Richard Kearney and Kascha Semonovitch (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823234615
- eISBN:
- 9780823240722
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234615.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
What is strange? Or better, who is strange? When do we encounter the strange? We encounter strangers when we are not at home — when we are in a foreign land or a foreign part of our own land. From ...
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What is strange? Or better, who is strange? When do we encounter the strange? We encounter strangers when we are not at home — when we are in a foreign land or a foreign part of our own land. From Freud to Lacan to Kristeva to Heidegger, the feeling of strangeness — das Unheimlichkeit — has marked our encounter with the other, even the other within our self. Most philosophical attempts to understand the role of the Stranger, human or transcendent, have been limited to standard epistemological problems of other minds, metaphysical substances, body/soul dualism and related issues of consciousness and cognition. This volume endeavors to take the question of hosting the Stranger to the deeper level of embodied imagination and the senses. It plays host to a number of encounters with the strange. It asks such questions as: How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility? How do we distinguish between projections of fear or fascination, leading to either violence or welcome? How do humans sense the dimension of the strange and alien in different religions, arts, and cultures? How do the five physical senses relate to the spiritual senses, especially the famous sixth sense, as portals to an encounter with the Other? Is there a carnal perception of alterity, which would operate at an affective, pre-reflective, preconscious level? What exactly do embodied imaginaries of hospitality and hostility entail, and how do they operate in language, psychology, and social interrelations? What are the topical implications of these questions for ethics and practice of tolerance and peace?Less
What is strange? Or better, who is strange? When do we encounter the strange? We encounter strangers when we are not at home — when we are in a foreign land or a foreign part of our own land. From Freud to Lacan to Kristeva to Heidegger, the feeling of strangeness — das Unheimlichkeit — has marked our encounter with the other, even the other within our self. Most philosophical attempts to understand the role of the Stranger, human or transcendent, have been limited to standard epistemological problems of other minds, metaphysical substances, body/soul dualism and related issues of consciousness and cognition. This volume endeavors to take the question of hosting the Stranger to the deeper level of embodied imagination and the senses. It plays host to a number of encounters with the strange. It asks such questions as: How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility? How do we distinguish between projections of fear or fascination, leading to either violence or welcome? How do humans sense the dimension of the strange and alien in different religions, arts, and cultures? How do the five physical senses relate to the spiritual senses, especially the famous sixth sense, as portals to an encounter with the Other? Is there a carnal perception of alterity, which would operate at an affective, pre-reflective, preconscious level? What exactly do embodied imaginaries of hospitality and hostility entail, and how do they operate in language, psychology, and social interrelations? What are the topical implications of these questions for ethics and practice of tolerance and peace?
W. Puck Brecher
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- November 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780824836665
- eISBN:
- 9780824871116
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Hawai'i Press
- DOI:
- 10.21313/hawaii/9780824836665.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Asian History
Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese ...
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Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This book corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics, and it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. The book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy.Less
Eccentric artists are “the vagaries of humanity” that inhabit the deviant underside of Japanese society: This was the conclusion drawn by pre-World War II commentators on most early modern Japanese artists. Postwar scholarship, as it searched for evidence of Japan's modern roots, concluded the opposite: The eccentric, mad, and strange are moral exemplars, paragons of virtue, and shining hallmarks of modern consciousness. In recent years, the pendulum has swung again, this time in favor of viewing these oddballs as failures and dropouts without lasting cultural significance. This book corrects the disciplinary (and exclusionary) nature of such interpretations by reconsidering the sudden and dramatic emergence of aesthetic eccentricity during the Edo period (1600–1868). It explains how, throughout the period, eccentricity (ki) and madness (kyō) developed and proliferated as subcultural aesthetics, and it demonstrates that individualism and strangeness carried considerable moral and cultural value. The book concludes that a confluence of intellectual, aesthetic, and social conditions enabled multiple concurrent heterodoxies to crystallize around strangeness as a prominent cultural force in Japanese society. Its coverage of the entire Edo period and engagement with both Chinese and native Japanese traditions reinterprets Edo-period tastes and perceptions of normalcy.
Richard Parish
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199596669
- eISBN:
- 9780191729126
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199596669.001.0001
- Subject:
- Religion, Church History
The book adopts as its theme Pascal's assertion that “Christianity is strange” (“le christianisme est étrange”), taken from the Pensées, and explores various possible understandings of the statement ...
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The book adopts as its theme Pascal's assertion that “Christianity is strange” (“le christianisme est étrange”), taken from the Pensées, and explores various possible understandings of the statement in terms of Catholic particularity, as it was expressed in the writing of the French seventeenth century. This was a period of quite exceptional fertility in a range of genres: apologetics, sermons, devotional manuals, catechisms, martyr tragedies, lyric poetry, polemic, and spiritual autobiography. The chapters consider a broad cross‐section of this corpus with reference to the topics of apologetics, physicality, language, discernment, polemics, and salvation; and evidence is drawn both from canonical figures (Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, St François de Sales, Madame Guyon) and from less easily available texts. The writer's aim is to explore all those features that the heritage of the Catholic Reformation brought to the surface in France, and to do so in support of the numerous ways in which Christian doctrine could be understood as being strange: it is by turns contrary to expectations, paradoxical, divisive, carnal, and inexpressible. These features are exploited imaginatively in the more conventional literary forms, didactically in pulpit oratory, and empirically in the accounts of personal spiritual experience. In addition they are manifested polemically in debates surrounding penance, authority, inspiration, and eschatology, and often push orthodoxy to its limits and beyond in the course of their articulation. The work aims thereby to afford an unsettling account of a belief system to which early‐modern France often unquestioningly subscribed, and to show how the element of cultural assimilation of Catholic Christianity into much of Western Europe only tenuously contains a subversive and counter-intuitive creed. The degree to which that remains the case will be for the reader to decide.Less
The book adopts as its theme Pascal's assertion that “Christianity is strange” (“le christianisme est étrange”), taken from the Pensées, and explores various possible understandings of the statement in terms of Catholic particularity, as it was expressed in the writing of the French seventeenth century. This was a period of quite exceptional fertility in a range of genres: apologetics, sermons, devotional manuals, catechisms, martyr tragedies, lyric poetry, polemic, and spiritual autobiography. The chapters consider a broad cross‐section of this corpus with reference to the topics of apologetics, physicality, language, discernment, polemics, and salvation; and evidence is drawn both from canonical figures (Pascal, Bossuet, Fénelon, St François de Sales, Madame Guyon) and from less easily available texts. The writer's aim is to explore all those features that the heritage of the Catholic Reformation brought to the surface in France, and to do so in support of the numerous ways in which Christian doctrine could be understood as being strange: it is by turns contrary to expectations, paradoxical, divisive, carnal, and inexpressible. These features are exploited imaginatively in the more conventional literary forms, didactically in pulpit oratory, and empirically in the accounts of personal spiritual experience. In addition they are manifested polemically in debates surrounding penance, authority, inspiration, and eschatology, and often push orthodoxy to its limits and beyond in the course of their articulation. The work aims thereby to afford an unsettling account of a belief system to which early‐modern France often unquestioningly subscribed, and to show how the element of cultural assimilation of Catholic Christianity into much of Western Europe only tenuously contains a subversive and counter-intuitive creed. The degree to which that remains the case will be for the reader to decide.
Paul Hammond
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780199572601
- eISBN:
- 9780191702099
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199572601.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Drama
In Seneca's Hercules, the tragic protagonist has been displaced into a form of space which no one else shares. His time is not their time, either, for his act endures impervious to the motions of ...
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In Seneca's Hercules, the tragic protagonist has been displaced into a form of space which no one else shares. His time is not their time, either, for his act endures impervious to the motions of change and decay which are the rhythms of the ordinary world. The case of Hercules exemplifies a mode of estrangement which seems to be characteristic of tragedy, a movement of translation and of decomposition. This book explores the ways in which tragedy effects radical forms of estrangement by translating the protagonist into modes of time, space, and language which are alienated from those forms of time, space, and language which, in the different imaginations of different societies, constitute the human home. In this new world, metaphor, tense, and syntax forget their habitual ways of establishing identity or likeness, the sequence of cause and effect, and the distinction between agent and patient. The plays chosen for discussion range from Aeschylus' Agamemnon to Jean Racine's Phèdre, from classical Greek drama to its reworking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Less
In Seneca's Hercules, the tragic protagonist has been displaced into a form of space which no one else shares. His time is not their time, either, for his act endures impervious to the motions of change and decay which are the rhythms of the ordinary world. The case of Hercules exemplifies a mode of estrangement which seems to be characteristic of tragedy, a movement of translation and of decomposition. This book explores the ways in which tragedy effects radical forms of estrangement by translating the protagonist into modes of time, space, and language which are alienated from those forms of time, space, and language which, in the different imaginations of different societies, constitute the human home. In this new world, metaphor, tense, and syntax forget their habitual ways of establishing identity or likeness, the sequence of cause and effect, and the distinction between agent and patient. The plays chosen for discussion range from Aeschylus' Agamemnon to Jean Racine's Phèdre, from classical Greek drama to its reworking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
David Simpson
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226922355
- eISBN:
- 9780226922362
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226922362.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger—the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor—carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are “different” has ...
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In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger—the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor—carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are “different” has become particularly strong. But arguments about the stranger are not unique to our time. This book locates the figure of the stranger and the rhetoric of strangeness in romanticism and places them in a tradition that extends from antiquity to today. It shows us that debates about strangers loomed large in the French Republic of the 1790s, resulting in heated discourse that weighed who was to be welcomed and who was to be proscribed as dangerous. Placing this debate in the context of classical, biblical, and other later writings, the book identifies a persistent difficulty in controlling the play between the despised and the desired. It examines the stranger as found in the works of Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and Southey, as well as in depictions of the betrayals of hospitality in the literature of slavery and exploration—as in Mungo Park’s Travels and Stedman’s Narrative—and portrayals of strange women in de Staël, Rousseau, and Burney. Contributing to a strain of thinking about the stranger that includes interventions by Ricoeur and Derrida, the book reveals the complex history of encounters with alien figures and our continued struggles with romantic concerns about the unknown.Less
In our post-9/11 world, the figure of the stranger—the foreigner, the enemy, the unknown visitor—carries a particular urgency, and the force of language used to describe those who are “different” has become particularly strong. But arguments about the stranger are not unique to our time. This book locates the figure of the stranger and the rhetoric of strangeness in romanticism and places them in a tradition that extends from antiquity to today. It shows us that debates about strangers loomed large in the French Republic of the 1790s, resulting in heated discourse that weighed who was to be welcomed and who was to be proscribed as dangerous. Placing this debate in the context of classical, biblical, and other later writings, the book identifies a persistent difficulty in controlling the play between the despised and the desired. It examines the stranger as found in the works of Coleridge, Austen, Scott, and Southey, as well as in depictions of the betrayals of hospitality in the literature of slavery and exploration—as in Mungo Park’s Travels and Stedman’s Narrative—and portrayals of strange women in de Staël, Rousseau, and Burney. Contributing to a strain of thinking about the stranger that includes interventions by Ricoeur and Derrida, the book reveals the complex history of encounters with alien figures and our continued struggles with romantic concerns about the unknown.
Simon Palfrey
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- January 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780226150642
- eISBN:
- 9780226150789
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226150789.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature
Tom is often understood allegorically. But he resists allegorical clarity or harmonious thematizing. He is more akin to what Levinas calls the “strangeness of the Other,” a being “absolutely ...
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Tom is often understood allegorically. But he resists allegorical clarity or harmonious thematizing. He is more akin to what Levinas calls the “strangeness of the Other,” a being “absolutely foreign.” But this does not connote existential freedom. Rather, Tom suffers the burden of being an allegory tout court, without the clarifying dependence or origin or ideology that would explain his presence. There always remain things to be accounted for—a remainder that speaks for unfinished history, counterfactual possibilities, and the pathos of particularity.Less
Tom is often understood allegorically. But he resists allegorical clarity or harmonious thematizing. He is more akin to what Levinas calls the “strangeness of the Other,” a being “absolutely foreign.” But this does not connote existential freedom. Rather, Tom suffers the burden of being an allegory tout court, without the clarifying dependence or origin or ideology that would explain his presence. There always remain things to be accounted for—a remainder that speaks for unfinished history, counterfactual possibilities, and the pathos of particularity.
RICHARD KEARNEY and KASCHA SEMONOVITCH
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823234615
- eISBN:
- 9780823240722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234615.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility? What exactly do “embodied imaginaries” of hospitality and hostility entail and how do they operate in ...
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How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility? What exactly do “embodied imaginaries” of hospitality and hostility entail and how do they operate in language, psychology and social interrelations (including xenophobia and genocide)? And what are the topical implications of these questions for an ethical practice of tolerance and peace? The essays which follow offer subtle and refined attention to the many Strangers — human, divine, animal and other — who appear, disappear or refuse to appear at all. This volume is divided into four parts. Part I interrogates hospitality as a liminal phenomenon: the relation of hospitality to place, the experience of borders, thresholds, frontiers, and portals. Part II explores the dramatic ambivalence at the heart of human encounters with a radical alterity we might call “sacred strangeness.” Part III considers the Stranger who finds us not-at-home, literally or figuratively, in our place, language or history. Part IV addresses critical implications of the work of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida.Less
How does the embodied imagination relate to the Stranger in terms of hospitality or hostility? What exactly do “embodied imaginaries” of hospitality and hostility entail and how do they operate in language, psychology and social interrelations (including xenophobia and genocide)? And what are the topical implications of these questions for an ethical practice of tolerance and peace? The essays which follow offer subtle and refined attention to the many Strangers — human, divine, animal and other — who appear, disappear or refuse to appear at all. This volume is divided into four parts. Part I interrogates hospitality as a liminal phenomenon: the relation of hospitality to place, the experience of borders, thresholds, frontiers, and portals. Part II explores the dramatic ambivalence at the heart of human encounters with a radical alterity we might call “sacred strangeness.” Part III considers the Stranger who finds us not-at-home, literally or figuratively, in our place, language or history. Part IV addresses critical implications of the work of Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida.
RICHARD KEARNEY and KASCHA SEMONOVITCH
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823234615
- eISBN:
- 9780823240722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234615.003.0005
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
This chapter turns to liminal experiences, this time of “things at the edge of the world.” It reposes Martin Heidegger's question, What is a “thing”? Phenomenologically revealed, things open worlds ...
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This chapter turns to liminal experiences, this time of “things at the edge of the world.” It reposes Martin Heidegger's question, What is a “thing”? Phenomenologically revealed, things open worlds and worlds within worlds. Through a “productive strangeness,” things at the edge of the world serve as sites that permit reversals and transformations. The chapter suggests we would perhaps do better to think of ourselves as involved in an event with these strange, other-than-human faces. After dismantling our paradigm of “things,” it moves on to provocatively address our presuppositions about the animal and human other. It also proposes an ethics of what it calls “fractalterity” that might emerge through such reversals and estrangements; this would be an ethos that safeguards strangeness. Finally, it addresses the neglected question of hospitality to others such as animals and purportedly “inanimate” objects, and asks when we legitimately, justly attribute a soul, a psyche, an interiority to the “thing.”.Less
This chapter turns to liminal experiences, this time of “things at the edge of the world.” It reposes Martin Heidegger's question, What is a “thing”? Phenomenologically revealed, things open worlds and worlds within worlds. Through a “productive strangeness,” things at the edge of the world serve as sites that permit reversals and transformations. The chapter suggests we would perhaps do better to think of ourselves as involved in an event with these strange, other-than-human faces. After dismantling our paradigm of “things,” it moves on to provocatively address our presuppositions about the animal and human other. It also proposes an ethics of what it calls “fractalterity” that might emerge through such reversals and estrangements; this would be an ethos that safeguards strangeness. Finally, it addresses the neglected question of hospitality to others such as animals and purportedly “inanimate” objects, and asks when we legitimately, justly attribute a soul, a psyche, an interiority to the “thing.”.
RICHARD KEARNEY and KASCHA SEMONOVITCH
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823234615
- eISBN:
- 9780823240722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234615.003.0007
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
Among the most promising-seeming possibilities for an ethics linked to theology is that of regarding the world as sacramental. A sacramental sensibility seems, potentially at least, a way to a ...
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Among the most promising-seeming possibilities for an ethics linked to theology is that of regarding the world as sacramental. A sacramental sensibility seems, potentially at least, a way to a valuing of some aspects of the world, but not a way particularly welcoming of the strange or the stranger. But fundamental to such a sensibility, this chapter argues, is a discipline of attention, of a carefully open listening, and such an attentiveness in fact requires that we listen to what we do not already understand, what sounds in our ears and appears to our eyes as something foreign. This chapter presents an account of a sacramental ethics that is always hospitable to the strange. Drawing on various texts from Augustine, Lewis Mackey, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Chrétien, and others, it narrates a history of the sacramental in Christian intellectual history. It advocates “listening” as a primary method of hospitality, a radical openness to the strangeness of the world in its all its beautiful, destitute, and bizarre incarnations.Less
Among the most promising-seeming possibilities for an ethics linked to theology is that of regarding the world as sacramental. A sacramental sensibility seems, potentially at least, a way to a valuing of some aspects of the world, but not a way particularly welcoming of the strange or the stranger. But fundamental to such a sensibility, this chapter argues, is a discipline of attention, of a carefully open listening, and such an attentiveness in fact requires that we listen to what we do not already understand, what sounds in our ears and appears to our eyes as something foreign. This chapter presents an account of a sacramental ethics that is always hospitable to the strange. Drawing on various texts from Augustine, Lewis Mackey, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean Chrétien, and others, it narrates a history of the sacramental in Christian intellectual history. It advocates “listening” as a primary method of hospitality, a radical openness to the strangeness of the world in its all its beautiful, destitute, and bizarre incarnations.
RICHARD KEARNEY and KASCHA SEMONOVITCH
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823234615
- eISBN:
- 9780823240722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234615.003.0010
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
Martin Heidegger's discussion of conscience in Division 2 is the most interesting moment in Being and Time. This chapter attempts to show where the ice floe of fundamental ontology begins to crack, ...
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Martin Heidegger's discussion of conscience in Division 2 is the most interesting moment in Being and Time. This chapter attempts to show where the ice floe of fundamental ontology begins to crack, for it is there that the questions of the uncanny and the stranger will begin to make themselves heard. At stake will be bringing the human being face to face with its uncanniness, with the utter strangeness of being human: we are the null basis-being of a nullity, a double zero suspended between two nothings. This chapter shows what Heidegger means by guilt, which is something closer to lack in the Lacanian sense or indebtedness than moral guilt or culpability. It rereads the elusive discussion of the “call” of conscience in Division 2 of Heidegger's Being and Time. It demonstrates that when Dasein finds itself, sich befindet, amidst this uncanniness, Dasein hears the stranger voice, die fremde Stimme. Dasein is paradoxically no place: in the gap between two nothings.Less
Martin Heidegger's discussion of conscience in Division 2 is the most interesting moment in Being and Time. This chapter attempts to show where the ice floe of fundamental ontology begins to crack, for it is there that the questions of the uncanny and the stranger will begin to make themselves heard. At stake will be bringing the human being face to face with its uncanniness, with the utter strangeness of being human: we are the null basis-being of a nullity, a double zero suspended between two nothings. This chapter shows what Heidegger means by guilt, which is something closer to lack in the Lacanian sense or indebtedness than moral guilt or culpability. It rereads the elusive discussion of the “call” of conscience in Division 2 of Heidegger's Being and Time. It demonstrates that when Dasein finds itself, sich befindet, amidst this uncanniness, Dasein hears the stranger voice, die fremde Stimme. Dasein is paradoxically no place: in the gap between two nothings.
RICHARD KEARNEY and KASCHA SEMONOVITCH
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- September 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780823234615
- eISBN:
- 9780823240722
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823234615.003.0011
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
How are we to understand hospitality? What can phenomenology tell us about welcoming the stranger? When the “stranger” in question morphs into the “uncanny,” it takes on a weirdness that the uncanny ...
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How are we to understand hospitality? What can phenomenology tell us about welcoming the stranger? When the “stranger” in question morphs into the “uncanny,” it takes on a weirdness that the uncanny itself suggests. For the layman, the word suggests a feeling of dread or inexplicable strangeness, seeming to have a preternatural cause, as if locked into the present by some ominous and long forgotten past. This chapter examines the key questions and method introduced by Martin Heidegger through Being and Time, and points to an alternative reading of the notion of guilt. This alternative depends on subtly different translations of “Nichtigkeit” and “Unheimlichkeit,” but also on a careful hermeneutic reinvestigation of Sophocles's Antigone and Heidegger's interpretation of that play. Paradigm of a paradox experienced by all human beings, Antigone arrives at the home, the hearth, only to be uncannily not at home. By attending to the textual unfolding of “uncanniness” and “homeliness,” this chapter refigures our understanding of both the play and Heidegger.Less
How are we to understand hospitality? What can phenomenology tell us about welcoming the stranger? When the “stranger” in question morphs into the “uncanny,” it takes on a weirdness that the uncanny itself suggests. For the layman, the word suggests a feeling of dread or inexplicable strangeness, seeming to have a preternatural cause, as if locked into the present by some ominous and long forgotten past. This chapter examines the key questions and method introduced by Martin Heidegger through Being and Time, and points to an alternative reading of the notion of guilt. This alternative depends on subtly different translations of “Nichtigkeit” and “Unheimlichkeit,” but also on a careful hermeneutic reinvestigation of Sophocles's Antigone and Heidegger's interpretation of that play. Paradigm of a paradox experienced by all human beings, Antigone arrives at the home, the hearth, only to be uncannily not at home. By attending to the textual unfolding of “uncanniness” and “homeliness,” this chapter refigures our understanding of both the play and Heidegger.
John M. Coward
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252040269
- eISBN:
- 9780252098529
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252040269.003.0009
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Native American Studies
This chapter looks at racial imagery in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the final years of the nineteenth century, comparing the illustrations of Indians and African Americans as a way of ...
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This chapter looks at racial imagery in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the final years of the nineteenth century, comparing the illustrations of Indians and African Americans as a way of explaining the shifting nature of race and representation as Western expansion ran its course. Native Americans were usually portrayed more sympathetically than African Americans. Indians were also depicted as more progressive than blacks. Moreover, Indians in the early 1890s were seen predominately as nonthreatening, both militarily and culturally. African Americans, by contrast, were closer and more familiar to whites and often perceived as less interesting to illustrators and more threatening to the status quo. Unlike Indians, whose apparent strangeness could be presented as exotic, black strangeness was ridiculed.Less
This chapter looks at racial imagery in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in the final years of the nineteenth century, comparing the illustrations of Indians and African Americans as a way of explaining the shifting nature of race and representation as Western expansion ran its course. Native Americans were usually portrayed more sympathetically than African Americans. Indians were also depicted as more progressive than blacks. Moreover, Indians in the early 1890s were seen predominately as nonthreatening, both militarily and culturally. African Americans, by contrast, were closer and more familiar to whites and often perceived as less interesting to illustrators and more threatening to the status quo. Unlike Indians, whose apparent strangeness could be presented as exotic, black strangeness was ridiculed.
Giovan Francesco Lanzara
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780262034456
- eISBN:
- 9780262332309
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- The MIT Press
- DOI:
- 10.7551/mitpress/9780262034456.003.0012
- Subject:
- Business and Management, Organization Studies
Part IV collects further inquiries in the phenomenology of innovation, picking up and discussing relevant issues raised by the two extended field studies. A major argument is that practices are ...
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Part IV collects further inquiries in the phenomenology of innovation, picking up and discussing relevant issues raised by the two extended field studies. A major argument is that practices are self-contained mediated worlds. When a new medium comes about, practitioners are pushed to reweave the texture of the practice within the new medium. They must cope with strangeness and make sense of the practice in the new medium. The different sections of Part IV have the character of ‘theoretical drills’ that deepen the book’s major themes concerning shifting practices. They touch on topics like the idea of mediation, medium specificity, the medium-object-representation triad, transient knowledge, transiency vs durability. Further insights on the practice of innovation are discussed, related to practices as mediated worlds, knowing as making, bricolage, assemblages, the elusive ontology of versioning, the paradox of the untouched ruin, to end up with dross, the dark side of innovation.Less
Part IV collects further inquiries in the phenomenology of innovation, picking up and discussing relevant issues raised by the two extended field studies. A major argument is that practices are self-contained mediated worlds. When a new medium comes about, practitioners are pushed to reweave the texture of the practice within the new medium. They must cope with strangeness and make sense of the practice in the new medium. The different sections of Part IV have the character of ‘theoretical drills’ that deepen the book’s major themes concerning shifting practices. They touch on topics like the idea of mediation, medium specificity, the medium-object-representation triad, transient knowledge, transiency vs durability. Further insights on the practice of innovation are discussed, related to practices as mediated worlds, knowing as making, bricolage, assemblages, the elusive ontology of versioning, the paradox of the untouched ruin, to end up with dross, the dark side of innovation.
Trish Winter and Simon Keegan-Phipps
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780719097300
- eISBN:
- 9781781708699
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719097300.003.0006
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
Chapter 6 examines the main ways in which ‘England’ is imagined within and around the English folk resurgence. Beginning with a survey of the imaginations of England historically associated with the ...
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Chapter 6 examines the main ways in which ‘England’ is imagined within and around the English folk resurgence. Beginning with a survey of the imaginations of England historically associated with the folk arts, it identifies five dominant, and overlapping, constructions of Englishness circulating through the contemporary English folk arts. First is England as rural idyll. Secondly, there is England as a patchwork of distinctively local places. Thirdly, there is a discourse that presents the English folk arts through a notion of ‘strangeness’, as an exotic other at the heart of England. Fourthly, there is a strand that directly associates folk with an urban, cosmopolitan idea of England. Finally there is an idea of ‘authentic England’ in which folk is positioned alongside hand craftedness as an authetic response to the commercialisation and globalisation of culture.Less
Chapter 6 examines the main ways in which ‘England’ is imagined within and around the English folk resurgence. Beginning with a survey of the imaginations of England historically associated with the folk arts, it identifies five dominant, and overlapping, constructions of Englishness circulating through the contemporary English folk arts. First is England as rural idyll. Secondly, there is England as a patchwork of distinctively local places. Thirdly, there is a discourse that presents the English folk arts through a notion of ‘strangeness’, as an exotic other at the heart of England. Fourthly, there is a strand that directly associates folk with an urban, cosmopolitan idea of England. Finally there is an idea of ‘authentic England’ in which folk is positioned alongside hand craftedness as an authetic response to the commercialisation and globalisation of culture.
Jacob Edmond
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823242597
- eISBN:
- 9780823242634
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823242597.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
This book begins with two questions: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? ...
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This book begins with two questions: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? Insofar as it responds to these questions, the book is a history of the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that have shaped the aesthetics of globalization from the late–Cold War period to today. But the book is also a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular. It explores what it is possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual. Instead of dichotomies, it offers a triangulated, multilingual, comparative approach to literary studies. Moving among avant-garde poetic examples from China, Russia, and the United States, it traces a series of cross-cultural encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, A Common Strangeness tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.Less
This book begins with two questions: Why is our world still understood through binary oppositions—East and West, local and global, common and strange—that ought to have crumbled with the Berlin Wall? What might literary responses to the events that ushered in our era of globalization tell us about the rhetorical and historical underpinnings of these dichotomies? Insofar as it responds to these questions, the book is a history of the patterns of literary making and cosmopolitan thinking that have shaped the aesthetics of globalization from the late–Cold War period to today. But the book is also a long essay on the relation between the general and the particular. It explores what it is possible to say about poetry, or the global, in the face of the poem and the individual. Instead of dichotomies, it offers a triangulated, multilingual, comparative approach to literary studies. Moving among avant-garde poetic examples from China, Russia, and the United States, it traces a series of cross-cultural encounters shaped by economic and geopolitical events from the Cultural Revolution, perestroika, and the June 4 massacre to the collapse of the Soviet Union, September 11, and the invasion of Iraq. In these encounters, A Common Strangeness tracks a shared concern with strangeness through which poets contested old binary oppositions as they reemerged in new, post-Cold War forms.
Koen Vermeir
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199857142
- eISBN:
- 9780199345427
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199857142.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, History of Philosophy
This paper argues that doing history of philosophy is not the same as making philosophical use of history. The difference between both is not one of anachronism or presentism, but both approaches ...
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This paper argues that doing history of philosophy is not the same as making philosophical use of history. The difference between both is not one of anachronism or presentism, but both approaches have different objects of interest and a different methodology. It argues that history of philosophy should take historiography seriously and should answer the disciplinary demands of history. It inquires into the philosophical interest and relevance of history of philosophy, arguing for the relevance of a genealogical method. The genealogical approach answers both those interested in the sameness of history and those that look into the strangeness of history.Less
This paper argues that doing history of philosophy is not the same as making philosophical use of history. The difference between both is not one of anachronism or presentism, but both approaches have different objects of interest and a different methodology. It argues that history of philosophy should take historiography seriously and should answer the disciplinary demands of history. It inquires into the philosophical interest and relevance of history of philosophy, arguing for the relevance of a genealogical method. The genealogical approach answers both those interested in the sameness of history and those that look into the strangeness of history.
Kostas Boyiopoulos
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- January 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748690923
- eISBN:
- 9781474412377
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748690923.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
Moving on to Arthur Symons poetry, chapter 4 argues that in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) the fragmented, impressionistic sensations and images of the city mirror the poet’s fragmented ...
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Moving on to Arthur Symons poetry, chapter 4 argues that in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) the fragmented, impressionistic sensations and images of the city mirror the poet’s fragmented consciousness and state of mind. The city is a matrix of darkness and light that limits and specialises the art of gazing. Through their impressionistic lens, Symons’s speakers are flâneurs that perceive the phantasmagorias of London, or Paris, from new angles and perspectives. The city becomes a gigantic textual tangle of artificiality that invites deciphering. In this sense, the female figures populating it with their masks of make-up and dress are textual enigmas. The sexual encounter within private quarters, or the constellation of dancers in the music hall, becomes a mirror of the city exterior.Less
Moving on to Arthur Symons poetry, chapter 4 argues that in Silhouettes (1892) and London Nights (1895) the fragmented, impressionistic sensations and images of the city mirror the poet’s fragmented consciousness and state of mind. The city is a matrix of darkness and light that limits and specialises the art of gazing. Through their impressionistic lens, Symons’s speakers are flâneurs that perceive the phantasmagorias of London, or Paris, from new angles and perspectives. The city becomes a gigantic textual tangle of artificiality that invites deciphering. In this sense, the female figures populating it with their masks of make-up and dress are textual enigmas. The sexual encounter within private quarters, or the constellation of dancers in the music hall, becomes a mirror of the city exterior.
Jacob Edmond
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823242597
- eISBN:
- 9780823242634
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823242597.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The conclusion considers how repetition has shaped the structures of commonness and strangeness through which we have come to know our current era. Rejecting repetition, it turns instead to what ...
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The conclusion considers how repetition has shaped the structures of commonness and strangeness through which we have come to know our current era. Rejecting repetition, it turns instead to what Gertrude Stein called “insistence”––whereby each repetition transforms and is transformed by the form and context of its presentation. Repetition can come to be seen differently when approached through the rhetorical strategies of continuous reframing—the poetics of insistence and encounter—explored here: Yang Lian’s superimposition and constellation, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s co-response, Lyn Hejinian’s everyday estrangement, Bei Dao’s allegory and echo, Dmitri Prigov’s intersecting iterations, and Charles Bernstein’s affective immediacy and distancing artifice. When seen through the cross-cultural encounters and poetries wrought by the passage from the Cold War world to our current era of globalization, history appears not as repeated waves of influence, of sameness and dif¬ference, but as insistence across space and time, language and culture.Less
The conclusion considers how repetition has shaped the structures of commonness and strangeness through which we have come to know our current era. Rejecting repetition, it turns instead to what Gertrude Stein called “insistence”––whereby each repetition transforms and is transformed by the form and context of its presentation. Repetition can come to be seen differently when approached through the rhetorical strategies of continuous reframing—the poetics of insistence and encounter—explored here: Yang Lian’s superimposition and constellation, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko’s co-response, Lyn Hejinian’s everyday estrangement, Bei Dao’s allegory and echo, Dmitri Prigov’s intersecting iterations, and Charles Bernstein’s affective immediacy and distancing artifice. When seen through the cross-cultural encounters and poetries wrought by the passage from the Cold War world to our current era of globalization, history appears not as repeated waves of influence, of sameness and dif¬ference, but as insistence across space and time, language and culture.
Nicholas Tampio
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780823245000
- eISBN:
- 9780823250707
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823245000.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
This chapter interprets Kant's conception of courage and its implications for contemporary political thinking. The chapter begins by examining Kant's reflections on courage in the Groundwork of the ...
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This chapter interprets Kant's conception of courage and its implications for contemporary political thinking. The chapter begins by examining Kant's reflections on courage in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the 1784 essay on Enlightenment, and the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The chapter then considers how contemporary political theorists inflect Kantian courage as apology, jurisprudence, and critique. Finally, the chapter argues that the Enlightenment ethos ought to combine the activities of defence, legislation, and transgression.Less
This chapter interprets Kant's conception of courage and its implications for contemporary political thinking. The chapter begins by examining Kant's reflections on courage in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, the 1784 essay on Enlightenment, and the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. The chapter then considers how contemporary political theorists inflect Kantian courage as apology, jurisprudence, and critique. Finally, the chapter argues that the Enlightenment ethos ought to combine the activities of defence, legislation, and transgression.
Maxime Felder
Stijn Oosterlynck, Gert Verschraegen, and Ronald van Kempen (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781447338178
- eISBN:
- 9781447338222
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Policy Press
- DOI:
- 10.1332/policypress/9781447338178.003.0002
- Subject:
- Sociology, Urban and Rural Studies
This chapter investigates the complex relation between interest and indifference and separation and exposure between neighbours in four socially and ethnically heterogeneous buildings in the Swiss ...
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This chapter investigates the complex relation between interest and indifference and separation and exposure between neighbours in four socially and ethnically heterogeneous buildings in the Swiss city of Geneva. It draws an important distinction between not knowing someone personally but being familiar and not knowing of someone's existence. From this analysis, it seems that good neighbours do not need to be ‘like us’ as long as they are friendly and do not threaten one's interests and privacy. Still, the combination of physical proximity and lack of acquaintance makes neighbours into strangers. Urbanites deal with their life among strangers and the incomplete knowledge they have of their neighbours with a back-and-forth movement between normalising and fantasising. In this way, urban residents balance their need for normality with their attraction to strangeness and diversity.Less
This chapter investigates the complex relation between interest and indifference and separation and exposure between neighbours in four socially and ethnically heterogeneous buildings in the Swiss city of Geneva. It draws an important distinction between not knowing someone personally but being familiar and not knowing of someone's existence. From this analysis, it seems that good neighbours do not need to be ‘like us’ as long as they are friendly and do not threaten one's interests and privacy. Still, the combination of physical proximity and lack of acquaintance makes neighbours into strangers. Urbanites deal with their life among strangers and the incomplete knowledge they have of their neighbours with a back-and-forth movement between normalising and fantasising. In this way, urban residents balance their need for normality with their attraction to strangeness and diversity.
