by Timothy Andrews
In the current pandemic, we find ourselves in a similar situation to that of Virginia Woolf’s audience in Between the Acts. Forced into our homes as a result of lockdown measures, a mirror is held up to us so that we can see the intimacy of our lives under the stark light of history unfolding in the present. Like Woolf’s audience, we too are on the cusp of a new era.
by Mark Harrison
The political meaning of the virus is contending constantly with its biological realities. But as its transmission has slowed in Asia, it is leaving behind newly calcified traces of the long-standing enmities, political compromises and aspirations of different modernist visions set in place in the early 20th century history of modernisation in Asia.
I remember it clearly, as if it was yesterday, the day I first met Ágnes Heller. It was early in 1980 on the ground floor of La Trobe University’s Social Sciences building. I had an appointment with her. I had come to ask her if she would supervise my PhD. I had read an article she had published in Telos journal on ethics, and I felt a strong affinity with it. I brought with me my Honours thesis on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. As I got to her office she appeared—both of us characteristically on time. My first impression: a short woman with penetrating deeply intelligent eyes. My lasting impression: she appeared with slightly damp hair and a towel around her shoulders. She’d been swimming in the university pool, one of her life-long favourite activities.
The scope of David Roberts’ book on the Total Work of Art is daunting. It stretches from the French Revolution through to the modernist avant-garde and its dissolution in totalitarianism.
Agnes Heller discusses modernity and globalisation at the ‘Workshop on Civilisation and Modernity’ hosted by Sichuan University and co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven. Heller argues that technology, science, popular culture and high culture are all globalised in modernity whereas political traditions and social relations retain particular cultural and regional articulations.
Modes of indigenous modernity: Identities, stories, pathways
Issue 145, April 2018 This special issue is the outcome of a collaborative venture – a three-day workshop between La Trobe University and Ateneo de Manila University, held in Manila. It brought together indigenous and non-indigenous researchers from both the Philippines and Australia and included aboriginal researchers in business studies, history, literature and anthropology, and non-indigenous researchers working on themes of indigenous history, material culture, film studies, literature, the visual arts, law and linguistics.
This issue of Thesis Eleven presents Agnes Heller’s essays. It is the first in a series of virtual special issues focusing on authors who have made significant contributions to Thesis Eleven.
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