Feminist philosophers of religion have drawn attention to desire as a neglected category for approaching the sources and concerns of religion. This paper extends this discussion by engaging with one particularly disturbing aspect of the writings of the Marquis de Sade. In a world where ultimate sexual pleasure is derived from destruction of the Other, Sade glories in describing the suffering of mothers, often at the hands of their own children. This paper offers one possible reading of these dark desires (...) through employing aspects of psychoanalytic theory to suggest that, rather than isolate him from the majority of humanity, we might consider possible connections between the desires he details and our own. This involves considering the ambivalence of the mother, and thus challenging the idealization of the all-caring, all-nurturing mother. (shrink)

Irony and sarcasm are two quite different, sometimes morally dubious, linguistic tropes. We can draw a distinction between them if we identify irony as a speech act that calls what is bad good and, correspondingly, sarcasm calls good bad. This allows us to ask, which one is morally worse. My argument is based on the idea that the speaker can legitimately bypass what is good and call it bad, which is to say that she may literally mean what she says. (...) This is not true of the opposite case: one cannot bypass what is bad and, therefore, she paradoxically does not mean what she says. In other words, irony is a morally less guilty trope. What is bad has its faults and thus it can be ironized; what is good is without blemish and thus it is difficult to know how it could be called bad. Also, irony can be freely intended, or verbal, or it can be situational in social context. I also discuss dramatic irony in Classical context. Sarcasm does not allow such complexity. Instead, we speak of cynicism and even nihilism as moral attitudes that accompany sarcasm and give it its typical force; or sarcasm may lead to cynicism and nihilism, that is, to the denial of values. Irony does not entail any corresponding attitudes or moral positions. This paper is a philosophical contribution to the ethics of communication and language. (shrink)

This paper explores some surprising historical connections between philosophy and pornography (including pornography written by or about philosophers, and works that are both philosophical and pornographic). Examples discussed include Diderot's Les Bijoux Indiscrets, Argens's Therésè Philosophe, Aretino's Ragionamenti, Andeli's Lai d'Aristote, and the Gor novels of John Norman. It observes that these works frequently dramatize a tension between reason and emotion, and argues that their existence poses a problem for philosophical arguments against pornography.

The scope of this article is to explore a body of literature that deals with the concepts of transgression, evil and festival to construct an alternative theoretical framework for violence. For the purpose of this work, the radicalisation of western-born young Muslims and so-called Islamic State's executions will be taken into consideration. The works of Bataille, Foucault, De Sade and Caillois will be the primary focus of this article. This article suggests using non-traditional criminological sources to create an alternative narrative, (...) aimed at adding a different dimension to the conversations around radicalisation and beheadings. (shrink)