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This paper reflects the inversion between the discourse on the Good and that on the khôra in view of the deconstructionist paradigm of the khôral mise en abyme as portrayed by Jacques Derrida and later elaborated on by John D. Caputo. Iddo Dickmann, further describing this paradigm as “lacunal”, schematically illustrates how it can create sameness in difference through reflective repetitions. This schema is used here in a Christian negative theological context and on the accounts of Incarnation and reincarnation to investigate the immanence khôra introduces into transcendence, rendering the Word/Logos as flesh. The present study takes a novel perspective in observing how this self-referential and meta-significatory paradigm can conversely render flesh as the Word, when flesh comes to reflect/interface the Good by negating itself ending up with the elliptical and creative contours that transcribe the Word, and outline a khôral negative-fleshly space that infinitely traces an abyssal “black sun”.

Japan was supposed to obey the law during the second world war. However, the Nanjing Massacre still happened. Hirohito, the Japanese emperor, deliberately avoided mentioning the International Treaties in the imperial rescript of the Great East Asia War in 1937. The Nanking Massacre was carried out according to the Japanese army's interpretation of the imperial rescript. Such a legal interpretation was rooted in the idea that Japan had to educate the Chinese and transform China by killing its people in order to pursue a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere led by Japan. In the film Black Sun: The Nanking Massacre (1995), we can see both a justification of and an opposition to killing. In this paper I am going to show how the imperial rescript is used to justify this mass killing is and how opposing arguments are used to show its cruelty and absurdity, which is taken as a means to achieve a greater good. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article is a fragment of the PhD thesis Philosophical and Aesthetic Principles of Tragedy in Calderon and Racine (Department of the History of Foreign Literature, Moscow State University, 1988). In her dissertation, the author examined Racine’s presence in Mandelstam’s poetry against the theory of the tragic. Written in the essayistic form, the article examines the following basic images and key concepts of this general theme: (1) cascading shawls as emblematizing heaviness / lightness; (2) a word-confession as expression of pure and redemptive suffering; (3) death by word followed up by redemption. It pays particular attention to the image of the “black sun” and the “tainted day” in Racine’s Phaedra. According to Mandelstam, this image has different connotations and “does not evoke a ready-made meaning” (“Conversation about Dante”). In Racine, Sun is a sacred symbol, it is “the Hidden God”, or Deus absconditus of Jansenism. Phaedra’s sin stains the Sun and darkens it. Phaedra’s last words confirm the redemptive effect of her death. In the article “Pushkin and Scriabin,” Mandelstam writes about the tragic meaning of the artist’s death and compares it with Phaedra’s deed. The study of Racine’s presence in Mandelstam, taking into account the studies of such scholars as Barthes, Goldmann, Poulet and others, allows us to point out explicit and implicit allusions to Racine in Mandelstam’s poetry. It also helps to understand Mandelstam’s idea of the tragedy and the tragic as it developed from 1914 through 1920 when the poet was translating the great French tragedian and at the same time was trying to comprehend the tragic events he witnessed.

This article explores two films by Kurahara Koreyoshi: Black Sun and Safari 5000, in the context of the scholars John Russell and Jonathan D. Mackintosh’s approaches to racism and so-called negrophilia in Japanese mass-culture and cinema. The authors argue that cultural stereotypes even have a negative impact on the artistically original Japanese directors, who only seem to be independent and express their thoughts freely.

This article explores the metaphor of the black sun in Gérard de Nerval's works, in particular the famous sonnet ‘El Desdichado’ and the autobiographical fiction ‘Aurelia’. The French writer uses this metaphor in a variety of contexts (astronomical, religious, solar) in order to signal a melancholy crisis, which characterizes not only the lyrical subject in the sonnet or the narrator in the story, but also the writer himself. Śniedziewski points out the fact that Nerval's metaphor, though it carries a distinctively subjective mark, also appears in many other works (by writers such as Jean-Paul, Heine, Gautier, Hugo) and is inscribed into Romantic attempts to define depressive states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Death is a fetishised, if problematic, event in documentary. But rather less critical attention has been paid to issues of corporeal injury, impairment and disability. This article analyses two recent documentaries that explore the vulnerability, but also the stubborn persistence, of the (white male) body. Black Sun is a largely erpressionist film essay on blindness based on a collaboration between protaganist/interviewee Hugues de Montalembert and composer/filmmaker Gary Tarn. Murderball is a realist account of young men competing in quadriplegic rugby which draws on sports movie conventions for its narrative shape. Both films share some dilemmas - as well as clear points of contrast - in approaching their subjects, especially around the invisibility of the impaired body. How (if at all) is impairment made manifest on the imaged body? How might the films mobilise, complicate or refuse the objectification of sufferer/s as the other/s of an implicitly able-bodied viewer's gaze? Vt/hat constructions of masculinity and ethnicity are evident here? And how are the subjects' particular modes of self-presentation (via competitive sport, travelling writing, etc) mediated, and at times queried or disrupted, by the films' representational strategies? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]