Ramona Fotiade

This is the new scholarly edition of Lev Shestov's major study of religious philosophy which contrasts the ancient Greek and the Biblical sources of existential thought, and provides the first sustained examination of the opposition between knowledge and life in Genesis, with reference to a long lineage of theologians and philosophers from Tertullian to Hegel, and from Plato to Husserl, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. This pocket format edition includes my preface, annotations, translations of Greek, Latin and German quotations, a bibliography and a chronology.

This chapter presents Boris de Schloezer's role as a translator and interpreter of Lev Shestov in France, following the two intellectuals' exile to Paris due to the bolshevik revolution in Russia and in Ukraine. The argument draws on previously unpublished correspondence between the two authors kept in the archives of the Mediatheque de Monaco and the Sorbonne University Library. The chapter also analyses Boris de Schloezer's conception of literary translation and his own fictional writings which were influenced by Lev Shestov's existential thought.

This is the first comparative analysis of Kenneth White's conception of geopoetics and Watsuji Tetsuro's notions of 'fudo' (milieu, climate) and 'aidagara' (between-ness) presented at the European Network of Japanese Philosophy Network international conference ('Webs of Kinship - Exploring Environmental Ethics in Japanese Philosophy') organised at the University of Edinburgh in September 4-6 2025. The argument in the paper explores the affinities between Watsuji’s and White’s visions of the human condition as part of a particular geographical and historical mode of existence. Both of their accounts of the connection between identity and the natural environment which we inhabit were influenced by Oswald Spengler’s landmark book, The Decline of the West (1918). However, whereas Watsuji’s approach in Climates [Fûdo] focuses on a typology of human experience within given geo-climactic zones of the globe, White’s geopoetics starts from the actual premiss of the decline of Western civilization in order to call for a radical turning away from the technological and utilitarian mentality predominant in the West and a deeper connection to the natural environment.

This article is the first comparative study of the conceptions of transmission in the European existential philosophical tradition and in the modern Japanese school of thought, with specific reference to Nietzsche's and Shestov's reception in Japan during the 1930s. The argument focuses on two significant moments in the reception of existential thought in Japan: Miki Kyoshi's critical account of Shestov's ideas and Kamei Katsuichiro's response to Shestov's "philosophy of anxiety" in the journal Nihon Romanha.

The first comparative study of the Japanese philosopher, Kuki Schuzo, and the Ukrainian-born existential thinker, Lev Shestov, an influential precursor of French existentialism. The article discusses Kuki Schuzo's essay, The Structure of the Iki, and his contribution to the Decades de Pontigny in 1928 with an essay on time, which ends with a reference to the myth of Sisyphus. The reference to Sisyphus (as a polemical response to Hegel's philosophy of history) was initially introduced in the French intellectual circles of the time in the preface to Shestov's book, Potestas Clavium.

This chapter presents Boris de Schloezer's role as a translator and interpreter of Lev Shestov in France, following the two intellectuals' exile to Paris due to the bolshevik revolution in Russia and in Ukraine. The argument draws on previously unpublished correspondence between the two authors kept in the archives of the Mediatheque de Monaco and the Sorbonne University Library. The chapter also analyses Boris de Schloezer's conception of literary translation and his own fictional writings which were influenced by Lev Shestov's existential thought.

A critical and historical presentation of the Romanian avant-garde in Paris, with specific reference to Benjamin Fondane's literary work and existential philosophy, from the point of view of Gilles Deleuze's conception of nomadism and outside thought. This article is a contribution to a Festschrift published in honour of Mircea Martin, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Literary Studies at the University of Bucharest (Romania), and a prominent figure of post-World War II East European literary criticism, theory, and comparative studies.

Through the comparative analysis of Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Alan Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046, this chapter considers the effectiveness of the postmodern notions of the “outside” as theorized first by Foucault, and then by Deleuze and Guattari for the possibility of outlining a different conception of temporality in its relationship to memory and testimonial. Deleuze’s notions of the “time-image” and of the “repetition of faith” help illuminate a radically different account of recollection as creative restitution of memory turned toward the future, which breaks the logic of temporal irreversibility and promises to overcome oblivion and, ultimately, death.

This paper explores notions of realism, evidence, undecidability and faith in the context of our relationship with images following the digital revolution and the transition from a culture of analog photographic and filmic records to the new space-time of virtual reality. The first part of the paper contrasts the phenomenological account of photographic images and the post-structuralist elaboration of an aesthetics of spectrality in the works of Roland Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida. Through the comparative analysis of films exploring processes of memory and time perception in relation to photographic and mental images, such as Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, the argument highlights the emergence of complex storytelling strategies which challenge our assumptions about the objectivity and mechanical functioning of the recording camera. In the second part of the paper, I discuss the consequences of the meta-narrative use of theatrical mise-en-scène and its avatars to bring into view the shared spectrality of the recording camera and of the human psyche in the age of virtual reality. Alan Resnais’s You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet, Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love and 2046 provide the case studies for a reassessment of the evolution of film theory from a culture of epistemic knowledge and technological progress, to a culture of belief and metaphysical exploration of the human condition as both limited by death and open to non-linear processes of haunting.