In our hours of drift and idleness we have taken to rereading some Ulven. In the prose book Gravegifts (Gravgaver, 1988) Tor Ulven commented on the 22 November, 1953 recording of Brahms’s “Tragic Overture,” in which Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall for 14 minutes and 7 seconds.

“In these old recordings it seems as if he [Toscanini] tries to play as fast as possible in order to incorporate as much music as feasible before death’s arrival: Brahms’ mild, pastoral serenade in A major rushes furiously by under the ageing orchestral tyrant’s baton as if it was a matter of putting an end to the slow, sunny hours of life as quickly as possible; as if in a fit of nervous rage he had commenced to tear up the entirety of the calendar’s summer leaves in order to arrive more quickly at a different summer, somewhere else. [...] I existed in these roughly 14 minutes while Arturo Toscanini, a former cellist, conducted a tragic overture that contained -- and still contains -- a wisdom to which I must at that time have been a complete stranger, since we would have to survive blindly and without question for years before we attain the level of reflection necessary for us to understand that life essentially is impossible, and by that time it is already too late to become unmade and to never have existed. Thus, we have never seen a newborn resign to destiny and reject the temptations of life (such as milk) with a tired wring of the hand, or to nostalgically long back to a distant past as non-existent.”

Translated by Torgeir Fjeld.

Posted 19 Nov, 2021. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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We’re fortunate to have good access to updates on American popular culture on our television. Recently we watched a documentary on the popular music outfit The Doors, When You’re Strange (dir. Tom DiCillo, 2010), which differs from the celebrated biopic on Jim Morrison, featuring Val Kilmer as the protagonist (The Doors, dir. Oliver Stone, 1991), in that it takes a less heroic view on the vocalist. To Oliver Stone, Morrison stood as the countercultural hero of the (Left) 1960s/70s, and his demise symbolised the victory of the dark, reactionary forces of jingoist America over the freedom-loving individual of the youth revolution.

The 1991 biopic suffers from this narrow frame, and in the Stone film Morrison’s brilliant bandmates Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist, and Morrison’s own favourite on slide guitar, Robby Krieger, are placed firmly in the background, as props for the ever-present and mysteriously genial Morrison.

DiCillo’s documentary takes a more complex view, both on the band, and on Morrison himself. First, there is no doubt left that the particular sound and approach was a team effort, and that when the group later tore apart the responsibility lay squarely on Morrison’s shoulders. Second, the documentary seems truthful in its portrayal of Morison’s shy character. He stood with his back to the crowd for the first concerts, not daring to face them; he talked disparagingly of photo sessions and portraits of himself; and, most importantly, he saw himself as a literary poet, dedicated to writing and the written word. Never was he as happy as when he was able to write sensitive and meaningful words to be read or heard as literary achievements, when he recorded his own spoken word poetry, or when Simon & Schuster decided to publish a collection of his poetry. The stage and its fame was alluring, but his awkwardness with crowds and other people made Morrison a stranger, even in the midst of adoration and hero-worship, a state of affairs that was sadly perpetuated with Stone’s 1991 biopic.

So was it fame that murdered Morrison? Or was it alcohol? DiCillo’s documentary leaves it open. In a country so infatuated with popularity and monetary success the urge to write poetry or participate in any other kind of high cultural endeavour for its own sake must seem strange indeed. And Morrison was strange, to his times, and, ultimately, to himself. The frontier mentality is brought out well in his relationship to his father, a combatant in the Vietnam war. On one of The Doors’s first albums Morrison had declared in the liner notes that his family was “dead.” In return, or so it may seem, his father, when asked later about his superstar son, answered journalists that Jim should immediately end his musical career, as he had no talent for it. The skirmishes continued into the family, and in the end an uprooted Morrison died alone in his bathtub in a Paris hotel, drunk beyond his wits, and far away from his adoring culture.

He kept looking for his literary roots, his Rimbaud, his Chopin, and his Oscar Wilde.

Posted 27 Jul, 2021. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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To those interested in Media Studies, and particularly early Cultural Studies of Television, John Fiske was a powerhouse. Sadly, he passed on July 12, 2021, due to complications following heart surgery.

Fiske revived what was then called “Telecommunications Studies” and made it become an integral part of the larger (and burgeoning) domain of Cultural Studies. Fiske wrote on television, race, and power, and is probably best known for the books Television Culture and Understanding Popular Culture, both widely used 101-level introductions.

Fiske taught at several universities in his native UK and in Australia before relocating to teach at Wisconsin. Fiske was among the first to regard television programmes as texts that could be decoded, and in this respect he was one of a number of scholars who took post-structuralist theories as crucial to their understanding of how popular cultural artifacts are made meaningful.

Here’s a quote that captures the type of cultural analysis we find in the work of Fiske and his generation (from his Wikipedia entry): “Culture (and its meanings and pleasures) is a constant succession of social practices; it is therefore inherently political, it is centrally involved in the distribution and possible redistribution of various forms of social power.”

An obituary on Fiske is available from U Wisconsin: https://commarts.wisc.edu/in-memoriam-john-fiske/.

Posted 20 Jul, 2021. Modified 7 Mar, 2025.

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The liberation of Bruce Lee was and indeed is an event that doesn’t promise to heal the rupture of the self, the fighter, or being, but that seeks to overcome divisions in order to incorporate them and make them part of the totality that is us. View the presentation “,” given at the 3rd Wrocław Chinese Martial Arts Congress 11 April 2011. Approx. 20 mins.

Posted 12 Apr, 2021. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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Hege Riise has been appointed new head coach of England Women, the Lionesses. When we met for an interview 20 years ago Riise, herself an accomplished international, emphasised how sport has the power to bridge the gender gap: “the joy and involvement the players demonstrate when we score [in international competitions] carries around the whole country.” Football truly unites people across boundaries.

Posted 19 Jan, 2021. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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June 11, 2021. How does the event puncture the smooth flow of becoming? And what is it like, the event in which we become ourselves? These are among our key questions in this first Ereignis conference. Headlined by internationally acclaimed speakers on appropriation and becoming, this conference seeks to merge profound and innovative thought with practical approaches to becoming. How do we arrive into our own?

We seek structured, well-argued papers that show evidence of rigorous scholarship. For the section Practice/s we seek interventions that challenge the traditional academic conference format, establish new ground, and open up for new ways of thinking and being together. All proposals should include an abstracts (max. 300 words) and a short author bio (max. 50 words), including the author’s current affiliation and interest. Submission deadline: 15 April, 2021.

More info ereignis.no/School.

Posted 14 Jan, 2021. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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Academic publishing has undergone great changes the last few years. One major driver in this change is the relatively recent adoption by the European Union of the Plan S initiative, a codex implemented to ensure open access to the products of academic work. Established private publishers have responded by accepting some degree of open access, instead demanding sizeable publication fees from authors, which in most cases means the authors’ institutions of employment. The effect has been that while university libraries in the past had large outlays to receive copies of scholarship produced by researchers employed by their own institutions, they now receive it without cost. Instead the institutions have to pay to get the scholarship published in the first place.

Let’s distinguish from the outset from a loose alliance of bodies that with a wide variety of motives seek to further public access to scholarship, and a far more narrow and more militant radical open access grouping. The first of these alliances emerged from a fair response to what is now largely recognised as a social injustice: how can it be that while the public have financed scholarship from their purse (through taxes that underpin academic institutions in most countries) they have been barred from access to the very fruits of that funding, the academic output in the form of journal publications? The Plan S initiative was one particularly successful response to this situation: through it private, corporate publishers have been compelled to recuperate their costs through other means than subscription, the most ubiquitous of which is author fees.

The Radical OA group, on the other hand, points out, rightfully, that the fees dictated by corporate publishers, whether from readers for subscriptions or from authors for publication, generate funds that go far beyond the component costs of processing and publishing academic articles. Some critics have noted that today the most prestigious journals are owned and controlled by an increasingly narrow band of corporations; only five global publishers now have the most important journals at their disposal, and their resulting bottom-lines are staggering and growing. It appears that these corporate companies have adapted very well to Plan S and the attendant calls for public access to socially generated scholarship. In other words, what we have is a small group of increasingly powerful publishers that generate unheard-of revenue in order to bolster their position in a competitive publishing market, a market that can be characterised as nothing but as a field of fierce competition between rivalling corporation founded on the principles of capital investment and returns, i.e. the system of production Karl Marx referred to as Capitalism.

What is clear from the outset is that the general open access movement, instituted through initiatives such as Plan S, and the more militant Radical Open Access group have very different aims. While the EU have undersigned the aim to open up the results of scholarship that has been funded by the public to those who have footed the bill, i.e. the taxpayers, there is nothing in Plan S that seeks to undermine the motivation to generate profit on capital investment, an obvious driver to corporate publishers when they have repositioned in response to Plan S. This latter purpose is, however, a strong motivator for the Radical OA group. In other words, what this group seeks is not merely to give the public access to scholarship that they themselves have funded, but to undercut the possibility for corporate publishers to generate profit on their academic journals.

While working against profit in publishing is perfectly legitimate, it isn’t entirely clear that generating profit from research is essentially any different from generating profit from other social activities, such as running a restaurant, a newspaper, a grocery store, or a social media network. Rather, it seems as if the main driver for Radical OA is not primarily open access, but that it should be radical, and this radicality is defined by its opposition to generate profits on capital investments, or, to put it differently, what the Radical OA grouping is opposed to is the capitalist mode of production and its inherent profit motive.

For this to be a fine and honourable purpose we should ask that Radical OA’s articulate clearly their political aspiration. Is their first concern to gain open access to publicly funded scholarship? Or are we witnessing the structure of a front organisation: while apparently working to further open access, is Radical OA exploiting a generally favourable public sentiment towards open access to promote their larger anti-capitalist project?

We will await good answers.

Posted 25 Oct, 2020. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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A general introduction to the philosophy of Ereignis.

We are expanding the Library of our Ereignis website. Recently we added some more detail to our approach to what the term Ereignis might mean. Does it ring true or interesting to you? We’d be very interested in hearing your views!

Ereignis is a way to understand technology and our everyday world, an approach to life, and a distinct philosophy. We begin by unpacking the multiple meanings of the word; we then go on to identify a vision, an obstacle, and a new reality. In the end we ask to what service Ereignis can be put to enable us to become who we are.

1. The meaning of Ereignis

Ereignis is a complex and intriguing word, even in the German. As a noun (an Ereignis) it basically means an unusual or special event, or, simply, something that has happened. However, when we investigate further we realise that there are vast arrays of potential meanings to this term. Synonyms suggested by the dictionary include occasion, interlude, opportunity, experience, happening, thing, and an event. At the etymological root of Ereignis we find that this is an event that is derived from the verb ereignen, designating something that plays itself out, as if by destiny.

One influential interpreter sought to distinguish the prefix er- from the stem eignen. It is when we consider eignen as a cognate of Augen that we get a sense in which ereignen is intimately connected to our vision, to what we see or have in our view. In German, the derived zueignen and aneignen means to acquire and appropriate respectively, and the verb eigen simply means to own. If an event only truly occurs when it is seen or observed, then what has happened can only be determined with by referring to what observers have called it to themselves, their interpretation, or appropriation, of the event.

To er-eignen, then, seems to mean to make something one’s own, in by appropriating it, acquiring it’s key meaning, or giving voice to its sense. This is important, because at the core of the eigen lies eigentlich, designating an event’s underlying cause, or its reality. In other words, what something really is, or what actually happens, can only come out through appropriation, of by distinguishing what it was that we experienced. This event, then, does not only refer to the happening itself, but crucially also to the act of making the event one’s own.

2. Philosophies of Ereignis: Heidegger, Schirmacher, Badiou

Ereignis is an experience and an approach to life. Our technological understanding of the world can bar us from this experience. Opening up for the multiplicity of reality we can rediscover the world as a sacred place.

2.1 Heidegger: nearness

There is no doubt that it was the game-changing philosophy of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) that brought the term Ereignis onto the stage of modern thought. In an essay on the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin Heidegger described how it feels to descend from the mountainous Alps, the returning and homecoming, and in this essay he associates this descent with a mystical experience of Ereignis.

Heidegger gave the term Ereignis the task of connecting Being, or the divine, with our lives. To Heidegger Being reveals itself as a light which enables it to become visible to itself. Being, or the divinity, gives, sends, or destines beings, such as ourselves, in an ongoing unfolding of self-awareness. Heidegger thought of this double movement as Being alternately disclosing or refusing itself, or, in a word, as a “clearing-concealing.” Ereignis is a term to describe this sense in which Being is self-giving or self-refusing, or what Heidegger mystically referred to as the “Ereignis of presencing.”

To be present, then, or to experience a presencing, is in Heidegger’s terminology to be in the nearness of Being. When Heidegger held that this nearness nevertheless can never be fully present he began from the assertion that the German phrase Es gibt, there is, not merely points to an empty placeholder “Es,” it/there, but that it serves to highlight the giving of the Es, rendering the phrase as literally “It gives.” In so far as the “It” here refers to Being, the giving that is provided by it is its own presence. However, even Heidegger acknowledges that this “It” is inaccessible to ordinary thinking; therefore we should turn to the poets, and particularly the recollective verse of Hölderlin, to be brought into “It’s” nearness.

2.2 Schirmacher: metaphysical technique

Now, what is the reason that we find ourselves removed from Being, at a distance from our own existence, in our daily lives? Heidegger was quite clear on this, referring to the reduction of the world from a place of transport and enchantment to an experience where we are oblivious to the things themselves as Gestell. Rather than a world revealing itself as a holy place, and the things within it as radiant, sacred beings, Gestell reduces things to mere resources that can only serve as means to ends. Wolfgang Schirmacher, a philosopher of technology, continues Heidegger’s thought to name this blockage “metaphysical technique,” a complex expression of attempts to dominate life by technical mastery, a technological fix which we often think of as either technological optimist, or utopianism.

Governed by an “instrumental prejudice,” Schirmacher writes, the metaphysical technique is an “ingenious expression of a technology of survival” where all objects, everything we encounter, are regarded with suspicion, as “potentially hostile.” This is why the dominant metaphysical technique seeks to bring the entirety of our external world “under control under all circumstances and by all means.” It is this naïve belief in technological supremacy which leads to the present explanation of all our shortcomings as a “lack of technology:” when our world is gradually brought to an end and destroyed with the aid of modern technology the often misunderstood response is to claim that it is not modern technology, or, rather metaphysical technique, that has brought this upon us, but the wrong use of instruments or an insufficient determination of their purpose; in this view our current fix is due to an incorrect application of technology. When metaphysical technique encounters failure its answer is to stubbornly pursue the same path with even more determination, and to explore and exploit further its beaten path of domination by technical knowledge.

Against this Schirmacher holds that the destructive effects of metaphysical technique cannot be defeated on its own ground, i.e. by further pursuing an accumulation of data, or positive knowledge. Technology, or, more precisely metaphysical technology, serves to conceal the world to us, and more knowledge of this kind will not reveal the world anew. In the words of Schirmacher:

If the concealment of technology is not revealed by knowledge, but paradoxically rather strengthened, only ignorance can help. Ignorance does not only mean the absence of knowledge, but indicates the Socratic admission of ignorance, which is to say a knowledge that deprives knowledge of its self-evident right.

What Schirmacher prescribes is the ancient philosophical cure: truth telling, but not as a simple mechanism to verify positive knowledge, but, rather, the Socratic model as an approach to life. Truth of this kind cannot ultimately be found by testing hypotheses, but emerges from a technique in which “facts are shown as they are conceived by us.” Against metaphysical technique with its “emptiness artfully filled with an abstract language of evidence and justifications,” truth technique makes the world in its entirety appear in a glimpse, and yet as if eternally.

To overcome metaphysical technique it is required of us to pose an entirely different subject, or I, so that we again can enter into an essential and poetic relation to the world. Overcoming metaphysical technique does not mean that we leave modern technology behind, but that we abandon its use as “denizens of the night-time,” and instead treat machines and practice the sciences behind them as “dwellers of the radiant world of the Ereignis.”

Somewhere along this path we join in with others who have abandoned the cage of metaphysical technique, fellow travellers who seek to give up on exploitation and abuse so as to become guardians, custodians, and nurturers of beings, and, by implication of the Event itself. Our question is how we are going to conceive of Ereignis in this sense.

2.3 Badiou: the new reality

One way to approach this seminal Event is suggested by the philosophy of Alain Badiou. Here, the event is a way to understand how reality intrudes into our everyday experience. To Badiou reality is a void grounded in an inconsistent multiplicity, a structure which cannot ultimately be upheld in any social or personal totality. Therefore, countless elements of this reality are excluded from the totality we perceive as our everyday existence, and it is when any of these elements imposes itself upon us, engendering a complete shift in our structure of perception, that we truly can talk about an Event in Badiou’s sense.

To Badiou the event opens up our everyday appearance of normality, enabling a sudden opportunity to rethink our lives as a whole. Since the event can be compared to a ripping open in the fabric of established reality it offers exhilarating possibilities for participants that can nevertheless be experienced as demanding for those who are tasked with assimilating the event. In Badiou’s view a real event generates not only new ways of thinking about the world, but also new truths. What previously didn’t count, Badiou writes, comes to interrupt the continuity of determinism, thereby generating something completely new.

An utter reformulation of prevalent prejudices and assumptions cannot be programmed in advance. Rather, Badiou holds that a true event can only be grasped retrospectively, and that it cannot have a presence. The event, in effect, suspends the chronology of time, becoming ubiquitous: at the moment of the event it is everywhere and nowhere. In other words, we cannot really realise an event until after it has passed, when we try our best to assimilate it into an opportunity we couldn’t have lived without.

3. Becoming who we are

Ereignis is about approaching the clearing, letting things stand out as they are, and the festive experience, i.e. the sense in which we let the world reveal itself as a sacred place. When we overcome metaphysical technology, an approach to life that only allows the world and others to appear as instruments or means to an end, we can again be brought into the nearness of a Being that gives and reveals itself. By returning to telling the truth we can experience the void of an inconsistent multiplicity that constitutes reality, and out of this void we can begin to rethink our lives and generate an entirely new reality.

It is when we regain this new ground we can begin to realise and become who we truly are. Thus is the experience of Ereignis.

Posted 11 Sep, 2020. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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The Time Traveller was one of those men who are too clever to be believed: you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush, behind his lucid frankness. H.G. Wells, The Time Machine

We’re happy to announce the publication of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, a new volume in our series Know Your Classics. Our edition is edited and introduced by Poul Houe, Professor Emeritus of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Minnesota. The Time Machine redefined the science fiction genre to include concepts like spacetime, as well as recent innovations in biology and sociology. H.G. Wells’ text, first published in serial format, became an instant hit, and has since become the centrepiece of not only numerous films and radio plays, but of our very conceptualisation of the future. As Poul Houe notes in his newly written introduction, “by way of the Time Machine we can travel out of ‘Now’ into both the distant past and future.” Sometimes referred to as having prophetic abilities H.G. Wells’ described a future that is credible and characterised by inventions that combine utopian and dystopian sentiments. Coupling Wells’ text with Houe’s introduction, and a newly written biography of H.G. Wells, this volume makes the classical text available to new generations of readers.

Know Your Classics

Know your Classics is a collection of carefully selected texts offered in a new, informative and entertaining frame. With an informative introduction and a new biography each of our books in this series are given a modern, inviting typography that places them in our contemporary era. These are unmissable remixes of classics everyone should read.

H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, edited and introduced by Poul Houe, joins

• Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, edited and introduced by Monika Žagar;
• Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, edited and introduced by Jørgen Veisland;
• Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, edited and introduced by Jørgen Veisland.

Support independent publishing by ordering these titles through one of our distributors. Our full catalogue with links to booksellers is available here.

Know your Classics are e-books and paperbacks from utopos publishing.

Posted 4 Aug, 2020. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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Inscriptions 3, n2, Power in a time of pandemic, is out. Among our key questions in this open issue is the relation between the subject and power: what is the substance and appearance of the sovereign, what is the domain and limits of state power, and what are the effects of governance in the time of a health scare. Two short texts by Giorgio Agamben. Contributions by Mehdi Parsa, Regina Surber and Christopher Norris.

Among our key questions in this open issue is the relation between the subject and power: what is the substance and appearance of the sovereign, what is the domain and limits of state power, and what are the effects of governance in the time of a health scare. Two short texts by Giorgio Agamben show how a religion of science became a tool to administer an exceptional governmentality under the pandemic. This issue features contributions by Leopold Haas, Christopher Norris, Mehdi Parsa, Lukas Reimann, Philippe Stamenkovic, and Regina Surber.

• Table of contents;
• Get a beautifully printed softbound copy (84 pp; USD 9.95).

Inscriptions is published online and in print, and is indexed by, among others, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Our issues are archived electronically and in print by Norway’s National Library. ISSN: 2535-7948 (print) and 2535-5430 (online).

Recent Issues

• Inscriptions 3, n2: Power in a time of pandemic, July 2020
• Inscriptions 3, n1: Outsourced!, January 2020
• Inscriptions 2, n2: Kierkegaard, July 2019
• Inscriptions 2, n1: The Global Unconscious, January 2019
• Inscriptions 1, n1-2: Consecrations, July 2018

Posted 3 Jul, 2020. Modified 20 Mar, 2025.

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