- Monograph
- Dissertation
Die heiligen Kanäle
Über die archaische Illusion der Kommunikation
Erich Hörl
2005
© ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe
- Type of publication
- Monograph
- Dissertation
- Publishing house, place
- Diaphanes, Zürich
- Author / Editor
- Erich Hörl
- Physical Description
- 299 p.
- Language
- German
- Year
- 2005
- ISBN
- 3-935300-57-3
- Content
- The Sacred Channels – On an archaic illusion of communication
Thinking at the turn of the 20th century is imbued with numerous notions on the Primitive, embedding a vague belief in transmission of holy forces as nucleus of the Primitive Peoples world-view. These speculations remain intrinsic to the discourse of the Primitive and the Sacred, thus permeating the knowledge of ethnology, anthropology, philosophy and sociology up to today. The Sacred Channels reads this interpretation of the Primitive Peoples world-view as projections arising from insecurities within a culture that found itself at the passage from alphabetical to electromagnetic practise and from representational to symbolic thought. George Boole and James George Frazer, Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, Cassirer, Lévy-Bruhl, Bataille, Heidegger and Lévi-Strauss are central characters within a history of illusion, which the author exposes as a history of archaic illusion of communication. Erich Hörl’s The Sacred Channels is the missing link towards an archaeology on the Sacred and the Primitive.