E-mail address: fogarasi@hung.u-szeged.hu
Home institution: University of Szeged
Academic position: associate professor
Areas of research: 18th-century aesthetics, (post)romantic
literature and philosophy, critical theory
Title of the presentation: Teletrauma:
The Notion of Distance in Burke?s Philosophical Enquiry
Most important Publications
Essays:
- ?Payments of Attention: Epitaphic Cash Flow in Gray and Wordsworth? (in English), in Culture ,Capital and Representation, ed. Robert J. Balfour (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 67-82.
- ?Performativity/Theatricality? (in Hungarian), in Apertúra (Fall 2010)
- ?Beyond the Rear: Theatricality in Hitchcock? (in Hungarian), in Apertúra (Fall 2010)
- ?The American Writing Desk: Law and Mobility in Kafka?s Amerika? (in English), in Serta Musarum (Essays in Honor of István Fried), ed. Thomas Bremer ? Katalin Kürtösi (Szeged: Department of Comparative Literature, University of Szeged, 2006), pp. 221?226.
- ?Metropolis/Necropolis: Baudelaire?s Paris, Benjamin?s Passagen? (in Hungarian), in Pannonhalmi Szemle (2004/2), pp. 52?56.; reprinted in Terek és szövegek (Újabb perspektívák a városkutatásban), ed. Tímea N. Kovács ? Gábor Böhm ? Tibor Mester (Budapest: Kijárat, 2005), pp. 307?311.
- ?The Stamp of the Gaze: Incarnation, Figuration, and Inscription in Book V of The Prelude? (in Hungarian), in Átjárások (Fiatal anglisták és amerikanisták tanulmányai), ed. Tamás Bényei (Budapest: FISZ, 2005), pp. 189?211.
- ?Horrible Smartness: Application and Aberration in Gadamer?s Hermeneutics? (in Hungarian), in Alföld (2004/9), pp. 43?59.
- ?Rilke and the Tele-Grammo-Phonics of Things? (in Hungarian), in Serta Pacifica (Tanulmányok Fried István 70. születésnapjára), ed. Otília Ármeán ? Katalin Kürtösi ? Ferenc Odorics ? László Szörényi (Szeged: Pompeji, 2004), pp. 127?133.
- ??One-Way Streets? (Paul de Man: Aesthetic Ideology)? (in Hungarian), in Literatura (2003/1), pp. 26?58.
- ?Legislation and Poetry: Rousseau, Kant, Shelley, and the Twilight of Apostles in Hungarian (Post) romantic Poetry? (in Hungarian), in Literatura (2002/1), pp. 39?71.
- ?Reverberations of Romanticism: Petőfi’s Figure of Memnon? (in English), in Kakanien Revisited (2002/1)
Edited volumes:
- Performativity/Theatricality (in Hungarian), co-editor: Vera Kérchy, in Apertúra (Fall 2010)
- The Stakes of Romanticism (in Hungarian), in Helikon (2000/1?2), pp. 1?218.
- Romanticism, Rhetoric, Prosopopeia? (in Hungarian), in Pompeji (1997/2?3), pp. 65?180.
Translations (into Hungarian):
- Paul de Man: Allegories of Reading (1999; rev. edition: 2006)
- Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (2008)
- essays by William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Walter Benjamin, Paul de Man, Andrzej Warminski, Samuel Weber, and others
Forthcoming book:
- ?English? Necromanticism: The Figure of the Ghost in Gray, Wordsworth, Marx, and Benjamin
Forthcoming essays:
- ?To Read at All: Heidegger, Marx, and the Technicity of Philology in Friedrich Schlegel?
- ?Heidegger/Wordsworth: Technics and Poetry?
- ?Coleridge?s Ghost-Theory?
- ?Perpetual Peace, Permanent Terror: Kant with Schlegel?
Title of the presentation
Teletrauma: The Notion of Distance in Burke?s Philosophical Enquiry
Abstract
The presentation seeks to trace the notion of distance in Edmund Burke?s Philosophical Enquiry, by first looking at Burke?s general theory of the passions (Part 1) as it differs from that of Locke, then moving to the more specific question of how the passion of fear or terror is related to both pain and the sublime (Part 2 and Part 4), and finally, by focusing on the way attention figures as a duplicitous shifter between an-aesthesis and suffering (Part 4).
Interestingly enough, while Burke conceptualizes the sublime as a passion based on mediation or distance, and therefore distinguishes it from ?simple? fear (underlining that the subject must not be in immediate danger, and that he or she must be spatially or temporally distanced from the source of the passion), later it turns out that fear itself is far from being a ?simple? notion for immediacy, since immediate danger or threat still presupposes a mere apprehension of pain, rather than pure pain itself. This double distance (between fear and the sublime, as well as between fear and pain), puts fear in an intermediate position, which is more traumatic than that of the sublime, but which contains an element of distance with relation to pain, and is therefore a form of ?teletrauma?, an amalgam of an-aesthesis and suffering. Being thus positioned between the sublime and pain, fear appears as the site of contamination, where detachment and involvement merge. In this respect, it may serve as a conceptual tool for a critical rethinking of the problematic nature of both aesthetic distance and perceptual immediacy.
This problematic is further pursued through a closer look at the figure of Campanella, and the way ?attention? appears in scenes of suffering or an-aesthesia as a two-way shifter which may function as a painkiller only to the extent it superimposes another pain upon the pain it wants to an-aesthetise. The notion of ?teletrauma? may then refer to this double move of attention: the move away from and the move toward the ?traumatic?.