Elisabeth Heyne

Although visual culture of the 21th century increasingly focuses on representation of death and dying, contemporary discourses still lack a language of death adequate to the event shown by pictures and visual images from an outside point of view. Following this observation, this article suggests a re-reading of 20th century author Elias Canetti. His lifelong notes have been edited and published posthumously for the first time in 2014. Thanks to this edition Canetti’s short texts and aphorisms can be focused as a textual laboratory in which he tries to model a language of death on experimental practices of natural sciences. The miniature series of experiments address the problem of death, not representable in discourses of cultural studies, system theory or history of knowledge, and in doing so, Canetti creates liminal texts at the margins of western concepts of (human) life, science and established textual form. mehr

Traditionally, the Amazon rainforest appears to be the natural habitat of illusions and hallucinations. As the fundamental “other” it provides the rare experience for modern human beings to feel outnumbered when faced with the abundance of “nature”, or “Umwelt”. This paper examines two paradigms of amazonian perception, their theorization and literary reflection. While serving as refuge for the last remains of “integral naturalness” (Pierre Restany) or as the vanishing home for the “chronically homeless”European (Lévi-Strauss, Frans Krajcberg) in 20th century, it gives lessons on the necessary modes of perception for the 21th century and its entanglements of humans, animals, plants and technologies in the Anthropocene (Eduardo Kohn, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro). A novel by Argentinian contemporary writer Pola Oloixarac, Constelaciones oscuras (2015; engl. Dark constellations, 2019), draws attention to the different functionalizations and imaginations of Amazon forests. Moreover, the novel seizes on indigenous ontologies, reverses positive and negative forms and completes approaches of modern Amazonian anthropology and their notions of multinaturalism, shamanism and perspectivism. The text ultimately does not recoil from the idea of an “anthropology beyond the human” and its consequences: the human as an externally controlled host in a symbiotic existence. On the basis of Oloixarac’s novel this paper sketches a theory of perception for the entanglements of the Anthropocene. mehr