The Babylonian Planet

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.

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