Search Results

This chapter introduces the book’s thesis that death penalty discourse helped both Rabbis and Christians to invent themselves in the first centuries of the common era. It reviews recent historiography of the early rabbinic movement, presents the book’s approach to reading rabbinic literature, and surveys the culture-critical concerns at the heart of the book: the politics of punishment, the politics of ritual, and the politics of imperialism. It addresses questions readers may bring to the subject, such as the historical reality of Jewish execution in antiquity, and the question of whether the classical Rabbis were for or against the death penalty. It also gives the plan of the book and describes the texts that the book will analyze.

This chapter discusses the preservation of the historicity of ancient biblical figures. It looks at the different ideas Erich Auerbach and Origen have on the subject. The start of the chapter includes Auerbach's praise of early Christian figural reading and an attack on ancient allegorical reading, which includes Origen's. It shows that Origenist allegorical reading dissolved history in favor of abstract or spiritual meaning. Through a careful comparison of Origen and Auerbach, it is revealed that both thinkers want to “preserve” historical reality. Auerbach believed that preserving history means allowing the existing, bodily reality of past events and persons to persist into the present events or persons that “fulfill” them. Origen, on the other hand, believed that the past is preserved whenever past events become present possibilities.

The third chapter considers how approaches to theological reflection within Latin American liberation theology might open up toward a decolonial project. It specifically focuses on how the work of the liberation theologians Ignacio Ellacuría and Jon Sobrino, unlike that of Clodovis Boff, points to the theoretical possibility of communities speaking theologically from epistemic loci located within the cracks of Western modernity. Ellacuría and Sobrino open up the methodological possibility to decolonize theological images and concepts, and in doing so, offer the possibility for theological reflection to decolonize social-historical structures. A decolonial option requires, but is also more than, a methodological shift that prioritizes the viewpoint of the poor as the starting point in theological reflection. Investigating how Ellacuría and Sobrino are able to open up the epistemic boundaries of theology is thus not an endpoint, but can provide a way forward for a decolonial theology.

In traditional ecclesiastical history, heresy was understood as dissent from the beliefs of the majority on the part of a minority which was organized as a church and had developed a defined system of doctrinal tenets. Today, heresy is seen as the result of a process of marginalization or in terms of the historical failure of a particular religious movement or teaching, Movements or creeds that were later termed heretical could hold sway over long periods of time, and thus themselves set the standards of orthodoxy for their period. The discussion suggests that the so-called disputes over Monenergism and Monotheletism were primarily conducted in writing, and are above all to be seen in the context of the rivalry between Rome, with its claim to primacy, and Constantinople. Only in a very restricted sense could one attribute a real political or social importance to the phenomenon.

This chapter examines how philosophers of history have tried to purge their discipline of attempts to establish meaning. It first considers the two parts of the philosophy of history, “critical” and “speculative,” before turning to “speculation” as an ineradicable—though zealously dissimulated—phenomenon within the discipline of the philosophy of history. It then argues that it is not meaning we want but “presence,” which is outside the philosophy of history, and that the concept of metonymy is a suitable tool for coming to grips with discontinuity and with the need for presence. More specifically, it shows that by exploring metonymy, a discourse of presence can be established that does not explain discontinuity away in some sort of “meaning,” but gives it its due. The chapter also describes metonymy as a metaphor for the simultaneousness of continuity and discontinuity and concludes by explaining how the interplay between metaphor and metonymy—termed “metonymics”—accomplishes what representationalism fails to do: to account for the relation between historiography and historical reality.

This chapter examines Maimonides' position on the nature of the commandments of the Torah. For him, the commandments of the Torah are not purely positivist — in the sense that in most cases God could just as easily have commanded something else — but they do not reflect anything about the metaphysical nature of the universe either. Rather, the commandments of the Torah are wise and beneficial, but in many cases reflect specific historical realities. The chapter then addresses the question about the nature of halakhah, which has profound implications for the understanding of what halakhah is meant to be, and important ramifications for the question of what Torah is, and how it is meant to relate to the world. It delineates two fundamentally opposed conceptions of what halakhah is; Maimonides holds one view, while his opponents hold a conflicting view. Maimonides's view is part and parcel of his opposition to the 'hyperrealism' of proto-kabbalah.

This chapter cites a few of Dante Alighieri's literary passages in which his terms hold an edge of metaphoric enhancement but are primarily metonymic; the naturalizing effect of transmission mechanisms being one of the factors that contribute to the referential and metonymic force of his terms. In addition, St. Thomas Aquinas supports the theory that reality transcends language. The literal level of language refers to the four preexisting and preverbal levels of reality: historical, figural, moral, and mystical. These levels are arranged to allow language to move metonymically between them. Dante and Aquinas appealed to three principles in addressing the literary passages—containment, attraction, and manifestation—all of which interrelate different parts of the universe in terms of parallelism, hierarchy, and causality.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the study, which comprises five films that offer complex and sophisticated treatments of the linked themes of nationhood and history. One of the most visible manifestations of the changing narrative can be found in the resurgence of films that take the American past as their subject. The book then raises the issues of the interpretation of history by fiction in contemporary films; cinema’s ostensible distortion of historical reality; culture’s willingness to substitute glossy images for historical understanding and insight, and the powers that underlie the idealized construction of nationhood. It explores the reshaping of our collective imaginary relation to history, and to nation.

This chapter assesses the work of Seamus Heaney, another semiautobiographical poet whose work nevertheless presses on the boundaries of fact. Heaney's poetry often raises the question of whether, or how, remembered experience differs from historical reality. Can memory—and, in particular, memory as revealed through poetry—have a knowledge separate from what happened? Reflecting on conceptions of memory developed by Wordsworth, a poet with whom Heaney identifies on multiple levels but whose poetry he occasionally misremembers, the chapter argues for the necessity of acknowledging mistake even as it pertains to aspects of a remembered life, fictional or not. The act of misremembering emerges as a technique for Heaney—as well as for other poets—to figure the difficulty of mapping the imagination onto a historical world.

This chapter looks at three developments in history writing that became conspicuous around the turn of the twenty-first century. The first is the decline of the revolutionary narrative, because of its obsoleteness in an age when capitalist reform and liberal values prevailed, and also because of relentless challenges from modernization theorists and historians. The second is the emergence of a new generation of Chinese historians who showed a growing interest in social and cultural histories at local or regional levels under the influence of theories and methodologies borrowed from the West. The third is the effort by a group of historians to reconstruct the “true realities” of some of the critical events in twentieth-century China by taking advantage of newly available archives and documents; their findings frequently challenged the version of stories endorsed by the party-state.

This chapter examines the film JFK in terms of the tension between the film’s formal innovations and its explicit aim to articulate a narrative of national cohesion. It argues that the film’s profusion of stylistic modes and idioms expresses the rupture of a once-unified national text. The film, thus, recuperates its radically discontinuous style by linking it to the absence of a unified national narrative, which it suggests as the foundation of community and the ground for all other narratives of human connection. JFK recalls the idea that modernist, antinarrative techniques, characterized by fragmentation, the explosion of the conventions of the traditional tale, and the dissociation or splitting of narrative functions, may be the most appropriate techniques for representing the historical reality of the contemporary period.

This concluding chapter discusses Habermas' critique of the Hegelian viewpoint concerning faith and reason. In the attempt to repair the breach between the two, Hegelian philosophy demands rational reflection on religion's truth-content. Christianity, for Hegel, represents the unity in difference of the finite and the infinite, the particular and the universal, the human and the divine. The basic problem with Hegel's reconciliation of knowledge and faith, as Habermas viewed it, is that this system presumes what it needs to demonstrate, namely, “that a kind of reason which is more than an absolutized understanding can convincingly reunify the antithesis that reason has to unfold discursively.” Hegelian reason assumes the historical achievement that it purports to reveal. It is thereby cut off from historical reality, temporal contingencies, and the procedures of critical reflection.

This introductory chapter offers a multifaceted historical perspective on Buddhism in Cambodia under Pol Pot's regime. At the same time it cautions against any one-sided views of the events that had taken place during this period. It is important to recognize that Buddhism in Southeast Asia has never been a disembodied conceptual system devoid of purchase on historical and political reality. When we look at Buddhism, we tend to focus on its philosophical and scholastic superstructure while ignoring the ways in which it has operated on a far wider level to sustain and inform the cultures with which it formed a whole. It has achieved its sociocultural character by the provision of educational and welfare facilities, certainly. But it has also acted through more direct involvement in the apparatus of state. Additionally, the chapter reviews the sources that inform the study in this volume.

This concluding chapter explains the significance of not only examining the relationship between a historical reality and a secondary literary reflection, but also the perturbing of that relationship. This includes looking at the distortions of history as imaginative and the tensions of literary expression as illuminating. If Aaron Burr continues to have significance for some people today, it is not because of his historical importance but because of the power of the imaginative (and often literary) creations of 1800–1807. What the Burr case evokes is a reconstituted project of literary history; the writing and reading of Burr came with the characterological work of the Revolution. The chapter closes with a few speculations about the aftermath of the Burr moment, elicited by some texts at the end of Burr's decade.

This play contains among several distinct dramatic features a ‘funeral oration’ delivered in praise of the ‘Seven Against Thebes’, all killed in that morally questionable assault and some of them very flawed heroes (see also 9) below). The paper discusses the major textual difficulties of the speech, which bear strongly on its interpretation as a whole; then its general character in a mythical setting, in relation to several literary records and examples of the great Athenian funeral orations delivered annually in praise of the war-dead, homilies to encourage civic virtues and pride. A final section establishes the oration as in formal harmony with play's plot and setting, and with its underlying ideals; it defends the oration against some critics’ scorn as a satire on the conventions of the Athenian annual speech.