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List of contents
Preface
Chapter 1: The Babylonian Planet
Chapter 2: Europe: Myth and Translation
Chapter 3: On the Shores … of the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris
Chapter 4: Outre Mér(e) : Jacques Derrida and the Mediterranean
Chapter 5: The Southern Cross: Planetarism of Alexander von Humboldt and François Arago
Chapter 6: Sublunar: Star Friendship in Orhan Pamuk‘s The White Castle
Chapter 7: In Orbit over the Earth: The Constellation of a Suitcase.
Chapter 8: Intergalactic: Universal Translation: Immanuel Kant, Spaceship Enterprise, and the Circulation of the Planets
Chapter 9: Heaven on Earth: Paul, a Cosmopolitan?
Finally: East Pole and West Pole
References
About the author
Sonja Neef (1968-2013) was Junior Professor of European Media and Culture at the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, from 2003 until 2010. She also became a Fellow at the International Kolleg Morphomata at the University of Cologne and a Feodor-Lynen Scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation at the University of Evry (Paris).
Summary
What is astro-culture? In The Babylonian Planet it is unfolded as an aesthetic, an idea, a field of study, a position, and a practice. It helps to engineer the shift from a world view that is segregated to one that is integrated – from global to planetary; from distance to intimacy and where closeness and cosmic distance live side-by-side.
In this tour de force, Sonja Neef takes her cue from Edouard Glissant’s vision of multilingualism and reignites the myth of the Tower of Babel to anticipate new forms of cultural encounter. For her, Babel is an organic construction site at which she fuses theoretical analysis and case studies of artists, writers and thinkers like William Kentridge, Orhan Pamuk and Immanuel Kant. Her skilful interrogations then allow her to paint a portrait of art and culture that abolishes the horizon as a barrier to vision and reclaims it as a place of contact and relation.
By combining the Babylonian concept of the encounter and the planetary concept of the whole-earth, Neef creates a space – an astro-culture – in which she can examine topics as varied as language, translation, media, modernity, migration and the moon. In doing so, she instigates a renewed cultural understanding receptive to the kinder forms of cultural encounter and globalisation she hopes will come.
Foreword
The English translation of the late Sonja Neef’s key text Der Babylonische Planet, which introduces the concept of 'astro-culture', an aesthetic that aims to shift our view of the view of the world as segregated to integrated.
Additional text
The Babylonian Planet reinvents cultural studies under the prism of planetarization by the use of a creative and convincing methodology, mixing issues as diverse as mythology and deconstruction or cosmos and globalization, while underlining the essential need to thinking translation culturally. The ultimate work of a great figure of cultural studies too quickly disappeared, whose perspective remains of an extreme topicality.
