As several scholars have argued, far from being antithetical to American values, the torture of nonwhite peoples has long been a method through which the United States has enforced (at home and abroad) a conception of what I will call “white moral citizenship." What is missing from this literature, however, is an exploration of the role that the erasure of torture, and the political and public narratives that are used to justify torture, plays in this function. (...) -/- As I will demonstrate in this article, the erasure of American torture takes at least three different but mutually reinforcing forms: erasure of the fact of torture, erasure of the experience of torture, and erasure of the victims of torture. Erasure of the fact of torture occurs when lack of education and public discussion creates widespread ignorance about the history of torture in America, as has occurred in relation to the post-9/11 torture program. Erasure of the experience of torture occurs when victims’ experiences of extreme suffering, and practices or institutions that inflict extreme suffering (such as solitary confinement), are not acknowledged as forms of torture. Erasure of the victims of torture occurs when victims are treated with indifference and even contempt, even when what they suffered is acknowledged to be torture, and their perspectives and experiences are dismissed, minimized, or ignored. -/- As I shall argue, both the use of the torture and the forms of erasure described above are essential components in the ongoing enforcement of the normative boundaries of American white moral citizenship and the myth of American exceptionalism and civilization. The repeating pattern of the use and erasure of torture leads to the ongoing toleration of practices that constitute torture and that overwhelmingly impact people of color. Until this pattern of justification and erasure is recognized and confronted, torture will continue to be embedded within American culture and institutions. (shrink)

The present essay focuses on political torture during the twentieth century. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, because it entails insights from history, politics, ideology, anthropology, psychology and literature. The aim of the present essay is to discuss the relation between "Classical" torture (in the past centuries) and "Modern" torture (in the twentieth century), analyzing the phenomena in a comparative perspective and paying attention to the hidden and unconscious motives behind historical facts. What I am interested in (...) is the mechanism by which, in the twentieth century, torture has been reintroduced particularly for political prisoners - that means torture for ideas and conscience, torture as a technique of power and not merely as a technique of punishment. What torture destroys first is the dignity and privacy of the victim; only then does it destroy the victim's freedom and integrity. For this reason, every torture is an act of rape, even a symbolic one. I mean this in psychological terms, not as a demonstration of feminist vocabulary. Every touching of the victim's body is rape, emphasizing the "virility" of the torturer. First of all, the torturer wants to become a master of his victim's body, and only later, a master of the tortured person's mind. I include imagination in the concept of torture, imagination being one of the tools of the act of torturing. In torture, imagination becomes, in my demonstration, a never-ending weapon. (shrink)

Medical practitioners and healthcare workers rely on information accuracy in academic journals. Some Covid-19 papers contain “tortured phrases”, nonstandard English expressions, or imprecise or erroneous terms, that give the impression of jargon but are not. Most post-publication attention paid to Covid-19 literature has focused on the accuracy of biomedical aspects, the validity of claims, or the robustness of data, but little has been published on linguistic specificity. This paper highlights the existence of “tortured phrases” in select Covid-19 literature, (...) arguing that they could serve as a class of epistemic marker when evaluating the integrity of the scientific and biomedical literature. (shrink)

Understanding Torture surveys the massive literature surrounding torture, arguing that, once properly understood, there can be no defence of torture in any circumstances.

Withdrawal involves emotional pain that motivates much addictive behavior. In this paper, I argue that the emotional pain of withdrawal compels much addictive behavior. Researchers have noticed this possibility but it is widely underappreciated. Among philosophers, only Hanna Pickard has discussed emotional compulsion in addiction, and the emotional aspect of withdrawal has been almost completely neglected. Accounts of emotional compulsion in the philosophical literature (from Tappolet, Elster, and Furrow) probably do not capture how the distress of withdrawal compels, so (...) I propose a more suitable account of “pathodoxastic” compulsion in addiction. On this account, the emotional pain of withdrawal compels when it undermines the ability to believe that one can continue to endure it, and therefore the ability to intend abstinence. (shrink)

Resumen: El presente artículo revisa los usos de la figura del testigo en dos novelas chilenas de reciente publicación: La dimensión desconocida de Nona Fernández y Monte Maravilla de Miguel Lafferte, ambos relatos cuyas tramas están basadas en casos, lugares y personajes históricos reales relacionados con violaciones a los derechos humanos en Chile durante la dictadura pinochetista. En ambos casos, la figura del testigo es compleja e intrincada, ya sea porque es un victimario arrepentido, una niña que se convertirá en (...) la narradora del futuro o un fantasma que resulta ser real. De paso, y a la luz del testigo como figura articuladora común tanto para el derecho como para la literatura, el artículo quiere reflexionar acerca de las posibilidades de los procesos judiciales, en tanto narrativas, como fuentes de memoria colectiva para dar cuenta del horror. El rol del testigo resulta clave en ambos campos discursivos: mientras en los procesos judiciales el testigo es el sujeto de la enunciación del testimonio y, con ello, elemento de prueba en la determinación de responsabilidades, en la literatura el testigo tiene implicancias tanto narratológicas como éticas importantes, las que le proporcionan una riqueza al testimonio que lo vuelven una forma eficaz de memoria que más que contar lo sucedido, se acerca a mostrarlo.: This article reviews how the witness figure has been used in two chilean novels that have been recently published: La dimensión desconocida, from Nona Fernández and Monte Maravilla, from Miguel Lafferte. Both script plots are based in real cases, places and historical characters, related to Pinochet´s dictatorship. They present a complex and intrincate witness figure, through the form a regretful torturer, a girl who will be the future´s narrator or a ghost that happens to be real. Meanwhile, in light of the witness understood as an common articulating figure for the law, as well as for literature, the article wants to reflect on judicial processes posibilities, while narrative, as colective memory sources that can be held accountable for the horror. The witness role turns out to be essential in both discourse fields: meanwhile in judicial procesess the witness is the subject of the testimony enunciation and, as such, an evidence element for criminal liabilities determination, in literature, the witness has important narrative as well as ethics implications, wich give such richness to the testimony, that it becomes an effective way of memory that not only narrates what happened, it closes to show it. (shrink)

A large and impressive literature has arisen over the past fifteen years concerning the emergence, transfer, and sustenance of political norms in international life. The presumption of this literature has been, for the most part, that the winds of normative change blow in a progressive direction, toward greater or more stringent normative control of individual or state behavior. Constructivist accounts detail a spiral of mutual normative reinforcement as actors and institutions discover the advantages of normative self- and other (...) evaluation. There is also now much interesting research focused on the question of how to predict the emergence of future norms.I focus, however, on a different issue here: the death of norms that had once seemed well internalized and institutionalized. The issue arises in relation to one of the most dramatic features in the defense policy of the United States since 2001: the crumbling of highly restrictive normative regimes prohibiting interrogatory torture and assassination as part of the “global war on terror.” My aim here is to sketch what I take to be the central features of cases in which even norms that are clearly defined and apparently well internalized in a democracy nonetheless lose their grip on policy. The ultimate lesson, however, is an unappealing irony: While democracies surely do better than authoritarian regimes in adopting and internalizing certain kinds of constraints, in part because of a greater sensitivity to public mobilization around normative questions, that same sensitivity makes the long-term survival of these norms precarious. In particular, I suggest that force-constraining norms are most effectively internalized by coherent and relatively insulated professional cadres who see themselves as needing to act consistently over time. But in a democracy the values and arguments of those cadres are susceptible to being undermined by a combination of public panic and the invocation by policymakers of a public interest that can override the claims both of law and pragmatic restraint. Democracy, hence, can be at the same time both fertile and toxic: fertile as a source of humanitarian values and institutions, but toxic to the very institutions it cultivates.The model I will describe may be of predictive use in helping us to see the special vulnerability of normative orders in democracies. But my hope is that it is also constructive in showing us how states and institutions committed to maintaining a certain normative order, especially democratic states, might best try to entrench those norms. While my argument is conceptual and philosophical, it draws on this recent history. I also add two qualifications to this article's title. First, I am not addressingallnorms, but specific norms concerning the state use of force in national security policy. I therefore do not make claims about the generalizability of the conflict I describe to other norms, for example, norms of racial, sexual, or religious orthodoxy or hierarchy, or norms of reciprocal interaction. Second, reports of a norm's death are frequently exaggerated, since norms can be latent, then resurrected. Arguably, the anti-torture norm was resuscitated by President Obama in 2009 when, as one of his first official acts as chief executive, he moved to prohibit cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees. I write here about the path of decay, whether or not that path is unidirectional, and why previously salient norms no longer seem to govern policy choice among political decision-makers. (shrink)

This paper suggests that late nineteenth-century definitions of self-mutilation, a new category of psychiatric symptomatology, were heavily influenced by the use of self-injury as a rhetorical device in the novel, for the literary text held a high status in Victorian psychology. In exploring Dimmesdale’s “self-mutilation” in The Scarlet Letter in conjunction with psychiatric case histories, the paper indicates a number of common techniques and themes in literary and psychiatric texts. As well as illuminating key elements of nineteenth-century conceptions of the (...) self, and the relation of mind and body through ideas of madness, this exploration also serves to highlight the social commentary implicit in many Victorian medical texts. Late nineteenth-century England, like mid-century New England, required the individual to help himself and, simultaneously, others; personal charity and individual philanthropy were encouraged, while state intervention was often presented as dubious. In both novel and psychiatric text, self-mutilation is thus presented as the ultimate act of selfish preoccupation, particularly in cases on the “borderlands” of insanity. (shrink)

Withdrawal involves emotional pain that motivates much addictive behavior. In this paper, I argue that the emotional pain of withdrawal compels much addictive behavior. Researchers have noticed this possibility but it is widely underappreciated. Among philosophers, only Hanna Pickard has discussed emotional compulsion in addiction, and the emotional aspect of withdrawal has been almost completely neglected. Accounts of emotional compulsion in the philosophical literature (from Tappolet, Elster, and Furrow) probably do not capture how the distress of withdrawal compels, so (...) I propose a more suitable account of “pathodoxastic” compulsion in addiction. On this account, the emotional pain of withdrawal compels when it undermines the ability to believe that one can continue to endure it, and therefore the ability to intend abstinence. (shrink)

abstract Much of the literature on torture in recent years takes the position of denouncing the barbarity of torture, while allowing for exceptions to this veto in extreme circumstances. The ticking‐bomb argument, where a terrorist is tortured in order to extract information of a primed bomb located in a civilian area, is often invoked as one of those extreme circumstances where torture becomes justified. As the War on Terrorism intensifies, the ticking‐bomb argument has become the dominant (...) line of reasoning used by both academics and policy advisers to justify a legalized, state‐sponsored program of torture. This paper argues for the unconditional refutation of any attempt to justify torture, without exceptions. We argue against the consequentialist reasoning of the ticking‐bomb argument not from a deontological position, but on consequentialist grounds. Empirical evidence suggests that the institutionalization of torture practices creates serious problems. Torture interrogation fails to fulfil its initial purpose as a low‐cost life saver, while its long‐term potential is the devastation of democratic institutions. (shrink)

After the events of 9/11, the concept of torture has emerged as one that is both pertinent and provoking. National polls have shown that some Americans support torture in some situations, though the majority still stand opposed. Torture has not received a tremendous amount of discussion in the philosophical literature, though I suspect that the leftward slant of academia would, for the most part, ensure limited support for torture. In this paper, I would like to (...) first discuss why torture is an important issue and then advance an argument that supports torture in limited cases. (shrink)

Ticking time-bomb cases famously—or infamously—invite us to imagine a scenario wherein the torture of one guilty terrorist will lead to the acquisition of information that can be used to save the lives of many innocents. Despite the contemporary focus on such cases, they have a long tradition, dating to the early 1800s. And, throughout their history, they have appeared in various guises, from the literary to the public to the philosophical. The principal moral question suggested by these cases is (...) whether one harm can be effected such that a worse one is not; while there is certainly dissent, most moral philosophers would answer this question in the affirmative. That said, there is substantial doubt as to whether torture would be the lesser harm or, more generally, whether ticking time-bomb cases gain any purchase in the real world or are otherwise relegated to philosophical fiction. But even if they gain such purchase, then what? In other words, even if torture can be morally justified in exceptional cases, should we authorize it? I n the literature—and conceptually—there are three basic approaches to authorizing torture. The first is not to authorize it at all, which is to say that torture—even if justified—requires some sort of punishable civil disobedience . Another approach is to authorize torture ex ante, such as through torture warrants. On this approach, torture remains prohibited except for when a judge grants permission for its application. Torture warrants have been defended by Alan Dershowitz, and we will evaluate that debate . Finally, torture can be legitimized ex post, which is to say that torture remains illegal but can nevertheless be justified or excused; our discussion will focus on the justifications of self-defense and necessity. (shrink)

This book is an analysis and evaluation of torture. My take on torture is unique for four reasons. First, it provides a distinct analysis of what torture is. Second, it argues that on non-consequentialist grounds, specifically rights-based ones, torture is sometimes permissible. Third, it argues that torturers are not always vicious. Fourth, it argues that it is plausible that these conclusions apply to some real world cases. In short, it fills the following gap: it evaluates (...) class='Hi'>torture from a rights-based perspective and finds that in some cases it is permissible. My book is a unique philosophical exploration of torture. It combines a philosophical analysis of torture with a moral evaluation of it. The philosophical analysis of torture has not received a lot of attention. My analysis defends a minimal view of torture and one that distinguishes the analysis of the concept of torture from the moral evaluation of it. The resulting theory, the minimalist theory, differs noticeably from other analyses. My moral evaluation of torture sharply differs from the rest of the literature. The evaluation focuses on the non-consequentialist approach to morality, that is, it assumes that what makes an action right is not solely whether it brings about the best results. Using the central feature of non-consequentialism, moral rights, I argue that torture is justified in a number of theoretical contexts, including defense, punishment, and when the person to be tortured consents. I then look at the actual world and argue that it is plausible to think that there are real-world cases where torture is justified. My analysis also looks at whether torture is virtuous in an attempt to get at what intuitively repels us about torture. My analysis is not only the first look at the issue, but it also ties in with recent developments in virtue theory. As in the analysis of the permissibility of torture, I try to show that my findings with regard to virtue are not merely of theoretical interest, but are plausible given some real-world cases. (shrink)

Early modern conceptions of aesthetic education propose a necessary relation between aesthetic and moral values such that the appreciation of beauty is a necessary condition for the attainment of virtue. Contemporary conceptions retain the causal connection, claiming that the appreciation of literature in particular produces more responsive readers such that the aesthetic merits of novels are moral merits. J. M. Coetzee agrees that there is a relation between the two spheres of value but maintains that the novelist seeking to (...) represent the secret policeman in a society that condones torture is faced with a dilemma: he or she must either portray the torturer by means of cliché and fail aesthetically or... (shrink)

This article reviews the social scientific literature on the causes of and prevention of torture, analyzes its successes and failures, and proposes a way forward. Many researchers have adopted a rational-actor, principal-agent framework, which fails to fully account for the multiple and often irrational motives of actors who work within complex bureaucracies. Researchers have also tended to follow the lead of practitioners, critiquing their approaches at prevention but not providing their own evidence-based recommendations. Future research should examine the (...) role of irrational motives, multiple actors, and complex bureaucracies in causing torture to happen, at the level of individuals, governmental institutions, and nation-states. The lessons from this research can help advocates better convince individual actors that torture is unethical and ineffective, better direct interventions into the structure of complex bureaucracies, and better direct international advocacy, providing other solutions besides “naming and shaming” campaigns. (shrink)

In light of the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal, this paper examines various works of literature to reveal that people who have prisoners in their power tend to torment their victims. Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville’s seafaring novels reveal how the captain and his mates assume brutal, godlike powers over the common sailors; T. E. Lawrence describes how the victim’s pain can become a masochistic pleasure; Franz Kafka imagines a state of universal guilt, where the victim, an average (...) man, suffers in the grip of an elaborate torture machine; Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Jacobo Timerman, both political prisoners who survived to describe their terror, and George Orwell, meditating on contemporary totalitarian regimes as he suffered the agonies of medical treatment, transform their pain into art. Such literary works provide insights into the morally ambiguous depths of punishment. Every scene of torture, based on the authors’ experience, observation and imagination, has the same context as those vividly captured in the Abu Ghraib snapshots. (shrink)

Early Buddhist texts were first being composed and compiled during South Asia’s Iron Age, and thus contain many references to iron and other metal technologies. This article examines one metalworking image that came to play a special role in the imagination of early Buddhists: the red-hot iron ball. I argue that the iron ball, which comes to be a torture device in hell, force-fed by hell wardens, is a mimesis of the pi??ap?ta, or almsfood offered to monks and nuns (...) by the laity. Around iron ball imagery clusters a set of related Buddhist concerns: anxieties about undisciplined and deceitful monks and nuns, especially in relation to taking alms; the public perception of the sa?gha; the conceptualization of Buddhist hells as an unfortunate karmic result of lacking discipline; and the relationship between these hells and Indian juridical forms of punishment. (shrink)

The paper describes the consequences of the failure of defences of torture to engage with interdisciplinary empirical literature on torture. It argues that the validity of existing defences of torture can only be asserted in the absence of consideration of the nature of torture and its actual impacts.

Despite the alarming drop in numbers of students studying science throughout the Western world today there is no more important subject in our time than science broadly construed, and these three books provide some of the reasons. Their diversity indicates the shape of the debates occurring about the scientist in Western culture, science's tortured philosophical realism and representation as troubled categories, and, most predictably, life on the screen in the age of the Internet.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“The Blessed in the Kingdom of Heaven Will See the Punishments of the Damned So That Their Bliss May Be More Delightful to Them”: Nietzsche and AquinasJames Lehrberger O.Cist.NO DECENT HUMAN BEING can read those words of St. Thomas Aquinas, which Frederick Nietzsche quotes in On the Genealogy of Morals1 (GM) without feeling horror, shock, and disgust: “‘The blessed in the kingdom of heaven,’ he [Aquinas] says meek as (...) a lamb, ‘will see the [End Page 425] punishments of the damned so that their bliss might be more pleasing to them.’” Nietzsche scholars regularly notice and comment on this passage from the Summa theologiae.2 The typical gloss takes it to show the spirit of hatred that lies at the heart of Aquinas’s Christianity. Thus Walter Kaufmann reads the quotation as showing how the Christian faith enables its adherents “to indulge their lust for revenge by hoping for the eternal torture and destruction of their persecutors.”3 Weaver Santinello echoes this sentiment when she claims that “‘the great teacher and saint [Aquinas]’ had a ‘bloodthirsty vision of Hell.’”4 Even so sensitive a Christian as Merold Westphal reads Nietzsche’s Aquinas in this way. “[I]t is hard to deny that the spirit of resentment and longing for vengeance burns hot in these passages... in them the final judgment makes the Final Solution seem almost moderate.”5 Similar comments and observations so abound in the scholarship that they form a virtual consensus on this Summa passage’s teaching.6This proliferation of such statements on Aquinas’s meaning, however, contrasts sharply with the absence of careful analyses [End Page 426] of the passage. I do not know, in fact, of a single article, book chapter, or study that takes Nietzsche’s quotation of Aquinas for its theme. More generally, despite the vast literature on Nietzsche and Christianity, comparative studies of Nietzsche and Aquinas are rare.7 The absence of substantive studies on the Genealogy’s use of the Aquinas quotation is doubly unfortunate. First, it silences or at least muffles the voice of Nietzsche. He cites Aquinas’s text in the specific context of Treatise I of the Genealogy. The quotation reveals the full meaning that Nietzsche intended it to convey only when it is read in that context. Second, it obscures and distorts the thought of Aquinas: the quotation must be read in its own context in the Summa theologiae to grasp the teaching that Aquinas intended his words to express.In light of Aquinas’s importance as a Christian theologian and the crucial role he plays in the Genealogy’s critique of moral values, I intend to examine Nietzsche’s presentation of this text. Careful study of this matter can shed light on a key question which has long been discussed and debated: Is Nietzsche’s account of Christianity as life-inimical rooted in an extraordinarily perceptive reading of the Christian psyche? Or is it based, rather, on a profound misunderstanding of that psyche? I will argue for two points: (1) that Nietzsche has utterly misconstrued Aquinas’s teaching; and (2) that Aquinas’s Christian morality, far from being life-inimical, is life-affirming. [End Page 427] More specifically, I will show not only that Aquinas is completely free from the hatred, envy, and vengefulness that Nietzsche attributes to him, but also that the virtues and beliefs he embraces, such as meekness, mercy, and divine justice, are strong and supportive of human flourishing.I will proceed in the following steps. First, I will investigate Nietzsche’s understanding of the Aquinas quotation in terms of the role it plays in the Genealogy’s First Treatise. As already noted, recognizing Nietzsche’s purpose in quoting Aquinas requires understanding the objections he develops to Christianity throughout that Treatise. Hence I will highlight the principal criticisms of Aquinas’s Christianity found there. Second, I will analyze the quotation from Aquinas in its own context in the Summa theologiae. Lastly, I will compare and contrast Nietzsche and Aquinas in terms of those issues which the quoted passage has brought to the fore. Nietzsche’s take on Aquinas, however, is the only question I will address. I do not... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 181 reason that it provides the best arguments available to date against nuclear deterrence, but ultimately the arguments fail because the author takes as an apodictic premise what is actually a prudential judgment that no nuclear weapons could ever be used in a moral and ethical way. Professor Kenny is not only an Absolutist, but also a Determinist. The present reviewers are neither. University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign-Urbana, (...) Illinois Public Affairs Officer ROBERT BARRY, O.P. MATTHEW M. MURPHY United States At·ms Control and Disarmament Agency Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages. By UMBERTO Eco. Translated by Hugh Bredin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986. Pp. 131. $12.95. This is not a new work. As Umberto Eco himself states in the Preface of this book, the text was written in 1958 and published in 1959 as a single chapter of a four volume handbook on the history of aesthetics, written by various authors (Momenti e problemi di storia dell' estetica, Milano, Marzorati, 1959, vol. 1: 'Dall'antichita classica al barocco, pp. 115-230). No doubt it was due to the recent popularity in Europe and America of Mr. Eco's novel, The Name of the Rose (which subsequently inspired the film of the same title) that Yale University Press saw fit to translate and reissue this seminal work of the author. He wrote it when he was 26 years old and serving in the Italian army. Hugh Bredin, a senior lecturer in scholastic philosophy at Queen's University, Belfast, has simplified in the translation what the author claims was the "tortured syntax" of his impressionable youth. Nevertheless, one suspects that the style and context of this slim volume will appeal primarily to philosophers and not art historians, despite its ubiquitous presence in art bookstores and museum giftshops. The scope of Mr. Eco's work enables the reader to gain an overview of aesthetic problems which developed in Europe in the period between the sixth to the :fifteenth centuries, when the classical tradition inherited by the medieval world no longer provided adequate solutions. A thousand years of artistic and philosophical history are barely penetrated in so few pages, but Mr. Eco forthrightly proceeds to catalogue ideas and thinkers in chapters devoted to such topics as Transcendental Beauty, Symbol and Allegory, and the Aesthetics of Proportion and Light. As 18~ BOOK REVIEWS was evident in The Name of the Rose, the author has an encyclopedic knowledge of both classical and medieval sources (he gently chides Maritain for his ignorance of one of Bonaventure's definitions of beauty, p. 24). As professor of semiotics his understanding of words and images is impressive (he takes a whole page to explain the visual applications of Vitruvius's use of the word euritmia, pp. 65-66). But after repeated eitings of relevant quotations from various medieval works-some in outright conflict with one another-the reader has no satisfying sense of what was the "medieval " view of art and beauty. Rather a mosaic of interesting and diverse facts emerges in the thematic structure of the book which cuts across chronological, geographical, and cultural boundaries. Thus, for instance, one learns in the chapter on the Aesthetics of Light that St. Augustine preferred equilateral to scalene triangles, Hugh of St. Victor considered green to be the most beautiful of colors, the Limbourg brothers in painting miniatures had no use for sfiirnatura just as Chretien de Troyes had no use for it in literature, and the Christian image of God as Light traced its pedigree to the Semitic Baal and the Egyptian Ra with heavy doses of Plato and Arab pantheism thrown in as contributing influences. This dizzying effect of so much intelligent trivia, forcibly pieced together in an effort to arrive at a persuasive conclusion, backfires and ultimately works ag:iinst Art and Beaiity in the Middle Ages in much the same way that the plot in The Name of the Rose suffered from a surfeit of scholastic argumentation. Mr. Eco, in an attempt to bedazzle his readers with facts, merely blinds them to the point. Other authors have written about art in the Middle Ages, and they were successful... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Notes and Fragments PLATONIC ELEMENTS IN KAFKA'S "INVESTIGATIONS OF A DOG" by Lewis W. Leadbeater Few critics of Kafka, and certainly few German critics of Kafka, have been willing to allow for much of any classical influence on his works. There are exceptions, but for the most part these commentators can bring themselves to admit only the fact Kafka endured with distaste his lengthy involvement with the classical languages (...) and literature and that, if in any way, he was influenced only in terms of syntax or style.1 Yet it is certain that Kafka read classical literature with interest and that he was well acquainted with classical epic, tragedy, philosophy, and mythology. The wandering Odysseus, the sea god Poseidon, tortured Prometheus —all these and other classical figures are to be found in his works. Indeed, a recent interpretation of The Trial involves a discussion of it in comparison with the trial of Socrates.2 The fact is that Kafka knew Plato's Apology and counted as one of his prized possessions a copy of Plato's Phaedrus. He and Brod read Plato together in high school.3 Are we really to assume, then, that, given Kafka's philosophical bent, he saw no relationship between Plato and the later philosophers, like Kierkegaard for instance, with whom he was quite taken, and that given his fertile mind and penchant for metaphor, Kafka reflects only Platonic syntax?4 Quite the contrary; we must, I think, cede his classicism to Kafka, and in the discussion which follows I should like to point out that in one of the short stories, "Investigations of a Dog," parable and metaphor blend as well as they do because of Platonic influence, and especially that of the Apology and the Phaedrus. Kafka's animals pervade his works in both metaphor and simile. Gregor Samsa awakes one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic beetle; Joseph K dies, at the end of his trial, like a dog, and it is a questioning canine which investigates the meaning of dog104 Lewis W. Leadbeater105 ness in "Forschungen eines Hundes." Generally the animalistic metaphor involves removal, alienation, and isolation— a loss of kinship with humanity to be sure, but more important a loss of communication, an inability to communicate, and hence an emphasis on all-encompassing, frustrating silence. The natural result for these people turned animal is an involvement in a process of severe introspection frequently linked with the pursuit of some idea or ideal which will provide a hitherto unknown, transcendent nourishment for a famished, alienated soul. Such is certainly the case with Gregor Samsa and quite possibly the case with Joseph K; it is in fact such pursuits which lie at the heart of the researches of our investigating Dog. Though any attempt to pinpoint the source of Kafka's penchant for animalistic metaphors is quite certainly futile, one might well posit as paradigmatic the alienation plays of Aristophanes involving animals, and certainly the notion of a psychological link between man and beast is present in Plato's Phaedrus, a dialogue in which the soul metaphor itself involves horses, and one in which there is considerable discussion of the interchangeability of the souls of men and beasts.5 As noted above such interchangeability or transformation occurs regularly in Kafka; within the ugly form of beetle lay the psyche of Gregor Samsa. Perhaps within the not-so-ugly canine form of our investigating hound lies the soul of Socrates. Consider for a moment the character of our Dog in light of Plato's Socrates as he appears in the Apology. To begin with, the Dog, as he tells us, is a solitary creature, withdrawn and involved solely in his "investigations" (p. 278).6 In addition, he fully realizes that he is different from the rest of his species (p. 279) and that indeed at times he feels rejected by his kind, realizing as he does that his investigations run counter to the traditional values of his species, a species by which he had hoped at one time to be accepted with great honor (p. 308). What he has capitulated to is "questions" which, furthermore, have quite removed him from normal... (shrink)

Abstract Michel Foucault has been an academic cause célèbre for some time, spaivning untold thesis papers and dissertations illuminating oppression's invisible fingerprints on history, literature, gender, and government. Yet for all his ceutrality in American higher education, Foucault's books are not studied so much for their substantative content as for their underlying insights into the forces shaping society. This paper confronts this paradox through a critique of the apotheosis of Foucaultian analysis, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (...) Discipline and Punish can be understood as a masterful harnessing of leftist assumptions about capitalism to reconfigure history. The extent to which Foucault distorts history to support his thesis, however, seriously undermines the practical relevance of his brand of social science. (shrink)

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity and profitability; dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry; and funerals have become less traditional. "Corpse chic" and "skull style" have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, (...) zombies, and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book considers, for the first time, these phenomena as aspects of a single movement, documenting its development in contemporary Western culture. Previous considerations of our fixation on death have not developed a convincing theory linking the mounting demand for images of violent death and the dramatic changes in death-related social rituals and practices. This book offers a conceptual framework that connects the observations of the simulated world of fiction and movies--including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, Night Watch, Hannibal, and the Harry Potter series--to social and cultural practices, providing an analysis of the specific aesthetics and the intellectual and historical conditions that triggered the cult of death. It also considers the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, as well as by posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement, in the formation of the current antihumanist atmosphere. With its critique of movie and book blockbusters and the death-related social rituals, festivals, and fashions that have coalesced into the cult of death, this timely volume will appeal to anyone hoping to better understand a defining phenomenon of our age. Scholars and general readers of cultural studies, film and literary studies, anthropology, and American and Russian studies will find this book thought-provoking. (shrink)

Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, The Body in Pain is a profoundly original study that has already stirred excitement in a wide range of intellectual circles. The book is an analysis of physical suffering and its relation to the numerous vocabularies and cultural forces--literary, political, philosophical, medical, religious--that confront it.Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury (...) trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Kissinger, She weaves these into her discussion with an eloquence, humanity, and insight that recall the writings of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre.Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain enormously difficult to describe in words--confronted with it, Virginia Woolf once noted, "language runs dry"--it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme instances to an inarticulate state of cries and moans. Scarry analyzes the political ramifications of deliberately inflicted pain, specifically in the cases of torture and warfare, and shows how to be fictive. From these actions of "unmaking" Scarry turns finally to the actions of "making"--the examples of artistic and cultural creation that work against pain and the debased uses that are made of it. Challenging and inventive, The Body in Pain is landmark work that promises to spark widespread debate. (shrink)

Mark Osiel’s The End of Reciprocity: Terror, Torture and the Law of War provides detailed discussions of a number of important moral and legal issues arising for the United States in its ongoing response to the threats posed by the Al Qaeda terrorist network.Thanks to Andrew Alexandra for comments on this paper. The material in the first section of this critical review is derived from a short review of this book I wrote for the International Harvard Review vol. 31 (...) no. 1 March 2009 p.84. The specific focus is the United States of America (USA) deployed counter-terrorist methods of sustained detention, enhanced interrogation and targeted killing of suspected terrorists.Osiel offers a distinctive and provocative view on these issues, and displays a wide knowledge of relevant literature in a number of fields, including international law, philosophy, sociology and cultural studies. As such, the book ought to be of interest to a wide audience.The book is in four parts. Part One concerns inte .. (shrink)

In an essay first published in 1959, Roland Barthes declared that modern literature had become “a mask pointing to itself ”.1 Barthes described this self-reflexivity as an anxious, even tragic condition, a tortured process in which literature divides itself into the two logically distinct, yet inter-related levels of object-language and meta-language. Asking itself continually the single, self-absorbing question of its own identity, literature becomes a meta-language and thereby ceases to be an object-language capable of depicting or describing (...) anything other than itself. “It follows”, Barthes proclaims, that “for over one hundred years our literature has played a dangerous game with its own death, or in other words, with a manner of living through its own death”. Barthes conjectures in passing that this perpetual self-questioning began with the bourgeoisie’s loss of its bonne conscience. Literature’s self-reflexive turn has resulted in a variety of fascinating writerly strategies, but has also had the global effect of precluding the emergence of a literature of action and engagement. Ceasing to ask: ‘What is to be done?’, the artist can only utter the words: ‘Who am I?’. (shrink)

Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer's representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress's Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author (...) argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. The book reveals a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization. (shrink)

Kasher and Yadlin make significant contributions to the literature on counter-terrorism, (1) in their fine-tuned distinctions among degrees of individual involvement in terrorist activities, and (2) in weighing (a) obligations to minimize harm to one's own noncombatants and combatants against (b) the duty to limit harm to non-citizen noncombatants. But the authors? analysis is hampered by some ambiguous definitions, some unwieldy terms, and some questionable moral assumptions and arguments.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Approaching Infinity:Dignity in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at NoonRoger BerkowitzIn his allegorical novel Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler tells of Rubashov, a founding father of an unnamed Party in an unnamed state.1 Jailed by the current Party leader, "Number One," and pressed to recant his deviationist views, Rubashov resists. At first, he resolves to go to his death to preserve his integrity. Later, Rubashov recognizes that to hold to his (...) own truth when it endangers the goals of political reform is politically irresponsible. He decides to recant.The aristocratic soldier in the neighboring cell is appalled by Rubashov's self-betrayal. "Honour," the aristocrat insists, "is to live and die for one's belief." Rubashov disagrees with the aristocratic idea of honor and responds that honour is "to be useful without vanity," which provokes his neighbor to erupt: "honour is decency—not usefulness." Rubashov answers: "We have replaced decency by reason" (Koestler, pp. 177–78).Today, we rationalist readers of Darkness at Noon are left with the question of the competing demands of usefulness and decency, of reason and dignity. Reason makes its arguments in familiar terms: to prevent a genocide, we will bomb the aggressors; in the name of rationalized health care, some will not get the care they need; for reasons of state, some will be tortured. In politics, as Max Weber teaches, rational ends demand a slow, powerful boring through of hard boards (Weber, p. 93).2 Thus reason—and Koestler unfolds reason as calculating rationality in its most Machiavellian garb—requires the willingness to employ sober and rational means to achieve desired ends. In common parlance, the end justifies the means. Against the nostalgia for a politics of decency [End Page 296] and dignity, reason counsels that to make an omelet, you need to break a few eggs.But what lies behind the opposing claim to decency? What is it that pulls us to resist the claim of reason when reason counsels war, torture, or even bureaucratic neutrality? What, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, is to be said for the eggs? (Arendt, pp. 270–84).3We may invoke conscience, duty, and decency. We might invoke civil and human rights. We condemn realpolitik and affirm a Judeo-Christian world order. In short, we invoke the dignity of man and affirm one's humanity as an inalienable core that cannot be breached. The limitations of such invocations are by now clear. At a time of recurrent genocides, democratically sanctioned torture, and suicide bombings of civilians, the stirring claims of the dignity of mankind ring hollow. Yet the collapse of the Western tradition of dignity does not necessitate the loss of dignity itself. The failure to secure dignity on religious or rationalist grounds need not send us fleeing, our eyes covered in horror and our heads between our legs. What is needed is a confrontation with our situation, one that seeks to comprehend both the impulse to affirm an inviolable core to humanity and our failure to do so.The ambition of Darkness at Noon lies in its bald effort to affirm the truth of human decency even as it recognizes that man's humanity is a bald-faced fiction. When Rubashov teeters on the precipice between reason and decency, his "eye" tooth aches. He rubs his eyeglasses. He steps only on whole squares in the floor, avoiding the cracks. Tooth, glass, and wholeness refer to the problem of the singular "I," an entity so mysterious that Rubashov follows Nietzsche in naming it the "grammatical fiction." What is the "I," the conscience, the self? How is it that the fictional "I" can and must have such an essential role in modern politics? Where, if anywhere, lies the relevance of the "I" for politics?Darkness at Noon is acclaimed as one of the most important books of the twentieth century—it is number eight on the Modern Library's list of the Hundred Best Novels of the twentieth century. Yet, given its enormous impact, its philosophical ruminations, and its political theme, the novel has garnered surprisingly little academic consideration. It is worth asking, therefore, why Darkness at Noon has not been taken seriously by the academic... (shrink)

In the last few years, many countries have introduced (or are proposing to introduce) legislation on ‘conversion therapy’, prohibiting attempts to change or suppress sexual orientation and/or gender identity. This legislation covers ‘aversion therapy’, a form of torture that has already been criminalized in most progressive countries, and also ‘talk therapy’, involving things like counselling, psychoanalysis, and prayer. Focusing on this latter category of practices, I explain what is at stake in the fact that sexual orientation and gender identity (...) have been paired for the purposes of this legislation. I use a particular law reform institute’s approach to this legislation as a case study, and review their literature review in mind to discovering whether they provided sufficient empirical justification for including gender identity in their conversion therapy legislation. I conclude that they did not, and suggest that the pairing of sexual orientation and gender identity may be purely political. (shrink)

This book traces the theory of violence from nineteenth-century symmetrical warfare through today's warfare of electronics and unbalanced numbers. Surveying such luminaries as Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Hannah Arendt, Paul Virilio, and Jacques Derrida, Avelar also offers a discussion of theories of torture and confession, the work of Roman Polanski and Borges, and a meditation on the rise of the novel in Colombia.

The Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Mario Vargas Llosa (2020) praises the legal protection of bullfighting by a Peruvian law that prohibits the torture of animals except in case of cultural traditions, such as bullfighting and cockfighting. He claims that his defense of bullfighting follows from his liberal point of view, and advances three reasons in favor of its preservation: It is a tradition, it is a fine art, and the individuals should be constitutionally free to choose what (...) to see and where to go. I argue that his arguments are morally irrelevant and logically unsound. (shrink)

The practice of solitary confinement (SC) is established within the literature as a common occurrence of torture within the prison system, and many international and national human rights organizations have called for its abolition. A somewhat more contentious topic in the literature is the practice of force feeding (FF) of hunger-striking prisoners. The paper aims to make a case against FF by establishing a parity argument that states the following: If SC is considered an immoral practice (and (...) indeed it should be), it should follow that FF is morally impermissible as well. In conclusion, this paper will argue that FF of hunger-striking prisoners is a violation of their fundamental moral rights and constitutes cruel and inhumane treatment and, therefore, should be abolished. (shrink)

In this article we address torture in military and police organizations as a public health and human rights challenge that needs to be addressed through multiple levels of intervention. While most mental health approaches focus on treating the harmful effects of such violence on individuals and communities, the goal of the project described here was to develop a primary prevention strategy at the institutional level to prevent torture from occurring in the first place. Such an approach requires understanding (...) and altering the conditions that cause and sustain “atrocity producing situations”. Given the persistence of torture across the world and its profound health consequences, this is an increasingly important issue in global health and human rights. (shrink)

The most common argument in favor of torture in the current literature is the ticking bomb argument. It asks us to imagine a case where only torture can prevent the detonation of a bomb that will kill millions. In this paper, I argue that the seeming effectiveness of this argument rests on two things: 1) the underdetermined semantic content of the term ‘torture,’ and 2) a philosophical attitude that regards the empirical facts about torture as (...) irrelevant. Once we pay attention to the facts about torture, and particularly about the role time plays in actual torture, the ticking bomb argument becomes incoherent, and hence cannot provide a basis for accepting torture. (shrink)

Despite intensive work by human rights organizations to garner global condemnation of torture, in the years since the atrocities of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay were exposed, support in the United States for the use of torture has increased, and torture also attracts significant support in many other countries. This paper seeks to understand the affective work that the ‘ticking time bomb scenario’ and its imagined dramatization does in shaping how torture is understood. The literature (...) is replete with debates over whether the scenario distorts or accurately describes the actual circumstances in which decisions about torture occur, and the moral criteria that ought to be brought to the decision-making process. In describing the scenario as a “thought experiment,” however, these analyses obscure the work that this imagined scene does in shaping how people evaluate the use of torture – work that takes place at the affective and somatic levels. Induced into a process of racially inflected and affectively laden identifications and aversions, the paper suggests that the “subjects” of this thought experiment do very little thinking and thus fact-based or logical counter-arguments are of little use in shifting evaluations of torture. Rather, we need to understand the affective work that somatically grounded stories do in normalizing and inducing subjects to embrace torture. The paper is particularly interested in how imagined scenarios can be used to institute affects that freeze and immobilize, and how we might construct other narratives to encourage more dynamic and fluid forms of affective experience and identification. Exploring the link between narratives and more dynamic affects may offer more productive strategies for encouraging people to shift positions as they confront new evidence and encounter other experiences and bodies. (shrink)

The article seeks to analyze the portrayal of the Jews in two plays from the Chester mystery cycle: “Trial and Flagellation” and “The Passion.” The analysis acknowledges that the cycle is a mixture of, and a dialogue between, the universal standpoint emerging from the presentation of the biblical story of humankind and a contemporary perspective, pertaining to the reality of the viewers. Therefore, while pointing to the unique formal and structural uniformity of the cycle, which strengthens the idea of continuity (...) between the Old and the New Covenant and the role of the Israelites in the history of salvation, it also recognizes the potential of the plays to engage in the current stereotypes. The article examines how the Gospel account of Christ’s trial and death is modified through presenting the Jews as torturers, whitewashing the non-Jewish characters, and placing special emphasis on the question of Jewish ignorance. It is demonstrated how different theological and popular stances concerning the Jewish people are merged and reconciled in the Chester representation of the passion of Christ and it is argued that the plays in question retell the biblical story in such a way that the justification for the expulsion of the Jews from England could be derived from it. (shrink)

The High Court's verdict is a major step forward insofar as that the existing institutionalized GSS torture practices are declared unlawful and are no longer possible in any institutionalized form. It appears, however, likely that Israel will attempt to reintroduce the legal use of different forms of “physical pressure” under specific circumstances. The legality of these forms in Israel is then likely to be tested by a High Court of Justice which is still clearly ambivalent and far from unequivocal (...) in declaring all forms of physical means during interrogations to be unlawful. Whereas the Court's ruling declaring the present guidelines and various practices of “moderate physical force” unlawful is a positive step from a human rights perspective and in the context of the Middle East peace process, its significance might thus eventually turn out to be less of a breakthrough than initially thought. The international community has ample reason to continue to follow Israel critically regarding possible infractions of the Convention and the ICCPR. (shrink)

It is well known that Wittgenstein's reading of the philosophical classics was patchy. He left unread a large part of the literature which most philosophers would regard as essential to a knowledge of their subject. Wittgenstein gave an interesting reason for his non-reading of Hume. He said that he could not sit down and read Hume, because he knew far too much about the subject of Hume's writings to find this anything but a torture. In a recent commentary, (...) Peter Hacker has taken this to show that ‘Wittgenstein seems to have despised Hume’. Hume, he adds, ‘made almost every epistemological and metaphysical mistake Wittgenstein could think of. (shrink)

The article reconstructs a brief period of intensive debates on the legitimacy and justification of torture in the early 1970s to the mid-1980s. It is shown that the emergence of the discourse on the morality of torture was influenced by the following factors. Firstly, the formulation of the “dirty hands” dilemma, which in the analytical tradition became a crucial tool for analyzing the relationship between ends and means. Secondly, the establishment of a theoretical and applied field of philosophical (...) research known as the just war theory. Although it should be acknowledged that the transfer of heuristics from the just war theory as a means of argumentation in favor of torture proved to be a philosophical deadlock, it allowed for the exploration of possibilities and limitations of new theoretical developments in the field of moral philosophy, which is always a necessary stage for the reiteration of debates. (shrink)

The vast majority of theologians accept true news, sound senses and healthy working mind as sources of knowledge. Due to the fact that the mind is counted among the sources of knowledge, reason-based evidence has been used in many subjects. It is known that Māturīdī was the first theologian who dealt with the mentioned sources of knowledge in his work. At the very beginning of his Kitāb al-Tawhīd, he determined the ways of acquiring knowledge as correct news, sound senses and (...) reason, and elaborated them in detail. Māturīdī mostly prefers the term inference to describe the use of reason. He has proven his views on theological issues with many types of inference as well as true news and sense knowledge. These include matters related to the hereafter, too. The visible over the invisible, which is a type of inference, was used as evidence by Māturīdī to prove almost every subject. Many definitions of the method of the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible have been made. However, it is possible to understand the structure on which it is built as follows: There are areas that human beings cannot comprehend and have will no definite knowledge about. These areas called as al-ghaib “the invisible” may be related to ontological differences or may be due to differences in time and space. The difference between humans and Allah is ontological difference, and Allah is an ontological invisible for humans. While events that have not yet happened are invisible in terms of time, happenings what beyond the mountain for example, are invisible in terms of spatial difference. It is not possible for human beings to fully understand (perceive) the attributes of Allah, who is ontologically invisible. For this reason, many theologians have used the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible especially in making the attributes of Allah understandable and have tried to explain the divine attributes with this method. Belief in the hereafter is also related to the realm of the unvisible. There are a lot of revelations (true knowledge) about the hereafter. However, because of the conditions of the hereafter are different from this world, it is necessary to make the revelations about that place comprehensible. Accordingly, it is interesting how Māturīdī uses the aforementioned method to understand the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter, which is the area of the unvisible. Māturīdī sometimes understood the verses about reward and punishment in the hereafter with their real meanings, and sometimes attributed different meanings to these verses. In this context, while dealing with the verses about the afterlife, he listed the possibilities regarding what they might mean, and included interpretations based the method the visible as an evidence for the invisible. Thus, Māturīdī tried to make the hereafter, intelligible based on human being’s experiences in this world. According to Māturīdī, the mind also has a function in understanding the hereafter. The mind has the capacity to go beyond the senses and gives us information about that field. Our mind, based on what we can perceive and understand, can go beyond itself and make inferences about the issues that are incapable of understanding. Knowing the pleasures and tortures of the world in order to understand the reward and punishment that will be given to humans in the hereafter happens in a similary way. In addition, he makes inferences based on events, situations, characteristics, etc. (visible) that people know from worldly life in order to better understand the expressions in such verses, which is quite remarkable for our study. In this context, while interpreting many verses, Māturīdī bases on the aspects of the realm of the visible similar to the realm of the hereafter. He explains the similarities of the hereafter to the worldly life, mostly through human nature, the Arabs’ perception of reward and punishment, and people’s perception of color and direction. In addition to these, he takes our knowledge, which has increased to the knowledge of observation, as a basis even though we learn through news, and evaluates the divine narrations for the hereafter on these principles. For the hereafter can be understood through things known, visible, lived and experienced in the life of this world. Māturīdī emphasizes the similarity of the world and the hereafter as well as the different aspects of the hereafter and uses these differences as a basis for his inferences. Our study is aimed at understanding how Māturīdī brings evidence to what people know from worldly life while explaining the nature of reward and punishment in the hereafter. In this context, methods such as interpretation, comparison, concept analysis, and literature review were used, and the study was limited to the books of Kitāb al-Tawhīd and Ta’wīlāt of Māturīdī. (shrink)

The mainstream approach to the understanding of pain continues to be governed by the biomedical paradigm and the dualistic Cartesian ontology. This Volume brings together essays of scholars of literature, philosophy and history on the many enigmatic shades of pain-experience, mostly from an anti-Cartesian perspective of cultural ontology by scholars of literature, philosophy and history. A section of the essays is devoted to the socio-political dimensions of pain in the Indian context. The book offers a critical perspective on (...) the reductive conceptions of pain and argue that non-substance ontology or cultural ontology supports a more humane and authentic understanding of pain. The general ontological features of the self in pain and culturally imbued dimensions of pain-experience are, thus, brought together in a rare blend in this Volume. The essays dwell on the importance of understanding what cultural, social and political forces outside our control do to our pain-experience. They show why such understanding is necessary, both to humanely deal with pain, and to rectify erroneous approaches to pain-experience. They also explore the thoroughly ambivalent spaces between pain and pleasure, and the cathartic and productive dimensions of pain. The essays in this Volume investigate pain-experiences through the fresh lenses of history, gender, ethics, politics, death, illness, self-loss, torture, shame, dispossession and denial. (shrink)

M'illumino/d'immenso - I'm lit/with immensity is Geoffrey Brock's translation of Giuseppe Ungaretti's poem Mattina. In the poem's minimalism, Ungaretti points to the maximal: the richness of poetry's expressive possibilities and the power of thinking in literature. This book addresses the fascination of readers to transcend the boundaries of their own in fiction, and literature's capacity, according to Kant, even to evoke, with the help of the development of aesthetic ideas, representations that exceed what is empirically and conceptually graspable (...) - in case studies about myths of creativity, images of death and the beyond after the 'death of God', of the soul, of melancholy as the dark ground of genius, of metamorphoses of both evil and good, of ecstasy, of the economy of self-sacrifice, of the art of resistance, and, among others, about figurations of biography and the portrait as approaches to singularity, what is particular and cannot be fully subsumed to any universality. (shrink)