Older people enter the final phases of their lives with well‐established habits and rituals, some of which might be or become substance abuse. This inquiry focused on the relationship between habits, rituals, and the compulsive addictive behaviours evident in older persons' substance abuse. Habits and rituals, examined as adaptive and limiting functions in older persons, revealed changes in autonomy, social inclusion, and emotional responses to such changes as older persons experience declining energy reserves and physical debilities. Older persons' ebbing sense (...) of control and passionate responses to change illustrate the perennial struggle between the will and emotions when habits and rituals transform to compulsive addictive behaviours. Two concepts, germane to this struggle both in older persons' addictive behaviours and nurses' response, emerged from this inquiry: temperance, a balance between the will's freely chosen actions and passionate desire, and discipline, the means to achieve such balance. The focused attention demanded in discipline can be realized in spiritual exercises and daily care of the soul. Disciplined actions engage the older persons' imaginative capacities to manage and abandon the self in goals consistent with end‐of‐life issues: meaningful fulfillment of human potential and the need for daily joy and pleasure in living the final years. (shrink)

Part travelogue, part meditation, _Abuses_ is a bold exploration of central themes in Continental philosophy by one of the most passionate and original thinkers in that tradition writing today. A gripping record of desires, obsessions, bodies, and spaces experienced in distant lands, Alphonso Lingis's book offers no less than a new approach to philosophy—aesthetic and sympathetic—which departs from the phenomenology of Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. "These were letters written to friends," Lingis writes, "from places I found myself for months at a (...) time, about encounters that moved me and troubled me.... These writings also became no longer my letters. I found myself only trying to speak for others, others greeted only with passionate kisses of parting." Ranging from the elevated Inca citadel of Machu Picchu, to the living rooms of the Mexican elite, to the streets of Manila, Lingis recounts incidents of state-sponsored violence and the progressive incorporation of third-world peoples into the circuits of exchange of international capitalism. Recalling the work of such writers as Graham Greene, Kathy Acker, and Georges Bataille, _Abuses_ contains impassioned accounts of silence, eros and identity, torture and war, the sublime, lust and joy, and human rituals surrounding carnival and death that occurred during his journeys to India, Bangladesh, Thailand, Bali, the Philippines, Antarctica, and Latin America. A deeply unsettling book by a philosopher of unusual imagination, _Abuses_ will appeal to readers who, like its author, "may want the enigmas and want the discomfiture within oneself.". (shrink)

Herbert Fingarett's achievements range from his assault upon the misconceived 'disease theory' of alchoholism, through social philosophy, philosophy of law, and philosophical psychology, to Chinese studies and Confucian thought. Fingarette's major works include 'The Self in Transformation' (1963), 'Self-Deception' (1969), 'Confucius---The Secular as Sacred' (1972), and 'The Meaning of Criminal Insanity' (1972). His Book, 'Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alchoholism as a Disease' (1988), transformed the public debate on alchohol treatment and made Fingarette the target of an intense barrage of (...) abuse and vituperation from entrepreneurs in the alchohol-treatment industry. 'Rules, Rituals, and Responsibilities' contains Fingarette's intellectual autobiography, nine papers by leading scholars on different aspects of Fingarette's thought, and Fingarette's response to each of these papers. (shrink)

Alcoholism is endemic in Nigeria’s traditional religion and society. This abuse is especially common at New Yam festivals, Ekpe, Ekpo and Nmanwu masquerades festivals, burial rituals, birth, marriage and naming ceremonies. Some claim that this is driven by specific beliefs and activities in African culture, such as beliefs in ancestors, libation, hospitality and entertaining guests and strangers and the desire to maintain the cultural traditions of the ancestors. Alcohol abuse has generated major health and social issues for abusers, their families (...) and society, plunging families, towns and tribes into crises and conflicts that bring economic and political retrogression. This research studied how the African traditional religion encourages alcohol misuse and how to decrease it for national development. This study was on Nigeria’s South-South region. The study uses qualitative and ethnographic research methodologies, including key informants, in-depth and focus group interviews and the reward deficiency syndrome as a theoretical framework. Although African Traditional Religion (ATR) supports alcohol usage, greed, a lack of self-control, peer pressure, indiscipline and lack of moral upbringing led to alcohol misuse, which harms the person, family, community and country as a whole. Education and enlightenment are a remedy to free alcoholics and utilise them for national integration and development.Contribution: Some say Africans drink a lot because their religious heritage promotes drinking, leading to abuse. However, peer pressure, selfishness, a lack of self-control, bad parenting and not religion push persons with reward deficiency syndrome into alcoholism, according to this research. (shrink)

As a distortion of God's created designs, sexual abuse carries a unique devastation-factor. Abuse that is sexual in nature damages a spectrum of internal and external aspects of personhood. In particular, the core realities of: self-identity, community, and spiritual communion with God can be deeply fractured through SA. In light of the significance of the image of God, movement toward healing includes strengthening personal agency, processing profound boundary ruptures, and managing disillusionment with God. Due to the multi-faceted trauma of sexual (...) abuse spiritual formation programs must not only plan for the unique profile of abuse victims, but also need to incorporate a fuller understanding and praxis of the realities of embodiment, ritual, and theocentric metaphor into their transformational goals. Analysis includes first-person experience, anthropological science, and theological reflection. (shrink)

"Recent decades have witnessed a sharp rise in the number of state apologies for historical and more recent injustices, ranging from enslavement to displacement and from violations of treaties to war crimes, all providing the backdrop to displays of official regret. Featuring a host of leading authors in the field, this book seeks to contribute to the growing literature on official apologies by effectively combining philosophical reflection and empirical analysis. It achieves two interrelated goals: it enriches the theoretical debates on (...) the nature and functions of apologies while bringing forth new insights from hitherto unexamined normative horizons. It further addresses often overlooked aspects of political apologies, such as their non-verbal dimension as well as religious overtones, while testing theoretical reflections through encounters with real practices of state apologies. Finally, the book explores the obstacles to, and the limitations of, political apologies. The result is an excellent interdisciplinary volume that affords the reader a better understanding of conditions for a legitimate and successful state apology. -/- TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction PART I: THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS 2. Beyond the Ideal Political Apology; Alice MacLachlan 3. Political Apologies and Categorical Apologies; Nick Smith PART II: RITES AND RITUALS OF REGRET 4. From Mea Culpa to Nostra Culpa: A Reparative Apology from the Catholic Church?; Danielle Celermajer 5. The Power of Ritual Ceremonies in State Apologies: An Empirical Analysis of the Bilateral Polish-Russian Commemoration Ceremony in Katyn in 2010; Michel-André Horelt 6. Confessing the Holocaust: The Evolution of German Guilt; Stefan Engert PART III: CHALLENGING CASES 7. Revisiting the 'Membership Theory of Apologies': Apology Politics in Australia and Canada; Melissa Nobles 8. The Canadian Apology To Indigenous Residential School Survivors: A Case Study of Re-Negotiation of Social Relations; Neil Funk-Unrau 9. What Makes a State Apology Authoritative? Lessons from Post-Authoritarian Brazil; Nina Schneider PART IV: OBSTACLES AND LIMITATIONS 10. The Apology in Democracies: Reflections on the Challenges of Competing Goods, Citizenship, Nationalism and Pluralist Politics; Michael Cunningham 11. An Apology for Public Apologies; Juan Espindola 12. Reasoning Like a State: Integration and the Limits of Official Regret; Cindy Holder". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Incorporating Religion into Psychiatry:Evidenced–Based Practice, Not a Bioethical DilemmaMary D. MollerFor over sixteen years I was the owner and clinical director of an advanced practice nurse–managed outpatient rural psychiatric clinic staffed by APNs, a social worker, a licensed counselor and several graduate students. Many of our patients were victims of severe and often brutal trauma and abuse suffered at the hands of family, friends, and various professionals including spiritual (...) leaders. We also uncovered sources of abuse suffered from those involved in occult practices ranging from seemingly innocent white witchcraft (Wicca, Paganism, New Age) that includes such activities as astral projection and remote viewing to the darkest possible black witchcraft (perpetrating evil, incanting evil spirits, casting spells and hexes, creating dissociative identities) such as occurs in ritual abuse and satanic rites. Both types of witchcraft also typically involved family, friends, various professionals, and spiritual leaders. Recognizing the controversy surrounding the reality of witchcraft I am sharing a story that I hope will help break down the barriers that prevent many patients from receiving the treatment that would provide the most benefit to recovery.Seeking services for these patients led me on an intense personal and professional journey that included a profound Christian born–again experience at almost 50 years of age. My professional career grew in nearly indescribable terms as a result of the incorporation of prayer and deliverance ministry as part of the services we selectively provided. Today I always include assessment of spiritual experiences a patient has as well as spiritual supports that are available with every new patient intake. For patients who indicate that prayer is one of their supports, I ask if they would like prayer at the conclusion of the session. The gratitude that is expressed by individuals who appreciate being able to pray with a psychiatric provider is often profound.In the field of psychiatry there has been a long–standing and distinct taboo regarding incorporating religious and spiritual aspects of life experience into treatment unless it is to frame most of these discussions within the context of psychosis. This stems from the advent of psychoanalysis in which religion was deemed a neurosis and atheism became the goal. Some still hold to that belief and there certainly remains controversy regarding the incorporation of prayer into routine outpatient or inpatient care. The essential starting point is the determination of accurate differential diagnosis, which can often be a lengthy process. The clinician must be careful about distinguishing between religious experiences and religious delusions, and often this takes time to sort out. The determination of the etiology of hearing the voice of God or the devil or demons must be carefully parsed and framed within the context of the situation and culture the patient describes. If the clinician denies the existence of God or the devil or demons or the practice of witchcraft, the patient’s descriptions of such experiences will be quickly [End Page 206] labeled psychotic. The patient may then experience a lengthy hospitalization and treatment with psychotropic medications that can have an extremely negative effect on the possibility of recovery. Once I witnessed the level of healing that occurs with carefully administered spiritual interventions that are related to specific spiritual experiences that are based on the patient’s belief system, there was no going back to using only allopathic medication and non–spiritual psychosocial interventions, even in spite of the criticisms from others. The key is to understand and respect the patient’s belief system, if this is not congruent with the practitioner’s belief system, then practitioner must refer out.In the United States, an increasing persecution of Christianity and a devaluing of the Judeo–Christian heritage of our Constitution are creating a climate of intolerance to the expression of religious values resulting in an expectation that Christians should compromise their beliefs for the sake of political correctness. As a doctorally prepared psychiatric–mental health advanced practice nurse I experienced a profound born–again Christian experience that ultimately led to study of the Hebrew roots of Christianity and I now worship in a Messianic Jewish synagogue. It is impossible for me to not include the concept of spirituality into... (shrink)

An examination of the physical and sexual abuse perpetrated by Ashtanga yoga leader Pattabhi Jois and the culture, structures, and mythos that enabled it, grounded in investigative research and real survivor stories.

Ayahuasca is a psychoactive beverage that is mostly used in ritualized settings (Santo Daime rituals, neo-shamanic rituals, and even do-it-yourself-rituals). It is a common practice in the investigated socio-cultural field to call these settings “healing rituals.” For this study, 15 people who underwent ayahuasca (self-)therapy for a particular disease like chronic pain, cancer, asthma, depression, alcohol abuse, or Hepatitis C were interviewed twice about their subjective concepts and beliefs on ayahuasca and healing. Qualitative data analysis revealed a variety of motivational (...) patterns, subjective effects, and user types. Most participants were convinced that ayahuasca had influenced their illness positively or improved their coping with their illness. More importantly, it had enhanced their well being in general. As a result, we concluded that the effects of ayahuasca should not be reduced to a pharmacological model. The substance should be conceptualized as a psychological catalyst that unfolds within different fields of sociocultural ideas. (shrink)

Feminized AIs designed for in-home verbal assistance are often subjected to gendered verbal abuse by their users. I survey a variety of features contributing to this phenomenon—from financial incentives for businesses to build products likely to provoke gendered abuse, to the impact of such behavior on household members—and identify a potential worry for attempts to criticize the phenomenon; while critics may be tempted to argue that engaging in gendered abuse of AI increases the chances that one will direct this abuse (...) toward human beings, the recent history of attempts to connect video game violence to real-world aggression suggests that things may not be so simple. I turn to Confucian discussions of the role of ritualized social interactions both to better understand the roots of the problem and to investigate potential strategies for improvement, given a complex interplay between designers and device users. I argue that designers must grapple with the entrenched sexism in our society, at the expense of “smooth” and “seamless” user interfaces, in order to intentionally disrupt entrenched but harmful patterns of interaction, but that doing so is both consistent with and recommended by Confucian accounts of social rituals. (shrink)

In the popular misconception fostered by blockbuster action movies and best-selling thrillers--not to mention conventional explanations by social scientists--violence is easy under certain conditions, like poverty, racial or ideological hatreds, or family pathologies. Randall Collins challenges this view in Violence, arguing that violent confrontation goes against human physiological hardwiring. It is the exception, not the rule--regardless of the underlying conditions or motivations. -/- Collins gives a comprehensive explanation of violence and its dynamics, drawing upon video footage, cutting-edge forensics, and ethnography (...) to examine violent situations up close as they actually happen--and his conclusions will surprise you. Violence comes neither easily nor automatically. Antagonists are by nature tense and fearful, and their confrontational anxieties put up a powerful emotional barrier against violence. Collins guides readers into the very real and disturbing worlds of human discord--from domestic abuse and schoolyard bullying to muggings, violent sports, and armed conflicts. He reveals how the fog of war pervades all violent encounters, limiting people mostly to bluster and bluff, and making violence, when it does occur, largely incompetent, often injuring someone other than its intended target. Collins shows how violence can be triggered only when pathways around this emotional barrier are presented. He explains why violence typically comes in the form of atrocities against the weak, ritualized exhibitions before audiences, or clandestine acts of terrorism and murder--and why a small number of individuals are competent at violence. (shrink)

Rape culture is reportedly prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa. Culture, patriarchy, poverty and religion continue to sustain rape culture. The notions of the objectification of women’s bodies amongst the Shona people are causatives for rape culture within diverse cultural institutions. Africans reasonably uphold marriage with high esteem; unfortunately, the marriage institution is also susceptible to becoming a source of abuse, coercion, and is often used as a tool for controlling women. Some of the entrenched marital rituals embody diverse detrimental and contentious (...) practices, which deprive girls and women their autonomous rights, particularly their sexual and reproductive rights. This research article interrogates numerous aspects within the Shona indigenous religion and culture, which precipitate the construction of rape culture. The study uses African feminism as a theoretical framework. It utilises African feminist cultural hermeneutics to interrogate rape culture amongst the Shona people. The research study is qualitative with a conceptual analysis paradigm. It concludes by proposing the need for tapping into some life-giving and gender inclusive principles within the Shona indigenous religion and culture to be utilised as tools for eradicating rape culture. Contribution: Utilising the African feminist cultural hermeneutical framework, the article interrogated several factors precipitating rape culture amongst the Shona people. It foregrounded that women bear the brunt of burden of rape culture. It concludes by proposing the need for tapping into some positive Shona indigenous traditions as tools for curbing rape culture. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Going Around Hungry: Topography and Poetics in Martial 2.14Richard E. PriorMartial paints a social and physical portrait of Flavian Rome unlike those from other periods of the city’s history. A signal feature of Martial’s epigrams is representation of his physical world which often manifests itself through a wealth of topographical references. Through attention to detail, he lays the city of Rome out and illustrates the actual function of each (...) place in the daily lives of his contemporaries, thus becoming an invaluable aid to topographer and social historian alike. Unfortunately, topographers usually read Martial’s epigrams literally, as maps, not as poems. Those few scholars who do read him as a poet pay little or no attention to his use of topography. To use Martial as a mine for Roman topography, one must understand how he approaches the features of the city and employs them in poetic discourse. Likewise, to understand Martial’s poetry, one must have knowledge of Roman topography. The aim of this paper is to explore the social issues and topographical questions involved in a single epigram of Martial, namely 2.14, which details the circuit of a certain Selius who is frantically searching for a dinner invitation. After discussing the social phenomenon central to the poem, dining, I will walk through Selius’ route, pausing at each of his stops to comment on the place itself and Martial’s treatment of the site in this and other poems, showing how neglect of topographical or literary dimensions has led to misguided conclusions and strained topographical evaluations.Martial could see potential for an epigram in nearly any incident, and he appears to have had a short list of behaviors which, whenever observed, were almost guaranteed a place in his poems. Since he depended on daily life for inspiration, it is not surprising that eighty-five poems, nearly an entire book’s worth, relate to so quotidian an experience as dinner—not just any meal, but the cena in particular. 1 His anecdotes graphically reveal the important functions of this meal (beyond alimentary [End Page 121] concerns) in Roman society, and its significance to both host and guest alike. At the most concrete level, an invitation to dinner represented an opportunity for free food. For the poor, this was not a question of gluttony, rather one of survival, or at least a respite from cabbage and pulse. For the niggardly, free food was just that—free. It also served as an opportunity for theft. Martial’s dinner thieves are not content, as are those of Catullus, with merely absconding with linen; they fill the linen with board from the table to sell the next day. 2Invitations to dinner represented a tangible manifestation of the existence of some social alliance. The unimportant or unconnected were never invited; thus, those wishing for connections (and thereby import) scrambled for invitations as marks of social connection. Since dinners reveal a host’s standard of living through both fare and presentation per se, they easily become vehicles through which hosts can display their wealth and self-proclaimed erudition. An invitation to dinner also becomes a mode of exchange. Bad (but monied) poets can buy a flattering audience for the evening; social climbers use promises of dinner to augment their retinue as they go about their daily affairs; hosts even extend dinner invitations in exchange for sexual favors. With such abuses and torments heaped upon guests as the price of admission, one may well wonder whether a willing guest existed at Rome. They did... in abundance. The efforts of these connection-hunters, especially when their designs are frustrated, are sources of great humor to Martial. Nor does he leave himself out of the fray. At 2.18.1, for example, he confesses his own participation in this ritual, albeit with chagrin: Capto tuam, pudet heu, sed capto, Maxime, cenam. (I keep trying to get a dinner out of you, Maximus, I’m ashamed to say, but I keep trying.)Given the importance of dinner invitations, then, the process of wheedling for them was bound to become something of an institution, and in some cases, a virtual science. The agent of the... (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to explore the contemporary postmodern appropriation and reinvention of the practice of “crazy holiness” in Russian Orthodoxy and Tibetan Buddhism, highlighting points of contact and discontinuities between the traditions. The first section of the essay will discuss the Russian phenomenon of yurodstvo, a term used to indicate radical ascetics known for their idiosyncratic behavior and their outspoken criticism of religious and political authorities. The recent phenomenon of the punk group Pussy Riot will then be (...) presented as a contemporary rendition of yurodstvo, in a post-theological context where religious rituals and practices are devoid of their metaphysical import. The second section of the essay will introduce the Tibetan phenomenon of the smyon pa, crazy yogins known for their erratic speech and behavior, but also for their readiness to criticize institutional hypocrisy and corruption. The figure of Chögyam Trungpa, a former Tibetan monastic who started the Shambala tradition of Buddhism, is then presented as a contemporary version of smyon pa; his behavior—despite unfortunate and unjustifiable instances of abuse—similarly enabled practitioners to access the truth of the dharma. This paper presents Pussy Riot and Chögyam Trungpa as postmodern instantiations of crazy holiness—for a post-metaphysical and post-religious world where the divine no longer indwells traditional practices but can be still accessed and displayed through performative subversion. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Creativity Belongs to the Person, not to DiseaseJuan J. López-Ibor Jr. (bio) and María-Inés López-Ibor (bio)Keywordscreativity, patho-biography, Saint Teresa, visionsIn the paper, “From the Visions of Saint Teresa of Jesus to the Voices of Schizophrenia,” Cangas, Sass, and Pérez-Álvarez (2008) take an original approach to patho-biography that is very welcome.The temptation to designate historical individuals or characters of fiction as suffering from mental disease has always produced disagreeable feelings (...) in me. This sort of abuse of psychiatry and of the people in question is parallel to the abuse by the media or lay citizens when they describe, say, an especially violent murderer as a schizophrenic—forgetting that the vast majority of people with schizophrenia are not in the least violent. Having read Santa Teresa’s writings during my adolescence, well before I even considered entering medicine, I reacted to comments about her alleged psychiatric illnesses with uneasiness, to put it mildly. The Santa Teresa of La Vida de la Santa Madre Teresa de Jesús (her autobiography), of the Camino de Perfección, and of the El Castillo Interior was surely not a mental patient, it seemed to me. The same would apply to San Juan de La Cruz, Jean D’Arc, Don Quijote, Sancho Panza, Edipus, and Clitemnestra, to mention a few. Even van Gogh’s paintings did not seem to me the productions of a patient with schizophrenia or epilepsy. Of course all of them may have suffered, at certain periods of life, symptoms attributable to a mental disorder, but their creativity rested elsewhere, and was often manifest during healthy periods of their lives. After years spent fighting the stigma of mental diseases, and after organizing several exhibitions of works of art of people with mental diseases, we came to the conclusion that creativity and singularity belong to the person, not to the illness. Some of the diseases of these individuals may have being accidents (van Gogh’s hallucinations and psychotic symptoms, for example, were most probably due to intoxications with absinthe, then rich in hallucinogenic alkaloids such as tujone), or, together with other life circumstances, may have had unspecific influences on the person’s condition. In contrast with many other psychiatric disorders that are represented in ancient Greek and Roman literature, there are no descriptions of individuals with schizophrenia in the Greek and Roman literature dating from the fifth century bc to the beginning of the second century Ad (Evans et al. 2003), and several authors have speculated that schizophrenia did not exist before the eighteenth century (Ellard 1987).Caution is important when dealing with mental health and religious issues in contrast with creativity. The creativity of people suffering from bipolar disorders is well recognized (Jamison 1993) and [End Page 277] the same applies to alcohol and drug intoxication. Tellenbach (1986) has also written on the creativity of depressed persons, although he refers more to the disposition of mood (Schwermut) than to clinical depression as such. The link between melancholia and genius put forward by Aristotle has often been misinterpreted. The philosopher was considering the melancholic temperament and not the melancholic illness as we would understand it today. Of the four temperaments, it is in his view only the melancholic that is gifted with creativity. The sanguine person seeks the immediate pleasures of life, the choleric one considers himself powerful and dedicates himself to manifesting this power, and the phlegmatic individual is disconnected from life and seeks to live without effort or pleasure. The melancholic temperament leads to creativity because of the predominance of doubt, reflection, and dissatisfaction with the miseries of life.Freud’s notion of religiosity as a collective obsessive neurosis is totally mistaken, in my view. The three main themes of obsessions are cleanliness, order, and guilt. In none of these cases is the theme the goal of the action; rather, it is a strategy to contain anxiety. As a consequence, patients with obsessions and compulsions about dirt and cleanliness tend to be dirty themselves, because the real purpose of their compulsions is not in fact to be clean but rather to satisfy a ritual. When order... (shrink)

Established religions integrate a society's everyday secular realities with humankind's numinous experience of the holy. Powerful emotions nourish the cultural expression of the archetypes propelling the “ritual dances” of art, sport, and technocracy. During sacred moments such as mother‐infant or adult bonding, neuroendocrine triggers activate lifelong ties. The cultural canon of the left cortex contrasts with the intuitive right. Brainstem “switches” alternate the left's cool, extraverted, sympathetic drive for control with the right's “warm” attachment behavior and dreaming sleep. Psychic (...) trauma damages flexibility with resultant alexithymic blindness to emotions and archetypes. Substance abuse and narcissistic overemphasis on control ensue. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 364-367 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Hamlet in Purgatory Hamlet in Purgatory, by Stephen Greenblatt; xii & 322 pp. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, $29.95. Hamlet in Purgatory is both more and less than literary criticism of Shakespeare's most haunting and most critically belabored play. Greenblatt has captured an evolving culture of belief which informs the play and goes far beyond source studies (...) or the history of ideas. He assays to show how the Medieval doctrine of Purgatory and the rejection of it by Protestant Reformers shaped the structure of Hamlet and the world of Hamlet's spiritual agony.Central to the argument is the notion that the rejection of Purgatory, and ritual practices associated with the doctrine, threatened to disrupt community and sever the relations between the living and the dead. Thus, the senior Hamlet's plea to "Remember me" takes precedence over his injunction to revenge; traditional preoccupations of Hamlet criticism become secondary to the concern for spiritual community which Reformation doctrine threatened. The exegesis is scholarly and the prose is engaging, yet the book suffers from the new historicist tendency to become absorbed more with context than with criticism and to assume too readily the relevance of the context to the criticism. Put another way, Greenblatt, like other new historicists, is not always rigorous in his inferences.Greenblatt warns that his book "requires a certain hermeneutical patience, a willingness to suspend direct literary analysis, in order to examine more thoroughly what has been treated as mere background for the canonical work of art" (p. 5). Although the book culminates in a description of the migration of discarded religious ritual into the theater, and a thoughtful commentary on Hamlet, Greenblatt cautions that "... for the book to work properly, the reader should understand literary analysis, and specifically the analysis of Hamlet, to be suspended in another sense as well, that is, distributed in tiny, almost invisible particles throughout my account" (p. 5). Amen. The caveats are essential for anyone who might expect an "interpretation" of Hamlet. Rather, Greenblatt has evoked the conflict of enduring beliefs and Reformist critiques which animated Shakespeare's imagination and Hamlet's suffering.Hermeneutical patience certainly is demanded of the reader, because more than half of the book presents commentaries on the doctrine of Purgatory from the late Middle Ages to the early seventeenth century. Greenblatt begins with Simon Fish's 1529 "Supplication for the Beggars," (p. 15) an anti-purgatorial (and anti-clerical) tract addressed to Henry VIII. Fish argued that the doctrine of Purgatory is at the heart of ecclesiastical corruption and is a danger to the state, because the fear that the doctrine can generate enables the clergy to extort enormous wealth in the form of "suffrages," donations for trentals, anniversary Masses, and other perpetual penitential memorials on behalf of the dead. Fish's argument is double: its theological burden is that Purgatory is a non-scriptural superstition; its rhetoric is that it is an abuse of the [End Page 364] poor and a danger to the economic solvency of the kingdom. Fish invokes both doctrinal error and political danger; this is thus an excellent tract to begin the elucidation of the complexity of Reformist objections to Purgatory in sixteenth-century England. Greenblatt adds that other Reformers saw Purgatory as a poetic creation, a fable, and therefore a vain imagining. John Donne's "Devotions upon Emergent Occasions" is cited to show that post-Catholic divines believed that purgation must be completed in this life.According to Greenblatt, an unintended consequence for the laity of the rejection of Purgatory is the creation of a radical divide between the living and the dead. If we pray for the dead, they are not as absent from us as if they had passed on to the timeless worlds of Heaven or Hell. Even if Purgatory is expensive or fabulous, its loss destroys a community with the dead that involved a reciprocal and continuing relationship, whereby the living can aid the dead towards Heaven and saved souls can eventually become intercessors in Heaven for the living... (shrink)

If we are looking for an Ur-explanation for the persistence of the Ur-myth, or any other myth, in our literature, could we not more directly find it in the structure of a mind which does not have to remember in order to imitate? The occasion of both myth and literature is the social life of the species which, in Starobinski's sense, is a history of continual eviction; but as regards the apparatus of thought by which this social life is reflected (...) in art it is more a history of assimilation and repetition. "The work of the brain," to cite a recent article in Scientific American, "is to create a model of a possible world rather than to record and transmit to the mind a world that is metaphysically true…Different worlds are presumably constructed by similar species."1 And, presumably, similar worlds are constructed by similar species. Weisinger hints briefly at something like this in his essay "The Mythic Origins of the Creative Process," but one has the clear impression, as his title suggests, that he would like to have the [myth/ritual] cart before the creative horse.2 However much this may satisfy our longing to crown our literature, if not creativity itself, with a mythic genealogy, it seems a wistful hypothesis. One might just as well look upon the remains of early man's shelters, marvel that they too had roofs, just like ours, and conclude that therefore our roofs have their origin in theirs.· 1. Harry J. Jerison, "Paleoneurology and the Evolution of Mind," Scientific American, January 1976, p. 99.· 2. Herbert Weisinger, The Agony and the Triumph: Papers on the Use and Abuse of Myth , p. 250.Bert O. States, professor of dramatic arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is the author of Irony and Drama: A Poetics and The Shape of Paradox: An Essay on "Waiting for Godot.". (shrink)

This chapter offers an overdue philosophical model of flirting. Flirting, I argue, is a conversational game involving two moves; push moves, which involve presupposing an intimacy that does not yet exist, and pull moves, which involve playfully pretending to block those presuppositions. As flirters perform rallies of these moves, they gradually increase the intimacy between them through a process known by philosophers of language as accommodation. This model illuminates a common social ritual and it can be marshaled against abuses (...) of the notion of flirting by perpetrators of harassment and assault. (shrink)

This paper reexamines the concept of filial piety from a specific perspective, asking how filial piety is performed by and observed on the body. I argue that in pre-Qin and Han Confucian texts, there was a strong anxiety over the potential hypocrisies of filial deeds; that is, the fact that filial piety could be abused and transformed to become a mere show intended for gaining fame and reputation. Because of this, early commentators felt the need to create methods and criteria (...) for evaluating filial piety. One important way to do this was to examine how filial piety was materialized through the ritual performance of the body. Filial piety was thus embodied and evaluated in terms of corporality. Ironically, this embodiment of filial piety had its own paradox as filial piety could become oversimplified as physical care of the parents and the ritual of xiao be reduced to a performance. (shrink)

The nature of communication can be theorized in many different ways, e.g. as ritual, storytelling, deliberation, rational argument, dissemination, articulation, translation, and even failure. In the present article communication is conceptualized as a (dialogic) process of conversation between the subject and the object as the Other; however, this conceptualization goes beyond its treatment as a simple reciprocal exchange of messages. First, a more nuanced and layered understanding of the role of the Other in communication is given; it is described (...) what it means to be existentially bound with the object and engaged with the Other in a conversation as a process of interpretation and signification. Secondly, the importance of time in this process is highlighted; it is argued that communication can be understood more adequately when treated as a process of temporalizing of meaning. And, thirdly, the aporia of communication as conversation is discussed; it is shown how intersubjectivity and reciprocity can be reified and abused. Overall, it is concluded that the nature of communication as a complex process of common human experience calls for other theoretical perspectives. (shrink)

Booker T. Washington's Cotton States Exposition Address enlarges our understanding of the genre of witnessing by presenting a version of public testimony and historical remembrance sharply at odds with contemporary definitions of the genre. Washington's resolute choice to lend voice as a living witness to the atrocities of slavery in the service of conspicuously pragmatic and narrowly defined interests rather than universal human rights dramatically separates his performance of public witnessing from its late modern forms. Whereas survivors of historical atrocity (...) in the post–World War II era ritually assume the difficult responsibility of testifying to past evils with the greatest possible accuracy, Washington relates the history of slavery—most notably its legacy of heinous human rights abuses—in radically inventive ways. The address demonstrates that those who embody the putative collective voice of subaltern communities may, in particular circumstances, call on the public to willfully forget, rather than somberly remember, the crimes of history. In doing so, the speech also suggests that the ability to bear witness may not automatically result in the ability to petition for equal human rights. (shrink)

Abstract:Much of the current discussion of evil within business and professions locates evil within the individual employee. Dennis Moberg (1997) has argued for conceiving of employee viciousness as a lack of self-control. This paper argues, that while some evil behaviors may be well-modelled as instances of low self-control, this model does not fit much of what might qualify as evil (e.g., child-caregivers falsely accusing their fellow employees of ritual child abuse). The paper examines three alternative models of evil, two (...) drawn from literature, one from theology, and shows why these alternative models are just as relevant for thinking about the nature and cause of evil as the low self-control model drawn from the criminology literature.How intoxicating to feel like God the Father and to hand out definitive testimonials of bad character and habits—Albert Camus. (shrink)

Christmas gives us that 'sweet little Jesus Boy' and Lent follows that with the 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild.' He was neither of those. In point of fact, he was the 'tough guy from Nazareth.' He was consistently abrasive, if not abusive, to his mother (Lk 2:49; Jn 2:4; Mt 12:48) and aggressively hard on males, particularly those in authority. In Mark 8 he cursed and damned Peter for failing to get Jesus' esoteric definition of Messiah correct. Nobody else understood (...) it either. Jesus had made it up himself and not adequately explained it to anybody until then. He called the religious authorities snakes, corrupt tombs, filthy chinaware, fakes, and Mosaic legalists who had forgotten God's real revelation of universal grace and salvation in the Abraham Covenant. He tore up the temple in the middle of a worship service and cursed those present for turning God's house of prayer into a den of thieves, when actually they were kind, helping out-of-town tourists obtain the proper sacrifices for the liturgical rituals. Jesus was persistently aggressive, often angry and not infrequently irrational, killing an innocent fig tree with his curse, for example. He constantly attacked the Pharisees and their proposals for renewing the spiritual vitality of the Jewish Community. He abused numerous people by healing them on the Sabbath just to make his political point against the religious leaders. He could just as well have healed them on Tuesday, if he really wanted to heal them. By healing the blind man in John 9 on the Sabbath, for example, he caused the man to be driven out of his synagogue, his family, and his community of faith; isolated and abandoned as if he were a leper. Even when he said surprising things about children, his focus was not on the children but on his disciples, using the children as tools for making an assertive teaching point. Jesus' life was one of perpetually aggressive claims for his vision of God's reign. He constantly and intentionally provoked conflict and disruption of the status quo, spiritually and politically. He refused to negotiate, compromise, palliate, or mollify his insistence upon keeping his elbow perpetually in the eye of the people in power. In all this he would not back down. The principle by which Jesus operated was absolute and that is why he did not back down, even though they killed him for this very reason. His principle was simply that the renewal of Jewish spirituality could only come from a return to the Abrahamic Covenant, which declared (Gn 12; Rm 8) that God is gracious and universally forgiving towards all humankind, unconditional to our conduct and behaviour, and radically in that it removes all fear, guilt, and shame from the equation of our relationship with God (Mi 7:18-20). He saw that the Pharisees and Scribes were absolutely wrong in assuming that the Mosaic legal system would renew the Jewish relationship with God. He was not the gentle Jesus, meek and mild. He was that tough guy from Nazareth! He had good reason and he was willing to go the distance for what he stood for, even to death on the cross. (shrink)

Translated by Drew S. Burk and Anthony Paul Smith. Excerpted from Struggle and Utopia at the End Times of Philosophy , (Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing, 2012). THE END TIMES OF PHILOSOPHY The phrase “end times of philosophy” is not a new version of the “end of philosophy” or the “end of history,” themes which have become quite vulgar and nourish all hopes of revenge and powerlessness. Moreover, philosophy itself does not stop proclaiming its own death, admitting itself to be half dead (...) and doing nothing but providing ammunition for its adversaries. With our sights set on clearing up this nuance, we differentiate philosophy as an institutional entity, and the philosophizability of the World and History, of “thought-world,” which universalizes the narrow concept of philosophy and that of “capital.” We also give an eschatological and apocalyptical cause to this end, of “times” or “ages” rather than those of philosophical practice. Last but not least, it is the Future itself in the performativity of its ultimatum that determines this end times, reversing these times from the Identity the Future accorded to it, withdrawing the thought-world from the lie of its death. Why this style of axioms and oracles, these more or less subtle distinctions, old and debased, with an appeal to the ultimata , to end times and last words? We fight to give, parallel to the concept of Hell, its new theoretical position, for its philosophical return and its non-philosophical transformation. No more so than any other word, Hell is not a metaphor here, just the Principle of Sufficient World. Every man, no doubt, has his “hell” readily available, connivance, control, conformism, domestication, schooling, alienation, extermination, exploitation, oppression, anxiety, etc. We have our little list that the Contemporaries established in the previous century in the same way one used to construct lists of virtues and vices or honors and wealth. They invented it for us without knowing it, for us-the-Futures who have as our responsibility to invent its use. In the Christian and Gnostic tradition, the struggle of the End Times takes place “on earth.” The most sophisticated of believers have it taking place in Heaven as well, above all in Heaven. The various kinds of gnosis imagine infinite falls and vertiginous highs, the vertigo of salvation. On Earth as in Heaven, a hell is available. The Marxists have the law of profit and the control of production, the class struggle Capital imposes on man. The Nietzscheans, the dull grumble of the struggle in the foundations of World and History, the domestication of man, the society of control. The phenomenologists, the capture of being, the most superficial amongst them, the age of suspicion. But all of these “hells” are taken from World, History, Society, and Religion. What we call Hell is no longer of the order of these specific and total intra-worldly generalities, it is both more singular and more universal, no longer being at all of the same order, it is the determinant Identity of these small hells strung out through history but unified here in the name of the last Humaneity. It is even found within the French idiom for hell [ enfer ], en-fer literally means “in-irons.” We are as much “in-irons” as we are “alive” [ en-Vie ]. We believe in Hell but as non-philosophers and it is even because we are non-philosophers that we can believe in it outside of any sort of religion. Hell is less mythological than ideological, it combines philosophizability with universal capital. Under what form? A single term could work for them without being a metaphor or something they would participate in by analogy, a more innovative and conjectural term than control, more universal than profit. It would denote the growing and permanent extortion of a surplus-value of communication, of speed and of urgency in change, in productivity and in work, in the pressure of images and slogans. It would be worse than solicitation, more tenacious than capture, more active and persecutory than control, softer and more insidious than a frontal attack, just as perverse as questioning and accusation, less brutal and offensive than extermination, less ritualized than inquisition, it would be soft and dispersed, instantaneous and vicious, it would be a crime without declared violence. Collusion and conformism, it would be afraid to show itself. Related to rumor, from which it borrows its infinite and tortuous ways. It is harassment. As a modernized form of Hell, perhaps harassment has a long future in front of it, of innocent torture, slow assassination, in short the fall, but radical with no way of recovering and which tolerates only salvation. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PAST OF NON-PHILOSOPHY Non-philosophy is thus Man as the utopian identity of the philosophical form of the World, a utopia destined to transform it. We still have to understand these equations, in particular that of the being-uni-versed from Man, and this book adheres to this by re-exposing non-philosophy in a different way via one of its new possibilities. It uses this opportunity to once again take up formulations that lead to objections answering certain external critics, as well as revisiting diverging interpretations specific to non-philosophers. A portion of this book is devoted to going through these theories via a strict or “lengthy” presentation of non-philosophy, and its defense against more expeditious solutions. This work of rectification is the occasion, merely the occasion, for refocusing non-philosophy on Man (the “Man-in-person,” “Humaneity”), and in a more innovative manner, on its utopian vocation established since the book Future Christ . As for this “occasion,” it is quite obvious. A school of posture, not to say a school of thought, supposes a minimum of closure from the most liberating of knowledge, a heritage, its utilization, and its no less certain dispersal. Within its development, a variety of interpretations will no doubt appear, deviations that are as much normalizations, and a struggle against this multiplication of divergent tendencies. These are perhaps not inevitable evils, especially here, merely a normal development according to the twisting paths of history. But the problem is made worse by the fact that this school of non-philosophers is that of utopia. Not the former attempts devoted to commenting on the worst authoritarian and criminal forms of the past and the present, but utopia as the determinant principle for human life, or to put it another way, of the Future as an irreducible presupposition of (for) thinking the World and History. Non-philosophers are engaged in an aleatory navigation between the respect for the most rigorous utopia, whose rules are not that of the reproductive imagination but those from the Future determining imagination itself, as well as the temptations, diversions, and remorse of history. Little by little, we will begin to understand that the Future as we understand it no longer has any temporal consistency or positive content, without being an empty form or a nothingness, but that it is foreclosed to past and present History, just as it is foreclosed to the place of places, the World, and that it is the only method for establishing the practice of thinking in a non-imaginary instance. Because it is the World and History that are imaginary and have a terrible materiality, it is not necessarily utopia. We will overlap two objectives here: the defense of non-philosophy against the (non-) philosophers that we are, only occasionally, and the introduction of philosophy to a rigorous future. Together they set out to definitively render, without any possible return to philosophical conformism or towards the facilities of the past and present, the non-philosophical enterprise understood as utopia or uchronia. Imagination and speculation, left to themselves and thus undistinguished, are quite good for participating in the grand game of History but have little value or worse for the Future which is unimaginable and unintelligible and must be maintained as such. MAN-IN-PERSON AS SUSPENSION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL CHORA The point where philosophical resistance is concentrated is without a doubt the invention of the Name-of-Man, first name, oracular as much as axiomatic, of the determining cause for the non-philosophical posture. And that which concentrates the differends is the style of non-philosophy as identity that possesses the dual aspect, of discipline and of the oeuvre, of the theorem and of the oracle. But the real difficulty in understanding the simplicity of non-philosophy is profoundly hidden in the depths of philosophy itself. Because philosophy, from Parmenides to Derrida, even Levinas, continues to be a divided gesture, without a veritable immanence, transforming its thematic contents of transcendence in also forgetting to transform the operative transcendence in the element from which the ontology of surface is established which we will call, in memory of Plato, the chorismos. The general effect of the chora literally gives place to philosophy, demanding binding and sutures to which we will once and for all “oppose” the Man-in-person, his power of cloning, and his future being. All philosophy contains a hinter-philosophy in which it deploys its operations and weaves its tradition like an understudy of a topographical nature and in the best of cases being itself topological. Philosophy as well consists of two levels, its pre-ontological operative conditions on the one hand, and its superficial theme on the other, it too has its presupposed, but is not aware of it or erases it within the unity of appearance named Logos. Rightly, the Logos, and its flash or lightning nature, possesses a “dark precursor,” the chora, which is as much a virtual image, and philosophy, dazzled by its own lightning flash, seems to completely forget about it at the same time it sets itself up within it. Non-philosophy risks taking this same path, of confusing what it believes to be the real with its phantom double, contenting itself to working on the thematic level of philosophy, not its surface objects and its idle chatter (we stopped talking about this a long time ago and in any case they are merely simple materials for inducing a work of transformation), but the transcendence-form of its objects. In the end it risks, through precipitation, taking back up the heritage of philosophy, a heritage of a misunderstood presupposed, even more profound than the play of transcendences. This is what the imperative of the radicality of immanence meant, to treat immanence in an immanent manner, not to make a new object out of it. And from here we get non- (philosophy) and its refusal of the Platonic chorismos , symbol of all abstraction, and thus all transcendental appearance. There are no illusions. The message will leave a heritage in tattered pieces and interpretations. But it was difficult not to dispute the differend to its core. There will be complete confusion of the multiple, possible, and necessary effectuations of non-philosophy with its interpretations. The non-philosophical or human freedom of philosophical effectuation and the philosophical freedom of interpretation. Effectuations demand non-philosophy to return to zero from the point of view of its philosophical material and thus also but within these limits the formulation of its axioms , but in no way providing from the outset divergent interpretations of the aforementioned axioms. They are divergent because they do not take into account the material from which these axioms are derived within non-philosophy, and because they do not see themselves as symptoms of another vision of the World. The utterances of non-philosophy are not mathematical theorems and pure axioms, they merely have a mathematical aspect . They are, by their extraction or origin, mathematical and transcendental. And by their determined function in-Real, within non-philosophy, they are identically in-the-last-Humaneity entities which have an aspect of an axiom and an aspect of interpretation (or an oracular aspect as we say) that attempts (sometimes it is ourselves who provide the occasion) to isolate and transform, in complete freedom of interpretation. There will be an opportunity to complain about the complex character of the language of non-philosophy, an idiom saturated with classical references, sophisticated in a contemporary way. Its freedom of decision up against the whole of philosophy demands these effects of “complication” and “privatization,” as the saying goes. But it also demands fighting against the drift [ dérive ] of the pedagogical-all and the mediatic-all that leads philosophy into the shallow depths of opinion, which is the site of its impossible death. The noble idealism of “pop-philosophy” has been consumed into a “philo-reality;” against this we propose philo-fiction. Parricide, which is at the bottom of these interpretations and which we can judge as being quite fertile, although it has informed tradition, only takes place once or within one lone meaning. In regards to Parmenides, it was possible; Plato introduced the Other as non-being and language, bringing into existence the philosophical system of the World, but is it possible to repeat it again with the same fecundity in regards to non-philosophy, this time in introducing (non) religion or (non) art, still mixing them without taking into account this mixture, alternatively as a philosophical or religious resentment? If philosophy begins via a crime, it is no doubt obliged to continue down similar pathways, to the effect that the crimes of philosophy, once the founding crime has been committed, are a reaction of self-defense. It is undoubtedly from this that we get Marx’s declaration that history begins by tragedy and repeats itself or ends in farce. The preservation of rigor and fecundity is, in every respect, a psychologically difficult task within a theory such as non-philosophy. Having posited an essential objective of liberation in regards to philosophy and its services, one has often understood this objective as an authorization of providing particular interpretations of its axioms and ends up obliterating their scope. This ends up confusing, on one hand, two kinds of freedoms in regards to non-philosophy, the freedom of its interpretations and the freedom of its effectuations. On the other hand, any defense of “principles” against precipitated interpretations is immediately taxed with a will to orthodoxy, a prohibitive objection when we are dealing with, as is the case here, a heretical theory of thought. Nevertheless, it is time to stop confusing heresy as the cause of thought with an ideology of heresies, which is certainly not at all our object, but rather a form of normalization. As for the “disciplinary” aspect, which is not the only aspect, it demands something other than philosophical “answers to objections,” a precision in the definition and use of its procedures in the formation of utterances, since non-philosophy is neither a supplementary doctrine interior to philosophy nor a vision of the world but one whose priority is a “vision of Man,” or rather Man as “vision” that implies a theory and a practice of philosophy. In the end, struggle is only one aspect of non-philosophy, not its whole or telos, struggle coming only from its materiality. In particular, if the discipline of non-philosophy is inseparable from struggle, it is not a question of reducing the monomaniacal obsession of its “marching orders.” This would reduce its complexity and kill its indivisibility, deploying it in a “long march” and a form of Maoization whose philosophical presuppositions no longer have any pertinence here, a case of the One and the Two, which are now cloned and no longer tied together. More generally, non-philosophy is a complex thought composed of a multitude of aspects, which is to say, unilateral interpretations, of a philosophical origin but reduced by their determination in-the-last-instance . The “liberalism” of non-philosophy is merely one of the aspects of which it is capable, not an essence. Similarly, it is only capable of having a “Maoist” aspect. Let us generalize. The weakness of non-philosophy is due to a specific cause, the determination-in-the-last-Humaneity of a subject for the World. Everything that has a right to the philosophical city can be said about it in turn and in a retaliatory mode since Man contributes nothing of himself that Man takes from the World. We can consider non-philosophy as being pretentious, absurd, idealistic, empty, materialistic, formalistic, contradictory, modern, post-modern, Zen, Buddhist, Marxist; it endures or tolerates, perhaps “appeals” to, or at least renders possible, sarcasms, ironies, and insults without even talking about the misunderstandings, partly for the same reason as psychoanalysis. All of this goes beyond simple “deviations.” They are its aspects, which is to say, its “unilateral” philosophical interpretations in both senses of the word, being either sufficient coming from the mouth of philosophers, or reduced to their absolute dimension of sufficiency and totality in the mouths of non-philosophers, and both times due to the weakness and strength of Man-in-person as their determination only in-the-last-instance. The non-philosopher is certainly not a Saint Paul fantasizing about a new Church. The non-philosopher is either a (Saint) Sebastian whose flesh is pierced with as many arrows as there are Churches, or a Christ persecuted by a Saint Paul. What is engaged in here is the practice of retaliation. A negative rule of the non-philosophical ethics of outlawed discussion by way of argumentation (the sufficient is you, the orthodox one is always you, you are the fashionable one, and when a master you are someone else) that is founded on the confusion of effectuations of non-philosophy and of its overall interpretations. Retaliation is the law but as with any too-human law, it must acquire a dimension that displaces it, or rather emplaces it and takes away its authority but not all of its effectiveness. If the non-philosopher is only authorized by himself, which is to say by philosophy but limited by the Real-of-the-last-instance, its critique of other non-philosophers can merely be retaliatory under the same conditions, only by the Real limited in-the last-instance. THE TREE OF PHILOSOPHICAL SAINTLINESS The thematic horizon or material of these debates is in the relationships between philosophy, religion as gnosis, and non-philosophy. It is inevitable, regarding non-philosophers in general (whether they are non-philosophers by name or simply its neighbors) that we often end up evoking Marx’s Holy Family and imagining, arranged on the neighboring branches of the tree of philosophy and annexed, sometimes abusively, to non-philosophy, authors who would quite evidently and quite rightly refuse this label. So it is that we find, for example, a Saint Michel, a Saint Alain, a Saint Gilles 1 without even mentioning the youngest who aspire as well to the freedom of “saintliness” and who make their muted voices heard here. If there is a Holy Family of non-philosophers, it extends completely beyond these three, provided that the sectarian spirit can save us. This book is organized in the following manner: To begin, in order to recall the essential part of the problematic, we have organized a Summary of Non-Philosophy , a vade-mecum of notions and basic problems, in a classical style. Secondly, there is Clarifications On the Three Axioms of Non-Philosophy , designed to posit their proper use as much as to elucidate their meaning. Thirdly, an analysis of Philosophizability and Practicity , both being extreme constituents of philosophical material or the contents of the third axiom. Fourthly, the heart of this work: Let us Make a Tabula Rasa of the Future or of Utopia as Method . Fifthly, we have a theoretical outline of a non-institutional utopia, The International Organization of Non-Philosophy, L’Organisation Non-Philosophique Internationale, (ONPHI) already created in practice but under the conditions of possibility and functioning from which here we put into question “de jure,” thus not without a perplexity concerning “facts,” in any case, without the capability of “getting to the bottom of things.” Sixthly, an essay characterizing The Right and the Left of Non-Philosophy , a brief topology of several philosophizing and normalizing positions of proponents or tenants of this problematic. Seventhly, Rebel in the Soul: A Theory of Future Struggle , a systematic discussion starting from a confrontation of non-philosophical gnosis and non-religious gnosis to the extent that they pose, posed or perhaps still will pose themselves as rivals to non-philosophy in a mixture of fidelity and infidelity. Despite the fact that it can also be read as putting non-philosophy into perspective: it pits against a standard Platonism two contemporary appropriations of Gnosticism. On the basis of the paradigm of Man who never ceases to come as the Future-in-person, each one of these moments strives to reestablish not the “true” non-philosophy and its orthodoxy, but the minimal conditions to respect in order to allow for its maximum fecundity. And in order to bring about one of the last possibilities of its development, making explicit Humaneity as a utopia-for-the-World. In introducing these considerations in the form of a “testament” and “ultimatum,” we want to indicate two things: First, that this is the last time we will intervene in order to caution non-philosophers against the temptation of returning and looking backwards towards philosophy. Only a disillusioned nostalgia for the former World and its traditions barely remain permissible to us.… Secondly, that non-philosophy is also a sort of ultimatum for considering one’s life and transforming one’s thought from the perspective of a uni-version rather than a conversion. Man as future is this ultimatum in action, not an impatient self-proclaimed genius, and philosophy is his testament. It is obviously the ultimatum that determines this testament as “old” with a view towards a life that is, itself, non-testamentary. In and of itself, the “old” can never bear a veritable eschaton. Thus, this book intersects according to the logic of this paradigm, under the sign of the ultimate or “last” as future, philosophy as testament and cautionary note for maintaining the non-philosophical oeuvre as “future” or “utopian.” We will see that between these two dimensions it cradles a theory of struggle. In the end, this book envisions non-philosophers in multiple ways. It inevitably sees them as subjects of knowledge, most often academics insofar as life in the world demands, but above all as close relatives of three great human types. The analyst and political militant are quite obvious, for non-philosophy is close to psychoanalysis and Marxism insofar as it transforms the subject in transforming philosophy. Here again, one must have a sense not of certain nuances but of aspects (of the interpretations, albeit unilateralized) and not in order to construct a simple proletarization or militarization of thought as theory. To be rigorous, rather than authoritarian or spiteful, is its task. And lastly, non-philosophy is a close relative of the spiritual but definitely not the spiritualist. Those who are spiritual are not at all spiritualists, for the spiritual oscillate between fury and tranquil rage, they are great destroyers of the forces of Philosophy and the State, which are united under the name of Conformism. They haunt the margins of philosophy, gnosis, mysticism, science fiction and even religions. Spiritual types are not only abstract mystics and quietists; they are heretics for the World. The task is to bring their heresy to the capacity of utopia, and their utopia to the capacity of the paradigm. NOTES We will recognize allusions, and sometimes references, to closely related or distant themes, but which are related, in the work of Michel Henry, Alain Badiou and via the representative of “non-religious” gnosis of a Platonic origin, in Gilles Grelet. It goes without saying that these discussions are current and local, neither concerning the ensemble of doctrines nor prejudging the eventual evolution of certain amongst them. This concerns defining certain proximities with non-philosophy (rather than adversaries which in some sense they are) and typological and emblematic differends (rather than conflicts with a certain author). (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient SatireCedric LittlewoodRalph M. Rosen. Making Mockery: The Poetics of Ancient Satire. Classical Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. xiii + 294 pp. 4 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55.This book ranges from pre-literary myths and rituals of abuse to the verse satire of Juvenal in pursuit of a poetics of mockery largely abstracted from the historical contexts of its production. We set (...) the various poetic modes of Greco-Roman mockery more successfully in their historical contexts, Rosen argues, with a synchronic appreciation of the literary phenomenon we recognize broadly as satire. The Roman practitioners of this famously home-grown genre themselves demand that we broaden our horizons: Persius, for example, prefaces his satires with fourteen lines of choliambics, while Horace (mis)represents his satiric predecessor Lucilius as deriving entirely from Old Comedy (Satires 1.4.1–7). Rosen’s study is bounded by the limits of poetry: Lucian’s comic sketches have no place in this book because they lack the “otherness” of poetic speech to demarcate them from the rhetoric of the everyday. This is a distinction with which I think one may valuably take issue—the prose of Petronius’ Satyricon hardly lacks markers of its own fictionality—but it is an important one for Rosen (see below on Callimachus, Iambus 1). Drama provides the fundamental model for the satiric posture: the poet, whether or not he plays a role himself in his comedy, stages a performance of mockery for an audience. Poetic mockery is a ritual act, and the chorus of Aristophanes’ Frogs (368–76) could draw an analogy between the abuse performed in one Dionysiac ceremony (the initiates’ procession to Eleusis) and in another (comic drama). How exactly comic mockery may have evolved from religious ritual is neither Aristophanes’ nor Rosen’s concern: their aim is to invoke the ritual of religious practice as a model for the conventions of art.Comic mockery is an ugly and potentially dangerous art. For his first case study, Rosen discusses the myth of Iambe, etymological kin to the iambus of poetic invective. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Iambe interrupts the grief of her mistress with jests ( 1, 202). Demeter laughs and ends her grieving fast. Rosen argues that Iambe’s comic interlude was abuse directed against the goddess who, with her laughing response, recognized the performance of mockery as something different from an act of hostility. Whether Demeter was the target of abuse or simply the audience of a breach of decorum is hard to determine from the text, but N. J. Richardson (The Homeric Hymn to Demeter [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974], 215) usefully records the parallel Alexandrian myth of Ascalabus, whom Demeter turned into a gecko because he laughed at her in the same circumstances. The fate of the obscenely joking Cercopes who are released [End Page 433] by a laughing Hercules rather than killed in anger provides another model not just for the restorative power of laughter but for the appropriate reaction to comic mockery. What, then, are we to make of Homer’s Thersites? Gregory Nagy argued (The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979], 260–62) that the base and ugly Thersites personifies the poetry of blame. His depiction and his fate show this genre’s inferiority to the epic poetry of praise. For Rosen, although many poetic characters engage in the practice of blame, “there can only be one playing the role of blame poet... and the criterion for identifying him as such is the level of “righteousness” he can persuade an audience he has on his side” (76). This, in my view, is a very difficult argument to sustain. Rosen acknowledges that an inscribed audience (here the Achaeans) does not offer a secure guide to the righteousness of the speaker, that the high moral stance of a poetic mocker is typically compromised by irony and by comedy, and that the terminology of mocker and mocked is “labile and unstable” (116). Nevertheless, a satirist whose righteousness is only intermittently convincing (as is often the case) is to be seen... (shrink)

This monograph on Theravada and Mahayana ordination ceremonies makes up for the neglect of ritual in most readily available studies of Buddhism. Its major thesis is that the historical puzzle over Ananda's mistreatment at the first Buddhist Council may be solved by reference to the abuse of ordinands at these ceremonies. Such abasement precedes elevation to a revered status within the community and is not evidence of rejection by one or other faction, as some have supposed with regard to (...) Ananda. A minor thesis is that the ceremonies have striking parallels with mystery cults of the Near East. The defining characteristic of a "mystery religion" seems to be that it has an initiation ceremony using the imagery of rebirth. But this is too general and would allow Lévy to label almost any tradition as a "mystery" religion. Based on sound scholarship and personal experience, his opening chapters present us with the available evidence. His conclusion is less important than his mention of the moral significance of gift-giving and suffering in Buddhism. These points deserve more extensive treatment than they receive here.--C. P. S. (shrink)

Theorizing about religious ritual systems from a cognitive viewpoint involves (1) modeling cognitive processes and their products and (2) demonstrating their influence on religious behavior. Particularly important for such an approach to the study of religious ritual is the modeling of participants' representations of ritual form. In pursuit of that goal, we presented in Rethinking Religion a theory of religious ritual form that involved two commitments. The theory’s first commitment is that the cognitive apparatus for the (...) representation of action in general is the same system deployed for the representation of religious ritual form. The differences between everyday action and religious ritual action turn out to be fairly minor from the standpoint of their cognitive representation. This system for the representation of action includes representations of agents. Whether we focus on an everyday action such as closing a door or a ritual action such as initiating a person into a religious group, our understanding of these forms of behavior as actions at all turns critically on recognizing agents. The theory's second crucial commitment (1990, p. 61) is that the roles of culturally postulated superhuman agents (CPS-agents hereafter) in participants' representations of religious rituals will prove pivotal in accounting for a wide variety of those rituals' properties. On our view religious ritual systems typically involve presumptions about CPS-agents. This theoretical commitment is orthogonal to the pervasive assumption throughout the study of religion that only meanings matter. By contrast, we hold that other things matter too (specifically, cognitive representations of religious ritual form). Large conflicts lurk behind the previous sentences but we cannot adequately address them here. For now we will only identify two of the most fundamental and comment on them briefly. First, amazingly (by our lights anyway), our claim that (conceptual) commitments to the existence of CPS-agents is the most important recurrent feature of religion across cultures is quite controversial.. (shrink)

Too often Confucian women’s voices and experiences are neglected as insignificant. This paper provides a wide and diverse set of examples of traditional Chinese and Korean women who knew and practiced Confucian ritual. Though representing only a small percentage of traditional women, these examples provide clear evidence and compelling arguments that support the following three conclusions. First, that the Confucian tradition did not deny women’s ability to know and perform rituals; second, that Confucian women read, learned, evaluated, decided, and (...) contributed to re/create the conception and practice of ritual; and third, that this led at least some women and the men around them to recognize and admire not only their moral agency but also their ability to become sages. (shrink)

Despite high rates of gendered violence among youth, very few young women report these incidents to authority figures. This study moves the discussion from the question of why young women do not report them toward how violence is produced, maintained, and normalized among youth. The girls in this study often did not name what law, researchers, and educators commonly identify as sexual harassment and abuse. How then, do girls name and make sense of victimization? Exploring violence via the lens of (...) compulsory heterosexuality highlights the relational dynamics at play in this naming process. Forensic interviews with youth revealed patterns of heteronormative scripts appropriated to make sense of everyday harassment, violence, coercion, and consent. Findings inform discussions about the links between dominant discourses and sexual subjectivities as we try to better understand why many regard violence a normal part of life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The contextual dimension of ren or li is celebrated in English studies of Confucian ethics. However, it often gives way to the issue of individual practice in studies concerning the relationship between ren and li due perhaps to an excessive focus on personal moral development. Inspired by a painting metaphor from the Analects, the present study reassesses this unbalanced approach to the ren-li relationship through the proposed theme of contextual individuality. In the wake of relationally constituted individuality in Confucian (...) philosophy, this study shows that the moral endowment of caring for others in human nature, which constitutes the moral foundation of ren and li, calls for a contextually practical approach to the ren-li relationship. This approach is crucial for the recognition that one’s moral development may not be truly accomplished unless undertaken in the context of the moral development of fellow human beings. (shrink)

This chapter reviews studies of sex differences in drug abuse. There is increasing preclinical and clinical evidence that gonadal hormones play a role in the subjective effects, reinforcing effects, and other effects of abused drugs. Despite this growing evidence, most studies that include women ignore the menstrual cycle. Until more studies are conducted to provide sufficient evidence that the subjective effects of a particular drug do not vary across the menstrual cycle, studies comparing males and females need to control for (...) menstrual cycle phase in a systematic fashion. (shrink)

Multinational enterprises are aware of their responsibility to protect human rights now more than ever, but severe human rights violations, including physical integrity abuses, continue unabated. To explore this puzzle, we engage theoretically with the means-ends decoupling literature to examine if and when oil and gas firms’ policies and practices prevent severe human rights abuse. Using an original dataset, we identify two pathways to mitigate means-ends decoupling: while human rights policies alone do not reduce human rights abuses, firms with a (...) high-quality human rights policy over the long-term reduce severe human rights abuses; firms that combine preparedness—which we define as a firm’s capabilities, practices, and engagement—with a long-term human rights policy also reduce the likelihood of human rights abuses. Preparedness, we argue, can lead to reinforcement dynamics between long-term policy efforts and additional capabilities that provide a more holistic understanding of firm behavior. (shrink)

In _Locating Politics in Ethiopia's Irreecha Ritual_ Serawit Bekele Debele gives an account of politics and political processes in Ethiopia as manifested in Irreecha celebrations over the years.