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This chapter quotes two of Kierkegaard's last words—in this sense, the passages he had written in his Journal as a “report to history,” rather than his final utterances in the hospital. As Kierkegaard himself had remarked in Fear and Trembling (1843), every “intellectual tragic hero” must have a last word to say which illuminates the significance of his life and makes clear the pertinence of his sacrifice. He had penned two such last words. The first, “The Wild Goose: A Symbol,” illuminates figuratively the significance of his life, written in 1854 and possessing coincidental parallels with Hans Christian Andersen's “The Ugly Duckling.” The second passage, “‘The Sacrificed Ones,’ The Correctives,” is more pertinent to his death.

Chapter 4 is a reading of Susan Howe’s Pierce-Arrow through the lens of Peirce’s semiotics. It argues that the three sections of her book-length poem are keyed to Peirce’s three types of sign—the index, the icon, and the symbol. It features close readings of the poetry, locating references to Peirce in the latter’s works and arguing that the book in its entirety operates as an allegory for Peirce’s system of semiotics.

A crucial deficiency of network models is their inability to modally identify or recognize the inputs they receive. To begin solving this problem, we ask to what extent current models resemble non-living systems. If we find neural network models trustworthy at first glance, but recognize strong analogies with other complex systems found throughout nature, we must consider whether these models are underconstrained or simply inaccurate. If not, we may have to accept panpsychism, holding that mind-like properties are found to be widespread throughout nature. When network models are compared with a system that appears utterly nonconscious-a group of rocks bathing in sunlight-it does not appear to be trivial to pinpoint why this inanimate system should be denied any neural-network like (or cognitive) capacity. But should this lead us to defend panpsychism? Considering the limitations of network models, various other approaches are scrutinized, such as computational functionalism, global workspace theory and information-theoretical frameworks. These are found to face the same problem as encountered before: a failure to attribute meaning or content to the information they process. But rather than defending panpsychism, these considerations lead us to conclude that current theories are still underconstrained.

In chapter 2, Nancy analyses a sentence from Nicolas Sarkozy in which the French president proclaimed that he wanted for this debate on national identity “du gros rouge qui tâche,” literally “cheap wine that stains.” The “gros rouge,” along with camembert, berêt, and baguette, is a symbol of eternal France and French identity, grasped, Nancy notes, as it were from below. Nancy analyses the clichés of French identity that those expressions carry. He shows how they carry the basest, lowest, most closed visions of what an identity is.

This essay by Jennifer Adkins Reynolds explores House’s love and use of music in his fiction writing. Reynolds concentrates on Clay’s Quilt and The Coal Tattoo, as she looks at his use of music as metaphor and expands the conversation well beyond Country Music, since House’s music knowledge and appreciation is broad and complex. Just as any study of Silas House would not be complete without a discussion of the poetry and lyricism in his work, so too is the musical imagery and intersection between music and theme important in his fiction.

‘From Ethos to Mythos: the General Strike and Britishness’ surveys and analyzes the ways that different interest groups have selectively reproduced the story of the 1926 General Strike as a historical and metaphorical symbol. As a cultural product, the strike served and serves to validate the various political perspectives of former volunteers, Marxist historians, amateur historians, the Labour Party, and the Trades Union Congress, as well as museum curators, novelists, playwrights, educators, and restauranteurs. This chapter shows how one event in a nation's history can transform a multi-vocal cultural symbol into a national metaphor, making it available and relevant for present-day pundits, scholars, politicians, educators, and business people to use for redefining British character.

This chapter discusses Woolf’s later short stories, from ‘The Lady in the Looking Glass’ to ‘The Shooting Party’, as well as Woolf’s concern with ‘The Searchlight’ and ‘The Symbol’, which are stories about the operation of memory and loss. Memory and loss are represented in these stories by field glasses or a telescope, whose close-up on a distant spot both isolates and focuses on a certain experience.

Li Yu, one of the few female Chinese film directors, has focused on female characters and issues women face. Lost in Beijing (2007) tells the story of Liu Pingguo, a migrant worker in Beijing who is raped by her boss. When she becomes pregnant, her husband and boss bargain over possession of her and the child she is carrying. She is reduced to a commodity function exchanged for its value in conceiving and bearing a child. Nevertheless, over the course of the film, a Mercedes-Benz serves not only as the basic status symbol for her boss but also a much more ambivalent role as the space of negotiation between the characters in the film. The final images of the film show this car breaking down on a major Beijing street. Simultaneously, Pingguo has left her situation, in an audacious recapitulation of Nora’s departure at the end of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. It is in this symbolic deployment of the car in combination with her escape that the film subtly but provocatively dismantles the patriarchy’s power over Pingguo.

This chapter discusses Scholem’s retelling of the Lurianic Myth, based on the esoteric writing of the immensely influential Kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria. Although Scholem often described Jewish mysticism as a historical corpus of Jewish Mythology, the Lurianic myth is the only myth that Scholem ever retold from beginning to end in any coherent matter. He appropriately titled it, the Myth of Exile. As such therefore, this retelling should serve as the epitome of Scholem’s literary achievement. For Scholem, it is here showed, the Lurianic myth serves as pivotal turning point in his historiography. It is here that his discussion of Jewish mysticism transforms to become a fully-fledged history of Jewish modernity. And finally, it is here that Scholem betrays his deepest political and philosophical biases. For, the attempt to imagine the Lurianic Kabbalah as a living principle, that is, as a principle of behavior, transforms it into an ideology, in a contemporary sense. Indeed, a careful reading of this myth reveals an ideology about community and freedom, which is remarkably close to the ideology which Scholem propagated when he was active in the Zionist Youth movement in Berlin, when he still struggled to imagine his own myth of exile.

The final chapter examines how the broomstick wedding appeals to different groups in the twenty-first century, some of which have no ancestral attachment to the custom. The chapter begins by analysing an “anarchist” marriage that uses the broomstick wedding, in which the author positions it as an anarchic symbol of matrimony since it was used by populations who were often married outside governmental regulations. It then uses this expansive historical framework to explore how jumping the broom was adopted and adapted by various cultural groups and communities in the United States and elsewhere. Viewing the ritual through a diasporic lens, it questions how it has gained some acceptance from Black people in the Caribbean and Atlantic islands who do not hold ties to North American slavery. It then analyzes how interracial couples approach the ceremony as depicted in both popular media and the wedding industry more broadly. The chapter then directs its attention toward Romani populations and Neo-pagans in the United States and Great Britain, and the circumstances under which the custom was revived and/or continued in these groups. The chapter explores the simmering debate surrounding questions of “cultural ownership” and who has the “right” to marry in this way.

This chapter addresses modern Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, originating in the appearances of Jesus experienced by nun Margaret-Mary Alacoque (1647–90). Since the seventeenth century, understandings of the Heart of Jesus have shifted from visceral to symbolic registers: from a fetish (a concealing object standing in for something else) to an icon (an image) and, finally, to a mere symbol (a sign). Yet from the eighteenth century up to the present day, the status of the Sacred Heart has remained a source of theological contestation between Jesuits and orthodox Catholics, who emphasize its viscerality, and Jansenist Protestants and Catholic reformers, who treat it as a symbol.

One of the most fascinating ideas ever to emerge from cognitive science was the notion that the mind, unlike digital computers, might proceed entirely without recourse to symbol-manipulation. But how tenable is that intriguing idea, 25 years later? Fodor and Pylyshyn challenged it immediately; I argue that so-called “eliminative connectionism” never made as much progress as its authors might hope. Instead, there continues to be good reason to believe that minds have, among other capacities, a neurally realized way of representing symbols, variables, and operations over variables, and have the resources to distinguish types from tokens and to represent ordered pairs and structured units. After a quarter century, advocates of eliminative connectionism have yet to mount an adequate alternative. A more profitable endeavor might be to figure out how to use networks of neurons in systems that unify symbols and statistics, rather than needlessly treating them as antithetical.

This chapter begins by reading from an essay called “A Tent of Her Own,” originally published in 1982 in the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin. Written by the author's mother, the essay has a rescue fantasy about Virginia Woolf and proposes that had Woolf taken up mountaineering, as her father—Leslie Stephen—had done, she would have lived a longer, happier, and healthier life. The chapter attempts to convince readers that this vision of Virginia Woolf as a mountaineer was not as unlikely a scenario as it might first appear. It does so primarily through a reading of Woolf's late short story “The Symbol” (1941) which, through its attention to the problem of accurately describing a mountain, represents a return to Stephen's Alpine legacy.

The Introduction explores the role of imagination especially since the eighteenth century and the impact of Kant's understanding of this faculty as the mental power of the figurative synthesis between the sensible and the intelligible that is necessary to account for the very possibility of experience. The Romantic celebration of the creative force of human imagination is a direct outcome of the Kantian emphasis on the reproductive capacity of the imagination and the subservient position assigned to reason. Building on this philosophical foundation, corroborated by the role of the imagination culled from kabbalistic sources, the imagination is here portrayed as the vehicle by which we exceed our social and biological environments that rupture the ordinary and open the horizons of scientific, technological, and aesthetic ingenuity to the possibility of the impossible, the nonphenomenalizable that is the epistemic condition of all phenomenality, the unseeing that enframes every act of seeing, the negative ideal of the unreal that positivizes the recurrent patterns and perspectival mutations that constitute the contours of the world we deem to be real. The role of imagination and the theocentric proclivity of Jewish philosophical speculation is investigated through this prism of the inapparent.

Chapter Three bridges the early focus on al-Nayhūm, al-Faqīh and al-Kūnī to a new generation of authors, bringing together al-Kūnī’s al-Tibr (1989; Gold Dust) with al-Tābūt (2006; The Coffin) and al-Khawf abqānī ḥayyan (2008; Fear Kept me Breathing) by ‘Abdallāh al-Ghazāl, a prominent novelist of the 2000s. Like al-Kūnī, his writing is marked by an explicitly Sufi poetics, entwined in environmental concern. Unlike him, he has remained in Libya for most of his life. While al-Kūnī’s Sufi poetics tend to the prophetic, al-Ghazāl writes from the perspective of emotional instability and psychological breakdown, and addresses Libya’s recent history in more explicit fashion. In this chapter, I compare novels by both, which are set within international conflicts, but take place on the margins of battle, culminating instead in scenes of violence against camels, introduced by Qur’ān 7:73. Dwelling not on heroism, but characters’ relationship to land, identity and spirituality, they convey social, psychological and spiritual disintegration with an often uncomfortably visceral depiction of spiritual and ecological interconnection.

Panda Nation examines the giant panda and its fascinating qualities as an animal while tracing the story of its rise from obscurity to global prominence as a symbol of nature and the nation of China. The book places this story in the historical and political context of the tumultuous history of the People’s Republic of China. The emergence of the giant panda as a national icon was made possible in part by its own striking natural appearance and allure, but ultimately was the result of China’s effort to define itself as a nation. As the subject of government-directed science and popular nationalism, the giant panda’s rose in tandem with the dramatic ascent of China to a position of broad global influence. As a bridge to nature, the panda also integrated urban centers with local officials and ethnic minority villagers in China’s remote regions. As a point of pride, the panda symbolized cultural and economic shifts before it was used as a diplomatic tool. It became an expression of nationalism, a tool for diplomacy, and a means for international cooperation and scientific exchange.

The panda did not become an official symbol of the PRC in a debate over worthy animal emblems, but emerged as a representation of China in various contexts by fulfilling specific needs of the nation. The giant panda became broadly relevant to human society when it was deemed a scientifically interesting animal. International research on pandas has probed most every aspect of the animal’s being. The Chinese government’s persistent endorsement of wide-ranging scientific work on the giant panda over the course of PRC history reflects the tremendous value the Chinese state has placed on the panda as an animal. What is most striking about the giant panda historically is not its curiosity as an oddity in the animal kingdom, but that it stands apart as a cute national symbol. Unlike the more commonly majestic and intimidating choices of eagle or lion, the panda elicits affection. The panda’s gentle allure has been central to its transformation into a powerful political tool. The traits that inspire anthropomorphism have enabled the panda to hold a special position as a diplomat, not only between China and the rest of the world, but also between the human and animal world.

This chapter addresses the debate about symbolic legislation that developed among German legal scholars and political scientists in the last two decades of the twentieth century and was a major motivation for the book. Given the semantic confusion that revolves around the term ‘symbolic’, the author begins with its meaning in the phrase ‘symbolic legislation’. Here the conceptualizations of symbolic legislation are distinguished from the ideas of symbolic politics and law as symbolism that were current in the 1960s and 1970s. Symbolic legislation concerns specifically those situations in which laws perform latent political functions that are detrimental to their legal-normative efficacy, that is, in opposition to their manifest legal significance. The chapter ends with a brief reflection on the concept, types, and effects of symbolic legislation.