and translation (the problem of the paradoxical immediacy of the medium). Chapter 5 considers the emergent relationhip between ‘discourse’ and ‘fiction’ in the context of 1950s and 1960s French philosophy (and literary theory). This development is shown to be connected to several seemingly disparate developments: the nouveau roman (Michel Butor and the new problem of ‘form’), the beginnings of postmodernism, and the birth of cybernetics (with its idea of the open system). This context marks the discovery of a certain opaqueness (in other words, écriture) associated with the meaning of a text. Écriture seems to be very close to the concept of the text, except for revealing a hitherto invisible dimension of the ‘text’, its ‘third element’ (as Michel Serres would put it) – one previously excluded: the motion or process of its sense. Chapter 6 (‘Let Apparitions Return’: Modern Spectrology and its Media) turns to the negativity of media in the context of modern German (and French) cultural, social, and philosophical anthropology – the eschatological critiques of new technologies in the interwar and post-war periods (by Helmuth Plessner, Max Picard, and Günther Anders), as well as their mythological invocations (by Edgar Morin, for example, as resurrections of the archaic vision). Critical reflections on the new modern media, which is at once disembodying and technically materialized, are shown to have implications beyond that of a merely residual or conservative reaction. In this context, as in art, the liminal phenomena associated with physical human existence and its disappearance (body impressions, ashes, tears, spectres) become subject to representation, which in turn intensifies belief in various paraphenomena; spectres seem to acquire a more real existence than their actually existing ‘doubles’. The chapter aims to explain how this, together with the colonization of the human image by digital media (Hans Belting), is related to the more fundamental character of the image as double, and how the mediality of the medium is configured along these borders. To this end, it takes into account several symptomatic art works and photographies: the post-mortem photography of the painter Bohumil Kubišta, Jindřich Štyrský’s death mask photography and his painting Na hrobě, Le cube by Alberto Giacometti, or Paul Klee’s Tod und Feuer.
Literature, media, mediality, technics At this point of our research, a number of tensions in the medium/mediality concept have become apparent over the course of its gradual emergence, and these are further investigated in the context of several concrete areas of research, with special regard to the progressive advancement of media awareness as well as literary culture. These tensions are as follows: the instrumental vs 98 Ukázka elektronické knihy, UID: KOS293419