida and German thought
(University of Oregon, 2015) Appelbaum, David
In this presentation, I examine the doubleness of the thing that is usually masked by the appropriative tendencies of life. Once the enigma of thingliness is given its place, the influence of its own non-intentional inherencies can be recognized. Derrida is particularly interested in the virtual or spectral manifestations of things and the affective power they possess. In the background of each thing, das Ding resides, and with it, the force to call forth the real.
Open Access
Being Human: Kierkegaard's 1847 Discourses on the Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air
(University of Oregon, 2015) Kangas, David J.
This article is a reading of Kierkegaard's 1847 discourses on "The lilies of the field and the birds of the air." In these discourses, I argue, Kierkegaard pursues the problem of the being of the human being—that is, engages a critique of the fundamental structures of human reality. I show, in particular, how Kierkegaard elaborates a critique of care or concern. The lily and the bird exist without concern. Without collapsing the difference between the being of the lily or bird and the human being, Kierkegaard elaborates a possibility of human existence that is not organized around the project—which is to say in terms of "care." Taking the lily of the field and the bird of the air as emblems of affirmation, he expresses human existence attuned to the superfluous or "whyless" character of reality.
Open Access
Beyond Secularism: Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and the Contestation of 'Turkish Identity' in the Borderland
(2008) Gokberk, Ulker
This paper explores the multifaceted discourse on Islam in present-day Turkish society, as reflected upon in Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow. The revival of Islam in Turkish politics and its manifestation as a lifestyle that increasingly permeates urban environments, thus challenging the secular establishment, has occasioned a crisis of ‘Turkish identity’. At the core of this vehemently contested issue stands women’s veiling, represented by its more moderate version of the headscarf. The headscarf has not only become a cultural marker of the new Islamist trend, it has also altered the meanings previously attached to socio-cultural signifiers. Thus, the old binaries of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress,’ applied to Islamic versus Western modes of living and employed primarily by the secularist elites and by theorists of modernization, prove insufficient to explain the novel phenomenon of Islamist identity politics. New directions in social and cultural theory on Turkey have launched a critique of modernization theory and its vocabulary based on binary oppositions. I argue that Pamuk participates, albeit from the angle of poetic imagination, in such a critique. In Snow the author explores the complexities pertaining to the cultural symbolism circulating in Turkey. The ambiguity surrounding the headscarf as a new cultural marker constitutes a major theme in the novel. I demonstrate that Snow employs multiple perspectives pertaining to the meaning of cultural symbols, thus complicating any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in Turkey. By withholding from the reader a clear guide to unequivocal judgment of right and wrong, the author transcends the parameters of Turkish modernist ideology. Pamuk situates his story in Kars, a border city in North-Eastern Turkey. This location at the geographical and cultural margins of Turkey emerges in the novel as a complex site of contested ideological, political, and metaphysical positions pertaining to the question of Turkish identity. It represents a space where Islamic faith in its esoteric and exoteric forms is carried out over against state-imposed laicism. I argue that it is the other-worldliness of the locale that instigates such a reflection. The protagonist Ka, a Turkish poet who has briefly returned to his hometown, Istanbul, after twelve years of exile in Germany, embarks on a journey to Kars. A member of the secular Istanbul bourgeoisie, Ka seems to be afflicted by an ailment common to his social stratum, a vacuum of spiritual values. Even though Ka travels to Kars with a journalistic mission, he soon becomes entrapped in this alien world of Sheiks, head-scarved girls, and former communists turned political Islamists. The novel oscillates between the Ka’s perspective as a detached observer and his personal quest to find transcendence. By employing multiple perspectives, Pamuk complicates any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in today’s Turkish society. I complement this reading of Snow with a brief excursus to Pamuk’s recent memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, permeated by the author’s critique of the modernist ideology of the Republican era. This critique sheds light on Pamuk’s opaque discourse on faith in Snow. These two books by the Nobel-prize winner have been his most disputed ones among the Turkish secular intelligentsia. I conclude with a reference to these critical commentaries.
Open Access
The Borderline or The Impossibility of Producing a Negotiable Form in the Social Bond for the Return of the Censored
(University of Oregon, 2010) Cantin, Lucie
How do we think the problem of the “Borderline” within psychoanalysis and the structural conception of psychic organization it proposes? As for the notion of a border between neurosis and psychosis that the case of the Borderline would simultaneously raise and call into question, we must rather recognize the failed experience of an internal limit in the subject with regard to the management of the censored that works and disorganizes the body in a jouissance that finds no path for its expression. The Borderline grapples with the work of the unbound drive, which is free and mobilized by unconscious and censored mental representations which fail to find both their mode of expression outside of the body and their meaning for the subject, as well as their negotiable form in the social space. In the absence of this space carved out in the social bond for the expression of the drive and of desire, the symptom and acting out inscribe and stage the censored within the public space, where its dramatization inevitably leads to a breakdown.
Open Access
The Borders between Autism and Psychosis
(University of Oregon, 2010) Bergeron, Danielle
The borders between autism and psychosis are determined by the position that the subject takes with respect to the entry into language during the mirror stage. An ethical choice on the part of the subject of the unconscious seems, very early in life, to determine the passage or the refusal of passage into the field of the Other. As a result of their experiences, certain children choose to reside in the present instant and to build their own space by surrounding themselves with objects, while other children take the risk of language and enter the time of the Other through which their history will be structured. We will address this question through consideration of the autobiographies of autistics and the clinical testimonies of psychotic patients.
Open Access
Borders, Migrants, and Writing
(University of Oregon, 2020) Nail, Thomas
We tend to think of migrants as moving between states and borders as fortifications of states. I would like to prove the reverse: that migrants produce and reproduce the state in the first place. I think we have got this story backward, and I think a very different politics would arise by getting this the right way round. I would like to try and rethink political philosophy starting from the figure of the migrant.
Open Access
The Breath of Sense: Language, Structure, and the Paradox of Origin
(University of Oregon, 2009) Livingston, Paul M.
Within contemporary analytic philosophy, at least, varieties of “naturalism” have attained a widespread dominance. In this essay I suggest, however, that a closer look at the history of the linguistic turn in philosophy can offer helpful terms for rethinking what we mean in applying the categories of “nature” and “culture” within a philosophical reflection on human life and practice. For, as I argue, the central experience of this history—namely, philosophy’s transformative encounter with what it envisions as the logical or conceptual structure of everyday language – also repeatedly demonstrates the existence of a fundamental aporia or paradox at the center of the claim of language upon an ordinary human life. I discuss the occurrence of this aporia, and attempts to resolve it, in the philosophical writing of Carnap, Quine, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and McDowell. I conclude that the prevailing naturalistic style in analytic philosophy, whatever its recommendations, is itself the outcome of an unsuccessful attempt to resolve the central aporia of twentieth-century philosophical reflection on language. Closer attention to this aporia reveals that language, as we find it in both theoretical and everyday reflection, is in the most important sense, neither essentially “natural” nor “cultural.”
Open Access
"Broad-Shouldered" Rhetoric: The Trump Era and the Peculiar Contempt for Words
(University of Oregon, 2017) Marlan, Dawn
Open Access
Brown Eyed Boy: Narrating Internalized Oppression and Misogynoir in Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Everything I Don’t Remember
(University of Oregon, 2020) Meir-Cruz, Benjamin
The rise of anti-immigrant sentiment and right-wing extremism in Sweden in the wake of growing migration has affected Sweden’s global reputation as a model progressive welfare state that prioritizes human rights and generously extends citizenship, welfare, and labor rights to migrants and asylum seekers. In Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Allt jag inte minns [Everything I Don’t Remember] (2015), xenophobia, Islamophobia, and racialized heteronormativity appear in the unlikely form of Vandad, a hypermasculine Muslim immigrant who has secretly fallen in love with another Swedish Arab man. This study involves a narratological analysis of how internalized racism inspires the novel’s narrator of color to produce figurative narrative acts of internal colonialism—that is, violent narrative acts, made possible by the effects of racism, against other non-white characters in the story. The essay additionally explores how the objectification of non-white women’s bodies and acts of misogynoir, the anti-Black misogyny that Black women experience, by queer men of color in the text operate as secondhand technologies of oppression manufactured by the political discourse of the extreme right. The essay concludes with a critique of the far right’s exploitation of collective cultural memory to mass-produce white nationalism in the guise of tradition and the implications this has for non-white Swedes and migrants in Sweden.
Open Access
Carol Jacobs, Sebald's Vision
(University of Oregon, 2018) Klebes, Martin
Review Essay
Open Access
Clouds: The Tyranny of Irony over Philosophy
(University of Oregon, 2015) Stern, Michael
Both Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche maintained an abiding concern for Socrates throughout their productive lives. Kierkegaard wrote his dissertation on irony through a Socratic lens and Nietzsche once declared that try as he might, he could not completely separate his concerns from those he associated with the Greek. Kierkegaard famously favored Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates in his comedy Clouds, claiming that it accurately portrayed the illegibility of the ironist. Nietzsche leaned toward Xenophon’s Socratic writings but most famously blamed Plato’s Socrates for the demise of tragic culture. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche engaged with the variety of Socratic depictions throughout their careers and perhaps more importantly, both employed irony in a Socratic fashion inflected by textual concerns. In other words, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche understood irony as both the indication of an epistemological limit, and as a strategy to induce the reader to think herself into the text. My article “Clouds: The Tyranny of Irony over Philosophy” analyzes this common concern and its implications for our understanding of European modernity.
Open Access
The concept of Byrony
(University of Oregon, 2015) Gurley, D.
“The Concept of Byrony” examines Kierkegaard’s lyrical relation to Lord Byron. As an alternative to models of German influence, this paper discusses Kierkegaard’s quotations of Byron’s poetry and allusions to the poet himself. The paper establishes a poetical relationship between the two writers in terms of irony and metaphor. Kierkegaard’s sense of irony is creative but not unique; its roots can be located in earlier writings of the Danish Golden Age. Of particular importance is the development of irony in the works of Johan Ludvig Heiberg and the young writers that surrounded him, including the young Kierkegaard himself. It was in Heiberg’s salon where Byron seems to have first stepped into the Danish literary landscape. For Kierkegaard and Danish letters in general, the reception and celebrity-status of Byron perhaps play a more important role than his verse, although another acolyte of Heiberg’s, Frederik Paludan-Müller, wrote poetry that strongly illustrates Byron’s poetical influence in Danish verse. The paper also examines the Byronic notion of the empty sign, a metaphor that points to its own meaninglessness as a further poetic relationship. Moreover, the Byronic hero as a model for a lived life provided Kierkegaard with a powerful public mask that accompanied him to his last days. I term this mask and masquerade Byrony. In its conclusion the paper marks a significant similarity between the death-scenes and epitaphs of these major nineteenth-century European writers.
Open Access
Die Grenzen im Kopf: Imagining walls, borders, frontiers, and national identity in Alsace/Elsaß
(University of Oregon, 2013) Wallace, Peter
Political geographers draw distinctions in English between borders, usually conceived of as lines on a map, and frontiers, which are seen as zones. In German, Grenze, a word borrowed from Slavic, and reflecting ethnic differences is often used for both. In French frontière with its roots in medieval warfare, covers both concepts. Beginning with some considerations of Alsace/Elsaß as a frontier zone between Germany and France, this paper will review ongoing debates among historians of nationalism on the definitions of nations, states, and frontiers. It will then trace the historical development in Europe of these concepts from antiquity into the early modern period. It was during the dynastic power struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the concepts of nation and state took on fundamental political significance as rules made claims to sovereignty in the name of historical nations and borders became enshrined in "international" law as the result of the peace treaties sighed in Westphalia in 1648. The essay questions both the historical depth of nations, states, and borders and the teleological assumption of their inevitability and permanence in human political relationships. Nations, states, and borders are mental constructs. They were imagined and can be reimagined. A close examination of Alsatian history shows the bloody historical effects of applying these concepts arbitrarily in a cultural borderland and the potential for a different political future for Europe by reimagining borders.
Open Access
Drawing Lines: From Kernberg and Haraway to Lacan and Beyond
(University of Oregon, 2010) MacCannell, Juliet Flower
This paper reviews the key concepts underlying the diagnosis of “borderline personality disorder” as exemplified in the work of Otto Kernberg. It looks both to history and philosophy (Rousseau), to social thought (Erving Goffman) and to psychoanalysis (Deutsch, Freud, Lacan) to show the limitations and problems with the diagnosis. It also looks at later cultural developments attacking the idea of limits and ‘borders’ (e.g, Haraway refusal of metaphoric distinctions among human-animal-machine) as having their own vexed psychoanalytic profile. The paper concludes with strong speculation about the reasons humans, and humans alone, draw lines.
Open Access
Empathy and Dyspathy with Androids: Philosophical, Fictional and (Neuro)Psychological Perspectives
(University of Oregon, 2009) Misselhorn, Catrin
The fact that we develop feelings towards androids, i.e., objects with a humanlike appearance, has fascinated people since ancient times. However, as a short survey of the topic in history, science fiction literature and film shows, our emotional reactions towards them are ambivalent. On the one hand, we can develop feelings of empathy almost as we do with real human beings; on the other hand, we feel repulsion or dyspathy when those creatures show a very high degree of human likeness. Recently, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori coined the term “uncanny valley” to refer to this effect. The aim of this essay is, first, to give an explanation as to why we feel empathy towards androids although we know that they do not have feelings themselves. This presupposes a perception-based concept of empathy which is going to be developed on the basis of some of Theodor Lipps’ ideas. The second question to be answered is why empathy with androids turns into dyspathy when they become very humanlike. As I will argue, this is due to a particular kind of interference between perception and the imagination when confronted with very humanlike objects. This makes androids quite special objects right at the divide between humans and non-humans. They are non-human, but we feel ill at ease when treating them as mere objects.

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