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Stowe's Truths: Privacy, Privation, and The Mob

Katherine Adams

in Owning Up: Privacy, Property, and Belonging in U.S. Women's Life Writing, 1840-1890

This chapter examines mid-19th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the ... More

This chapter examines mid-19th-century U.S. privacy discourse in its dystopian aspect, where privacy is a force that threatens to invade the public sphere and destroy free democratic association. The argument focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayals of Sojourner Truth in her 1856 novel Dred and her 1863 Atlantic Monthly essay “Sojourner Truth: The Libyan Sibyl.” It shows how Stowe operates within a pattern of representation that poses blacks as figures of privation—that is, as subjects enslaved by their own bodies, incapable of self-containing self-government—through which white Americans deflected the problem of their own surplus embodiment and the failures of free labor and market idealism that produced it. The chapter demonstrates that Stowe uses Truth to engage this national crisis of uncontained bodies and, in so doing, to negotiate the embodied limits of her own female authorship.Less

The Sacred and the Bad

Robert Merrihew Adams

in Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics

Badness is not understood here, in parallel with goodness, as resemblance to a transcendent Bad. Rather it is understood in relation to the Good, as privation of goodness, more gravely as opposition ... More

Badness is not understood here, in parallel with goodness, as resemblance to a transcendent Bad. Rather it is understood in relation to the Good, as privation of goodness, more gravely as opposition to goodness, or in the most horrifying cases as violation of something sacred. This chapter takes a widely shared sense of moral horror at certain actions as a clue in developing the relevant concepts of violation (here preferred to that of defilement) and the sacred. The treatment of the sacred in terms of images of God provides a context for an account of the special value of persons as persons.Less

“The Other War Was but the Beginning”: The Politics of Loyalty in Western North Carolina, 1865–1867

Steven E. Nash

in Reconstructing Appalachia: The Civil War's Aftermath

The Civil War brought privation, loss of life, and governmental power to western Carolinians' doorsteps to an unprecedented degree. Conscription officers, tax collectors, and soldiers became ... More

The Civil War brought privation, loss of life, and governmental power to western Carolinians' doorsteps to an unprecedented degree. Conscription officers, tax collectors, and soldiers became commonplace in the region during the war. White mountaineers greeted the Richmond government's policies with more of an attitude of exasperation than the defiant opposition that many later observers read into their responses. When the Richmond government inaugurated the first draft of the war in April 1862, its exemption for white men on farms with 20 or more slaves led to a spike in desertion and violence.Less

The Oblivion of the Interval

Rebecca Hill

in The Interval: Relation and Becoming in Irigaray, Aristotle, and Bergson

This chapter reads difference in Aristotle's metaphysics in relation to Irigaray's first essay on his work, “How to conceive (of) a girl?” from Speculum of the Other Woman. It argues that his ... More

This chapter reads difference in Aristotle's metaphysics in relation to Irigaray's first essay on his work, “How to conceive (of) a girl?” from Speculum of the Other Woman. It argues that his explicit and well-known subordination of difference to identity is predicated upon a phallocentric cover up. The concepts Aristotle privileges—form, substance, identity, physis—are isomorphically congruent with phallic masculinity, while the concepts he designates as their subordinates—matter, privation, and difference—are entwined with a misogynist figuration of femininity. Yet the privilege of form, identity, and physis is far less secure than he admits. They stand on the repression of an interval, which covertly serves to distinguish Aristotle's phallic conceptual architecture from what Irigaray calls the maternal-feminine.Less

The Civilians from Seoul

S. P. MacKenzie

in British Prisoners of the Korean War

This chapter looks at the experiences of the small number of British civilians captured in the initial North Korean advance in the summer of 1950 while in transit northward and in various North ... More

This chapter looks at the experiences of the small number of British civilians captured in the initial North Korean advance in the summer of 1950 while in transit northward and in various North Korean camps along the Yalu. Particular attention is paid to the circumstances of capture, how the group coped with sometimes severe privation, the impact of seeing how various groups of US military prisoners behaved, their ability to argue with and resist political instructors aiming to expose them to the joys of life in the people's democracies, and the subtle effects on some of them of long-term exposure to only communist literature.Less

The Chill and the Meager (Hieyase): Poetics and the Philosophy of the Privative

in Emptiness and Temporality: Buddhism and Medieval Japanese Poetics

Shinkei composed a hokku to which Sōgi wrote a tsukeku, providing concrete evidence that Sōgi learned a lot from Shinkei during their mutual participation at sessions in Musashi during the Ōnin War. ... More

Shinkei composed a hokku to which Sōgi wrote a tsukeku, providing concrete evidence that Sōgi learned a lot from Shinkei during their mutual participation at sessions in Musashi during the Ōnin War. It is also a testament to the close and immediate relation between performance and critical evaluation in the renga milieu. Shinkei emphasizes the important role of critical evaluation in the dialogical poetics of renga and argues that appreciating another poet's brilliance is more difficult than composing a verse oneself. This chapter examines Shinkei's tsukeku as an example of his celebrated aesthetic of the “chill and meager” (hieyase), his valorization of sabi and hieyase, the philosophy of renunciation, reclusion as a time-honored tradition in Japanese culture, Shinkei's view about the moving character (aware) of art and his understanding of privation, as well as his notion of pure poetry and Japanese poetry. It also considers the so-called “vital tensility,” Shunzei's “deep mind” and Teika's ushin realm of meditation, and the post-ushin realm of absolute emptiness (hikkyō-kū).Less

The Howl of Oedipus, the Cry of Héloïse: From Asceticism to Postmodern Ethics

Edith Wyschogrod

in Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy's Others

This chapter argues that the discursive formations within the episteme of asceticism are bound up with the self-imposition of corporeal and psychic pain or privation, but ... More

This chapter argues that the discursive formations within the episteme of asceticism are bound up with the self-imposition of corporeal and psychic pain or privation, but contends that not all pain and privation, even when self-generated, is ascetic. It claims that the cry of Oedipus, far from being akin to a scream uttered in response to physical injury, a biological reflex, is a distillate of a certain telos (“purpose”) and of a complex discursive formation, one that is different from asceticism. In what follows, four interrelated claims are considered. Within the structure of asceticism, gaps or fissures appear in its understanding of love, pleasure, and pain in the form of an eroticism that asserts and denies itself. This is especially evident in the correspondence of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abélard. The view of the body that emerges presages a new, postmodern understanding of asceticism and its relation to ethics.Less

Epilogue: “The Smoking Ruins”

Mary A. DeCredico

in Confederate Citadel: Richmond and Its People at War

The epilogue chronicles General Robert E. Lee’s return to Richmond after surrendering his army at Appomattox Court House. Lee could not have been prepared for the sights that greeted him as he ... More

The epilogue chronicles General Robert E. Lee’s return to Richmond after surrendering his army at Appomattox Court House. Lee could not have been prepared for the sights that greeted him as he crossed the pontoon bridges linking Manchester to Richmond. The fires were still burning in places as he and his party entered the city. Most of the business district had been destroyed. People were camped in Capitol Square, homeless. The entire social and racial system in Richmond was in shambles. Richmond faced innumerable challenges in the immediate postwar period.Less

Interlude Job Redux

Simon Palfrey

in Poor Tom: Living "King Lear"

This section looks at the Edgar-part as a re-living of the suffering and temptation of Job. In particular, the radical verticality of a single moment of privation, and how this moment can instantly ... More

This section looks at the Edgar-part as a re-living of the suffering and temptation of Job. In particular, the radical verticality of a single moment of privation, and how this moment can instantly extend as a life-sentence. Important here is the correlation between the seven days’ silence of Job, and Edgar’s disappearance, in-between going into exile and returning as Tom. Survival, not death, is the punishment, because it is survival as radical loss of loved ones and identity. Edgar and Job have to substitute for themselves; their bodies taken hostage, their voices the vehicle of ambivalent freedom. Both are reduced to radical incipience: destitution generates the rebellious, imaginative weaving of para-worlds. But how scripted are these experiences? Job’s by God? Tom’s by Edgar? Do they both use cruelty purposively, reduce a subject to abject object-hood for some higher purpose? The final part of the chapter uses Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage fable to help frame such questions.Less

Bellini's Unseen Voices

Mary Ann Smart

in Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera

In Daniel Auber's 1828 opera, La Muette de Portici, the pantomimes of the heroine Fenella relied on a comfortable certainty that gesture could say the same things that language could. In contrast, ... More

In Daniel Auber's 1828 opera, La Muette de Portici, the pantomimes of the heroine Fenella relied on a comfortable certainty that gesture could say the same things that language could. In contrast, Italian opera of the 1820s and 1830s believed in the transparency of melody. For Fenella, sequences of repeating scales underline and reinforce the movement of her body, while Gioachino Antonio Rossini or Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti set words such as “gemito” (groan), “lagrime” (tears), or “pianto” (lament) to onomatopoeic melodic figures. The most interesting manifestation of onomatopoeia, as it connects to staging and embodiment, occurs in the operas of Vincenzo Bellini, whose operas are saturated with sigh figures: brief, highly conventional melodic patterns used to imitate the sounds of the body in pain or emotional distress. This chapter asks what happened to the operatic body between Bellini's two operas, Il pirata and I puritani: why the sighs and groans of Il pirata began to disappear, and what replaced them. It focuses on privation, on a metaphorical anorexia of the body that overtakes Bellini in I puritani.Less

Matter and Evil

Dmitri Nikulin

in Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity

The problem of evil, one of the central ethical and ontological problems in Neoplatonism, is discussed in Chapter 11. In Ennead I.8, Plotinus presents matter as utter deficiency, as the absence, ... More

The problem of evil, one of the central ethical and ontological problems in Neoplatonism, is discussed in Chapter 11. In Ennead I.8, Plotinus presents matter as utter deficiency, as the absence, lack, or privation of the good, and thus as radical evil. In De malorum subsistentia, Proclus explicitly responds to Plotinus and argues that evil does not exist since non-being does not exist. This means that evil is not opposite to the good because the good has no opposite, and opposites belong to the same genus. Therefore, in its elusive and indefinite nature, evil should be characterized by the rethought and redefined concepts of privation, subcontrariety, and parypostasis. In its inescapable deficiency, then, evil is the privation and subcontrary of the good that exists parypostatically; that is, as elusively present in its absence as the misplacement of being and the displacement of the good.Less

Via Negativa and the Imaginal Configuring of God

Elliot R. Wolfson

in Giving Beyond the Gift: Apophasis and Overcoming Theomania

This chapter examines the thesis that the salient feature of modern Jewish thought is the dialogical imagination, an act of theopoiesis centered on the figural iconization of the invisible deity in ... More

This chapter examines the thesis that the salient feature of modern Jewish thought is the dialogical imagination, an act of theopoiesis centered on the figural iconization of the invisible deity in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic terms. The emphasis on the dialogical, which proceeds from Hermann Cohen's logical principle of correlation, bears the risk that what should not be subject to imaginary representation invariably will be so represented, even in the guise of the nonrepresentable. Transcendence, which is a property of the uniqueness (Einzigkeit) as opposed to the unity (Einheit) of God, signifies the utter dissimilarity and incommensurability of the divine; inescapably, however, the transcendent becomes immanent to thinking insofar as there is no way to think the unthinkable that does not encroach on its unthinkability. The infinitude of transcendence is unknowable, not because there is some hidden essence that cannot be known, but because transcendence is expressive of the continuous manifestations of finitude by which the unlimited is delimited. The chasm between infinite and finite is narrowed to the extent that the transcendent is immanent, which is necessitated by the fact that God serves as an ethical ideal that imposes a mutual obligation on divine and human through the mediation of the world. Moreover, to generate the personification of transcendence, which is required by Cohen's own notion of divine forgiveness and goodness, the archetype, the originary-image whence all images originate, would have to be conceived itself imagistically. Like Cohen, Rosenzweig and Buber promote a dialogical thinking that is rooted in the principle of correlation that preserves the separate identities of God, human, and world. But they, too, acquiesce inevitably to the anthropocentric personification of transcendence.Less

Augustine, Free Will, and Evil

Gavin Rae

in Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition

Early Christian attempts to resolve the problem of evil initially led to a turn away from the ‘soft’ metaphysical dualism of Christianity to the ‘hard’ dualism of Manicheism. This, however, led to a ... More

Early Christian attempts to resolve the problem of evil initially led to a turn away from the ‘soft’ metaphysical dualism of Christianity to the ‘hard’ dualism of Manicheism. This, however, led to a resurgence in Christian attempts to incorporate the problem of evil within a monotheistic framework, the most important of these, both historically and conceptually, was Augustine’s. This chapter focuses on his insistence that ‘evil’ entails a privation of being and is a choice of individual free will. Two problems are, however, identified with this formulation: first, by claiming that ‘evil’ entails a privation, it seems to disavow the reality of evil, and, second, it is not clear that making individuals responsible for ‘evil’ is compatible with the Christian claim that God is omnipotent.Less

The McDonaldization of the Kibbutz Dining Room

Nir Avieli

in Food and Power: A Culinary Ethnography of Israel

This chapter addresses the unexpected consequences of the privatization of iconic kibbutz institutions. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the dining rooms of three kibbutzim in different ... More

This chapter addresses the unexpected consequences of the privatization of iconic kibbutz institutions. Based on ethnographic research conducted in the dining rooms of three kibbutzim in different stages of privatization, or “McDonaldization,” the chapter follows the contested meanings of the dining room experience. The food and eating patterns that prevail in these dining rooms are presented as expressions of hegemonic power structures, and their modifications reflect changing values within and beyond the kibbutz. The chapter's findings challenge the common understating of the “kibbutz crisis,” or the understating of failure in general as a consequence of the rise of individualism in contemporary Israel.Less

Suárez’s Objectualism: The Division of Beings of Reason

Daniel D. Novotný

in Ens rationis from Suárez to Caramuel: A Study in Scholasticism of the Baroque Era

This chapter deals with Suárez’s views on the division of beings of reason and provides an overview and evaluation of Suárez’s entire theory. The chapter is divided into five parts. The first part ... More

This chapter deals with Suárez’s views on the division of beings of reason and provides an overview and evaluation of Suárez’s entire theory. The chapter is divided into five parts. The first part discusses Suárez’s views on whether the traditional division of beings of reason into negation, privation, and relation is exclusive; the second deals with the question whether this division is exhaustive; the third concerns his position on the commonalities and differences between negations and privations; the fourth adds a few words about relations of reason; and the final part summarizes Suárez’s theory of beings of reason in general and identifies some problems and objections this theory faces. The question of the division of beings of reason is taken up in sections 3 to 6 of Suárez’s Disputation 54.Less