What are the differences between cosmopolitanism and globalization? Are they “natural” historical processes or are they designed for specific purposes? Was Kant cosmopolitanism good for the entire population of the globe or did it respond to a particular Eurocentered view of what a cosmo-polis should be? The article argues that, while the term “globalization” in the most common usage refers and correspond to neo-liberal globalization projects and ambitions, and the Kantian concept of “cosmopolitanism” responded to the second wave, “de-colonial (...) cosmopolitanism” refers to global processes and conceptualizations delinking from both neo-liberal globalization and liberal cosmopolitan ideals. But it delinks also from theological and Marxist visions of a homogenous world center around religious ideals or state socialist regulations. De-colonial cosmopolitanism is a cosmopolitanism of multiple trajectories aiming at a trans-modern world based on pluriversality rather than on a new and good universal for all. (shrink)

This study situates Romantic literature in a historical narrative that runs from the Fall of the Bastille to Waterloo, and places Romantic texts against contemporary events like the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the rise of European imperialism in Africa and Asia that mark the period from 1789 to 1832. At the same time, this study considers the relation of the Romantic epic to narratives of universal history from Hegel to Marx. A central concern is the appearance of (...) the Romantic hero as a Promethean subject of history in the bourgeois social revolutions of the age. Napoleon's career provides a paradigm for the bildungsroman of the Romantic subject; while the life of Goethe expresses this dynamic life-history as an aesthetic narrative. Taken together, then, these narratives define the milieu in which the Romantic subject is constituted, and delineate the parameters of the revolutionary transformations of modernity. ;The concept of modernity as a process of development came into currency as a description of the radical changes undergone by European society during the emergence of industrial capitalism, the democratization of the public sphere, and the rise of a world-imperial order. The Romantic period thus constitutes an event like the postmodern break in which the narratives through which history is mediated to individuals are shattered by a traumatic shift in modes of cultural production. Romantic epics like Faust, Part II, Jerusalem, Don Juan and The Excursion respond to this crisis of representation by reinserting historical experience into an overarching narrative of development that describes the evolution of the representative individual or collective subject, "Man," in his fall into alienation and self-division in social forms, and his rise toward utopian self-unification as a figure of desire for restored human community. The contradictions of modernity are thus reproduced in the Romantic epic, which both projects the totalized form of an emancipatory metanarrative and records the deconstruction of that narrative by social change. Romanticism, then, is a displaced ideological afterimage of the inception of modernity as it is experienced by Romantic writers in all its apocalyptic violence and utopian promise. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diasporic Impulses:Sikh Philosophy as an AssemblageArvind-Pal S. Mandair (bio)Let me begin this response by thanking the editors of Philosophy East and West for generously allowing space for this review forum on my recent book, Sikh Philosophy: Exploring Gurmat Concepts in a Decolonizing World (Bloomsbury, 2022), and thanking the reviewers Monika-Kirloskar Steinbach, Ananda Abeysekara, and Jeffery Long for their careful readings of this work. "Sikh Philosophy" names the modern academic (...) discourse that crystallized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of the encounter between modern Western philosophy and gurmat, a mode of thought-praxis deriving from and associated with Sikhi (lit. "the path of learning"), a spiritual-philosophical tradition hailing from India, which most readers may only have encountered through the modern knowledge system's categorization of it as the religion known as Sikhism. To avoid complicating the discussion, I will be referring interchangeably to gurmat and Sikh philosophy, even though they represent quite different entities. Gurmat represents a tradition of thought-praxis that goes back to Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhi, whereas Sikh philosophy is a modern formation that emerged from the encounter between gurmat and European thought, which is why I prefer to regard it as an assemblage. The book examines some of the key concepts of Sikh philosophy and how they inform its vision of life, what they tell us about the nature of reality, and whether it is possible to discern a distinct logic, epistemology, and ontology based on the principles of gurmat. In their reviews, Kirloskar-Steinbach, Abeysekara, and Long have provided critical readings and insightful questions, which I address below.Monika Kirloskar-Steinbach asks about the relationship between Sikh philosophy and Indian philosophy, noting that my book does not explicitly engage Indian philosophy. Specifically, she raises two questions: (1) whether Sikh philosophy should or potentially could be part of the broader field of Indian philosophy, and (2) whether I would be inclined to contribute to that field, particularly in light of recent efforts to diversify philosophical practices within Indian philosophy by scholars like Jonardon Ganeri in his Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (2017) and Purushottama Bilimoria and Amy Rayner in their History of Indian Philosophy (2018). My immediate response would be "yes," but with an important caveat. In that vein, I applaud Ganeri's and Bilimoria/Rayner's efforts to open up philosophical inquiry within Indian traditions and take them beyond darśanic framings that narrowly positioned different thought-practices of South Asia either within or [End Page 364] in relation to the Brahmanical/Vedic/Sanskritic paradigm. Ganeri's "multiperspectival" narrative about practices might well enable discussions about Sikh philosophy to flourish, given that the lexicon of gurmat (the teaching, logic, practice of the Guru) is replete with concepts that have cognate terms in the main Hindu philosophical schools including Sāṃkhya, Yoga, Mīmāṃsā, and Vedānta; the Jain and Buddhist traditions; and perhaps most importantly, within the Islamic, especially Sufi, traditions. It is the seeming parity between cognate terms such as the Punjabi dharam (Skt. dharma), karam (Skt. karma), yoga, śabad (Skt. śabda), guru, hukam, and many more, which has given rise to the misperception that Sikh philosophy is a purely syncretic thought system parasitic on earlier Indic systems. A similar misperception might be that Sikhi is more primarily a mode of lived praxis or dharam than it is a philosophy (Bhogal 2018) and therefore has less to do with thought than with spiritual attainment. But this approach is far too narrow in that it opposes "philosophy"/"thought" to spiritual praxis without asking whether there might be a broader definition of thinking at play within Sikhi or gurmat. Such an approach fails to extricate itself from the legacy of imperial categorizations of Indic traditions as essentially religious and therefore unrelated to what is called "thinking." By doing so, it falls prey to another misconception many have, that the closest Indians have come to philosophical thought are the darśanic schools, not realizing that most Indian philosophers and thinkers were at the same time devotees and spiritual adepts who developed rigorous modes of discipline and practice.Having said this, I would premise any... (shrink)

Revisionists have reclassified fascism as an autonomous revolutionary force based on the power of myth. Yet despite attempts to close the gap between materialist and culturalist readings, theories of fascism as the future-oriented projection of a mythic past overlook the point that, though intrinsic in the subjectification and deautonomization of the individual in collective-type societies, myths cannot be revolutionary because they derive their significance by projecting an idealized past that originates outside the emancipatory-developmental trajectory of modernity. Myths constitute a (...) generic feature of human societies, idealized narratives which synthesize historical events, values and ideals into all-encompassing and enduring social intuitions; myths cannot be criticized because they are ‘untrue’ but because they exhibit an intrinsically speculative and particularistic nature which is unable to provide an objective basis for the revolutionary transformation of capitalist social relations. As a violent rupture of incendiary modernism, the mythic narrative of interwar fascism dramatized the experience of modernity in a new and scandalous form, confronting but ultimately reaffirming the conformism and disavowal in bourgeois culture. Unable to rise above the powerful yet imaginary ideal of ‘manifest destiny’ – an imperial ideal shared by non-fascist European powers, fascism offered a beguiling glimpse into the transgressive power of the modern postdemocratic corporate state, pointing towards a social structure of accumulation based on an appropriation of the cooperative capacities and democratic potential of society by capital. Emphasizing the accumulated or ‘constituted’ violence of modernity, the fascist mythologization of power led to the functionalization of reason, the demoralization of socially motivated action, and the suspension of objective moral standards as grounds for civic association. (shrink)

This study is an exploration of the Hagar narrative from the perspective of African Womanist Theology. The article focuses on the spirituality of Hagar before and after her captivity (Gn 16). The research takes an Afrocentric perspective and uses a postcolonial lens to comment on the preceding text as well as consider how this story is captured in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. At the core of the article is an attempt at reclaiming the African in Hagar who is largely (...) portrayed in the stories of Sarah and Abraham within a Hebrew perspective which itself is arguably imperial. The aim is to inspire modern African women (and in the diaspora) to reclaim their African spirituality within their stories and experiences. Summarily, the article is a critique of the colonial project, slavery and its legacies in dehumanising and disenfranchising people and African knowledge systems. The article is structured as follows: firstly, it introduces the Hagar and/or Hajar traditions from the perspectives of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Secondly, it takes a step back to consider Hagar’s identity as an Egyptian princess before she encountered Sarah and Abraham. The article also discusses how Hagar’s past in Egypt had a bearing on her spiritual encounters when she and her son Ishmael and/or Ismail were exiled. Finally, the article concludes with a recommendation for continued reflection on an African spirituality narrative of the Hagar traditions alongside the predominant narratives from Abrahamic religions.Contribution: This article demonstrates that the religious scriptures must be read from liberation perspectives such as the postcolonial paradigm to inspire the recovery of authentic experiences of the oppressed and displaced, and it is an inspiration to African women to reclaim their true identity and spirituality. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article discusses some common narratives found in discourses on national identity in Russia and Japan, and their temporal transformations reflecting the needs of a nation as it becomes a colonial empire. National identity discourse is examined from the viewpoint of national antagonism arising from an external threat. Russian and Japanese intellectuals, with their vastly different historical and cultural heritage, have dwelled upon similar issues pertaining to modernization of the state and adoption or rejection of foreign ideas and ways of (...) life. There are several themes in Russian and Japanese discourses on national identity that share a significant overlap, particularly themes of national uniqueness and a ‘special path’, deterministic worldviews, imperial cosmopolitanism/messianism and criticism of ‘Western’ philosophical systems and concepts. This article elucidates the shared aspects of these narratives and philosophical inquiries in Russia and Japan and puts them into a historical context. (shrink)

Histories of the conquest of America have long highlighted the role of wonder, possession, and desire in Spanish conceptions of the New World. Yet missing in these accounts is the role that studying nature played in shaping Spain’s imperial ethos. In the sixteenth century, Spanish missionaries revived the practice of natural history to trace the origins of New World nature. In their pursuit of the cultural meanings of natural landscapes, however, Spanish natural historians naturalized their own fears of the (...) demonic. In this article, I argue that naturalist inquiry served as an empirical and spiritual laboratory to develop a contentious narrative of political domination. I focus specifically on the writings of the missionary ethnographer, Bernardino de Sahagún, who compiled the first bilingual account of the peoples of the Aztec empire and used his immersion in Nahua culture to promote indigenous conversion to the Christian faith. Sahagún’s narrative techniques were aimed at the New World’s cultural regeneration, particularly through the study of nature. Yet his intellectual transformation during this journey bears surprising ideological paradoxes. Sahagún’s legacies therefore offer political theorists today a medium to rethink key historiographical assumptions about the anthropolitics of nature and the broader geopolitics of early modern political thought. (shrink)

Eighteenth-century naval ships were impressive infrastructures, but subjected to extraordinary strain. To assist with their “voyage repairs,” the Royal Navy gradually established numerous overseas bases, displaying the power, reach, and ruthless logistical efficiency of the British state. This article, however, is concerned with what happened where no such bases (yet) existed, in parts of the world falling in between areas of direct British administration, control, or influence. The specific restrictions imposed by technology and infrastructures have been studied by historians interested (...) in naval strategy, but they can also help to reframe national narratives of power or observe the transnational interactions surrounding access to knowledge and resources. This paper discusses the material, cultural, and diplomatic constraints that could appear when vessels, and especially “discovery ships,” sailed in strange waters or sought technical assistance in allied ports. I argue that the “mortification” of some commanders at their vessels’ unfitness for service was an important – and often neglected – element on the palette of emotions undergone by voyagers, capturing their strong sense of ultimate material powerlessness. Such frustration even became embedded in imperial cartography, as shown by the case study of Matthew Flinders. This perspective highlights the limits of naval technology, complicating imperialistic “success stories” and better reintegrating the navy into the history of maritime travel and transportation, from which it is often singled out. (shrink)

In reference to the paradoxical classification of art in Kafka’s Josefine story, religious aspects of the artist’s performances and their effect on the audience are scrutinized. The leading question is to what extent it evokes an allusion to the primal scene of divine revelation, following Stéphane Mosès’ commentary in his readings of the Bible. Josefine’s singing with a “nothing of a voice”, reduced to “the slightest of nullities”, the zero-point of signification, nevertheless affects an experience of presence and community that (...) touches the listeners’ entire being. From the perspective of the artist, her song recitals are manifestations of supreme art of which she claims a soteriological significance in respect of her audience who belongs in Kafka’s portrayal obviously to the Jewish people. Around such a tension between maximal restraint of an utterance (the voice onset of the aleph of the word anokhi/i) and all-encompassing meaning (the name of God and all Commandments whose acceptance is constitutive for the Jewish people) circle the theological exegeses of the Sinai-scene (esp. Ex. 20,1) in the tradition of Rashi and Maimonides, in modernity e.g. of Gershom Scholem in dispute with Walter Benjamin on Kafka. It will be shown that the depicted paradoxes of Josefine’s art performances unfold the mentioned tension as an original literary reflection on revelation and language under the conditions of modernity. (shrink)

Resumen El artículo revisa los discursos de viaje dentro de dos relatos escritos por mujeres durante el período imperialista del fin de siècle, quienes viajaron por espacios marginales a la modernidad. La primera autora es Florence Dixie, noble inglesa que escribe su relato de viaje a la Patagonia durante 1879, mientras que Iris, mujer igualmente aristócrata y chilena, escribe su periplo realizado por el lago Ranco en 1910. Independiente de la nacionalidad de origen de estas mujeres y sus diferencias personales, (...) en tanto el rol jugado por ellas en el grupo de expedición, ambas escritoras viajeras son depositarias de una mirada imperial, que se vuelca en la manera que se internan narrativamente por los espacios explorados.The article reviews the journey discourses in two narratives written by two women during the imperialist period of the fin de siècle, who traveled through marginal spaces to modernity. The first author is Florence Dixie, an English noblewoman who writes her travelogue to Patagonia during 1879, while Iris, an equally aristocratic, and Chilean woman, writes her journey made through Ranco lake in 1910. Independent of nationality of origin of these women and their personal differences, as long as the role played by them in the expedition group, both traveling writers are repositories of an imperial gaze, that shows in the way they go into theirs narrative through the spaces explored. (shrink)

One can view the recent science fiction films Gravity, Interstellar, and The Martian as a three-part dialogue concerning the existential relationship between humanity, technology, and the science employed to create said technologies. Pitched into the deep of space, each film’s protagonist must seek to find technological answers to save their own existence. Each film’s exploration of these themes essentially questions the importance of technology as a product of scientific-calculative thinking and the validity of this thinking as the primary mode of (...) understanding the world. In this article, I explore the existential dialogue crafted between these films through Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger. Through Benjamin, we will see how the medium of film is completely dependent upon technology to present its art and how this transforms the stories it tells, while also transforming the audience and the audience’s reality. Consequently, understanding the popular reception of these films becomes just as important as the films themselves for our present study. Through Heidegger, we will see how technology provides a space where we can find a truth about ourselves and our reality. However, modern technology’s increasing scientific complexity, created by scientists who in turn employ modern technology to further science, also conceals just as much as it reveals. These films provide us with an opportunity to explore a truth about our dependence upon technology even though, as technologically dependent works of art, they may also conceal how dependent upon science we have become when constructing our reality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Children in the Visual Arts of Imperial RomeJenifer NeilsJeannine Diddle Uzzi. Children in the Visual Arts of Imperial Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiv + 252 pp. 75 black-and-white ills. Cloth, $80.As anyone who has looked at images of the Christ Child in early medieval art or Baroque portraits of young royalty knows, the imagery of children is highly constructed and a minefield of interpretive (...) challenges. In classical art, [End Page 289] representations of children are never as straightforward as they might at first seem. A girl on a swing painted on an Athenian vase, for instance, is not an innocent child at play but an expiation rite for Erigone, the daughter of Ikarios, who after her father's murder committed suicide by hanging herself. Except for funerary memorials, children are rare in classical art, and their presence usually connotes a special event or situation, often one with dire consequences. The earliest images of children in Greek art are those shown on Geometric funerary vases mourning a dead parent or the slaughter of the innocents at Troy. Likewise, in Roman art children appear not as principal players but as adjuncts to ceremonial events or military exploits.Although ancient Roman childhood has been thoroughly investigated of late, most notably by the social historian Beryl Rawson, studies of the depictions of children in Roman art are not numerous. By its title, Uzzi's book might seem to fill the void, but its contents are limited to children depicted on coins, historical reliefs, sarcophagi, and one silver vessel—some one hundred thirty in all. Chronologically it covers the reign of Augustus to the Severan dynasty, and it excludes as much it includes, namely, mythological children, slaves, camilli/ae, and, perhaps most surprisingly since the author claims to examine only official art, children who can be identified as members of the imperial family. A more apt title might be something like Narratives of Roman Identity: Roman and Non-Roman Children on Historical Reliefs.The basic premise of this book is the visual distinction between Roman and non-Roman children, which Uzzi relates to narratives of inclusion and exclusion—or, what it means to be Roman. In brief, Roman children are generally shown with their fathers in public rituals such as those of imperial largesse (congiarium, alimenta, liberalitas), adlocutiones, processions, games, and sacrifices. By contrast non-Roman children are depicted in rites of submission, as captives in triumphal processions, and in scenes of military activity often with their mothers (e.g., on the two helic columns in Rome). These distinctions are particularly evident on the Column of Trajan because it includes scenes of both Roman and non-Roman children. Scene XCI uniquely shows both together in a scene of sacrifice made upon the arrival of the emperor: three children in Roman dress are accompanied by male figures at the front, nearest to Trajan, while the three provincial children, in non-Roman attire, are farther back with women. While it is not surprising among the Dacians to find only mothers tending their children (all the able-bodied fathers presumably being actively engaged in combat), it is noteworthy that Roman children, both boys and girls, make public appearances with their fathers in Dacian territory. Are they simply led out to see the emperor (as we line up our children to see the presidential motorcade) or is there another agenda here, a process of Romanization, as Uzzi suggests?In the introductory chapter, Uzzi considers modern theories and definitions of nationhood, setting the background for her inquiry into Roman identity. In the next chapter, entitled "Primary Sources," she in fact surveys the secondary literature on Roman children and their imagery (Rawson, Currie, Kleiner), [End Page 290] various methodological approaches to Roman art (Zanker, Evans, Gregory, Hannestad, Brilliant, Beard), and definitions of childhood (Carp, Eyben, Pleket, Locke, Foucault). She then goes on to identify markers of ethnicity, namely, hairstyle and costume. For the purposes of this study she identifies children as "those figures who are approximately one-half to two-thirds the size of adults of the same gender (if known), with round faces and bodies (again, if possible to determine), and without... (shrink)

This article traces the association between the European overseas empires and the concept of sovereignty, arguing that, ever since the days of Cicero—if not earlier—Europeans had clung to the idea that there was a close association between a people and the territory it happened to occupy. This made it necessary to think of an “empire” as a unity—an “immense body,” to use Tacitus’s phrase—that would embrace all its subjects under a single sovereign. By the end of the eighteenth century it (...) had become possible, in this way, to speak of “empires of liberty” that would operate for the ultimate benefit of all their “citizens,” freeing them from previous tyrannical rulers and bringing them under the protection of more benign regimes. In such empires sovereignty could only ever be, as it had become in Europe, undivided. The collapse of Europe's “first” empires in the Americas, however, was followed rapidly by Napoleon’s attempt to create a new kind of Empire in Europe. The ultimate, and costly, failure of this project led many, Benjamin Constant among them, to believe that the age of empires was now over and had been replaced by the age of commerce. But what in fact succeeded Napoleon was the modern European state system, which attempted not to replace empire by trade, as Constant had hoped, but to create a new kind of empire, one that sought to minimize domination and settlement, and to make a sharp distinction between imperial ruler and imperial subject. In this kind of empire, sovereignty could only be “divided.” Various kinds of divided rule were thus devised in the nineteenth century. Far, however, from being an improvement on the past, this ultimately resulted in—or at least contributed greatly to—the emergence of the largely fictional and inevitably unstable societies that after the final collapse of the European empires became the new states of the “developing world.”. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Of Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth Century ChinaR. Kent GuyOf Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in Eighteenth Century China. By Angela Zito. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Pp. xix + 311. Hardcover $45.00. Paper $17.95.It may be best to think of the argument of Angela Zito's enormously stimulating book Of Body and Brush: The Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in (...) Eighteenth Century [End Page 623] China as a series of concentric circles. At its core is a careful and satisfyingly annotated translation of the chapters of the Comprehensive Rites of the Qing (Da Qing tong li) (1756) that concern the grand sacrifice, the most important ceremonial moment in the life of a Qing emperor. From her careful and original analysis of these materials, Zito is able to bring new life not only to the Qianlong Emperor himself but also to the worlds of which he was, or sought to be, the center. These included the officials who served him, the community of scholars and editors who wrote about ritual, and the people who looked to the state for models of the centering process. In so doing, she rescues the eighteenth century from the accusation that it was the "graveyard of modernity." But she also examines the nature of Chinese ritual itself, in a way that explodes Western assumptions and explores Chinese subjectivities.There are far too many implications of this book to deal with in a short review, and any choice of themes is somewhat subjective. Zito's suggestion that we refer to the community of Chinese officials as an "imperium" rather than a "bureaucracy" (à la Weber) is a convincing one that will certainly influence our narrative practice. I was most impressed, however, with what I found to be the triumphant demonstration that this book achieves of the vitality of ritual in the eighteenth century. We have always known, at some level, that ritual was important in China, but we have not always known what to do with this fact. Like contemporary undergraduates who respond with blank stares when asked if they have ever participated in a ritual (I have tried this), we have stood mute before the mountain of Chinese primary source materials dealing with ritual. In showing us a way to read ritual texts, Zito reminds us that these provided for the Chinese a way of "making manifest" (p. 79) the power of heaven in human affairs, and re-actualizing past words in present ceremonial. In short, eighteenth-century students of ritual texts were hardly antiquarians; they were actually optimists, pursuing the possibility that the realities of the golden age of the past could actually be recovered in the present. And they were not only this, of course, for Zito offers the fascinating suggestion that in a world where literacy was becoming more common, the analysts of ritual were attempting to recuperate their social and political positions as "interpreters and creators of authority" by reconnecting writing and obscure ancient ritual practice.This comment, however, is really an aside in an argument that is mainly concerned with how ritual was acted out in the eighteenth century. The details of the Grand Sacrifice—the various prostrations, placements, and profferings—are compellingly described and interpreted here. One waits—to say "breathlessly" may be a bit strong, but certainly with mounting anticipation—to see what historical associations or symbolic statements will come next in this most theatrical of imperial performances. One of the most interesting questions is whether the emperor sacrificed as a filial son—human, like the officials who surrounded him on the lower steps of the altar, or like a sage whose access to the heavenly realm was of a qualitatively different character than that of any other mortal. Of course the emperor was both, and it was the function of ritual, as Zito argues, to negotiate the differences between the two. [End Page 624]What is at stake in this volume is nothing less than an attempt to recover the mentality of those who were engaged in ritual practices. What did it mean when the emperor clothed his body in ceremonial... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mechanisms of Violent Retribution in Chinese Hell Narratives Charles D. Orzech University ofNorth Carolina Greensboro Ai! The criminals in this hell have all had their eyes dug out and the fresh blood flows [from them], and each of them cries out, their two hands pressing their bloody eye-sockets—truly pitiful! To the left a middle-aged person is just having an eye pulled out by one of the shades; he struggles (...) unceasingly, screaming; his left eye has already been extracted... (56b) Ai-yah!... Each of the criminals is bound to a an iron pillar and the ox-headed demons are in the process of administering punishment—using iron or copper blades they peel the skin of the person's face, just as a butcher kills a pig and then flays it. Each of the criminal ghosts screams in pain... (59b) The criminal ghost's hands are bound about an iron pillar which is entirely red [with heat] and the criminal ghost's two hands are entirely cooked and it is unbearable... (126a) Record ofA Journey to Hell These passages are found, not in some medieval description of hell, nor in a work for sadists, but in a modern and quite popular Chinese "good book" (shan-shu) titled Record ofA Journey to Hell (Ti-yu yu-chi). Record ofA Journey to Hell is the most recent work of a genre which emerged in tenthcentury China and which may be found throughout Asia from Vietnam to Japan. This persistent fascination with gruesome scenes of torture stands in striking contrast to Michel Foucault's observations that by the first quarter of the nineteenth century "punishment had gradually ceased to be a spectacle" in Europe (9). In Record ofA Journey to Hell we are not faced with a seachange in the discourse and practice of a society. Rather, we must come to 112Charles D. Orzech grips with and seek to understand the persistence of images oftorture as well as actual torture and public execution in some modern Chinese societies. The Chinese hells—more properly purgatories, as punishment there is not eternal—are a product of cultural adaptation and interaction. Before the first century of our era we have evidence of only the most attenuated notions of the underworld, a "yellow springs" (huang-yiian) where "all, good and bad, huddled together in darkness being guarded jealously by the god of the Soil who ended by devouring them" (Thompson 29). The ruling elite avoided this fate through elaborate ancestral ritual indexed by the possession of a surname. Social status was, from the earliest times, "inscribed" on tablets which gave visible form to both social and cosmological hierarchies (Li 247-54). However, the rise of the Taoist Celestial Masters movement (T'ien-shih tao, second century) with its heavenly and infernal bureaucracies soon coupled with newly imported Indian Buddhist descriptions of the workings of karma and the hells. The result of this amalgam is the popular Chinese vision of the underworld as a vast bureaucracy centered on ten "courts," and headed by Yama, the South Asian lord of the dead (Seidel). At death the soul is summoned before the lords of hell who administer punishments appropriate to the misdeeds of the soul. After almost interminable periods of suffering, often in all of the hells in succession, the soul is reborn as a human, an animal, or even an insect, to start the whole process again. By the tenth century this distinctly Chinese version ofthe underworld had found wide dissemination and was the framework for worship and ritual directed to the recently dead.18 Unlike the South Asian prototypes, Chinese hells appear to be modeled on the imperial bureaucracy and administered by a hellish staff. The "court" layout often major and numerous subsidiary hells mimics Chinese palace and temple architecture and is quite distinct from the mandala-like layout found in "orthodox" Buddhist prototypes. Taoist priests, Buddhist monks and nuns, and a variety of folk practitioners and mediums act as intermediaries between this world and the other. They grease the wheels of the bureaucracy with their ritual knowledge and with community offerings to obtain release for imprisoned souls. Knowledge of the workings of the underworld is, according... (shrink)

Daga (the Bulgarian word for “rainbow”) was a Bulgarian comic magazine launched in 1979 and regularly published until 1992. Its remarkably westernized aesthetic greatly impacted an entire generation of readers. Included in its variety of stories (history, sci-fi, literary classics) is an action-packed account of Spartacus’ exploits. For ten consecutive issues (1979–1983), the story spanned the hero’s life from a more fanciful narrative of his early years in Thrace to the better-documented events in Italy and his death. The paper (...) explores the plotline, characterization, and visual aspects of “Spartak” to reveal the eponymous hero’s significance for young Bulgarian readers in the 1980s. Drawing on the cultural and historical context, I argue that Spartacus was well suited to serve as a role model and a national hero by embodying the proletarian anti-imperialist struggle and also, notably, because of his supposed place of birth near the river Strimon in modern-day Bulgaria. I also look at examples of contemporary comics, including a new graphic novel based on Daga’s story published in 2020, and consider the transmutations of the hero to suit the post-communist (and anti-communist) ideological agenda, characterized by a departure from the proletarian image of Spartacus in favor of more conservative, aristocratic features. (shrink)

The purpose of this article was to comprehensively explore the phenomenon of the narrative of the Decalogue in its fundamental principles in the context of the theological understanding of Jewish law. For this purpose abstract-logical methods, historical-legal, phenomenological, axiological, epistemological methods, method of critical and systematic analysis and method of comparative theology were used. The result is a theological understanding of the basic moral and legal principles and reducing to a single, systematic; a study of the correlation between the (...) normative and the moral side of such a narrative was conducted. Of particular importance is the establishment and isolation of the basic initial principle in the defined context that underlies both Sinai law and all the biblical law. Because with the change of historical realities, which coincided with the destruction of the Temple and the termination of sacrifices, the law has also changed. However, the biblical law was of particular ideological importance, it set the tone and revealed and formed the basic principles for the further development of all Jewish law. Therefore, in our study we have drawn attention to the main ideological features of the biblical laws, because in our opinion, the basic formative essence is hidden in them and only by understanding it − will we be able to understand Jewish law itself. However, the phenomenon of law and even more so of Jewish law, is one of the best regulators and exponents of the educational principle that is designed to raise a person in love. Of course, morality is called for it and it should take precedence over everything else, but the legal part should not be ignored. Law should serve as a socially just, integrative, fundamental, binding, most effective, most respected regulator. Therefore, the problem of combining legal principles and moral precepts for biblical law did not stand basically. The significant part of the adopted legal norms initially was characterized by moral prescriptions, confirmed and expressed by law. Such a transition, the shift from morality to law, and the close relationship between them are one inseparable whole. And apart from Halacha, which was responsible for the legal aspect, there were also the writings of the prophets whose task was to illuminate the transition from law to morality, because precisely morality is the essence of everything. Here is the true meaning of the existence of a legal expression of such an educational principle. Thus, the basic educational principle of the Decalogue, in particular, and of biblical law in general, was to educate a high-moral person who had restrictive precepts that would not allow him to fall into lawlessness, and the formative commandments that would allow a person to be educated in the search for God, and to stabilize himself in the godlike state commanded by God through Moses. That is the essence of the Decalogue and Jewish law. The educational principle, both basic and effective, though not so familiar to the modern understanding of the nature of law, is precisely the principle that laid down both the basis of the Decalogue and the foundation of all Jewish law at least in its biblical part. (shrink)

For centuries, Burmese have looked to the authority of their religious tradition, Theravada Buddhism, to negotiate social and political hierarchies. Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar examines those moments in the modern history of this Southeast Asian country when religion, culture, and politics converge to chart new directions. Arguing against Max Weber’s characterization of Buddhism as other-worldly and divorced from politics, this study shows that Buddhist practice necessitates public validation within an economy of merit in which moral action earns future rewards. (...) The intervention of colonial modernity in traditional Burmese Buddhist worldviews has created conjunctures at which public concerns critical to the nation’s future are reinterpreted in light of a Buddhist paradigm of power. Author Juliane Schober begins by focusing on the public role of Buddhist practice and the ways in which precolonial Buddhist hegemonies were negotiated. Her discussion then traces the emergence of modern Buddhist communities through the colonial experience: the disruption of traditional paradigms of hegemony and governance, the introduction of new and secular venues to power, modern concerns like nationalism, education, the public place of religion, the power of the state, and Buddhist resistance to the center. The continuing discourse and cultural negotiation of these themes draw Buddhist communities into political arenas, either to legitimate political power or to resist it on moral grounds. The book concludes with an examination of the way in which Buddhist resistance in 2007, known in the West as the Saffron Revolution, was subjugated by military secularism and the transnational pressures of a global economy. A skillfully crafted work of scholarship, Modern Buddhist Conjunctures in Myanmar will be welcomed by students of Theravada Buddhism and Burma/Myanmar, readers of anthropology, history of religions, politics, and colonial studies of modern Southeast Asia, and scholars of religious and political practice in modern national contexts. (shrink)

This article looks at the role of Hellenistic thought in the historical narratives of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. To a certain extent, both see—with G. W. F. Hegel, J. G. Droysen, and Eduard Zeller—Hellenistic and Roman philosophy as a “modernity in antiquity,” but with important differences. Heidegger is generally dismissive of Hellenistic thought and comes to see it as a decisive historical turning point at which a protomodern element of subjective willing and domination is injected into the classical (...) heritage of Plato and Aristotle. Arendt, likewise, credits Stoic philosophy with the discovery of the will as an active faculty constituting a realm of subjective freedom and autonomy. While she considers Hellenistic philosophy as essentially apolitical and world-alienated—in contrast to the inherently political and practical Roman culture—it nonetheless holds for her an important but unexploited ethical and political potential. (shrink)

Resumen: La impronta colonial en el pueblo mapuche llevó a gran parte de sus producciones culturales al borde de la extinción; una de ellas es el tallado monumental en madera, vinculado a procesos ceremoniales en la cultura ancestral. No obstante, desde la década de los noventa, este reaparece junto con los procesos de recuperación y fortalecimiento de la identidad cultural, y adquiere una rápida expansión en el antiguo territorio mapuche dinamizando la frontera política y cultural de este pueblo bajo dos (...) vertientes, como práctica cultural tradicional o como expresión de un arte moderno mayoritariamente urbano. En este marco, este trabajo indaga cómo la instalación del tallado monumental resignifica los espacios urbanos y rurales del Güllumapu. Se sostiene que estas producciones culturales actúan semiotizando el espacio de contacto cultural, refundando el antiguo wallmapu o territorio mapuche, proceso que se realiza al inscribir una fuerte carga simbólica que convoca un nuevo sentido del tiempo-espacio histórico en el territorio mediante una “producción de localidad”, articulando categorías de identidad cultural y nacional, y colaborando en la recuperación de las fronteras al construir una narrativa de la identidad cultural y nacional en un contexto adverso.: The colonial stamp on the Mapuche people led their cultural productions in large part to the brink the extinction. One of these is monumental wood carving, linked to ceremonial processes in the ancestral culture. However, since the 1990s, this has reappeared together with the processes of recovery and strengthening of the cultural identity, and has rapidly expanded into the old Mapuche territory, invigorating the political and cultural border of this people with two main focuses: as a traditional cultural practice or as an expression of mainly urban modern art. In this framework, this study investigates how the installation of monumental carving is redefining the urban and rural spaces of Güllumapu. It is maintained that these cultural productions act by semiotizing the cultural contact space, refounding the old wallmapu or Mapuche territory, a process done by inscribing a strong symbolic power that summons a new sense of the historical time-space in the territory through a “production of place”, articulating categories of cultural and national identity and collaborating in the recovery of the borders by constructing a narrative of the cultural and national identity in an adverse context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reconquest Colonialism and Andalusī Narrative Practice in the Conde LucanorDavid A Wacks (bio)In the tenth century, when Cordova was the richest and most populous city in Europe, and the Umayyad Caliphate was setting the standard for cultural florescence in the Islamic world, a group of Christian nobles in the rocky precincts of northernmost Spain sought to expand their territorial holdings southward, into al-Andalus. Their aim was to unseat (...) Islamic political power on the Iberian Peninsula, and they sought to authorize this project by discrediting Muslim leaders as the usurpers of lands to which the Christians were rightful heirs. In their view, Christian conquests of al-Andalus were the recuperation of lands that, in the eyes of God himself, belonged to them.Spanish culture as we know it today is the product of this medieval frontier society, in which Christians and Muslims—during a span of some 700 years—continuously negotiated a political border that was culturally quite porous. By the middle of the thirteenth century, Christian rulers had gained control of the large majority of the Iberian Peninsula, including the populous and important cities of Cordova and Seville in the south. The Christians who populated these newly conquered lands found themselves in close contact with a sizeable population of Andalusī Muslims (and Jews and Christians) who had remained. The conquering Christians were great consumers of Andalusī culture in general, especially arts and sciences, and even literature. At the same time, they viewed Islam, the dominant religion of al-Andalus, as a purely illegitimate basis for political power and social organization. If the official narrative of Reconquest argues for tidy cultural purity and conformity, the reality on the ground is, in contrast, a messy and emergent pluralism, one that resonates with early modern and modern colonial experiences.1While medievalists have been slower to embrace postcolonial theoretical approaches than their colleagues working on modern and contemporary texts, they have begun to adapt the ideas of thinkers such as Fanon, Memmi, Bhabha, Spivak, and others to medieval European perceptions of and experience in the East.2 However, it is curious [End Page 87] that Hispanists (with what may be the sole exception of David Hanlon) have completely avoided reading the Christian conquest of al-Andalus as a colonial project. Despite the substantial differences between medieval and modern colonialisms as regards political reality, public discourse, and the construction of subjectivity, one may safely argue that the Christian conquests of al-Andalus were a colonial endeavor, one of several studied by historians of medieval Europe.3 The case of medieval Christian Iberian colonialism was distinct from other medieval colonialisms (such as French and English crusading in the Middle East) in that it contributed fundamentally to the formation of a Spanish national identity, and served as a domestic proving ground for the conquest of Spanish territories in the Americas.Don Juan Manuel, author of the Conde Lucanor (1340) [CL],4 was the most powerful nobleman of his time. He held extensive lands in Murcia, which retained a far higher proportion of its preconquest Muslim population than did neighboring Castile and Leon [O’Callaghan, History 459]. While his military and political career depended on eradicating Islam from the Iberian Peninsula, he earned his literary renown—in part—by imitating and incorporating Andalusī narrative tradition and history into his own writings. In Juan Manuel’s adaptation of the frametale genre, the CL, this dissonance between the religious and political agendas of the Reconquest manifests in narrative. If the CL shows us the ideology of the Reconquest, it also offers the reader a reflection of the more complicated and nuanced reality of daily life and human behavior characteristic of Reconquest-era Castile-Leon [Linehan, “At the Spanish Frontier” 53]. In it, Juan Manuel distills the political realities, religious discourse, and cultural interaction of the time into the first original frametale in any European vernacular.5Juan Manuel’s religious agenda and frontier political philosophy come across quite clearly in the 50 exemplos of the CL. The idea of the Christian nobleman’s duty to wage war against Islam permeates the work, most starkly in these words of the Count’s advisor Patronio: “... Dios vos poblo... (shrink)

Conventional narratives hold that parties are “the orphans of political philosophy” and that systematic normative justifications of parties and partisanship have emerged only in recent years in the West. This article aims to show that when antiparty sentiments were prevalent in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Western societies, a systematic justification of party politics existed in China. Western antipartyism in that time shifted from an older accusation that parties were divisive and subversive to a “progressive antipartyism” that portrayed parties as (...) elitist and antidemocratic “machines.” In China, however, although proparty intellectuals faced the first type of antipartyism, the “progressive” type was relatively absent, as there weren’t any mature party machines in the first place. Far from being a hindrance to democracy, parties comprised of public-spirited elites were justified as an instrument for political founding: transforming passive subjects under an imperial despotism into modern active citizens in a constitutional democracy. (shrink)

Narrative fictions have surely become the single most widespread source of entertainment in the world. In their free time, humans read novels and comics, watch movies and TV series, and play video games: they consume stories that they know to be false. Such behaviors are expanding at lightning speed in modern societies. Yet, the question of the origin of fictions has been an evolutionary puzzle for decades: Are fictions biological adaptations, or the by-products of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for (...) another purpose? The absence of any consensus in cognitive science has made it difficult to explain how narrative fictions evolve culturally. We argue that current conflicting hypotheses are partly wrong, and partly right: narrative fictions areby-productsof the human mind, because they obviously co-opt some pre-existing cognitive preferences and mechanisms, such as our interest for social information, and our abilities to do mindreading and to imagine counterfactuals. But humans reap some fitness benefits from producing and consuming such appealing cultural items, making fictionsadaptive. To reconcile these two views, we put forward the hypothesis that narrative fictions are best seen asentertainment technologiesthat is, as items crafted by some people for the proximate goal to grab the attention of other people, and with the ultimate goal to fulfill other evolutionary-relevant functions that become easier once other people’s attention is caught. This hypothesis explains why fictions are filled with exaggerated and entertaining stimuli, why they fit so well the changing preferences of the audience they target, and why producers constantly make their fictions more attractive as time goes by, in a cumulative manner. (shrink)

Lockdowns, or modern quarantines, involve the use of novel restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to suppress the transmission of COVID-19. In this paper, I aim to critically analyze the emerging history and philosophy of lockdowns, with an emphasis on the communication of health evidence and risk for informing policy decisions. I draw a distinction between evidence-based and modeling-based decision-making. I argue that using the normative framework of evidence-based medicine would have recommended against the use of lockdowns. I first review the World (...) Health Organization’s evidence-based pandemic preparedness plans for respiratory viruses. I then provide a very brief history of COVID-19 modeling, which was cited as justification for the use of lockdowns in the U.K., the U.S., and much of the world. I focus on the so-called Imperial College model designed by Neil Ferguson et al. as well as the so-called Oxford model designed by José Lourenço et al. I analyze the evidence-based pandemic response known as ‘mitigation’, and I compare it with Ferguson et al.’s experimental strategy known as ‘suppression’. I summarize the strengths and weaknesses of these strategies based on their diametric aims and each model’s parametric assumptions. Based on my critical analysis of the suppression strategy, I attempt to expose what has been called the ‘logic of lockdowns’, which Sunetra Gupta of the Oxford model group has suggested is flawed. Finally, I consider Trisha Greenhalgh’s objection to evidence-based policy based on the precautionary principle, and I attempt to offer a response. I conclude with a brief narrative review of the emerging randomized evidence on restrictive NPIs, which seems to support my claim that mitigation was the strategy that would have been recommended by evidence-based medicine. If this is true, then COVID-19 modeling may serve as an important reminder of the enduring lesson of evidence-based medicine: that one should always ‘Trust the Evidence!’ for better health policy. (shrink)

As a grand narrative of progress, the utopian project of modernity is primarily concerned with notions of rationalism, universalism, and the development of a metalanguage. The triumph of the Moderate Enlightenment has seen logics of domination, accumulation and individualism incorporated into the project of modernity, with these logics giving rise to globalised capitalism as the metalanguage of modernity and neoliberal economics as the grand narrative of rational progress. The project of modernity is all but (...) complete, requiring only the formality of an end. However, rather than utopia, the foreseeable endpoint of modernity is environmental collapse, with neoliberal economics also serving as a grand narrative of environmental destruction. As an anti-modern response, postmodernism has been a triumphant failure. While there is much to be gained from the postmodern critique of modernity, its incredulity towards metanarratives has left it incapable of forming an adequate response to modernity, especially in regards to action on climate change. Postmodernism is better characterized as a crisis located within modernity itself and it will be argued that rather than the pursuit of the modern or the post-modern, we need to re-imagine ourselves as proto- historical to overcome the impasse of late-capitalism. (shrink)

The intelligibility of a performance of improvised dance does not reside in the rehearsed execution of a pre-existing script, nor does it result from a sustained verbal interaction between the dancers. Many aspects of the speechless performance obviously play an important role in the achieved intelligibility of the dance: a dancer is seen moving on and from a ground, on a stage, in a space delimited by walls, illuminated by spotlights, sounded by music, in front of an audience. And of (...) course with other dancers, whose joint gestures and moves give shape to a choreography by providing pace, rhythm and sequences, thereby constituting a narrative or fragments thereof. This paper addresses the manufacture of this witnessable order, by presenting some results of an ethnographic inquiry. The investigation will be focused on how, in an improvised duet, each dancer interacts with the other, and more specifically how she or he positions her- or himself in relation to the other, from distance to proximity and touch. This work of distance management is the dance, whose choreographic accountability is produced and structured by dancers staying at a distance, getting closer and touching each other. The analysis shows that distance management is oriented to as relevant by the dancers and that it has consequences on their improvised duet. It is also what makes their performance analyzable by distant observers. (shrink)

The ArgumentThe vine lousePhylloxera vastatrixbecame a “pest” as it was transferred from North America and from France to Germany during the 1870s. Embodying the “invading alien,” it assumed a cultural position that increasingly gained importance in Imperial Germany. In this process, the minute insect, living invisibly underground, was made visible and became constitutive of the scientific-technological object, “pest,” pertaining to a scientific discipline, modern economic entomology. The “pest” phylloxera emerged by being made visible in a way that enabled control (...) measures against it. Thus, visibility functioned as a prerequisite for control measures. I differentiate between social visibility and physical visibility, as well as between social control and physical control of the “introduced pest.” The object phylloxera emerged at the intersection of techniques of social control such as surveillance, techniques of physical control such as disinfection, and representational practices of the sciences such as mathematics and graphics. The space of its visibility was not the vineyard as property of a vintner but the vineyard as national territory, where German (viti-) culture was defended against foreign infiltration and destruction. Many vintners had alternate visions of the grapevine disease, they resented the invasion and destruction of their vineyards by government officers, and thus they did not participate in the social and epistemic constitution of the “pest.” By 1914, the “introduced pest” had not yet become an effective “machinery.” However, the “pest” as an object of scientific knowledge emerged together with economic entomology. The field became organized as a discipline in Germany in 1913, forty years after the phylloxera had first aroused the minds of some worried Wilhelmians, and, together with its nationalistic images, the field of “pest” control became organized towards a redefinition of German society and its perceived dangers. (shrink)

Extending the approach to a ‘theology of science’ developed in Faith and Wisdom in Science, I expand its theme of the tension between chaos and emergent order, within the arc of the Biblical story of creation, towards a theology of evolutionary science. In addition to the material in Job, the book of Wisdom provides a remarkable account of transmutation of species, within a recapitulation of the Exodus theme, that I juxtapose with a modern genotype-phenotype theory of evolutionary dynamics, exploiting analogies (...) with statistical mechanics. The dual and connected structures of microscopic and macroscopic provide a locus for the Joban tensions of chaos and emergent order, and provide an interpretative narrative for the emergent directionality of evolution, and a theology that situates within a creation of freedom to explore the potential of the created order. (shrink)

`From Aristotle to Us', the conference held at La Trobe University in May 2007, names a powerful and highly influential Romantic trajectory, one which posits a particular conception of the ancients, a particular conception of the moderns, and a complex conception of the relationship between the two. Using the modern Olympic Revival as a case study and a case in point, this article argues that such `exercises' in Greek appropriation always operate with largely unstated assumptions about the nature of the (...) present's relation to the past, and the enormously complex quality of the Greek past. In becoming self-critical about such appropriations of the Classical legacy, contemporary critics are forced to contend with the spectre of religion, a topic that `Greek exercises' almost inevitably carve in high relief. The article concludes with an historiographic meditation on varying images of `paganism' in contemporary culture, images that link the Greeks to athletics to such modern and post-modern `revivals'. (shrink)

The idea of an inevitable conflict between science and religion leading to relentless hostility between the two emerged in the nineteenth century and has become a powerful narrative of modernity. Most historians of science trace the origins of the so-called ‘conflict thesis’ to the English-speaking world, more precisely to scientist-historian John William Draper and literary scholar Andrew Dickson White. Their books on the history of scientific-religious conflict turned into bestsellers. Yet, if we look beyond the Anglo-American world, the (...) conflict thesis appears in new historical settings. This paper argues that the science vs. religion narrative flourished already in Germany before Draper and White announced the warfare between science and religion in England and the USA. Focusing on Germany, we aim to show that the conflict thesis emerged in a polycentric process shaped by various political, cultural, and social struggles. It became a rhetorical weapon for liberal scientists in Germany to oppose Ultramontanism and, at the same time, to discredit their rivals as unscientific, fanatic, or even as ‘henchmen’ of the Pope. Our paper makes a case for a decentred approach to the history of the conflict thesis, which brings to the fore specific political and cultural tensions shaping this narrative in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

This article presents the results of the authors’ research on cosmological and philosophical narratives related to the personality of Lady Xian and her cultural heritage, and on their function in the contemporary cultural practices of Guangdong Province and the whole modern Chinese culture. The authors systematise Lady Xian’s corpus of cosmological and philosophical narratives, reconstruct Lady Xian’s main cosmological concepts and philosophical ideas, and reveal their specific features as well as their differences with Western cosmology and with cosmological narratives in (...) Western culture. The authors show that Lady Xian’s philosophical and cosmological ideas function as the masterplot of modern Chinese culture, which comprises such essential components of China’s international cultural policy as cultural identity, cooperative attitudes to other cultures, the dissemination of Chinese traditional culture in the world, peaceful coexistence, and soft power. The authors argue that Lady Xian’s cosmological concepts are an essential component of the implementation of the cultural aspects of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and that they can be used as an effective and helpful tool in the spread of modern Chinese culture in European countries. The article concludes that Lady Xian’s cosmological concepts are an essential method for deepening the understanding of China’s international cultural policy and China’s Belt and Road Initiative in European countries. In addition, Lady Xian’s culture can be used as a counter-narrative in overcoming some negative stereotypes about China’s international cultural policy and China’s Belt and Road Initiative present in the information space of European countries. (shrink)

Claudian of Alexandria's last datable poem, the Panegyric on the Sixth Consulship of Honorius, was delivered in Rome in 404, presumably on 1 January. This performance occurred in the course of the first visit to Rome by an emperor for nearly a decade and a half. Imperial visits to Rome were notoriously rare in the fourth century and, in a well-known passage of that poem, the goddess Roma herself muses on their rarity: she had only seen an Augustus three (...) times in the last hundred years. This is not quite true, but the only legitimate emperors known to have paid formal visits to Rome in that period were Constantine in 312–13, 315 and 326, Constantius II in 357, and Theodosius I, accompanied by his four-year-old son Honorius, in 389. In this article I shall begin by making an observation about the court's intentions in moving to Rome in late 403, and then deal with two problems bound up with the interpretation of this poem and with the circumstances of imperial visits. The first problem concerns the visit of Honorius during which the poem was first performed. In Claudian's narrative the description of Honorius' triumphal entry leads into a description of his assumption of the consulate, and scholars have sometimes asserted that he made a triumphal entry as consul on 1 January 404. This is clearly wrong: Honorius arrived in Rome weeks or months before. But even when this point is recognized, it is often asserted that the poem blends triumphal and consular imagery, and elements of the triumphal entry are confused with the assumption of the consulship. My argument therefore moves from the chronology of Honorius' visit to elucidating the structure and imagery of Claudian's poem, as well as casting light on the patterns of the late antique imperial aduentus more broadly. The second problem concerns the description of Honorius' previous visit to Rome with his father in the summer of 389. Here it has sometimes been inferred on the basis of Claudian, and of late chronicles, that Honorius was created Caesar by his father on 13 June, the day of the aduentus. I shall show on the basis of a critical examination of the chronicle tradition, as well as a survey of contemporary numismatic, epigraphic and literary evidence, that this belief is unfounded, and that the relevant passages of Claudian require a different interpretation. However, this evidence also makes clear that signals were being sent in 389 about Honorius' imperial future. (shrink)

As part of a larger project, this paper serves as an overview that examines how “ai” 愛 as an affective concept made its way into the Chinese vocabulary, how it gained popularity at specific junctures in modern Chinese history, and the ways in which it has been adapted as a marker of modernity and a political discourse in Republican and Communist China in distinct ways. Although literary scholars have noted the significance of the shaping of love as an affective (...) concept for the project of Chinese modernity, they mainly focus on the conceptions and interpretations of love in the literature, and with a time frame from late imperial to Maoist China. The few studies about love in post-Mao era usually attribute the sources of such affect to Christianity. My paper makes a fresh contribution in three aspects. First, I take a longer historical perspective, from the 1910s to the 2010s, and dedicate, secondly, a large part of my study to the decisive impact from revolutionary radicalism to popular religions on the formation of the discourse of state propaganda and everyday politics, rather than manifestations in the literature and sources from Christianity. Third, I study some of the most controversial political figures in modern China, including Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, and Xi Jinping, rather than intellectuals and writers only. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nature as Guide: Wittgenstein and the Renewal of Moral Theology by David Goodill, O.PCajetan Cuddy and O.P.Nature as Guide: Wittgenstein and the Renewal of Moral Theology. By David Goodill, O.P. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2022. Pp. xiii-319. $75.00. (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-8132-3445-8.Nature as Guide is an intriguing reevaluation of the philosophical legacy of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the light of Thomistic moral theology after the Second (...) Vatican Council. Goodill helpfully lays out his fundamental argument in the book’s introduction: Wittgenstein can help the philosopher to reconcile the “modern dichotomy between nature and reason,” and the theologian to reevaluate “the associated oppositions typical of modern thought, such as that between moral agency and natural agency or between grace and nature” (2). The author is overt in his appreciation for Fergus Kerr’s 1997 monograph Theology after Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, Nature as Guide is unique insofar as it focuses on specifically moral theological issues in a moment of theological “renewal”—one in which we can recognize “the restoration of metaphysics to the center of theological debate” (12).The first four chapters of Nature as Guide consider Wittgenstein in relation to themes associated with classical philosophy. Goodill’s “objective in the first part of the book is to construct a dialogue between Wittgenstein and the metaphysical tradition which illuminates both conversation partners” (38). This initial part of the book culminates in an account of human nature that serves as the foundation for the moral theological inquiry that follows in the second part (the fifth through the eighth chapters).In the first chapter (“What Lies Hidden: Wittgenstein, Metaphysics, and Moral Theology”), Goodill introduces Wittgenstein’s “philosophical practice”—specifically his “insistence on grounding philosophical enquiry in everyday thinking” that effectively “connects him to the [metaphysical] tradition that begins with Plato and Aristotle” (16). Goodill is perceptive and nuanced in his analysis of Wittgenstein’s texts. He recognizes that “it would be wrong to treat [Wittgenstein] as an unproblematic inheritor of this tradition” (37). Nonetheless, he wants his readers to appreciate the careful balance between theory and praxis maintained in Wittgenstein’s thought vis-à-vis the priorities of classical philosophy. To this end, he examines G. E. M. Anscombe’s account of how Wittgenstein helped her to overcome the “trap” of phenomenalism.In the second chapter (“Nature, Logic, and Grammar”), Goodill attends to the progress of key tenets in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He identifies as “the guiding theme” of this narrative “the development of Wittgenstein’s understanding of the relationship between the meaning and the application of linguistic expressions” (40–41). Specifically, he suggests that Wittgenstein’s “mistake” in the Tractatus (51) can be reduced a fundamental point: the erroneous presupposition that there is “one general notion of clarity which is required in all contexts. It was precisely this requirement which Wittgenstein came later to reject in the Investigations” (52). Indeed, between the Tractatus [End Page 703] and the Investigations Wittgenstein abandoned his efforts to establish a “forced unity” of language through “the general form of the proposition”—turning, instead, to “our actual linguistic practices” (85). The whole of human life, thus, “provides the unity of our grammar” (ibid.). Nonetheless, Goodill also points out that Wittgenstein does not reject “the central insight” of the Tractatus, namely, “that meaning is internal to our forms of representation” (59). This immanence remains throughout the Tractatus and the Investigations.The third chapter (“Grammar, Teleology, and Understanding”), summarizes objections to Goodill’s proposal that Wittgenstein can be read in continuity with the metaphysical tradition. William Charlton “argues that in the absence of a teleological conception of nature Wittgenstein’s account of language collapses into pragmatism” (88-89). Rush Rhee “accuses Wittgenstein of being misled by his analogy between language and games to neglect the basis of our linguistic practices in the human search for universal understanding” (89). In brief, both “Charlton and Rhee argue that a much richer conception of our natural human capacities and reactions is required than that provided by Wittgenstein”—and they do so in a complementary way (103). Although Goodill does not believe that their objections stand above... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Tragic as an Ethical CategoryRobert GuayTragedy is at the center of Nietzsche's conception of his mature philosophical project as the only alternative to the ascetic ideal, and thus as the only avenue for affirmation. It is not merely an aesthetic category, but one that encompasses the very character of self-determining (or "self-creating") agency. The tragic character of self-determining agency, I shall claim, stems from the conflict between the (...) local, practice-dependent character of our normative commitments and their transcendent purport. My argument will run as such. Becoming what one is, according to Nietzsche, is a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation. Such narratives are teleological: they are structured by a kind of directionality (or, more broadly, by "ideals") that cannot, practically, be taken as arbitrary. But these narratives are inevitably incomplete, and so therefore are the norms and selves that depend on them.The very project of a genealogy of morals supports my first claim, that becoming what one is involves a matter of taking a particular place in a narrative of self-creation. 1 The Genealogy of Morals begins with the declaration that we are unknown to ourselves, and the explanation it provides of this shortcoming, that we have never sought ourselves, is expanded by means of a temporal metaphor: the bell-strokes of our life that we do not think to reckon until after they have passed. What we have failed to accomplish, and what the genealogy attempts to recover, is a diachronic account of who we are. This missing story covers the singular as well as the collective "we." The end of the story, Nietzsche [End Page 555] claims, is the "sovereign individual," 2 and this notion is presumably governed by his general claim: "all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically drawn together elude definition; only that which has no history is definable" (GM, 2.13). Of course it does not follow from this that everything indefinable has a history, but the special elusiveness of modern individuality seems due to the complexity of its narrative source. And not only individuality in general, but also the particular individual, seems to have a narrative basis. In the book subtitled "How one becomes what one is," in the section that promises the "real answer to the question, how one becomes what one is" (EH "clever," 9), Nietzsche offers this account of personal development:One must keep the entire surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—clean of any great imperatives. Beware even of every great word, every great posture! Sheer danger, that the instinct comes to "understand itself" too soon—meanwhile the organizing "idea" with a calling to rule grows and grows deep down—it begins to command, it slowly heads back from detours and wrong ways, it prepares single qualities and competencies that will one day prove to be indispensable as means to a whole—it in turn trains all subservient faculties before giving any hint of the dominating task, "goal," "end," "meaning."The individual, Nietzsche suggests, cannot be understood in terms of anything available to her consciousness, and not even in terms of any "great imperative" or "great word." Instead Nietzsche accounts for individuality, and in fact his own individuality, in terms of a meaningfulness available in terms of the familiar tropes of journeys and roads, and growing and commanding.This passage from Ecce Homo suggests not merely a narrative, but one with a teleology, even if only a retrospectively apparent one. Narratives of self cannot be random or arbitrary; their meaningfulness depends on the structure provided by some kind of directionality: in Nietzsche's words, a dominant "task" or "goal." This directionality is invoked by Nietzsche, for example, with the "teachers of the purpose of existence" of The Gay Science's opening section and with the famous "formula of our happiness" of The Antichrist's opening section: "a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal." The Genealogy of Morals provides a general account of this directionality in terms of a "progressus."I would like to say that even partial becoming useless, atrophying and degenerating, loss of meaning and purposiveness, in short... (shrink)

This chapter applies the modified philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre to mental health law, and in particular to the mental health tribunal. The natural law approach of Thomas Aquinas is used to assist in this. It is argued that, for law to be just in pre-modern terms, it requires that it be assessed as rational together with the care it supports as a single entity. As such, according to a modified version of the Thomistic Aristotelian ethics of MacIntyre, justice would require (...) reconciliation of both doctor and patient narratives regarding care, possibly at the tribunal. It is suggested that psychiatric intensive care, in particular, could benefit from this approach. The approach might be seen as an additional protection to human rights-based considerations. It is also argued that the tribunal can be seen differently, according to the tradition of enquiry. (shrink)

I argue that the modernist notion of a human self cannot easily be post-modernistically rejected because the need to view an individual life as a unified 'narrative' with a beginning and an end is a condition for asking humanly important questions about its meaningfulness. Such questions are central to philosophical anthropology. However, not only modern ways of making sense of life, such as linear narration in literature, but also premodern ones such as tragedy, ought to be taken seriously in (...) reflecting on these questions. The tradition of pragmatism has tolerated this plurality of the frameworks in terms of which we can interpret or 'structure' the world and our lives as parts of it. It is argued that pragmatism is potentially able to accommodate both the plurality of such interpretive frameworks-premodern, modern, postmodern — and the need to evaluate those frameworks normatively. We cannot allow any premodern source of human meaningfulness whatsoever to be taken seriously. Avoiding relativism is, then, a most important challenge for the pragmatist. (shrink)

Many people report that reading first-person narratives of the experience of illness can be morally instructive or educative. But although they are ubiquitous and typically sincere, the precise nature of such educative experiences is puzzling—for those narratives typically lack the features that modern philosophers regard as constitutive of moral reason. I argue that such puzzlement should disappear, and the morally educative power of illness narratives explained, if one distinguishes two different styles of moral reason: an inferentialist style that generates the (...) puzzlement and an alternative exemplarist style that offers a compelling explanation of the morally educative power of pathographic literature. (shrink)

Temporal divergence creates a need for new narratives and paradigms. In Diverging Time David Carvounas supports this assertion through detailed expository and diagnostic readings of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. He focuses on their contribution to our understanding of modernity as an epochal shift in the relationship between past and future—recasting the significance of the past and future of the modern present. Despite their different solutions to the problem of temporal coordination, they urged the modern world to look not to (...) the past but to the newly opened future for continuity, meaning, and purpose. This book not only offers a fresh look at a defining characteristic of modernity, but also makes a compelling case that a coherent modern temporal structure requires a sustainable orientation toward the future—an orientation that Kant, Hegel, and Marx delineate in distinctive and powerful ways. (shrink)

How have broad patterns of violence and war changed from the dawn of humanity up to present time? In answering this question, researchers have typically framed their arguments and evidence in terms of the polarized debate between Hobbes (or hawks) and Rousseau (or doves). This article moves beyond the stalemated debate and integrates the most robust existing theoretical developments and empirical findings that have emerged from various disciplines over the past 20 years – primarily sociology, political science, anthropology, and archaeology (...) – to answer the question. Drawing on carefully curated violent lethality data for pre historically appropriate hunter-gatherers, as well as historical pre-state and state societies, it shows that simple narratives of violence and war decreasing through history from ostensibly high levels in the human state of nature, on the one hand, and the obverse insistence that the once mostly peaceful communities became highly belligerent with the transition to modernity, on the other, are both wrong. Instead, multiple lines of existing evidence and theoretical perspectives suggest a complex, non-linear, Kuznets-style relationship between violence and the passage of history. (shrink)

The author draws attention to the fact that the new millennium has not lived up to the high expectations that the ideological project of «tolerant universalism» and «multicultural liberalism», with its focus on consensus, solidarity, respect for the Other, and emphasis on universal liberal values, could become the ideology of global progress in the 21st century. Instead, misunderstandings, wars, conflicts, and violence have not disappeared from the world stage. On the contrary, there is an observable «budding» of new and new (...) conflicts and wars. Conflict, like evil in general, has deep roots in both historical and psychological experience, as well as in the very ontology of humanity. Therefore, the issue is not about eliminating conflict but about qualitatively changing the direction of conscious human efforts – whether individual, collective, or socially organized. The author argues that, if restraint and tolerance are not cultivated, mutual destruction remains the alternative. We enter the modern world (which is not unified, but globalized) through the intersubjective space, through dialogical truths, and so on. This requires the establishment of new forms of worldview, new approaches to examining phenomena in nature, society, and the human being. Clearly, today there is a preference for research ideas and principles related to the synergistic approach, self-organization, self-creation, and self-reproduction, both at the level of the macrocosm and the microcosm. Philosophically, these ideas resonate with existentialist and phenomenological narratives and philosophies. The author currently points to the presence of such approaches in the thought of domestic philosophers. (shrink)

From 1957 to 1973, Barcelona Zoo was transformed from a small-scale, antiquated establishment harboring very few animals, a place that was still in a poor condition following the Spanish Civil War, into a new, larger, modern, and internationally recognized institution that included up-to-date animal enclosures and that boasted one of the first dolphinariums in Europe, as well as a famous white gorilla as its icon. From its very beginning, this renovation involved an intense popularization campaign. In this paper, by describing (...) the public discourse generated throughout this transformation and by analyzing the roles played by Antoni Jonch, the director of the zoo at that time; Josep Maria de Porcioles, the then-mayor of Barcelona; and General Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who was head of state during this period, I will highlight how the context of the dictatorship not only authorized the new Barcelona Zoo but is, in fact, crucial to its understanding. The narratives that surrounded the renovation of the zoo focused on its civic and educational purpose, with a firm emphasis on modernity. The zoo was a modern space for learning about animals in order to become better people. These narratives were not only suitable to the policies, ideas, and aims of Porcioles’ City Council and Franco’s dictatorial regime; in fact, they completely matched them. Both local and national governments benefited from the restructuring of Barcelona Zoo and from its public discourse as a tool for social control and an instrument for their own propaganda, legitimation, and perpetuation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 135-149 [Access article in PDF] Ghostly Comparisons: Anderson's Telescope H. D. Harootunian While the formation of area studies in the universities and colleges of the United States was initially inaugurated as a response to the Cold War "necessity" to win the hearts and minds of the unaligned, many of whom were new refugees of decolonization, one of its unintended consequences was to foster the development of (...) comparative perspectives of study across disciplines and different cultural regions. But this secondary goal was often diverted by the principal purpose of area studies programs to supply authoritative information on regions outside of Euro-America (the second and third worlds) considered crucial to the national security and to private businesses thrown increasingly into an expanding global market seeking new regions capable of providing buyers, workers, and materials. In time, the vocation of comparison became part of the unconscious of area studies, as the unit of the nation-state took precedence over all other considerations. Instead of envisaging genuinely interdisciplinary agendas that were able to integrate different disciplines, area studies have too often settled for simple multidisciplinarism, substituting coverage for comparison, language acquisition for method, the nation-state for the totality of the cultural region. Benedict Anderson's recent Spectre of Comparisons reminds us of the role played by area studies programs in the American academic profession during the nervous days of the Cold War and the wartime exigencies that led to their postwar organization and installation in a number of universities. But it also recalls for us the comparative promise associated with area studies and how it was either redirected to a multidisciplinary approach poorly disguised as interdisciplinarism or simply incorporated into large developmental narratives like modernization theory. It is instructive to see how Anderson's own work, rather than Southeast Asian area studies, has been able to achieve the remote goal of integration and comparison in a number of stunning examples that have eluded the collective efforts of many institutional programs. This singular success magisterially discloses how he was trained to envisage the region as a "unified" area studies program, even though little more than a geographical term named this unity, and what he needed to do to actually realize the dim prospect of achieving some sort of larger, integrated understanding, which was eventually inscribed in his seminal book, Imagined Communities. At the most basic level, Anderson was able to secure this effect first by roaming around the area (turning his banishment from Indonesia in 1972 to good use by shifting his attention to Thailand and then the Philippines). Yet, as his essays show, there were other, more intellectually and epistemologically compelling reasons which, if amplified, might provide such diversity with a sense of commonality that only geography and the putatively integrative approach of an area studies program seemed willing to promise even as they failed to deliver.Anderson situates his own intellectual trajectory within the institutional circumstances of the region as an area studies which he and his contemporary fellow students "helped give a certain reality" [Spectre 19]. In fact, "Southeast Asia" has always been [End Page 135] the common frame that structured the particular relationship between Europe of the colonizers and its Asian colonized and thus became the location that best exemplified for him the peculiar nature of the "haunting," as he puts it, as both the place of comparison and the necessity of comparability. In other words, Southeast Asia was the locus that best afforded a sighting of the spectacle of specters that recalled authorizing sister images in Europe and provided a perspective that was necessarily comparative. In Anderson's reckoning, comparison first referred to the circulation of images between metropole and colony and secondly between the various colonial sites that constituted Southeast Asia. As a result, Southeast Asia, and by extension all colonies, became the overdetermined place of haunting.Beyond the agency of the war, of course, was the experience of colonialism and those first modern interpreters of Asia who, as administrators, spent long years in the field serving imperial bureaucracies and who were in the incomparable position of examining such sites... (shrink)

The survival and significance of the Latin American liberation theology movement relies, to some extent, on the power of the narratives of martyrdom. Precisely by relying on these narratives, through the dynamics of the theological category of memory that leads to solidarity, liberation theology situates itself in the tension between modernity and postmodernity. The categories of narrative, memory and solidarity, which are at play in the whole dynamic of martyrdom, constitute a postmodern way of doing a modern liberation (...) theology. Liberation theology will only be able to retain its “liberative” and “theological” element insofar as it continues to be “modern” and “postmodern” at the same time. Against the postmodern disbelief in the possibility of human emancipation, liberation theology continues to labor precisely under principium liberationis grounded in the promise of liberation contained in God’s revelation in the Scriptures. However, against the “modern” conception of emancipation based on reason and governed by the idea of progress, liberation theology envisions liberation as an integral process which takes place in a concrete, particular historical reality and under the eschatological promise of God. Keywords: liberation theology, martyrdom, modern, postmodern, narrative, memory, solidarity. Abstrak: Relevansi dan pertumbuhan teologi pembebasan, sampai tingkat tertentu, juga bergantung pada kekuatan kisah kemartiran. Dengan mendasarkan diri pada kisah (narrative) yang diolah lewat kategori pengingatan (memory) yang mengarah pada solidaritas, teologi pembebasan menempatkan diri dalam tegangan antara modernitas dan posmodernitas. Kategori kisah, pengingatan, dan solidaritas, yang berada dalam jantung narasi kemartiran, mengetengahkan sebuah cara posmodern untuk melakukan teologi pembebasan yang modern. Teologi pembebasan hanya akan berhasil mempertahankan unsur “teologi” dan “pembebasan” sejauh bersifat modern dan posmodern pada saat yang sama. Melawan ketidakpercayaan posmodernitas terhadap kemungkinan proyek pembebasan, teologi pembebasan mempertahankan prinsip pembebasan atas dasar isi pewahyuan Allah dalam Kitab Suci. Akan tetapi, melawan pemahaman modern tentang pembebasan berdasarkan akalbudi dan kemajuan, teologi pembebasan memahami pembebasan sebagai sebuah proses integral yang terjadi dalam waktu dan tempat yang nyata, dalam realitas sejarah yang partikular dan dalam kerangka janji eskatologis Allah. Kata-kata kunci: teologi pembebasan, kemartiran, modern, posmodern, narasi, pengingatan, solidaritas. (shrink)

I argue that the modernist notion of a human self cannot easily be post-modernistically rejected because the need to view an individual life as a unified ‘narrative’ with a beginning and an end is a condition for asking humanly important questions about its meaningfulness. Such questions are central to philosophical anthropology. However, not only modern ways of making sense of life, such as linear narration in literature, but also premodern ones such as tragedy, ought to be taken seriously in (...) reflecting on these questions. The tradition of pragmatism has tolerated this plurality of the frameworks in terms of which we can interpret or ‘structure’ the world and our lives as parts of it. It is argued that pragmatism is potentially able to accommodate both the plurality of such interpretive frameworks—premodern, modern, postmodern—and the need to evaluate those frameworks normatively. We cannot allow any premodern source of human meaningfulness whatsoever to be taken seriously. Avoiding relativism is, then, a most important challenge for the pragmatist. (shrink)

ArgumentMutuality in “contact zones” has been emphasized in cross-cultural knowledge interaction in re-evaluating power dynamics between centers and peripheries and in showing the hybridity of modern science. This paper proposes an analytical pause on this attempt to better invalidate centers by paying serious attention to the limits of mutuality in transcultural knowledge interaction imposed by asymmetries of power. An unusually reciprocal interaction between a Japanese forester, Ishidoya Tsutomu, at the colonial forestry department, and his Korean subordinate Chung Tyaihyon is chosen (...) to highlight an inescapable asymmetry induced by the imperial power structure. Ishidoya, positioning himself as a settler expert, as opposed to a scientist in Tokyo, pursued localized knowledge in growing interaction with Chung, resulting in Ishidoya's career change as a herbalist focusing on traditional medicine and Chung's leadership in Korean-only botanizing. However, their mutual transformations, limited by asymmetric constraints on their choices, did not unsettle the imperial power structure or the centrality of centers. (shrink)

The following essay is divided in three parts. First, while sharing in principle Harrison's hypothesis of an affinity between the sixteenth‐century Reformation and early modern science, it questions the connection between the latter and the Weberian “disenchantment of the world.” Second, it suggests a broader group of possible actors than that envisaged by Harrison in referring to virtuoso collectors and their cabinets of curiosities who are rather marginalized in Harrison's narrative. And third, it highlights (in agreement with Harrison) the (...) physico‐theology of the second half of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century and beyond as an important temporary fusion of religion/theology and science at a time when the new science was still striving for social and religious respectability. (shrink)

This article compares topographical and archaeological remains of the Thermopylae frontier with the ancient testimonia of the sixth century historian Procopius of Caesareia (De aedificiis4.2.1.–22). It was revealed that: many of the frontier fortifications described were initially built before the sixth century; the fortified κλεισούρα mentioned should be equated with the Dhéma Pass; and the commercial settlement of Myropóles is best identified with the modern village of Káto Dhió Vouná. Written in Attic prose, this passage represents a rhetorical exercise, the (...) climax of which turned not on the ancient battlefield of Thermopylae, but rather on a mountain pass and it's highway that neutralized the Thermopylae defenses if they were ever controlled by the enemy. We were told that only the Emperor Justinian's wisdom could grasp this critical fact. Additionally, Procopius employed many rhetorical devices in this narrative: τóπος, χρóνος,, ἄγαλμα, ἔκφρασις, πανηγρικóς and employed imperial propaganda, praise, and exaggeration as well. In short, the passage is a classic example of selective story telling that may have found its inspiration in the Hunnic raid of 539/540 and the Herodotean account of the Persian invasion of 480 BC. While Procopius' account remains our best topographical description of the late antique Thermopylae frontier, one can only say that more archaeological questions were left unanswered than were resolved. In short, as an archaeological source, theDe aedificiisis a disappointing and vexing resource filled with equivocations. Finally, one may doubt that Procopius ever did visit the Thermopylae frontier, even though during his career he certainly had ample opportunity to do so. His account, therefore, must have been based upon secondary sources, whether imperial archival material, itineraries, or military staff reports and were not the result of personal autopsy. (shrink)

This paper provides an overview of semiotic studies about advertising, beginning with the early work done in the 1960s. Advertising communication plays a particular role in semiotic studies in the second half of the twentieth century. Pioneering studies of advertising messages, in particular those of Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco, date to the 1960s and were carried out for the most part using the tools of classical rhetoric. Following a period in which semiotics displayed a relative lack of interest in (...) advertisements, in the 1980s advertising texts were used as examples in applied narratological analysis by Jean-Marie Floch and others. This occurred at the same time as the so-called “passion turn of semiotics,” which stressed that the passions and emotions present in texts are crucial issues in textual semiotics, and it also seemed to offer fresh perspectives for the analysis of advertising communication. The passion turn took account of the evolution of advertising itself, since modern advertising is more and more interested in conveying passions and emotions. The effectiveness of an advert tends to be closely bound up with the presentation of sensations associated with a given product or brand. Recently, semioticians have begun to study more general features of advertising and marketing discourse. (shrink)