Participants
Zrinka Blažević, University of Zagreb
Potentials of Otherness: the Landmarks for the Foreign Country
Starting from Michel de Certeau’s famous presumption that history is an emblematic form of heterology marked by pathological effort to establish a relation with the dead and absent, this paper aims at questioning possible disciplinary convergences between history and imagology as exemplary discourses of/about Otherness. Following the idea of Paul Ricoeur, it might be stated that history and imagology share a common constitutive element – the image – whose readability and visibility is a key representational feature of temporal and spatial Otherness. Since both disciplines are marked by responsive imperative (Bernhard Waldenfels) and have a mediatory function with regard to the historical, social and cultural Other, the analytical focus will be put on their epistemological premises, cognitive ranges and explanatory possibilities or, more precisely, their ability to function as languages of/about Otherness. In this manner, not only landmarks for practical research on the Other but also cornerstones for constructing historical xenology will hopefully be established.
