The idea of culture formulated by Matthew Arnold emerged from a nineteenth century tradition of thought that began to separate the aesthetic and intellectual activities of men from the material and economic developments of an industrialising society. As the nineteenth century progressed, culture, in Raymond Williams's words, became ‘a court of human appeal, to be set over the processes of practical social judgement … as a mitigating and rallying alternative’. It is this idea of culture as being a source of oppositional and supplementary ideas to the perceived dominant values of an industrial society that led to the particular form that the convergence of culture and ethnicity took in the years between 1865 and 1910. Thus, the value of ‘the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic peoples’ for Arnold was that it proved to be a counterbalance to the hard-headed materialism of English philistine society. Similarly, William Dean Howells detected in the ‘childish simple-heartedness’ of African Americans a source of regeneration for an ‘over-civilized’ United States. These conceptions of Celtic and African-American uniqueness became influential within those groups themselves. W. B. Yeats followed Arnold in considering the Irish a ‘conquered race’ with a particular insight into ‘charms, dreams and visions’, and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that African Americans were ‘the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars’.

D. P Moran's argument mirrors the contributionist views espoused by Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells. While Arnold argued for the amalgamation of the Celtic peoples into a dominant English nation, and William Dean Howells desired the fusion of his nation's ethnic and linguistic differences into a common American identity, Moran conceives of an Ireland in which the nation's racial and cultural diversity is absorbed into a dominant Gaelic culture. R. F. Foster considers Moran's statement that ‘the Gael must be the element that absorbs’ a ‘chilling dictum’. When one considers, however, that this passage was written at a time when such views of ethnic contributionism were widely entertained, a time when the Gael was generally feared and ridiculed in the British press, and when Irish speakers had no access to education in their own language, Moran's dictum may be less chilling than first impressions might suggest.

Following the Allied victory, Heidegger was brought before a denazification commission at the University of Freiburg. He was forbidden to teach and refused Emeritus status. The details of the tribunal, the evasions he gave to try to hold onto his job, and the damning letter from Karl Jaspers that probably swayed the decision have been well explored in numerous works, and need not concern us here. Although Heidegger's sentence is insignificant compared to the enormity of the crimes and punishments of Europe as a whole, the denial of an audience for his ideas was surely considerable for one who so clearly valued teaching as a means to research. We should note that almost all of Heidegger's published works after Being and Time derive from lecture material.

But Heidegger did not retreat into silence. Not long after the war, in late 1946, while his position was still undecided, and recognising the impact his ideas were having, particularly in France – Sartre's Being and Nothingness appeared in 1943; Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception in 1945 – he agreed to respond to some questions posed to him by Jean Beaufret, who had been a correspondent since 1945. This text, the Letter on Humanism, is one of Heidegger's most interesting pieces, a tour-de-force of clarification, summary and future programme, particularly orientated around positioning himself against the ‘existentialist’ interpretation. If a detailed reading will be eschewed here, one particular passage neatly illustrates a number of the problematics that this book has been concerned with.

‘The Inner Truth …’

The issues that arise from the reading of Aristotle outlined in the previous chapter play out in a number of ways. On the one hand there is a continuity, where Heidegger stresses the idea of the human as the being with the logos, with language (for example, GA29/30, 442–3; GA31, 54; GA32, 91; GA33, 125/106; GA34, 198), and discusses the fallen sense of modern logic (such as GA32, 109, 149–50; GA36/37, 69–77, 103; GA40, 142). On the other, we find a continual effort to rethink and problematise earlier discussions, such as the argument that because legein means lesen, to glean, ‘to harvest or gather [zusammenlesen, sammeln], to add one to the other, to include and connect [mitrechnen] one with the other’, the primary meaning of logos is ‘relation [Beziehung]’ or ‘relationship [Verhältnis]’ rather than discourse (GA33, 5/2–3, 121/103; see GA34, 198; GA40, 95). This is both a partial rejection of the claim in Being and Time that Verhältnis is a misleading translation of logos (GA2, 32), but also builds into the claim that logos is rule or law, ‘the ruling structure, the gathering of those beings related among themselves’ (GA33, 121/103).

This is an important hint of the link between the mode of connection of humans in community, through language, and the calculative politics – through the notion of mitrechnen – to be discussed in Chapter Three.

The period from 1880 to 1915 has been described as ‘the age of Booker T. Washington’ by historians of black America. Born into slavery, Washington became a leading African-American spokesperson and educationalist renowned for advocating a shift in black thought from an emphasis on political enfranchisement to economic development, from social integration to agricultural self-sufficiency. In his September 1895 speech to the ‘Cotton States and International Exposition’ in Atlanta, Washington argued that, given that a third of the South's population was African American, any ‘enterprise seeking the material, civil and moral welfare’ of the region could not disregard their interests. He suggested that African Americans should shun the temptation to head north for employment – ‘Cast down your buckets where you are’ – and contribute to the capitalist economic expansion of the Southern States.

Mark Jancovich has demonstrated that struggles over genre classification reveal much about how social identities are constructed through the use of cultural distinctions. As he explains, ‘genre definitions are produced more by the ways in which films are understood by those who produce, mediate and consume them, than they are by the internal properties of the films themselves’ (Jancovich 2001: 33–4). More than this, genres cannot

These observations – which suggest that genre classification is a process to be observed, rather than a fixed destination to be arrived at – are of particular relevance in the case of the simultaneous reception at multiple exhibition sites of New Korean Cinema. South Korea's emerging national film industry is revealing itself to be open to struggles over its meaning and status at home and abroad. Questions of genre have a crucial role to play in this regard.