MICHAELA FIŠEROVÁ Philosophy - Aesthetics - Media Studies

 

Doc. Michaela Fišerová, Ph.D. vystudovala

Mgr. z kulturologie na Univerzitě Komenského v Bratislavě (2004),

M.A. z estetiky na Université Paris 8 v Paříži (2006),

Ph.D. z filosofie na Université Paris 7 v Paříži (2009). 

 

Habilitovala se z filosofie na Masarykově univerzitě v Brně (2020). 

 

V letech 2010-2018 působila jako odborná asistentka na Univerzitě Karlově v Praze.

V současnosti působí v pozici docentky na Metropolitní univerzitě v Praze. 

 

Kontinuálně se zabývá výzkumem v oblasti vizuálních studií a současné francouzské filosofie, především dekonstrukce a poststrukturalismu. 

 

V letech 2014-2016 byla řešitelkou postdoktorského GAČR grantu na téma Dekonstrukce podpisu. Metafyzická dimenze legální mediační politiky.

 

Je autorkou odborných monografií 

- The Event of Signature (New York, State University of New York Press 2020) - v tisku

- Fragmentární vidění. Ranciere, Derrida, Nancy (Praha, Togga 2019)

- Dekonstrukce podpisu. Jacques Derrida a opakování neopakovatelného (Praha, Togga 2016)

- Obraz a moc. Rozhovory s francouzskými mysliteli (Praha, Karolinum 2015)

- Partager le visible. Repenser Foucault (Paříž, L'Harmattan 2013)

a spoluatorkou několika tuzemských i zahraničních kolektivních monografií. 

 

Publikovala celou řadu odborných studií, především v časopisech

Filozofia (SK)

Philosophy Today (USA)

Signata (BE)

Tumultes (FR)

 

Na odborné úrovni (mluveným i psaným projevem) ovládá jazyky: francouzština, angličtina, čeština, slovenština. 

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Doc. Michaela Fišerová, Ph.D. has received her

Mgr. in Cultural Studies at Comenius University in Bratislava (2004),

M.A. in Aesthetics at Université Paris 8 in Paris (2006),

Ph.D. in Philosophy at Université Paris 7 in Paris (2009). 

 

She received her academic title "Docent" in Philosophy at Masaryk university in Brno (2020). 

 

In 2010-2018, she worked in the position of Assistant Professor at Charles University in Prague.

In the present time, she works in the position of Associate Professor at Metropolitan University Prague. 

 

She does her continuous researches in the fields of Visual studies and contemporary French philosophy, mostly Deconstruction and Poststructuralism. 

 

In 2014-2016, she did her GAČR grant research entitled 

Deconstruction of Signature. metaphysical Dimension of the Legal Mediation Politics. 

 

She is the author of monographs

- The Event of Signature (New York, State University of New York Press 2020) - in print

- Fragmentary Vision. Ranciere, Derrida, Nancy (Prague, Togga 2019)

- Deconstruction of Signature. Jacques Derrida and Repeating of the Unrepeatable (Prague, Togga 2016)

- Picture and Power. Interviews with French Thinkers (Prague, Karolinum 2015)

- Sharing the Visible. Rethinking Foucault (Paris, L'Harmattan 2013)

and coauthor of several collective monographs. 

 

She has published numerous scientific papers, mostly in the journals

Filozofia (SK),

Philosophy Today (USA),

Signata (BE),

Tumultes (FR).

 

Scientific level of spoken and written expression in the following languages: French, English, Czech, Slovak. 

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Michaela Fišerová works in the fields of contemporary philosophy, media studies, and aesthetics. Fišerová specializes in deconstruction and poststructuralism, mostly in Derrida’s, Nancy’s, Marin’s, Didi-Huberman’s, Rancière’s, Foucault’s, and Deleuze’s philosophies of media and technologies. In the past decade, she has written four scholarly books: Sharing the Visible. Rethinking Foucault published in Paris in 2013, Image and Power. Interviews with French Thinkers published in Prague in 2015, Deconstructing Signature. Jacques Derrida and Repeating of the Unrepeatable published in Prague in 2016 and Fragmentary Vision. Rancière, Derrida, Nancy published in Prague in 2019. She is also the co-author of scholarly books including Gilles Deleuze on Literature: between Art, Animality and Politics (with Gregg Lambert), Cyberphotography. Opaque Medium and Technological Realism.

In her ongoing philosophical research, Fišerová focuses primarily on the problems of representation and repetition; she elaborates these in relation with various visualities and visual media, mostly photographs and signatures. Another focus of her work is on the political strategies of recognizing pictures through privileged modes of sharing them and elaborating on their style.

In her monograph Sharing the Visible. Rethinking Foucault (2013), Fišerová contributed to the research of the complex philosophical problem of sharing the visible, which she situated in contemporary epistemological discussions on the politics of representation. Her innovative method, inspired both by Michel Foucault’s archeology and Derrida’s deconstruction, consists in analyzing statements (texts explaining legitimately visible images) and visibilities (images chosen as appropriate illustrations of the texts) in the field of the archive. Her study of one particular archive case from Czechoslovakian history of art reveals a double bind: during the period of normalization (1968–1989) and the following period of democracy, the only way to achieve a legitimate politics of sharing the visible was by fixing particular aesthetic norms functioning as political limits of the authorized vision. No sharing of knowledge by means of image is possible without intervention of selection and without production of representations.
In her later work, Fišerová retains her interest in the problem of representation, but in her attempts to solve it, she turns considerably toward Derrida’s philosophy.

In Deconstructing Signature. Jacques Derrida and Repeating of the Unrepeatable (2016), she proposes to rethink three metaphysical expectations of handwritten signature, which are shared in the discourses of graphology and forensic analysis. The first expectation is the ability to recognize the writer: signature is understood as displaying the same “natural” qualities as the author herself. The second expectation is the ability to guarantee an “authentic” trace: signature is taken as a proof of contact between the signed document and writing instrument held by the author’s hand. The third expectation is the capability of perpetual manual reproduction: handwritten signature is considered to be a personal idiom, which guarantees the author’s legal “identity.” By grasping this triple metaphysical expectation as triple aporia situated in the interval between life and law—aporia of “natural” resemblance; aporia of “authentic” tracing; aporia of “identical” repetition—Fišerová provides a complex answer to the question why handwritten signature is expected to repeat the unrepeatable event of writing.

Inspired again by Derrida’s thinking, Fišerová recently returned to the topic of photographic mediation. In her scholarly book on the metaphysical expectations of a “good” portrait, titled Fragmentary Vision. Rancière, Derrida, Nancy (2019), she proposes an innovative philosophical insight into the “fragmentary” practice of photographic representation. To determine whether it is possible to take a photographic picture of a memory, she suggests turning from Rancière’s perspective to those of Derrida and Nancy. According to Fišerová, if an event visually “survives” in the archive, it is due to its technologically constructed representation, which can be deconstructed. In order to be photographically depicted, the event must be fragmented and framed: the parergonic technology chooses and frames a perceptible part of it, which is technologically translated into its material version, labeled as “the event,” and stored for further perceptions. The photograph can be taken for a surviving “relic” of an event of perception because of metonymic schematism, which wards off the fragmentary insufficiency of the representational “ruin” of the perceived event. Her conclusion is rooted in Nancy’s conception of technology as a beneficial metaphysical necessity: based on the principle of representation, it is even possible to take a photographic picture of past perception, of a memory; to compose it metonymically out of the fragments of present perception.

Throughout her research, Fišerová emphasizes the inevitable difference between life and law, which opens up the interval between the event and its political construction. Such an interval cannot be overcome by any technology promising “identical” repetition of events. No medium of “authentic” representation can avoid its double dependance: on the one hand, on the metaphysical expectations of the credible medium; on the other, on the discursive expectations of the authorizing politics of sharing.