Return to Saussure

The Simulation of the Fall. AI image Opening Scene: 1989 as a Shock to History The evening of November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, appeared as a breach in the texture of late twentieth-century history. Crowds crossed checkpoints, dismantling concrete with improvised tools, while images of jubilation circulated across the globe. For a brief moment, history seemed to recover a sense of unpredictability. What had appeared frozen—structured by geopolitical equilibrium and managed narratives—suddenly moved again. Yet this apparent immediacy invites a more difficult question: did the collapse of the Wall interrupt the system, or did it stage the very illusion of interruption? Was this a genuine event, or a moment already destined for integration within a broader logic? It is precisely this ambiguity that animates the reflections of Jean Baudrillard on modernity, history, and their limits. Against the Philosophy of History: An Anti-Hegelian Vision To approach this question, on...

Gift and Counter-gift. AI image “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35) Introduction: From Exchange to Recognition Theories of exchange and accounts of recognition have largely developed along separate trajectories. In anthropology, Marcel Mauss is read as providing a foundational analysis of gift practices, centered on obligations that organize circulation beyond market logic. In philosophy, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is taken to elaborate a theory of subject formation grounded in recognition. Each tradition has produced its own conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework, leaving their proximity insufficiently explored. This separation obscures a shared concern. Both approaches address the conditions under which relations between individuals become either reciprocal or asymmetrical. What appears in Mauss as a cycle of giving and returning, and in Hegel as a movement of recognition between self-conscious beings, can be read as distinct formulations ...

Vanessa Beecroft´s tableaux vivants. AI art Introduction The gaze has long preoccupied philosophy and aesthetics as a force that does more than merely register the visible. To be looked at is not a neutral act but one that shapes, disturbs, and even constitutes subjectivity. Jean-Paul Sartre famously described how the presence of another’s eyes destabilizes the self, while Jacques Lacan identified the gaze as a rupture in the visual field that reveals our condition as objects for others. For women, the implications are particularly acute: the gaze has historically positioned them as passive spectacles rather than autonomous subjects. Against this backdrop, Vanessa Beecroft’s performance installations offer a provocative intervention. By instructing her female performers to withhold acknowledgment of their spectators, she stages a refusal of recognition that unsettles the traditional dynamics of the nude and the aesthetic act of looking. The Gaze and the Making of the Subject ...