Inscriptions

- contemporary thinking on art, philosophy and psycho-analysis -
https://inscriptions.tankebanen.no/

**Title:** Editorial

**Author:** *Inscriptions*

**Section:** Editorial

Copyright © 2022 *Inscriptions*.

**Correspondence:** *Inscriptions*, e: inscriptions@tankebanen.no.

**Received:** 5 January, 2022.

**Accepted:** 10 January, 2022.

**Published:** 15 January, 2022.

**How to cite:** *Inscriptions*. Editorial. *Inscriptions* 5, no. 1 (January 2022): 7-8.

This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
Editorial

It is with trepidation and joy we begin to circ-
culate this fifth volume of *Inscriptions*. What
started as a small project, well hidden in
the more obscure corners of contemporary
thought, has grown to something quite dif-
ferent: as our readership is growing, so are
our demands of ourselves and the journal we
make, which in turn generates interest from a
widening circle of thinkers, writers, and schol-
ars. This issue is special; it is devoted to "Being
and Event", the topic of a conference hosted by
Ereignis Center for Philosophy and the Arts
in June last year. Many essays in this issue are
reworked versions of papers presented there,
and have benefited from scholarly dialogue ini-
tiated at that event. In all cases essays published
by *Inscriptions* are subject to double-blind re-
view by two external peers.

We stand by our founding principles, contin-
uing to insist on scholastic rigour and quality
in everything we publish. Nevertheless, those
who undertake a project such as ours, partly
experimental and wholly entertained outside
institutional and corporate sedimented struc-
tures, will encounter situations that strongly
compel them to modify their path. The obser-
vant reader will already have noticed that this
issue does not include a section on arts. Our de-
cision not to include artworks in a separate sec-
tion is due to two considerations. First, while
we have been delighted with the artworks we
had published thus far we have come to recog-
nise that our format severely restricts the kinds
of art we can disseminate and the quality by
which we are able to reproduce them. At this
time *Inscriptions* is limited to PDFs: images we
publish must therefore have fixed size and fit
within the A4 format. This really is a tech-
nologically superfluous requirement. As we
have continued to publish the artworks from

*Inscriptions* in galleries at our sister site *ereignis.no/* we have come to recognise the advantages of online galleries: they enable a wider range of formats (videos, audio files, GIFs, etc.), and they can be maintained with greater ease, and in a way that is much more conducive to a proper display of artworks than a scholarly journal can ever do.

Our second consideration has been a desire
to pool our resources to enable us to make the
best scholarly journal possible. While this led
to some soul-searching we decided to concen-
trate our efforts on scholarship, albeit with our
own particular angle: beginning with this issue
we include creative criticism as a new category
of scholarly articles, and while these texts will
be submitted to the same rigorous double-blind
review as other texts we encourage authors to
submit articles that challenge the traditional
scholastic format: we look for texts that ex-
plicitly reflect on methods and practices, in-
cluding lyrical and personal reflections. While
we will continue to pursue our interest in the
arts, and also to publish artworks in this jour-
nal when appropriate, as well as in the galleries
at *ereignis.no/*, we believe that our reformu-
lated editorial policies will prepare the ground
for a better, stronger, and more focussed effort
in an emerging area of scholarly open access
publishing.

Our current issue stands as an example of
what can be achieved with this kind of ap-
proach. We're delighted to bring to the reader
ten essays that develop the notions being and
event (*Ereignis*) so as to give readers a fuller,
more complex understanding of these inter-
esting terms. David Ritchie's contribution, a
fine example of creative criticism, is a profound,
accessible, and at times witty reconsideration
of the topology of events. His text revolves
around the ways in which our inherited no-
tions of social events seem to rely on hierarchi-
cal, top-down relations, while we in our time
increasingly hear calls for bottom-up, or flat,
topographies. Will we need to reformulate our
concepts in the face of these demands? Con-
versely, Dror Pimentel strictly limits the event
to denote a meeting in art: art, he suggests, is
an event of hospitality to the radical other. In
a perceptive analysis of Rilke's poem "Archaic
Torso of Apollo" Pimentel demonstrates how
the statue's call for the viewer to change his
life does not emanate from the regulative or-
der but from the outside of this order itself, a
radical outside that makes a demand on our hos-
pitality and understanding. Jørgen Veisland
shows how the terms appropriation and event,
or *Ereignis*, are names for a relation of time to
Being, where Being is given expression as an
indeterminate positive difference, while Aaron
Kulak reads the 19th century Danish philoso-
pher Søren Kierkegaard such that creation is
the event in which the Biblical command of
love is given expression.

James Bahoh and Andrew Jorn both engage
the notion of authenticity in their approach
to the event. What is an authentic event, and
how can it be distinguished from its inauthen-
tic other? Bahoh approaches the event as an
elemental, pre-personal ground of selfhood.
He argues that since the authentic and inau-
thentic are inextricably entwined, authenticity
is essentially about recognising this mutual de-
pendency. Andrew Jorn goes further to claim
that we should dispel the notion, or fantasy, of
authentic events as those in which we achieve
some kind of reunification with Being. In-
stead, he argues, the authentic is precisely the
transversal of such fantasies.

While all contributions to this issue have a
singular approach to being and event what they
demonstrate together and each on their own
is an acute attentiveness to decisive moments
an the analysis of the event. We would like
these contributions to be but the beginning of
a new kind of thinking about events: attentive,
incisive, and rigorous.

Copyright © 2022 *Inscriptions*.

Correspondence: *Inscriptions*, e: inscriptions@tankebanen.no.

**How to cite:** *Inscriptions*. Editorial. *Inscriptions* 5, no. 1 (January 2022): 7-8.
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