Renunciation as a creative force is the animating idea behind Ross Posnock s new book. Taking up acts of abandonment, rejection, and refusal that have long baffled critics, he shows how renunciation has reframed the relationship of writers, philosophers, and artists to society in productive and unpredictable ways.".

As Death Comes for the Archbishop approaches one hundred years of critical scrutiny, it still speaks to readers in much the same way it did in the 1920s. A critical response to early twentieth-century materialism and mendacity, the story of nineteenth-century New Mexico Archbishop Jean Marie Latour and his friend and Vicar, Fr. Joseph Vaillant affirms as it dramatizes friendship and renunciation while simultaneously celebrating the centrality of the transcendent self and the richness and value of lived personal experience.

Religion of the Rabaris of the Rajasthan, India; a study.

Nietzsche’s texts contain a puzzle about the role of vulnerability in the creation of intimacy and its function on behalf of human flourishing. I describe the interpretive puzzle and its prima facie paradoxical aspects. On the one hand, there are texts in which Nietzsche expresses a longing for intimacy and other texts where he furnishes details about the possibility of intimacy between equals. On the other hand, Nietzsche is severely critical of certain types of intimacy and advocates for a pathos (...) of distance in human relationships. I claim that Nietzschean intimacy is not an inherently paradoxical concept. A proper understanding of Nietzsche’s anti-humanism provides the resources to resolve the paradox and to use the solution of the puzzle to illuminate Nietzsche’s insights about human psychology. (shrink)

The Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads characterize the life of the saṃnyāsin as devoid of earthly pleasures. At the same time, these and other texts record confusion and suspicion toward those who would pursue such a life, and disbelief that such severe austerity could be required. To many, the saṃnyāsin seems to forsake the good life in forsaking earthly pleasures. I call this the ‘Precluded Pleasures Objection’ to the saṃnyāsin ideal. A number of replies to the Precluded Pleasures Objection might be drawn from (...) the Saṃnyāsa Upaniṣads themselves. The first points out that the saṃnyāsin ideal is typically reserved for members of the twice-born classes, and perhaps only brāhmaṇa men, who have reached relative... (shrink)

For Gianni Vattimo, the renunciation of violence is the starting point for constructing a post foundational politics. So far, criticism of Vattimo’s argument has focused on his larger commitment to metaphysical nihilism and whether the renunciation of violence is a thicker principle than his post foundational philosophy can support. I argue that Vattimo’s renunciation of violence can also be criticized for two other reasons. First, Vattimo attempts to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable uses of violence through an (...) under developed idea of self-defense. Second, despite his attention to the political and philosophical impact of mass communications technology, Vattimo ignores emerging technological challenges to our understanding of violence. Nonetheless, I argue that Vattimo’s renunciation can still serve as a useful starting point for contemporary political thinking. What Vattimo’s logic shows is that we can enhance the moral standing of democracy by decisively detaching its practices and institutions from historical artifacts of political violence. (shrink)

The aim of this dissertation is to present a systematic exposition of renunciation (Samnyasa) as a philosophico-religious category within Indian tradition with special reference to Advaita Vedanta of Samkaracarya.

In the essay “Das Wort” (“Words”), Martin Heidegger wrote about “renunciation” (verzicht) in the context of the poetry of Stefan George. According toHeidegger the entrance into the possibility of Saying, with the capital “S” – as opposed to the chatter of every-day life – could be achieved in the instance of the poet’s deliberate acceptance of renunciation. Heidegger’s writings, including “Words,” have had an enormous influence in the second part of the 20th century on authors and thinkers alike. (...) And yet this influence may have had a pernicious effect, at least in the opinion of some commentators. In the 2005 book L’adieu à la littérature, William Marx, for instance, claimed that the 20th century is the time of a literature sans style. If on the one hand literature achieved its autonomy, on the other it farewelled the cognitive purpose with regard to the world, which, some could argue, equates with a retreat from its civilizing purpose. This essay does two things: first it illustrates and contextualizes the notion of “renunciation” from philosophical as well as literary and cultural perspectives: second it discusses a set of authors who have experienced the category of “renunciation” in different ways and with different outcomes. I refer to Maurice Blanchot, Frances Ponge and Édouard Glissant. (shrink)

En prenant en compte l’article de Freud sur le Moïse de Michel-Ange et son dernier ouvrage L’homme Moïse et le monothéisme, il est possible de montrer comment le renoncement pulsionnel ouvre la voie à la sublimation et à la réalité spirituelle.

Ricoeur interpreted the work of compromise as a creative process to imagine a new world by projecting ourselves into other people. The challenge of compromise is to learn to tell our own story differently within the contours of a broader collective narrative, in compliance with the paradigm of translation. As such, Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise is at risk of highlighting the element of creation, which refers to the social imagination of a shared vision of a better society, at the (...) cost of recognition of the element of renunciation, which refers to the reciprocal shelving of ideas and desires that the other side considers to be truly intolerable. However, I argue that we can read a delicate connection between forgetting, forgoing and forgiving in Ricoeur’s thought. It is, then, the model of forgiveness, as part of the paradigm of translation, that gives due respect to the importance of renunciation through the emphasis on the unjustifiable, for which renunciation even cannot suffice. The ‘poetics of pardon’ brings creation and renunciation together and, by doing so, it highlights that compromise always remains an object of hope. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 813-832, July 2022. Ricoeur interpreted the work of compromise as a creative process to imagine a new world by projecting ourselves into other people. The challenge of compromise is to learn to tell our own story differently within the contours of a broader collective narrative, in compliance with the paradigm of translation. As such, Ricoeur’s political ethics of compromise is at risk of highlighting the element of creation, which refers to the (...) social imagination of a shared vision of a better society, at the cost of recognition of the element of renunciation, which refers to the reciprocal shelving of ideas and desires that the other side considers to be truly intolerable. However, I argue that we can read a delicate connection between forgetting, forgoing and forgiving in Ricoeur’s thought. It is, then, the model of forgiveness, as part of the paradigm of translation, that gives due respect to the importance of renunciation through the emphasis on the unjustifiable, for which renunciation even cannot suffice. The ‘poetics of pardon’ brings creation and renunciation together and, by doing so, it highlights that compromise always remains an object of hope. (shrink)

This essay develops a new account of the work the self must perform on itself in disciplinary relations through the cultivation of resources from Foucault’s later work. By tracing the ethical self-relation from Greco-Roman antiquity to the Benedictine monastery, I am able to provide insight into the relationship of self-renunciation that underlies disciplinary docility and obedience. This self-renunciation undermines individuals’ ability to lead themselves and makes them reliant on another who has mastery of the truth through which the (...) subject must be constituted. Disciplinary relations were thus seen to be doubly efficacious in producing relations of domination: they attempt to eliminate the self- leadership of the individual which not only un- dermines the individual’s potential to resist; it leaves them in need of the dominating training that disciplinary relations institute. This insight into the activity of the individual in the produc- tion of their own docility was then used to clarify and develop aspects of two perennially enigmatic but powerful areas of Foucault’s work, his focus on “bodies and pleasures” and his turn to the “aesthetics of existence.”. (shrink)

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Migration and diversity are important factors in education of teachers around the globe. From an intercultural perspective, we shall analyse how metaphysical and religious assumptions overlap and enable teachers to motivate pupils from different religious-cultural backgrounds to understand in greater detail the facets of (minimal) universalism, relativism and other concepts that obtain in more or less open societies. We argue for a concept of Intercultural Human Rights Education that uses different texts in philosophy classes, includes controversial positions from different cultures, (...) and is methodologically versatile. According to this concept, we think that a) human dignity (as a typically Western concept) and human rights and b) one tradition of interpreting the Qur’an (renunciation of force and the Indian concept of ahimsā (nonviolence)), can motivate teachers to discuss the efforts and also the limits of an overlapping consensus about the intercultural perspective. Finally, we provide the outlines of a teaching unit plan in accordance with our theoretical insights. (shrink)

D. Z. Phillips thinks that the religious concept of immortality should necessarily be construed as not involving any idea of the self existing after death. In this paper it will be argued that his attempt to support this view on the basis of a descriptive analysis of the self-renouncing character of faith is inadequate. The notion of the finality of death is not essential to, nor inseparable from, a religious conception in which the nothingness of the self is stressed. That (...) this is so is suggested by the existence of religious notions of the nothingness of the self which are religious, in a sense comparable to that implied by Phillips, only in combination with a view of death as not being a termination of the self. (shrink)

Marc Van den Bosche suggests that Heidegger’s conceptions of Gestell and Gelassenheit, taken together with his analysis of Nietzschean Nihilism, depicts our era in a way that “supplements” Andrew Feenberg and Don Ihde’s work. Weaving these sources together, he sees the possibility of our becoming “technicians” that “live, in a released way, within the groundless.” Here, I raise some questions about whether the author has really fitted all these sources together and argue that his idea of becoming post-modern “technicians” appears (...) to require that we first practice a very un-Heideggerian kind of “renunciation.”. (shrink)

The fierce propaganda campaign against the CPSU and other Marxist-Leninist parties developed in the 1960s by the Mao Tse-tung group in China confronted the international communist movement with the fact that a new front in the ideological struggle had come into being. The significance of this struggle is defined by the fact that the matter at issue is what constitutes a contemporary, truly scientific interpretation of the principles of revolutionary theory, and the determination of the future of socialism and communism.

In this article we tried to point out the outstanding convergences between On abstinence of Porphyry, and the Indian ascetic tradition, as it is shown in the sources rooted in the Katha up. In this process, becomes evident the exquisite spirit of the neoplatonic philosopher and his search for an universaly view through which it could be able to express his compasive caring for the liberations of all the “inteligences of good will”.