Florian Schneider's blog

"On Bakhtin" was a symposium i organized last May and it was focussing on the theories of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. On May 16th three guests were invited to the "Imaginary property" research project at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht: After "Passing Drama" a film by Angela Melitopoulos, Arianna Bove, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Angela Melitopoulos gave presentations that were linked up with Bakhtins radical reconceptualization of the relation between self and other. Bakhtin suggests an event-like relation between “possible worlds”. The other is neither an object nor a subject; it is the expression of possible worlds.

"Bakhtin’s philosophy can still speak to us because it poses the problem of the relationship between life and culture, between life and art, a problem that traversed the entire beginning of the century, and the 1920ies in particular. The solution given by Bakhtin to this problem is markedly distinct from the solution of the ‘avant-gardes’. According to Bakhtin, in order to ‘overcome’ the separation and opposition between art and life, between art and culture, the elaboration of a ‘first philosophy’ is required: The philosophy of event-being. Art and life cannot and must not tend towards identification, as was the case with the Situationists, for example. But, in order that the enriching, excessive and productive difference between art and life be able to express itself, it is necessary to possess a theory which, whilst maintaining the irreducible differences between these two dimensions, articulates them in the achievement of the event." (Maurizio Lazzarato: Dialogism and Polyphony).

"Que viva Mexico!", is the film Sergei Eisenstein came to shoot in Mexico, and he would tragically be excluded from editing it. The film's hybrid images depict Mexican life as a simultaneity of past and present. Reminiscent of, and yet surpassing the modern 'primitivist' fascination with the 'archaic', Mexico presented for Eisenstein a tableau of dialectic imagery that allowed him to re-conceptualize the role of modern art and revolutionary cinema in traversing the modern dichotomies of subject and object, rational and irrational, inside and outside, individual and collective, and even death and life. Oksana Bulgakowa is Eisenstein's biographer and, together with Anselm Franke, co-curator of Sergei Eisenstein: The Mexican Drawings. The lecture has been recorded on April 3, 2009 in MuHKA_media, Antwerp. http://www.extracity.org