2 items

Active Passivity?journal article
Manuele Gragnolati and Christoph F. E. Holzhey Active Passivity?: Spinoza in Pasolini’s Porcile
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Porcile (Pigsty) was shown at the Venice Film Festival in 1969 and was harshly criticized for its scandalous and desecrating character. It is indeed a provocative and bleak film, which offers a scathing political critique of ongoing fascism but without seeming to allow for any space for intervention or change. With Porcile, Pasolini continues to distance himself from Marxist engagement and revolutionary politics, and while he characterizes its politics in terms of an ‘apocalyptic anarchy’ that can only be approached with distance and humour, our suggestion is that Porcile proposes abandoning (political) activity and hope for a better future as a paradoxical form of both radical political critique and joy.
2015. Pasolini, Piero Paolo; active passivity; Porcile (film); Spinoza, Baruch
Aspects and AbstractaBook Section
B. Madison Mount Aspects and Abstracta
Philosophers of perception and psychologists first studied ‘multistable’ or ‘reversible’ figures, Kippbilder, in the nineteenth century. The earliest description of the phenomenon of a ‘sudden and involuntary change in the apparent position’ of a represented object occurred in a letter written by Louis Albert Necker in Geneva to Sir David Brewster on 24 May 1832 and published six months later in the Philosophical Magazine. The picture in question would become known as the Necker cube.
2014. abstract algebra; aspect-relative cognition; homonyms; mathematical analysis; multistable figures; multistability; Wittgenstein, Ludwig – Philosophical Investigations