1.  This opposition can be, most generally, associated with Lacan’s opposition symbolic/real as well as with Deleuze’s one between the virtual and the real. (back)

2.  We see literature as incorporated as an object in philosophy from Plato to Deleuze; to what extend however, is it not a subject as well? Does the rhetoric of Plato’s texts not refute his own distinction: as it is known many interpreters tend to regard Plato’s work as syncretic, as combining philosophical and literary aspect (in Bulgaria, for ex. Bogdan Bogdanov,  Мит и литература. Осма глава: Платоновият диалог – модус на Платоновото философствуване. София, 1985). (back)

3.  I will recall the problem which I would signified as the problem of the phantasm’ topos. Within philosophy Plato discriminated a definite type of images which lack their own topos, which simulate being. Within the thought territory of the Universal, philosophy, the notion of images of pure negativity, black holes in the meaningful filledness of the world is introduced. These are the phantasms distinguished from icons (Sophistes). Icons are likenesses of the idea, in the end contributing to its identity, while phantasms, simulacrums deprived of grounds are instruments of the Sophist’s subversive activity. The Sophistes distinction of two types of images apparently corresponds to the imitation’s two-degree structure through which poetry is accounted for in the Republic. It is phantasms, the topos-less images that philosophy rejects; the latter seeks likeness which guarantee ideas’ identities. (back)

4.  In Difference and Repetition Deleuze claims that the virtual is always partial, fragmentary. But I have to add the virtual is at the same time the real’s crutch, it completes it, it is the power that allows it to imagine existence. The real is never ultimate, never complete; the virtual precedes it and endows it with existence. In border notions like wholeness, completeness, beginning, end the real and the virtual are co-posited and the root of the real becomes visible. Therefore ‘the actual real’, here and now, is always partial. Only the virtual’s  cocoon, woven from time’s thread provides its transcending (here I approach from another point of departure the poststructuralist view of literature as preceding and grounding philosophy as well Nelson Goodman’s idea of fiction as a way of worldmaking). (back)

5.  “For we are conscious of being enchanted by such poetry ourselves; though it would be a sin to betray what seems to us the cause of truth.” (The Republic of Plato, translated by John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan, London, 1920, p.352). (back)

6.  See § 608 of The Republic: “At any rate, we have learned that we must not make a serious pursuit of such poetry, in the believe that it grasps truth and is good: on the contrary, the listener, apprehending danger to the constitution within him, is bound to be on his guard against it, and to adopt the opinion which we have expressed on the subject.” (p.353). (back)

7.  Cf. Ernst Cassirer: “Hier kann noch alles aus allem w e r d e n, weil alles mit allem sich zeitlich oder räumlich berühren kann.” (Philosophie der symbolischen formen, II: Das mytische Denken, Berlin, 1925, p. 62). (back)

8.  In her essay On photography, Susan Sontag, analyzing the discrimination of image by the philosophy, writes: “For defenders of the real from Plato to Feuerbach to equate image with mere appearance – that is, to presume that the image is absolutely distinct from the object depicted – is part of that process of desacralization which separates sacred times and places in which an image was taken to participate in the reality of the object depicted.” (Susan Sontag, On photography, New York, 1978, p.155). In other words, in mythology the virtual is subordinated, included in the all-embracing real’s content. (back)

9.  “Häufig findet es sich, daß dort, w o w i r, vom Standpunkt der wissenschaftlichen Welterklärung, vom ‘Zufall’ sprechen, das mytische Bewußtsein gebieterisch eine ‘Ursache’ verlangt und in jedem einzelnen Falle eine solche Ursache selzt. (…) Demnach scheint innerhalb des mythischen Denkens so wenig von gesetzloser Willkür die Rede zu sein, daß man eher versucht wäre, vom Gegenteil, von einer Art Hypertrophie des kausalen “Instinkts” und des kausalen Erklärungsbedürfnisses zu sprechen.” (Ernst Cassirer, op. cit., p. 63 - 64). (back)

10.  Arnold Ruge writes in 1841 in Deutschen Jahrbüchern: “daß alle Philosophie nichts Anderes sei als der Gedanke ihrer Zeit… In diesem Sinne ist die Hegelsche Philosophie der Revolution und die letzte aller Philosophien überhaupt.” (quot. by Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophishe Diskurs der Moderne, 1986, p. 65). (back)

11.  Cf. Baudrillard’s and Hobsbawm’s claims uttered in a parallel perspective, obviously having negative connotations and the media apologist’s, McLuhan one which is, logically, positive. (back)

12.  From this point of view, today mass culture works as a whole represent a typical media product. These works’ whole significance can be reduced to the very process of meaning construction, without leading to a complete result – on the contrary it is exhausted with itself. With them one cannot speak of construction of an object of a different order, that can be separated from its relation with a subject. These characteristics are intimately connected with the physical character of audio-visual media, reproducing real human images and voices and thus appearing as a pregnant continuation of our bodily world. The re-cycled and re-sacralized media images deserve Plato’s accusations against drama to a greater degree. They really appropriate the priestly gesturing entering directly in our psychophysical environment and unfolding there their manipulations. Thus the real’s territories expand and considerably prevail over the virtual, in opposition to literature. (back)

13.  Thus we could explain the rise of the ‘media myths’: the rigidly codified texts are unifying power, opposing the over-expanding world’s entropy. They create fixed models (therefore their recognition, their being pre-known causes pleasure) which act stabilizingly endowing effortless identity. (back)

14.  In his article Quelques réflexions sur le statut épistémologique du texte électronique (In Computers and the Humanities, 1985) the medieval scholar S. Lusignan writes: “Information should not be confused with meaning. Meaning appears as a result of a human interpretation of information.” Informational technologies whose original function is the one of instrument (an object in a subject position), without leading to the creation of a value model, i.e. to meaning generation, mechanically attempt to usurp the subject’s position for the new information they produce becomes a means to their own improvement and organization - a closed circle of processuality which lacks a meaning product: a zero circumference, which can be transformed into a spiral only by a catastrophe. (back)

15.  It is not difficult to guess that the modern understanding of history is inseparable from these dimensions. The very sense of historicity, the conceiving of the past as historical is a product or at least an integral, reciprocal part of the writing culture (the cultural experience stabilization through writing vectorizes time), the way the oral word culture is connected with the mythological ‘feeling’ and the mythological conception of time (the cyclic repetitiveness). On its part, the stages in book development, the transition to the typewritten book, for ex. – correspond to the transformation of historical models. Writing’s ‘virtualization’ is in any case a sign of a new but similar transformation and for now we can only dimly anticipate the influence it will have on our view of history, on our relations with the past and future. Does the human world expand or diminish? (back)

16.  The oral word in radio, plus the image – in television, in computers – the co-positing of the textual and the visual codes (the new iconic signs). The very resurrection and establishment in new codes of the image is symptomatic. (back)

17.  As Wolfgang Iser puts it in the final sentence of  The Fictive and the Imaginary: “Precisely because cognitive discourse cannot capture the duality adequately, we have literature.”(p. 303). (back)