Alex Garcia

Something needs to be changed—be it through the revolutionary overthrow of social conditions, the liberating force of passion, the contemplation and creation of works of art, or the exploration of an unresolved past. Luchino Visconti's films are models for the failure of such attempts. They show that this failure arises whenever people cling to possibilities that stand opposed to the reality of their lives. Does Adorno not write: "The place of utopia is blocked off by possibility, never by immediate reality"? _Visconti: Insights into Flesh and Blood_ draws on aesthetics, film theory, and practical philosophy to propose an original interpretation of the melodramas of a great European director. In the encounter with Visconti's art, we come to see that something has changed already.

Hannah Arendt’s studies and essays on totalitarianism revealed that in the concentration camps of the National Socialists, human life reached a limit that teaches us something about the human being. Giorgio Agamben took up this insight and developed it further in his ethics of bare life.3 Are there indications in Arendt’s work that the human being can approach the limit of human life in other contexts as well? This essay will show that poverty also constitutes such a limit, a wall at which we experience something about the human being, about the possibility and impossibility of a public life.

Yo estoy aquí para expresar mi solidaridad con mis colegas y con los estudiantes en el Centro de Investigación en Filosofía Europea Moderna, y mi apoyo a la campaña «Save Filosofía en Middlesex». Creo que el éxito nacional e internacional inesperada de esta campaña-que hubiera pensado hace sólo unas pocas semanas de que el anuncio del cierre de un Centro para la Filosofía en una universidad británica desencadenaría una reacción de este tipo? tiene una importación y un impacto que apuntan más allá del caso de Middlesex. Muchos de nosotros, ya sea estudiantes, académicos o no académicos, están hartos de la forma en que la filosofía, las humanidades y la educación superior de manera más general son tratados por los políticos y administradores, ya sea en Inglaterra o en el continente o en otras partes del mundo, por ejemplo en Australia.

Issue theme - Process:Music. At the beginning there was an encounter, accidental or not. In Zagreb, in the early 1960's, Orson Welles was shooting parts of The Trial based on the writing of Franz Kafka. A kind of rumor, a tale, was burned into the memory of a city that at the time feverishly invested itself into modernism. Among those newly founded institutions the Zagreb Music Biennale has played a significant role. Almost four decades later, in April 2009 the Process:Music program within the 25th Music Biennale, has sought to take a step back, to orient itself in regard to the meeting that has brought together two major 20th century artists and a city, by mere coincidence or not. Six invited musicians and philosophers had not been given any strict specification whatsoever, just a formal indication in the guise of a rumor, gossip, hearsay or a tale to tackle an encounter that has materialized itself as a movie. Their interventions and new, additional, contributions in this issue of Frakcija Journal represent philosophical, musical and cinematic accounts inspired by and taken over by a tale, gossip, hearsay or a even a lie. Momentarily. By chance, or not.