In the 1950s and 60s, Martin Heidegger turned to sculpture to rethink the relationship between bodies and space and the role of art in our lives. In his texts on the subject—a catalog contribution for an Ernst Barlach exhibition, a speech at a gallery opening for Bernhard Heiliger, a lecture on bas-relief depictions of Athena, and a collaboration with Eduardo Chillida—he formulates his later aesthetic theory, a thinking of relationality. Against a traditional view of space as an empty container (...) for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein. Filled with illustrations of works that Heidegger encountered or considered, _Heidegger Among the Sculptors_ makes a singular contribution to the philosophy of sculpture. (shrink)

Great bliss clarified -- Six verses on co-emergence -- Utterly clear teaching of unification -- Definitive teaching on dreams -- Clear teaching on utter non-dwelling -- Full teaching of suchness -- Six verses on Madhyamaka.

This essay brings together the perspectives of phenomenology and East Asian philosophies through an engagement with Dōgen, Heidegger, Nishida, and Nishitani to address the concept of place in relation to the concept and feeling of homelessness. With respect to the notion of dwelling and finding one’s place in the world and with oneself, the experience of being and feeling lost psychologically will be considered as a way (dao) toward overcoming nihilism and as an opening to attaining an awakened mind.

España arrastra un problema de vivienda accesible desde hace veinte años. En 2001 el Instituto Nacional de Estadística publicaba un estudio en el que se anunciaba que el país contaba con 3,1 millones de casas desocupadas. Diez años después, tras la crisis del sector inmobiliario otro estudio evidenciaba la existencia de más hogares de hasta 3,4 millones de hogares vacíos.Este trabajo pretende realizar una revisión de las políticas fiscales llevadas a cabo tanto en España como en otros países para que (...) las viviendas vacías salgan al mercado del alquiler. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to ancient Chinese (...) Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.1 (2003) 64-76 [Access article in PDF] The Sign System in Chinese Landscape Paintings Cliff G. Mcmahon Paintings emerge from a culture field and must be interpreted in relation to the net of culture. A given culture will be implicated by the sign system used by the painter. Everyone agrees that in Chinese landscape paintings, the most important cultural bond is to ancient Chinese (...) Taoism, and to a lesser degree, to Confucianism. Obviously, then, the key for these landscapes is an alert understanding of Taoism, and the primary source is the book the Tao Tê Ching.Some of the most crucial elements in Taoist beliefs are often ignored in the analysis of the Taoist landscapes, and this deserves more attention. The core of Taoism lies in a philosophic and religious guess, and the guess is made as an effort to reach a high-order explanatory theory of the origin of the universe, the structure of the universe, and the best path for human life. The guess of the ancient Chinese sages goes something like this: The universe is created by an Ultimate One whose nature remains mysterious, beyond the power of words, an Absolute pervaded by the spirit of motherhood, and thus moved to the acts of creation, using two agents of creation. These two agents are invisible but real forces that operate by the tension of polarity, the dynamic interplay of negative and positive energies, much like male and female forces. The female power is called Yin, the male power Yang. The female power is seen wherever there is fluidity, softness, openness, receiving, emptiness, or darkness. The male power is at work in hardness, assertiveness, force, and light. Everything that is made is a blending of the Yin and Yang polarities, and the dynamism and flux of reality is based on the tendency of Yin and Yang to advance and retreat, the tendency of one to become the other, just as summer changes into winter, and day changes into night. In order for a man to be complete, he must learn to put on the way of woman, to be receptive. This is a very intelligent principle. [End Page 64] When we take in all our impressions of nature, and take in all the books we have read, we are in the receptive mode. The Yin female principle of emptiness has a priority over Yang in that there must be an empty space before any concrete thing comes to occupy the space. The Yin female force is seen in the low and quiet valley, and in the fluid receptivity of water. Yang is in the bold assertive mountains and in the hardness of stone. Yin appears in the graceful and flexible bending of bamboo, while Yang is in the hardness and strength of bamboo. Since Yin is associated with water, all forms of cloud and mist are symbols of Yin. Yang is action, Yin is wisdom.One of the most important aspects of Taoism is the principle that the mysterious Absolute One has permeated all of reality and serves the good of all creatures in every passing minute, asking nothing in return and offering no favoritism to any age or any group. This is obviously a sophisticated and intelligent principle for a theology. On this point, Taoism is superior to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Christianity might have taken a similar stand in that the gospel of John declares that the eternal logos dwells in all created things in a timeless manner, and was fully embedded in the world before the coming of the historical Jesus, but so far, Christians have almost totally ignored the opening lines of John.This philosophic core of Taoist belief compares to the great Western idea that Godhead creates by the use of cosmic agents. In the gospel of John, the logos is the agent. In chapter eight of Proverbs, Wisdom is the agent. In Plotinus, Nous is the agent. In Heraclitus, the polarities of love and hate are this agent. Sometimes the idea of cosmic agent is used to protect... (shrink)

As the world’s most populous country, China is experiencing unprecedented magnitude and speed of population ageing since it entered the ageing society two decades ago. The rapid population ageing- driven by decreasing fertility rate and prolonged life expectancy- has profound impacts on economic development and poses significant challenges for formal and informal care provision. Although the Chinese government has implemented a series of progressive policy reforms on pension, healthcare, and long-term care systems, the capacity gaps regarding the coverage, adequacy, affordability, (...) and sustainability remain large. At the same time, social and economic changes have eroded the supportive role of family, especially for rural-dwelling, childless, and empty-nest older adults. This chapter documents the statistical and social reality of ageing in China, introduces a series of policy reforms implemented by the Chinese government in response to population ageing, and describes the family dynamics and intergenerational support patterns under the changing socioeconomic background. Besides pressing challenges of ageing for family and society, this chapter also looks at the emerging lifestyle and proactivity for active ageing in China. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 23 (2003) 67-76 [Access article in PDF] Double Religious Belonging:A Process Approach Jay McDaniel Hendrix College Increasingly, Christians in the United States are turning to Buddhism for spiritual insight and nourishment. Many are reading books about Buddhism, and some are also meditating, participating in Buddhist retreats, and studying under Buddhist teachers. As they do so, they approach what might be called "dual religious belonging."The phrase itself can (...) suggest at least three metaphors. We can imagine them (1) as people crossing a bridge into the world of Buddhism and who then return to Christianity with fresh insights; or (2) as people with two intravenous tubes in their arms, one providing fluid from a Buddhist lineage and one providing fluid from a Christian lineage, for the sake of a more complete life; or, shifting to a more organic metaphor, (3) as people with primary roots in Christian soil but with secondary roots in Buddhist soil, who receive anchorage and sustenance from both kinds of soils.Shortly I will draw upon the third metaphor to suggest the desirability of a "taproot" as opposed to a "fibrous" approach for such double belonging, at least in its initial stages. First, a word is in order about the philosophical backdrop for my approach, which draws upon the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and its theological counterpart, process theology. Toward this end, I will draw upon the first metaphor: the bridge. A Bridge for Double Belonging Process theology emerged in the 1930s at the University of Chicago and has since been used by many Christians and some Buddhists, mainly but not exclusively Pure Land Buddhists, to interpret their respective religious perspectives. I myself have used this theology in several books to try to show how Christians can draw deeply from the wells of Buddhist insight and practice in ways that enrich and deepen Christian life.Process theology draws upon the "philosophy of organism" developed by the late philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead's philosophy is unique in that it has deep similarities with numerous Buddhist points of view even as it also offers a rich way of interpreting and appreciating core Christian insights. [End Page 67] It is no accident that process theologians such as John Cobb suggest that process theology is a way of seeing things—a theological bridge—that can help a Christian cross over into Buddhism, learn from it in deep ways, and return with fresh insights that enrich a walk with Christ; and that can also help Buddhists cross over into Christianity, learn from it in deep ways, and return with fresh insights for practicing the dharma.What, then, are the core teachings of process theology? If we imagine process theology as a wooden bridge, here would be ten of its planks:There are many worlds beyond words, which can be known in many ways, including prayer and meditation, empathy and imagination, intuition and mindful perception.Human life consists of a series of moments of experience, each of which includes, and is dependent on, the whole of the universe.The universe is an unfolding process that is never the same at two instants.Humans and other living beings have no substantial or permanent self that separates them from the surrounding world.Ultimate reality is a nonstatic and nondualistic Emptiness of which all things are manifestations: with Emptiness referring to (a) the emptiness of words and concepts as adequate descriptions of things as they are, (b) the sheer presence of things as they are in their suchness, (c) the absence of a self-contained substantiality or "own being" within things, (d) the sheer interconnectedness of all things, (e) the pure becoming of all things.There is a womblike presence—God—who shares in the joys and sufferings of each living being, and who is herself an example of no-self, interdependence, pure becoming, of the Emptiness described above.God is present within each living being an in-dwelling lure toward wisdom and compassion.God's presence is also found between humans, when they live in community with one another in a... (shrink)

In On Doubt, Vilém Flusser refines Martin Heidegger's famous declaration that "language is the dwelling of Being." For Flusser, "the word is the dwelling of being," because in fact, in the beginning, there was the word. On Doubt is a treatise on the human intellect, its relation to language, and the reality-forming discourses that subsequently emerge. For Flusser, the faith that the modern age places in Cartesian doubt plays a role similar to the one that faith in God (...) played in previous eras--a faith that needs to be challenged. Descartes doubts the world through his proposition cogito ergo sum, but leaves doubt itself untouched as indubitable and imperious. His cogito ergo sum may have proved to the Western intellect that thoughts exist, but it did not prove the existence of that which thinks: one can eliminate thinking and yet continue being. Therefore, should we not doubt doubt itself? Should we not try to go beyond this last step of Cartesian doubt and look for a new faith? The twentieth century has seen many attempts to defeat Cartesian doubt, however, this doubt of doubt has instead generated a complete loss of faith, which the West experiences as existential nihilism. Hence, the emergent emptying of values that results from such extreme doubt. Everything loses its meaning. Can this climate be overcome? Will the West survive the modern age? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.1 (2003) 48-76 [Access article in PDF] Dialogic Characteristics of Philosophical Discourse:The Case of Plato's Dialogues 1 Frédéric Cossutta The dialogic is increasingly acknowledged as a fundamental factor in the study of human language, a factor that transcends its explicit presence in dialogue. Habermas and Apel are examples of philosophers who do not think of the dialogic as subordinate to the monologic, an approach to reflexive (...) consciousness inherited from Cartesianism; they also invest it with a constitutive dimension when they demonstrate its foundational role in knowledge and ethics. In their eyes, dialogue does not so much constitute ordinary human activity as create the conditions of its possibility. Thus with Apel this pragmatic dimension becomes transcendental, a dimension logically independent of the social or historical circumstances within which it is brought to bear, and one that is capable of playing the role of ideal regulator in the establishment of any community that is authentically human.My aim in this paper is to investigate the role that this dialogic dimension plays in philosophical discourse. If it is constitutive, and not derived, as Habermas and Apel claim, then it should be found at work in the history of philosophy. Indeed a number of philosophers and historians of philosophy have recently claimed an implicit dialogicity at the core of Descartes's Meditations, although these are actually presented in the form of a soliloquy (cf. Jacques 1979; Beyssade and Marion 1994; Bouvier 1996). But while it is true that every philosophy exhibits interdiscursive and intertextual dimensions even at the moment that it attempts to efface all traces of this interplay to present itself as a closed system, may we not question this dialogical property as constitutive of philosophical discourse as such? Philosophers who present their doctrines in the form of dialogues often use this form merely for the purposes of polemic, refutation, or instruction. There is, however, one famous exception: Plato, whose philosophy [End Page 48] is developed for the most part through a series of fictional dialogues, to which his talent gives an intrinsic "literary" quality. We thus have a case in which we can justifiably examine the philosophical value of the dialogue form. Historians of philosophy usually claim that the elements of his dialogues are no more than expressions of an underlying and constitutive dialectical dimension, though there is some dissent. 2 But I shall show that all of the elements of the dialogues, even the prologues and the settings, play a role that is intrinsically philosophical. Studying these elements will enable us to reveal the philosophical status of the dialogical dimension.I shall consider three hypotheses: (1) Though Plato's dialogues are literary rather than actual, their form cannot be reduced to the empty shell for an otherwise purely monological thought; there is an effective dialogism at work in both the early and the later Dialogues. This statement can be more easily accepted if it is recalled that philosophical activity for Plato consists of dialegsthai (Dixsaut 1985). 3 (2) In Plato, in effect, dialogue constitutes philosophical speech itself. The link between dialogue as a way of embodying doctrine and dialectics as an expression of the process of thought is intrinsic and necessary. Insofar as this link is necessary, dialogic activity cannot be characterized as an empirical practice of conversation, nor can it be reconstructed as a literary genre; rather, it is informed throughout by a philosophical theory whose explanation it makes generally available. (3) As a consequence, dialogic interplay at work in the Dialogues follows pragmatic rules that are not empirical in nature but possess a transcendental dimension and require ethical presuppositions. A parallel may thus be drawn between the Platonist conception of dialogue and the theory developed by Karl Otto Apel as "transcendental pragmatics" (1987 and 1994). This last point I shall dwell upon at length. Plato's Dialogues: Dialogism or hidden monologism? Paradoxically, the very thinkers who regard language as constitutively dialogic refuse to see this dialogism in Plato. It is true that at first sight the Platonic dialogues seem to turn the... (shrink)

This essay argues that in constraining travel to specific motorized vehicles, the Interstate Highway System’s transportation hegemony alienates humans from both mythic and existential dimensions of lived experience. By separating humans from encountering the environment through their indigenous connection to the earth, their feet, the highway system alienates them from what it means to dwell intersubjectively in a place. This alienation includes the loss of cultural memory rooted in place: the emptying of meaning that mythic symbolism and rituals create in (...) habituating humans to dwelling in place. Freeway alienation severs human cooperation with the constituents of the environment that is necessary for creatively maintaining a healthy mutual habitat. (shrink)

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. Currently available in the collection I Looked Alive . © 2010 The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions | ISBN 978-1934029-07-7 Originally published 2003 Four Walls Eight Windows. continent. 1.1 (2011): 43-51. Introduction Ben Segal What interests me is instigated language, language dishabituated from its ordinary doings, language startled by itself. I don't know where that sort of interest locates me, or leaves me, but a lot of the books I see in the stores (...) seem to lack language entirely. Gary Lutz (2006). This issue of continent.'s fiction section features a reprint of “This Is Nice of You” from the first edition of Gary Lutz's collection I Looked Alive . That book was originally released by Four Walls Eight Windows in 2003 and has since been reissued in 2010 by The Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions. Calamari Press has also reissued Lutz's Stories in the Worst Way (originally published by Knopf, largely forgotten and dismissed, and then re-issued by the too-short-lived 3rd Bed). “This Is Nice of You” was edited for the re-issue of I Looked Alive and, as the original book is out of print, the earlier version of the story has been hard to come by for some time. This initial version is a bit longer than the new version—Lutz is a master of tightening down his texts to their most linguistically intensified cores—but it is in no way sloppy. It is a great privilege for continent. to be able to make available rare texts of (first) aesthetic and (second) scholarly value. For those readers unfamiliar with Gary Lutz, I believe this story will serve as a worthy introduction. Like Raymond Carver, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, and so many other important twentieth century and contemporary short story writers, Lutz studied with and was edited by Gordon Lish. This connection is apparent in his attention to sound and the sentence as compositional unit, but Lutz's is a unique voice. “This Is Nice of You” bears Lutz's trademark torqued and turning syntax, his sexed-but-nameless characters, his rendering of the human body and its emissions as utterly discomfiting. Lutz's preoccupations with the mundane raise ordinariness, via startling language and observation, to grandiosity and grotesquery. In the fall of 2008, Lutz delivered a lecture entitled “The Sentence is a Lonely Place” to writing students at Columbia University. The lecture was later printed in The Believer (and is linked below). In it, he spoke about the importance of the sentence as a compositional unit, as even the distinguishing formal characteristic of prose. Specifically, Lutz explained that, from Lish, he had developed a "poetics of the sentence." Accordingly, Lutz constructs his stories at the level of the sentence, paying extreme attention to the material of words- their letters and their sounds- and the way they abut one another and interact on this material level even before they are employed in the service of traditional aims of fiction like meaning or story. Lutz often uses a(n almost constraint-related) technique called consecution. Letters or sounds from one word are carried forward into the following, producing drama and movement in the language itself at a level entirely apart from that of plot. For example, you can see how the 't's in the first sentence of “This Is Nice of You” repeat fast and hard through met and then soften into the 'th's of brothers and they. This close attention to the specific material and characteristic conditions of prose means that Gary Lutz's work always involves both a happening in language and of language. “This Is Nice of You” has a richness and depth that is hidden not in symbolism or obscure reference but on the surface of the page, in the language of every sentence. FURTHER READING Lutz, Gary. “ The Sentence Is a Lonely Place. ” The Believer January, 2009. Web. Short stories and excerpts at Web del Sol . Web. Taylor, Justin. “ An Interview with Gary Lutz .” Bookslut. July, 2006. Web. THIS IS NICE OF YOU [156] [1] I was a man dropping already well through my forties, filthy with myself, when, taking a turn at the toilets one afternoon, I met two brothers-they said they were brothers-who swore they had a sister, a schoolteacher, an officer of instruction at the county college, a whirlwind midlife turmoil of everything already put to ruin, who had gone off from a new marriage in an old car, an upkept and ennobling sedan, but had returned now to the apartment and [157] was living there alone with the little runoff there was from the marriage-some outcurved appliances, apparently, and low-posted furniture promoting its own mystery but becoming figurable in certain concentrations of TV light-and, above all, a telephone (on a pedestal, they insisted), the handpiece of which she gripped in lieu of exercise, or in fury, and I thus let out my little, reliable cry that I was in fact a student of the telephone, that it was a debasing apparatus in the main, with its meager economy of bells and tones, and the intimacy of the mouthpiece that sent your breath, tiny aftervapors of it, back toward your lips, so that regardless of the party accepting the outgoing products of your voice, you were, at most, in a further, rivaling exchange with yourself alone, and this is what must have brought the two of them around, the men who proclaimed brotherhood with the woman, because they offered me her phone number, put it at my disposal on a piece of paper one of them had already committed it to, a tearing from a menu, and the looks the men were now giving me had deletions in them, already, of my exact, beanpole shape and size. So off I went to a pay phone, the nearest canopied one I could find. The woman answered after the second ring and said she needed a lift right that very moment into the little, unlevel city close by. She was idling in the doorway of the building when I pulled up in front, and I helped her into the car, then got back in myself. I had always had a way of not having to look at people that nonetheless brought them to me in full, and so I still am certain of the susceptive and impressible comp-[158]lexion, the shimmer on the mouth, a lipstick of low brilliance, a difficulty around the eyes, the hair short and rayed out exclamation ally, skin bagged up over the elbow bone, conflict even in how her arms stayed at her sides—in sum, a spinal loveliness for me, an off-blonde quantity with shadowed, thumbworn hollows that put me out of as much as I might have ever known of women before. I set the two of us into the narrow traffic, and I remember telling her, by way of explaining the little burden which I had shifted, by now, from the shelf of the dashboard and onto my lap, that when you lived in filth, as I then did, a daily newspaper came to count for a lot, although instead of the thick-supplemented local paper I bought a trimmer one from a backlying town—not, of course, for any affluences of native data it carried, but as an article of house ware: a rough immaculacy in four lank sections, a set of fresh, hygienic surfaces to come between the table, say, and whatever I had going for me at the table, if the table was where I was going forward—because what else so cheap comes so clean and far-spreading? The woman told me that her own trouble with paper was that through a modest hole, no larger than a quarter, that had been drilled a foot or so above the floor (the standard height, she had reasoned, of legitimate electrical outlets), and by means of which her faculty office had at last gained communication with the roomier but unoccupied office next door, more and more often shot a single sheet of paper, plain copier paper she had rolled just barely into a tube, [159] so that after landing on the floor of the neighboring office the paper would preserve little if any of the curl, and there would be nothing written or typed on it, of course, and it was always a blank sheet that had been ageing on her desk for some time and had already been moved around, or advanced, from station to station on the desktop, coming into further creaselets and crimps and other infirmities—paper, in short, still too bare and unfraught to be thrown responsibly and forgettably away, and yet too seasoned and beset with irritations of the surface (a molelike blemish, say, or what looked like a tiny hair, an eyelash, sunk into it, or frecklings, or notational pressings of a fingernail), too wrought, in sum, for the paper to be appointed to any secure curricular purpose. Her office, she claimed, was in fact full of such paper, much-handled and singularized sheets of it by the loose, functionless hundred. I had to get it across to the woman that I myself no longer had an office, or any other place to divide me reliably from everybody else, and that for much of the daylight I thus appeared to be among people because I kept putting myself where people came together into even closer-fitting assortments, the viewing areas and showrooms and rotundas and such: I took in the lean-to look of the women, the tongues coming and going in what the men kept thinking of to say—whole families of low knees for me to bark my shins against during the crowded and involving way out. At home afterward, in the one room where my life was packed down, I would keep my nose stuck in the safehold of the phone [160] book, where the names of people suffered reduction to mere episodes of the alphabet and underwent humbling declensions down every column (Lail, Lain, Laine, Lainerd), and he names of streets, of the towns and townships, got docked in crude, heedless abbreviations (the vowels almost always the first to get poked out), and I would run my eyes over the telephone numbers themselves, each sequence of digits another fallible run of the infinite. I thus corrected my feelings for people and assembled myself emotionally into whatever else I had at hand—the obligating arms of the clothes hangers, usually, or the keen-angled understructure, the guardian legginess, of the ironing board. The woman said that in her case, though, it was more a matter of making slow circuits of the classroom where she had to put across the Emporial Sciences, retail theory and methods, to heat-giving and suggestive young women, some of them world cruelties already. There was the cooing of empty stomachs in the hour just before lunch, and the braying and fizzle of loaded stomachs in the low hours of the afternoon. She would recite her notes in a voice barely loyal to anyone octave, a tiny alluvium of slaver hardening at the corners of her mouth on the days she gave the glassy lozenges a slow, warming suck, and she would take lowering notice of how whatever she said succumbed at once to freak spellings and razzing paraphrase in the big, dividered notebooks; and because in midafternoon light the world looked as thorough, as filled in, as it was ever going to get, a better way to set about ruining her eyes was to review how hair had [161] established itself on the arms of the young women, because almost every arm had brought across itself a welcome and diversifying shadow. On one girl it would be a fine, driftless haze afloat above the white of the arm, never seeming to touch down on the skin itself. (An atmosphere, at most, of chestnut brown.) On another, it was as if copper wire, the narrowmost lengthlets of it, had been stuck into the fleshy batter of the thick, freckled forearms. On a third: a field of it–wheat-colored, thin-spun. On a fourth; a differencing, darkish updrift that shaded off as it approached the inner bend of the elbow, then re-emerged at the base of the upper arm as whiskery fringe. On others it was a brassy or rust-colored frizz, or it was as coarse as cornsilk, or it looked fussed on, as if the arm had been slowly stroked with charcoal. But here the woman broke off, or I may well have made an interruption of my own—I think I must have asked whether she was hungry, and she said if I was, and so on one of the lesser streets I parked the car and led her down into a belowstairs eating house I still remembered. Sandwiches were presently lowered in front of us. I watched her remove the festooned toothpick from hers and then play her fingers over the toasted planes before she took a fond first bite. "This is nice of you," she said. I must have looked at her in the way I then had of getting people to speak so they would not seem to be dwelling any longer on my features, because if on the well-set face the mouth and eyes are said to seem frozen in elegant orbit about the til) of the nose, then mine was a face that behold-[162]ers, regarders, could not help trying to round off with greater success, to goad the particulars of it back into the arcs they had wandered away from—the mouth, for instance, having been pursed and pinched suchwise that it seemed resident more on one side of the face than the other—and there were other signs of original strife to be busied with (slapdash eyebrows unbunched, it appeared, from reserves of hair elsewhere on my person; a showing of adult acne, a shrivelly little relevance of it, confined to the declivity of my nose); and so to be polite, the woman thus sank her gaze into her sandwich, and told me, in a voice lowered accordingly, that, one late-childhood summer, she had devoted herself to collecting postage stamps: it was a tongue-involving sideline to early-arriving puberty, and she liked having to lick the pale, gummed hinges instead of the sticky backs of the stamps themselves before entering everything into the hosting album; and once, during some foul weather between her and a brother (the older, thrown-over one, who had already made a habit of fooling the underside of his arm across the top of hers and calling her "pussified"), she reached for the shoe box in which she had let duplicate stamps accumulate—Spanish ones, mostly, of a fading orange—and sent the box slooshing through the lower air so that the stamps showered onto the brother's bare legs with a full, delicate harm. The woman was now touching up the surface of her iced tea with tiny activities, initiatives, of the longspun spoon. I myself was good at getting my touch onto things, although in a way that seemed to mix up the motive atoms inside [163] them, but I was satisfied that for the moment my sandwich, the unbitten-at half of it, was displayable and fit and local to my plate. The woman went on to say that, as a child, she had been bundled off, many an afternoon, to the slope-ceilinged quarters of a bachelor uncle who, when speaking of anybody not immediately present, could not bring himself to use the person's name but instead would say "an acquaintance of mine in ..." and then mention the name of some lapsed homeland, or little-loved rural orchestra, or backset building about to come down; and it was never a riddle, this device of his (not once could the girl have been expected to identify any of the subjects), and no matter how often and aloud he insisted that particularizing persons any further—bringing even a first name down upon anyone of them—would have been indecent, he claimed, much like doing things to people while they slept, the girl accepted all of the uncle's prim and extravagant evasion for what he surely must have intended it to be: a neat, protective trick to space the world out a little further in her favor, to scatter the population so that wherever her hand might at last come down, it would have to be on herself alone. And here I could sense that the woman wanted from my mouth an account of as much as I myself might have ever managed of attachment, so I told her I had once owned a house (a rising, really, of much-fingered, handwrought architecture that amounted to a little family of rooms above garages: a boxlike building with a rattly thorax of downspouts [164] and drainpipes and an unfolded but full-toned fire escape), and I had had for a time a boarder, a student, a high-colored, loose-packed representative of declining girlhood, hung with necklaces and barrettes, a girl of precise but shifting leanings and inclinations; and the afternoon she had come round to ask after the room, I stood in the entranceway, handshaken and asweat, and from what would later be my memory of the girl, I made off with, first, how every pore of her nose seemed to be sheltering within itself a tiny dark seedlet, a grain of something immediately, enormously valuable. And an almost lipless mouth (just a slit, practically), the teeth inside looking wet, watered-it was my life's chore, at that instant, to keep from sending the back of my thumb blotterlike across the line of them (I was later to learn she drank everything cold and through the narrowest of straws). And her hair: it was tea-colored hair she had, long and reachful, an unstopped downcome of it. Tall for a girl, but she managed to stay out of much of her height and put herself across as somebody backward, or behind. I must have told the girl, as best I could, that I of course had a wife, a full-faced, imperishable partner, though for the moment she was gone otherwhere in the marriage, and here the woman, my present companion, my tablemate, whose feet were now parked, in parallel, on the grade of my upper leg, interrupted to say that her husband, too, had been such a liar, and what could I bring up by way of reply other than that a lie is a truth struck through with other, further truth, or that a lie is the present multiplied by the past or that a lie [165] is an outcry of borrowed hope? The woman gave me an allowed look of disgust, her eyes lowered but still popular with me, and on I went with what had now become the girl of my story. For there had been a great, gainful carpet in the room I put the girl into, a matty expanse of coarse, grabby piles, an engrossing affair that took things into itself and held them tight, misered them, and I of course insisted that the girl not bother herself with its upkeep, that I enjoyed weekly access to a prestigious, upstanding vacuum cleaner; but no sooner was the girl out of the house each morning than I would withdraw from my room, where time was unportionable, and loose myself into the ticktock impertinence of the girl's room and get down on my knees, and, going after the carpet first with my fingers, then with a forceps, and finally by unspooling lengths of clear package-sealing tape and pressing them against the tufts in neat rectangles to catch what I might have missed, I brought vast tracts of the carpet to depletion, recovering not simply the girlinesses, the girleries, one would expect (buttons, straight pins, downed jewelry), but flirtier personalia in the form, say, of a stray confetto brought into the world when a page had been wrung with out caution from a spiral-bound notebook, or some pleated paper shells of the chocolates she required, or one of the bargain antihistamines she took to get her naps going, or a trash-bag tie ragged enough to show the kinked line of the wire within (this I would get wound around my finger), or a cough drop enwrapped like a bonbon (I would undo the [166] wings of the wrapper and have to decide whether to suck the drop all down or begin chewing it midway)—I became the following, the public, that these things, these off-faIlings, had come to have; but mostly there was hair, afloat above the uppermost pushings of the fabric of the carpet an almost continuous haziness of loose hairs of all lengths and sources, and I would have to set them out on a fresh sheet of paper and assort them according to the regions of the body they had taken their departure from, and in no time I had nest-like filiations of broken filaments and smaller involvements of the hairs that made me think of hooks, of barbs, of treble clefs, and each pile required a separate envelope, to be filed in a separate shoe box for every sector of the body until, I hoped, the boxes themselves would no longer be enough and I would have raised something semblable, brought up something equal in volume to the comprehensive girl herself. And her wastebasket! For every bit of rubbish, every dreariment she tossed into the thing, I would, in secret, deposit a reciprocal discard of my own, matching a spotted, confessory tissue of hers with a lurid throwaway after my own heart–the cardboard substructions of a fresh parcel of underwear, maybe, or tearings from pantyhose I now and again pressed against a span of my forearm to work onto it the complications of female shading I otherwise made do, choosily, without. I thus built the two of us up together in her trash! One afternoon-it was another of those lifeful, unsam-[167]pled days on which the world humors us each a little differently to keep us nicely on our last legs—I discovered in the wastebasket an inch-deep textbook of hers, a paperback with a celery-colored cover that had come partly unglued, and this dilapidation I paired off, naturally, with a name-your baby guide to whose pages, during my recurrent turnings of them, in bed or at table, I had contributed dried produces of my person, a chemical splendor entirely mine. This coupling sent a sudden spigoty thrill from me that forced an unbuckling and an unzipping and a cleanup with a handkerchief I then ventured responsively into the wastebasket as well. It was in the bathroom afterward that I found a suds-clouded puddle on the unlevel floor of the tub, a little undrained remainder, rimmed with offscum, of the girl's prolonged early-morning soak, and this was as much as I needed to get on my hands; I pressed them flat against the wet porcelain, then flapped them around in the air, and that was when I noticed it—in the amphitheater of the toilet bowl, an orange-yellow tint, or value, to the waters. When the girl arrived home that evening, I told her, of course, that I had discovered fresh, unforeseen trouble within the tank of thelet (a misalignment of the trip lever, a waywardness of the float ball, a ulation of the lift wires, kinks and defects, really, throughout the entire system) and that in fine it was an apparatus now operable only by means of advanced and strenuous equilibrial manipulations that it would be unseemly, inhospitable, of me to pre-[168]sume to burd to burden her with–so that from here on out, following any leak or evacuation she need merely lower the lid and then, before quitting the room, ring the handbell that had been placed on the would seeeverythinghing else. But the bell never rang, not even once, and from my window the next morning I watched the girl carry from the house a little plastic bag distended balloonishly, much like those bags you will remember having seen in the hands of children bearing homeward their solitary carnival-prize goldfish. In fact, I never ran across the likes of the girl again. The man who came to collect her things-not the father, apparently, but an advocate, an upholder-l found to be dull-eared and lax in his speech, and the better part of his face seemed to have already begun making tiny, rotational departures from whatever it was that the eyes, themselves impressively mobile, were just that moment having to take in. (Was there a lamp in the house that was not that night slopping its wattage over everything?) I guess I was waiting for the man to take a laggard, last-minute interest in me, and by now I was pushing everything out into the paired first person–it was, I said, “Our night shot,” and I began including the two of us in whatever it might be doing out, the expected sprinkles and such—but he was no friendship buff, and he paid no heed to my telling him that the only dress of hers I'd ever twidged myself into even part of the way had been the simplest of them all, a large-buttoned wonder of depthless blue, and then only on the principle that one naturally fits whatever one has into whatever somebody else [169] had first, or how else would the world keep getting any taller with people? The man just went about the removal of the girl's things without having to be reminded too noticeably, I guess, of how every dick hangs by a thread. My listener, though, had by this time brought about some becoming slowings of her arm—it was an arm inclinable to langorous diagonals and magicianly swoops through the air above the tabletop—but it no longer was involving itself with her plate, so I suggested we shove off, I made payment for the food, and on our way to the car, and then in the car as I took to following her pointings, the directional tilts of her head, she said that you naturally kept putting more and more of yourself into another person, at first wondering how much she can take, how much of you is accumulable and how much she can hold, and you're letting things out, disbursing yourself, and you've soon got things set up in her, and room is being made for even more of you, and if you bring this off with enough people, even two or three, what you've got is at first a comfort, because you can pass yourself along and move a little more widely through the world and leave it to these others to man your grievances, your disappointments; and what brought this to mind, the woman said, was a term of financial hardship she had contrived for herself a few years back, an unpaid leave of absence from scrupling letter grades onto quiz papers (propped-up As, and upended Bs made to look, rather, like fannies; all As and Bs, no Cs or anything lower, the difference between an A and a B having less to do with the accuracy of whatever facts might [170] have been impounded in provided for an answer than with anything recallable about the way the enrollee ad conformed her body to the confining perpendiculars of her chair and the navel-level writing surface that projected from it, or the way there might one day have been an unignorable blush on the instep of a once-moseying foot, disburdened of its shoe, that had got itself trapped in the grillwork of that cagelike involvement, intended for books, that was welded to, or otherwise schemed into, the underworks of the chair)—this had been a duration, in short, of controlled difficulty when the misexpenditure of even a twenty-dollar bill had set her thrilling, gloating, over everything she would miss out on, and one afternoon she had made an engagement for a haircut, just a trim, and very early in the session the haircutter, a woman ill-defined in the face but otherwise full of conspicuities of emotion, set down the prevailing scissors and pressed the flat of a lukewarm hand against the woman's cheek, held it there for a good minute or longer, while the other hand eventually found its way into a drawer, a shallow treasury of slender specialty scissors, one pair of which the cutter withdrew and began routing deductively through the woman's hair, the other hand staying put on the cheek, longer and longer, and the woman went home and for afterward the bathtub was now a more likely destination than any of the upright furniture, and it got easier to fill the tub with further clarifying volumes than to clear space on the difficult heights of the sofa, and she was hardly claiming to have become a cleaner [171] person in result—she in fact would often discover, voyaging about her body, a browned, fractionary detail of a larger crepe of toilet tissue that must have got itself stuck in some assy crevice and was impossible to get plucked out of the revolving suds—she was saying only that she spent more and more of her time thus immersed, ill off in water, and the haircutter had surely had a hand in it, the woman was doing some of the cutter's life now, coming into some of its wrong, because you sometimes have to look to somebody else's life to get dimensions set back even part of the way around your own, and it should not have to be any less your own life when it comes from somebody else, and you could surely fudge a society out of anyone available person and get this person doubling for the many, so that in the little run of things perpetuable from one person to the next, every loose moment stood to become a complete, active finality. But by now this was a new day, with only an hour or so off it already, and the place the woman had made me bring us to, the man's place, with a promise that the man was elsewhere—this was on a little offshoot of a street, a stewy efficiency apartment the color had long ago gone out of; and when, once in bed, still clothed, I found among the sheets and blankets a spoiling pair of the man's underpants, one of the leg openings of which was puckered into an avid, sloppy mouth, I held myself accountable for redisposing the fabric until I got a befitting featurelessness back onto it; but all the while, I am sure I had to make myself go over again in my mind that if the body is the porter of as many organs of affec-[172]tion as there might one day turn out to be, then the idea was to let the thing carry you to where you would otherwise never have any reason to arrive, because I listened for the unmelodiof the the thede ofthe woman's zipper, and then the woman made me put myself out of my own clothes, the attritional corduroys and overshirt, and got herself up at last onto the topic not of the man whose apartment it was (because his story was scarcely the story of how the boy who decides he is half a girl no sooner starts to worry about where the other half might than he gets careless with where he rests his eyes, or what he gives even the feeblest of fingerholds to, and anything, even a crumbly triangle of pie offered on a saucer instead of on a pie plate proper, comes in easy, ready, wronging answer), but of her husband, and how, no more than a couple of months into the marriage, he had begun snugging away in his undershorts a little source of chanc, reliable frictions to nudge him onward through the workday—anything company-keeping that could be counted on not to slide out of the elasticky leg holes: a half-dollar packet of chocolate tittles, maybe, that was barely noticeable in the baggy surround of the widecut trousers so popular at the time. For by now the woman had at last brought what is usually called the other mouth to within only inches of my lips, but it is not a mouth, obviously, although I let myself go along with the goodwill behind the comparison, the way I will remain loyal to anything deliberately and faithfully misunderstood, and I fussed my tongue against the vital trifles hung inside of her, as much of the curtailed finery as I could find, [173] and gave the whole insimplicity of it a slow-circling, examinational lick, until I was taking a sudden tepid downwash on the tongue. It was a familiar, latrine in dribble that must have tasted, no doubt, like trouble just starting out.p [1] Editor's Note: Original pagination from first edition print denoted with bracketed page numbers. (shrink)

continent. 1.3 (2011): 201-207. “Poetry is experience, linked to a vital approach, to a movement which is accomplished in the serious, purposeful course of life. In order to write a single line, one must have exhausted life.” —Maurice Blanchot (1982, 89) Nikos Karouzos had a communist teacher for a father and an orthodox priest for a grandfather. From his four years up to his high school graduation he was incessantly educated, reading the entire private library of his granddad, comprising mainly (...) the Orthodox Church Fathers and the ancient classics. Later on in his life he sold the library for money, only to buy a little more time before he went broke again: “I carry sorrow like a cage/ I got no birds/ as I come back from her hair/ I see the profit emptied/ cool from terror.” (1993, Ι, 101) Nowadays—and ridiculously recently—we are more than apt to speak of a certain insouciance pertaining to the Greek form of expenditure: expenditure without any type of investment, sometimes not (even) symbolic. In the vaults of the European unconscious, this imprudent stance still conjures a “capital punishment” in the form of de-capitation, reflecting back the fear of excess and the terror of its consequences.1 Thus the Greek way of living is very close to what a stranger could have termed as “the Greek way of dying.” Yet, what is not often understood is that the Greek esprit , the same one that invented the maxim μηδ?ν ?γαν (“nothing in excess”), does not experience death solely as an imminent fear of bankruptcy. For it miraculously combines its unconditional acceptance with the promise of a resurrection that is always there in the scents of Spring, from Dionysus to the orthodox Christ: “Everyone resurrects himself through dying [….] Resurrection is the switching of mortalities.” (2002, 94) Hence, if an entire library was imprudently traded for a plate with seven olives, a sliced tomato and some fresh goat cheese, let us not be fooled: this is not the meal of the pauper, but that of “an aristocrat from God” (1993, II, 491) feeding his eloquent loudmouth, ridiculously cut open in an otherwise rock-solid caput . *** To speak of the Greek experience is to speak about a half-dead language that still utters in life what is seemingly excluded from it and thus forbidden to be talked about: death. Death as anything that is out of this world, as something that will never return . Still, along with an experience of death that recently waned as a worn-out academic fashion, the Greek experience is dead too. Nearly 2300 years of written words separating Homer from the fall of Byzantium equal 500 books on a library traded for money: “I am with the killed. Hence my deepest solitude. I do not feel this tremendous macho society, beyond from the fact that it is a ruthlessly consuming one. It is me who pays all the time .” (2002, 57) Let us do the math and see how much this dealing with the Greek experience is costing the poet and how much dealing with the Greek experience might cost us today. *** “I do not guarantee a single word.” (Karouzos, 1993, II, 454) Through its various dialects and forms, the Greek language speaks through an incessant historical dissemination. Anyone who is aware of this terrifying polymorphy and still calls himself a poet, must stand against a white sheet of paper, pen-in-hand, with a very particular duty: to be as fully inconsistent as possible. In the formally ironic uniqueness of the poem, the poet functions as “a band-aid for lesser and greater antinomies.” (1993, I, 251) Of course these antinomies are not exhausted in language—they are historical, political and, alas, existential. Yet, beyond appearances , it is language that ruthlessly encodes them through history, submitting the poet to the temptation of placing them one next to the other on a single white sheet. The closer their neighboring, the greater the scattering of the writer in the ironic uniqueness of the paper. In a work where poetic license is described as a “freedom-impasse” (2002, 51), this task is undertaken in full conscience of its personal consequences: “what I am interested in is to escape my individuality (envisioning the non-ego) […] Nevertheless, my dissociations never achieve duration.” (2002, 74-75) Hence, though poetry is the “deserted direction of will,” (1998, 62) the stance of the poet is not that of a Nietzschean “great man.”2 Whereas drunkenness provides a thread between the poem and the excess it both presupposes and infuses (“Poetry always enlarges. ‘Drunkenness’ is nothing more than that,” (2002, 85)), whereas language flashes in loudmouth spurts of déraison (“When I am alone I do something else. I utter words. For example, while having my ouzo and listening to music I am most likely capable of randomly shouting ‘Electricity!’” (2002, 138)), the poet never gives in to the double affirmation that would eventually risk the “element of pleasure in discourse.” (2002, 80)” It is exactly because the gap of the antinomies is so vast that poetry is not meant to be written with a hammer. Neither does writing consist in a reevaluation of those elements. In short, poetry is not an affirmation of difference, but the surprising beauty of chiming antinomies. We might never transcend them, but it is up to us to put them together. Yet again, this voisinage is not to be identified with the necessity of chance as an eternal return.4 On the contrary it is a return from that very return : Let us treat Yes as a No to No and No as a Yes […] And let us not forget that this pissed affirmation crumbled down Nietzsche’s intellect in the dark paths of this world. (2002, 88) This return from the “vicious circle” should in no way be taken as a form of artistic prudence. Rather it can be seen as a dribble of demonic inconsistency as Dionysus transforms himself into a Christ that is in turn de-theologized: “Who can forbid that? Every man is capable of his own theology, nothing can stop him.” (2002, 73-74) This is a turn towards an existential vision of the world, historically coinciding with a particular political defeat of the Left, to which the poet devoted all his life: after the defeat of the popular front I raised the question “why do we exist?” while others were asking “why we failed.” (2002, 57)5 But most of all it is a return to poetry that exceeds the existential question itself, going beyond the issue of faith. Poetry comes in as a question of return after a defeat that is confessed in full profanity. Though it accepts the necessity of the defeat, it does not affirm it. Though it negates it, the negation is not in the name of a promise to be delivered in the kingdom of heavens. Following a historical and existential defeat, poetry is born post mortem . It signals a return to Christ as “groundless religiousness in the surprise of the real as such” (2002, 72) which is at once a return to the refuge of childhood. It is not a question of endurance towards an eternal return. Rather it is a question on the possibility of an existential return. Returning in a world as someone who cannot enjoy any returns exactly because he is averse to guarantees. A return without returns. *** PHOTOCOPY OF HAPPINESS When I was young I used to pin down cicadas and step on ant nests. I used to stand there silent for hours. With threads I decapitated bees. Now I am a dead man breathing. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 336.) The return to the “paradise of childhood” (2002, 68) constitutes the devouring refuge of its own memory when defeat becomes the synonym of adulthood. The political struggles of a young communist in a country torn up by a civil war right after World War II fraught with incarcerations and exiles. Historically they resulted in the defeat of the communist movement in Greece and opened up a long turbulent road that would peak in the dictatorship of 1967. Existentially they led to a series of disillusionments: mental breakdown, divorce, abandonment of studies in law school. To the question “why do we exist” the answer was poetry. Still this exposé should not be read as a sweeping chronography of a man. For it actually happens to coincide with the historical fate of a nation that after its modern constitution never stopped dreaming of the glories of its past youth, in a present that was (and is) sweepingly disappointing. But isn’t this return to youth finally a way of compensating for a loss of youth that necessarily results in a losing adulthood? Will Greeks, the eternal children of Plato and Nietzsche, ever learn? How to return without dying, how to remember without wasting time? WE ARE IN THE OPEN MEANING Living the coldest mauve night right across Parthenon I went to take a piss on some foliage and I was enjoying the foliage as it was steaming. (Karouzos, 1993, II, 340) Beyond the historical tragedies of modern Greece and away from any personal disappointments, the relation that this land holds with language and history is mediated through the Greek light—whose omnipresence is the very condition of its transcendence. All historical contradictions from Dionysus to Christ took place under this light; all those disseminated dialects were spoken beneath its warmth. To paraphrase Lévinas,6 light is both the condition of the world and of our withdrawal from it—a withdrawal towards the invisibility of God, of the dead, of meta-physics, resulting from the temptation that all is still here, behind this light the visibility of which they once evaded: “birds, the allurement of God.” (1993, I, 17) Under that luminous sky, if Greeks can do anything at all, it is to envision a return that will never come. All they can do is write poetry—which is doing nothing; other than lending an ear to a disseminated language whispering a unity that cannot be promised, as an adulthood in defeat is ready to recognize. Trying “to trap the invisible in visibility” (1993, II, 483) they forget that they have grown up and one day they die—with the promise of return. Hence an additional meaning must be given to this return to childhood. It does not signal salvation but rather its promise. To the ears of an aged continent it means that the return to/of poetry is a losing game, a return without returns. “Europe, Europe… you are nothing more than the continuation of Barabbas.” (1993, I, 295) *** “Life is not there to verify theories.”7 The records show that Karouzos was finally given a second-class pension from the Greek government, at the time when he was being recognized by the literary press as one of Greece’s major contemporary poets. Being neither a bourgeois nor a nobelist, he proclaimed himself to be an anarcho-communist, unconditionally faithful to the utopia of a classless society. He also drank, heavily. “Capitalism made an animal out of man/ Marxism made an animal out of truth/ Shut up.” (1993, II, 369) Perhaps one of the most scandalous divides of our times has been the one between the living and the dead, the latent prohibition that the living should not be concerned with the dead based on the mere impossibility of the dead to be concerned with the living in the first place. What adds to this scandal is that this divide abuses anything that cannot return to us by subsuming it under the same futility. Hence death is no longer “loss” in the usual sense. It no more refers to the things we lost but to our “loss” (of time, money and well-being) as we insist to dwell on them. Death is a waste —of time. It is this waste that we find in the insouciance of Greek expenditure; the waste in dealing with a language that most of its historical part is no longer spoken (a dead language); the waste in translating a poet who is ex definitio untranslatable; the waste of his vision, his money, his life. The waste of dealing with anything that cannot return and that cannot bring in any returns . But it is also the waste of life that poetry itself presupposes, the waste of dealing with invisibility, with anything that is out of this world and thus invokes the fear of death that is in turn—and surprisingly— nowhere to be found. Instead of death, what is there, beyond the light, is the being without us (to recall the Lévinasian il y a ), the mumble of our own nothingness which constitutes the price to be paid for writing poetry under an evergreek light. To understand this to-and-fro, is to realize that poetry is something out of this world that nevertheless takes place in this world, by virtue of this world. But to ridiculously equate this to-and-fro with death as non-existence, is to exile poetry along with its own possibility from this same old world: I do not believe that poetry will ever disappear from this world. […] But I am also sure that it does not have many chances of playing, as you say, a redemptive role in our vertiginous technological future. Without being endangered as a creative need, it will be placed on the side of history. (2002, 32) It is mainly there that we would like to locate the meaning of Nikos Karouzos’s poetry today. If we are willing to include the Greek original it is because we consider that it will be both a waste of time for us to do so (since most of you cannot read Greek) and because it might induce you to the even larger waste of learning it. We would additionally be glad if this small introduction served as an equally wasteful, academically useless piece of reading, gesturing towards a taboo of investing in anything Greek—that is in anything dead among the living, in anything that will never come back and maybe was never here in the first place. This is the only way to reserve for ourselves the possibility of poetry and preserve the light of its promise. “To return: that is the miracle.” (1993, I, 17) Athens, Greece July 10, 2011 NOTES 1 “ Capitale (a Late Latin word based on caput “head”) emerged in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries in the sense of funds, stock of merchandise, sum of money or money carrying interest.[…] The word and the reality it stood for appear in the sermons of St. Bernardino of Siena (1380-1444) ‘… quamdam seminalem rationem lucrosi quam communiter capitale vocamus ’, ‘that prolific cause of wealth that we commonly call capital’” (Braudel, 1992, 232-233). 2 “A great man – a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style – what is he? First : there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, ‘divinest’ things in the world.” (Nietzsche, 1968, 505, §962) 3 Cf. Deleuze, 1986, 186-9. 4 “Return is the being of becoming, the unity of multiplicity, the necessity of chance: the being of difference as such or the eternal return.” (Deleuze, 189)5 In this 1982 interview Karouzos refers to the defeat of the communist movement in Greece after the civil war of 1946-1949 between the Governmental Army and the Democratic Army of Greece, the military division of the Greek communist party. Karouzos’s father was a member of the communist National Liberation front (EAM) members of which formed the mainl resistance movement (ELAS) in Greece during WWII. The poet was a member of the United Panhellenic Organization of Youth (EPON), which was a youth division of EAM. After the end of the war, ELAS was called to disarmament in view of the formation of a National Army. The members of EAM resigned from the government of national unity and a series of protests led to a 3 year civil war between ELAS and the Government Army. After the defeat of ELAS the Communist party was outlawed and many communists were exiled in deserted Greek islands. Karouzos, who took action in the Greek resistance and was active during the Greek civil war, was exiled in Icaria on 1947 and in Makronisos on 1953 where he was called two years earlier to do his military service. 6 “Existence in the world qua light, which makes desire possible, is then, in the midst of being, the possibility of detaching oneself from being. To enter into being is to link up with objects; it is in effect a bond that is already tainted with nullity. It is already to escape anonymity. In this world where everything seems to affirm our solidarity with the totality of existence, where we are caught up in the gears of a universal mechanism, our first feeling, our ineradicable illusion, is a feeling or illusion of freedom. To be in the world is this hesitation, this interval in existing, which we have seen in the analyses of fatigue and the present.” (Lévinas, 1988,43-4) 7from a TV interview. THE POETRY OF NIKOS KAROUZOS From Redwriter [ Ερυθρογρ?φος ], in Collected Works, Vol . II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 463-4. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 9-10.] JESUS ANTI-OEDIPUS* Why were we once saving till the fifth day the Paschal lamb? The scriptures say: with this victim’s meat we ought to cleanse all of our senses. To give life to the whitest wave miraculous odors in the extension of the chest. Ideals to death. For us to witness the illustrious dawns of Absinthe and for the soul to be a deeply carved ornament on the fore we named will. Then many deer running amidst the evergreen growth with watery hymns, then, the unintended angels descending with heights spiraling in their momentum offer themselves to the luminous Adventure. Whence the need for speech and our sufferings covered with flags like the glorified dead. An incorporeal finger pointing at the flamboyant and fragrant holocausts within the tired horizons and the exhausted breadths with joys of the mistletoe on fire and shivering all of the green-leaved love. Something would have chirped again had we not driven it away— maybe the ewe’s grass. Something would have called us to the eternal resurrection— maybe the grace of spring. But now our heart is fiercely blinded, withdrawn to the appearances of Hades. Silence and ice incessantly cover the Infant Spirit in thatched times. While the cherry trees are dreaming faintly glowing in absolute darkness there’s nothing the Babylonians can contemplate in labs with automatic colored lights. How to rejoice now in the fifth day of the lamb? We have forked the stars. We’ve gradually become supposedly sublime with plucked chimeras in our hands. Avenged relentlessly by science. *Though the poem appears in a 1990 collection, it was actually written in 1968. Hence the reader must be aware in not associating Karouzos’ Anti-Oedipus with the famous 1972 work of Deleuze and Guattari, given that the former precedes the latter. ΙΗΣΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙ-ΟΙΔΙΠΟΥΣ Γιατ? κρατο?σαμε κ?ποτε ?ς την π?μπτη μ?ρα το πασχαλιν? πρ?βατο; Τα κε?μενα λ?νε: μ’ αυτο? του θ?ματος το κρ?ας ?πρεπε να καθαρ?σουμε ?λες τις αισθ?σεις. Για να δ?σουμε κ?μα στη ζω? λευκ?τατο θαυμ?σιες ευωδι?ς στην ?κταση του στ?θους. Ιδανικ? στο χ?ρο. Για να βλ?πουμε τα λαμπρ? χαρ?ματα του ?ψινθου και να ’ναι η ψυχ? στ?λισμα βαθυχ?ρακτο της πλ?ρης που την ε?παμε θ?ληση. Τ?τε πολλ?ς δορκ?δες τρ?χοντας αν?μεσα στην καταπρ?σινη φ?ση με τους υδ?τινους ?μνους, τ?τε, κατεβα?νοντας οι αθ?λητοι ?γγελοι με κυλινδο?μενο το ?ψος στην ορμ? τους χαρ?ζονται της αστραφτερ?ς Περιπ?τειας. ?θεν η μιλι? γι’ αυτ? χρει?ζεται και τα δειν? σκεπ?ζονται ωσ?ν τους τιμημ?νους νεκρο?ς με σημα?ες. Ασ?ματο δ?χτυλο δε?χνει τα φλογ?δη και μοσχοβ?λα ολοκαυτ?ματα στους κουρασμ?νους ορ?ζοντες στα εξουθενωμ?να πλ?τη καθ?ς αν?βουν οι χαρ?ς του νερα?δ?ξυλου και τρ?μει ολ?κληρη η πρασιν?φυλλη αγ?πη. Κ?τι θα κελαηδο?σε π?λι αν δεν το δι?χναμε— μπορε? της προβατ?νας το χορτ?ρι. Κ?τι θα μας καλο?σε στην απ?ραντη αν?σταση— μπορε? του ?αρος η χ?ρη. Μα η καρδι? μας ?γρια τυφλ?θηκε π?ρασε στα φαιν?μενα του ?δη. Σιγ? και π?γος αδι?κοπα σκεπ?ζει στους αχυρ?νιους καιρο?ς το Ν?πιο Πνε?μα. Την ?ρα που ονειρε?ονται οι βυσσινι?ς και λ?μπουν αμυδρ? μεσ’ στο απλ?τατο σκοτ?δι τ?ποτα δε στοχ?ζονται οι βαβυλ?νιοι στα εργαστ?ρια με τ’ αυτ?ματα χρωματιστ? φ?τα. Π?ς να χαρο?με πια την π?μπτη μ?ρα του προβ?του; Φουρκ?σαμε τ’ αστ?ρια. Γ?ναμε σιγ?-σιγ? δ?θεν υπ?ροχοι με μαδημ?νες χ?μαιρες στα χ?ρια. Μας ν?μεται σκληρ? η επιστ?μη. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], in Collected Works, Vol. II, Athens: Ikaros. 1993, 472. [Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18.] DIALECTΙCS OF SPRING Christ the straight angle; Christ the Pythagorean theorem. Christ the infinitesimal calculus from above the blessed Sets Christ. Christ the tessellation of massive particles Christ the zero mass. Hence we spray numbers and fields of lust. We are carabineers of diseased logic plus something— Observed means observer and Hekate The darkness luminous and light in the dark Astarte banqueters demons from today. ΔΙΑΛΕΚΤΙΚΗ ΤΟΥ ΕΑΡΟΣ Χριστ?ς η ορθ? γων?α· Χριστ?ς το πυθαγ?ριο θε?ρημα. Χριστ?ς ο απειροστικ?ς λογισμ?ς ?νωθεν ?λβια Χριστ?ς τα Σ?νολα. Χριστ?ς η ψηφιδογραφ?α στα μαζικ? σωμ?τια Χριστ?ς η μ?ζα μηδ?ν. ?ρα ψεκ?ζουμε αριθμο?ς και πεδ?α λαγνε?ας. Ε?μαστε τυφεκιοφ?ροι νοσο?σης λογικ?ς και κ?τι-- παρατηρο?μενο σημα?νει παρατηρητ?ς και Εκ?τη σκ?τος το π?μφωτο και φως εν τ? σκοτ?? η Αστ?ρτη συνδαιτημ?νες δα?μονες απ’ ?ρτι. From: Redwriter [Ερυθρογρ?φος], Athens: Apopeira, 1990, 18. [1993, II, 472]. CREDO (as we are used to say in Latin) Α I believe in one Poet expelled from heavens / fugitive from the god and vagabond, Empedocles / and here on earth / exile on the earth etc. of Baudelaire /. Β I believe in one Computer inside thunder and through matter. Γ Suffering undefiled / substantive / the Poet uplifts himself slow-burning suicidal implying lengthy sleeps. Δ Cutting down on prospective mistakes. Ε Of all things visible and invisible officiating the onion-peelings. Ζ The Poet has nothing / see the departed /. Η I believe in one Poet that says: madness I enjoy; he ridicules existence; let me light up from my mana. Θ Syntax he doesn’t care about when musicality commands him. Along with still more licenses, and Ts are played according to the concept sound anywhere. E.g. the winters here, he winters there; it will not come—I will not rest, etc. etc. Ι The Poet exercises thought until it’s stripped down. Κ And if he’s Greek he must always study the fineness of Attica, in light, mountains, fields and sea. For this fineness teaches language. Λ And if he’s deeply destined the Poet expresses the unexplainable of the explained; he happens to be a rightful heir to the scientist and his predecessor. Μ On the froth he does not last; the Poet blusters at the bottom of the pot. Ν Flamebred and never redeemed. Ξ The Poet must sometimes say: what a consumption of presence — be a bit lonely for a change! Ο The Poet is twilit. Π He is susceptible of deaths and resurrections. Ρ He looks from the corner of his eye and exists in a glance. Σ He follows behind the mother. Τ Eveningless when it comes to age. Υ I believe in one Poet who says: let the purities coincide. Until the Corinth of the Universe or even further. Φ In a higher despair. Χ In a brighter quintessence. Ψ In one sensation that lifts off. Ω Forgiving everyone. CREDO (ως ε?θισται να λ?με λατινιστ?) Α Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν εκτ?ς ουρανο? / φυγ?ς θε?θεν και αλ?της, Εμπεδοκλ?ς / και επ? της γης / εξ?ριστος π?νω στη γη κ.λπ. του Βωδελα?ρου /. Β Πιστε?ω εις ?να Υπολογιστ?ν εντ?ς κεραυνο? και δια της ?λης. Γ Υποφ?ροντας ?χραντα / ουσιαστικ?ν / ο Ποιητ?ς ανατε?νεται βραδυφλεγ?ς αυτ?χειρας εξυπακο?οντας πολ?ωρους ?πνους. Δ Τα υποψ?φια λ?θη λιγοστε?οντας. Ε Ορατ?ν τε π?ντων και αορ?των ιερουργ?ντας την αποκρομμ?ωση. Ζ Ο Ποιτ?ς ?χει τ?ποτα / βλ?πε τους αναχωρ?σαντες /. Η Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: η τρ?λα μ’ αρ?σει· γελοιοποιε? την ?παρξη· ας αν?ψω απ’ τη μ?να μου. Θ Συνταχτικ? δεν το γνοι?ζεται στην προσταγ? της μουσικ?τητας. Μαζ? και μ’ ?λλες ακ?μη λευτερι?ς, και τα νυ πα?ζονται κατ? την ?ννοια ?χος οπουδ?ποτε. Π.χ. τον χειμ?να εδ?, το χειμ?να εκε?· δε θ? ’ρθει – δεν θα καταλαγι?σουμε, κ. λπ. κ.λπ. Ι Ο Ποιητ?ς γυμν?ζει τη σκ?ψη σε απογ?μνωση. Κ Κι αν ε?ναι ?λληνας οφε?λει να σπουδ?ζει π?ντοτε της Αττικ?ς τη λεπτ?τητα, σε φως, βουν?, χωρ?φια και θ?λασσα. Διδ?σκει γλ?σσα η λεπτ?τητα το?τη. Λ Κι αν ε?ναι βαθι? πεπρωμ?νος ο Ποιητ?ς εκφρ?ζει το ανεξ?γητο του εξηγητο?· τυγχ?νει ν?μιμος δι?δοχος του επιστ?μονα και προκ?τοχ?ς του. Μ Στον αφρ? δεν ?χει δι?ρκεια· στο πατοκ?ζανο μα?νεται ο Ποιητ?ς. Ν Φλογοδ?αιτος και ποτ? ξελυτρωμ?νος. Ξ Ο Ποιητ?ς κ?ποτε πρ?πει να λ?ει: μεγ?λη καταν?λωση παρουσ?ας – γενε?τε και λ?γο μοναξι?ρηδες! Ο Ο Ποιητ?ς ε?ναι αμφ?φλοξ. Π Επιδ?χεται θαν?τους και αναστ?σεις. Ρ Ακροθωρ?ζει και υπ?ρχει σε ξαφνοκο?ταγμα. Σ Ε?ναι ουραγ?ς της μητ?ρας. Τ Αν?σπερος απ? ηλικ?α. Υ Πιστε?ω εις ?να Ποιητ?ν που λ?ει: να συμπ?σουν οι αγν?τητες. Μ?χρι την Κ?ρινθο του Σ?μπαντος ? μακρ?τερα. Φ Σε αν?τερη απελπισ?α. Χ Σε φαειν?τερη πεμπτουσ?α. Ψ Σε μια α?σθηση που πτηνο?ται. Ω Συγχωρ?ντας τους π?ντες. From Large Sized Logic [ Λογικ? μεγ?λου σχ?ματος ], Athens: Erato, 1989, n.p. [1993, II, 521-3]. (shrink)

C.A. Macdonald's incisive note, ‘On the Unifier-Multiplier Controversy', gave me fresh thoughts regarding the method of actindividuation which he defends against Jonathan Bennett's and my own misgivings. I believe a second look at the Reductive Unifying account, in light of Macdonald's apology for it, will help us size up the issues, notably those involving causation and time.I shall follow previous debaters and dwell upon examples of mayhem, where one individual kills another by carrying out a more rudimentary action. Here is (...) Donald Davidson's case. A queen murders her royal husband by emptying a vial of poison into his ear as he sleeps. To be exact: she rotates her wrist, and the lethal drug cascades toward his ear. (shrink)

This paper refers to the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri in commemoration of which Pope Francis released a special apostolic letter highlighting the genius and significance of the Italian poet. We should praise his genius, the Pope writes, because it is he who was able to express, much better than most of the others, the depth of the mystery of God and His love. The Commedia is the fruit of deep religious inspiration. This is why Francis repeats (...) after Benedict XV – „Dante is our own!” Why is it so? Because there breathes in Alighieri the devotion that we too feel and his faith resonates with ours. Dante’s work continues to be a meaningful and valid exemplar for Christ’s followers. However, in today’s pop culture Dante is mainly seen through his depiction of hell – the artistically described eternal punishment. The truth about hell which Dante made the subject of his narrative does not find acceptance even between Christians. Many people are really outraged and scandalized because hell is for them the symbol of sadism and distorted image of God – a vengeful tyrant who condemns human souls to eternal perdition. But hell is present in the biblical message. The early Church Fathers spoke of hell in their sermons, wrote about it in treatises, disputed the dwelling place of the condemned souls, the position of Satan and other demons, and the imminence of God’s judgement. In this way in the Catholic dogmatic theology consolidated the truth of the reality of hell and eternal punishment. This was also in accord with the views of the prominent medieval theologians. Therefore, why the ancient and well-known truth about hell is rejected today as outrageous and Dante’s vision does not gain recognition? The heart of the matter is the understanding of the idea of justice and atonement. In their denial expressed through the notion of the empty hell and rejection of eternal punishment for angels’ and people’s sins, we have to do with misunderstanding of the significance of human intellect and will. The refusal to accept responsibility for our free choices entails the uninhibited rejection of seriousness of our earthly life. If we believe that our fate, and what is more, out eternal fate – the salvation or damnation – depends on what we were able to do in our lifetime, Dante’s poetic vision strongly illustrates this standpoint. The power of free will is deeply and inalienably present in The Comedy’s stanzas. In the Dante’s poem the essence of hell lies in the ultimate rejection of the goal that man longs to achieve from his very nature – the happiness which is the union with the infinite Good – God, the Creator and the Redeemer of the world. How is it possible? It happens due to the existence of free will which is innate to all people and no one can deprive them of it or minimise it. This rejection of the sublime happiness is the result of human free decision – the condemned did not say to God: “Thy will be done!” but “my will be done!”. The existence of hell becomes the guarantee of human dignity, the evidence that a perfectly Good and Omnipotent God treats the man whom He had created seriously and preserves him for the eternity in the same state in which he wanted to remain in his earthly life. (shrink)

Heidegger and Epicurus seem to be separated by a great divide. Where Epicurus seeks ataraxia by minimizing anxiety and our concern with death, Heidegger describes how anxiety and death are factored into authentic living. But looks can be deceiving. A close study of Heidegger’s critique of das Man reveals a distinctly Epicurean line of thinking. His account of curiosity, in particular, parallels Epicurus’s own criticism of normal life as being mired in unnatural/empty desires due to an unconscious fear of (...) death. Despite this similarity, Heidegger’s interest in ontological anxiety, i.e., homelessness, contrasts deeply with Epicurus’s goal of mental tranquility. Yet this difference is overcome, in part, in Heidegger’s turn to peaceful dwelling as an expression of authentic Being-in-the-world. Indeed, Heidegger’s account of the fourfold as the essence of dwelling can be seen as an Epicurean four-part cure to suffering, bringing Heidegger into dialogue with the tradition of philosophical therapy. (shrink)

In _On Doubt_, Vilém Flusser refines Martin Heidegger’s famous declaration that “language is the dwelling of Being.” For Flusser, “the word is the dwelling of being,” because in fact, in the beginning, there was the word. _On Doubt_ is a treatise on the human intellect, its relation to language, and the reality-forming discourses that subsequently emerge. For Flusser, the faith that the modern age places in Cartesian doubt plays a role similar to the one that faith in God (...) played in previous eras—a faith that needs to be challenged. Descartes doubts the world through his proposition _cogito ergo sum_, but leaves doubt itself untouched as indubitable and imperious. His _cogito ergo sum_ may have proved to the Western intellect that thoughts exist, but it did not prove the existence of that which thinks: one can eliminate thinking and yet continue being. Therefore, should we not doubt doubt itself? Should we not try to go beyond this last step of Cartesian doubt and look for a new faith? The twentieth century has seen many attempts to defeat Cartesian doubt, however, this doubt of doubt has instead generated a complete loss of faith, which the West experiences as existential nihilism. Hence, the emergent emptying of values that results from such extreme doubt. Everything loses its meaning. Can this climate be overcome? Will the West survive the modern age? (shrink)

This article proposes a direction—inspired by a reading of Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture— in which thinking enriched by artistic experience can unfold an alternative mode of being-in-the-world. Heidegger points out that, in contrast to a scientific understanding of space as an empty container, the special character of space in sculpture is characterized by a clearing-away (Räumen), which presupposes and points to an open, receptive attitude toward experience that is necessary for dwelling to take place. From Heidegger this article (...) proceeds to reflect on artworks by Eduardo Chillida and Janet Echelman. These offer concrete examples of how a thinking of sculpture can apply to different notions of place. While Chillida’s sculptures present a sense of place as rooted and embedded in the landscape, Echelman’s artworks explore an expanded notion of place through a multisensory sense of immersion. Applying Heidegger’s meditations on Räumen, it turns out that the differences between these artworks are of greatest significance in illustrating the breadth of the experiential space that they share: an openness to dwelling and a receptivity toward being-in-the-world. In this way, Heidegger’s reflections on sculpture are unfolded in a contemporary context and the potential of sculpture for a thinking of experience is established. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Beautiful Soul:From Hegel to BeckettDrew Milne (bio)The "beautiful soul," lacking an actual existence, entangled in the contradiction between its pure self and the necessity of that self to externalize itself and change itself into an actual existence, and dwelling in the immediacy of this firmly held antithesis—an immediacy which alone is the middle term reconciling the antithesis, which has been intensified to its pure abstraction, and is (...) pure being or empty nothingness—this "beautiful soul," then, being conscious of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, is disordered to the point of madness, wastes itself in yearning and pines away in consumption.—G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of SpiritThe figure of the beautiful soul marks out a limit of representation. Its persistence is that of a literary fiction which cannot be actualized, but whose imaginative lure is no less powerful for being so resistant to embodiment. The beautiful soul emerges in a shift from philosophical reflections on moral beauty into the romantic novel, but for Robert E. Norton, the history of the beautiful soul is brought to a close by Hegel [139]. Nevertheless, the way this figure stands between philosophy and literature, and between moral agency and the literary imagination, casts shadows over contemporary thought. Unreconciled immediacy, disordered by consciousness of its contradiction and proximity to pure abstraction, becomes the sign of modern art, perhaps most explicitly in the writings of Samuel Beckett. In The Broken Middle, Gillian Rose projects the beautiful soul out of Hegel and Goethe into a speculative account of modern thought's ethical equivocations. For Allen Speight, Hegel's recourse to the awkward literary and novelistic status of the beautiful soul reveals how "inescapable questions discernible in the products of modern literary artists are ones that concern the account we give of our freedom as modern agents" [135]. This essay seeks to unravel some of the contemporary relevance of the beautiful soul, exploring the instability of this figure as a mediation between philosophy and literature, in particular as a tension in the interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit.The difficulties posed by the beautiful soul for interpreting Hegel can be gleaned from Terry Pinkard's impressively lucid survey German Philosophy, 1760-1860. Pinkard notes how Hegel's discussion of the beautiful soul in the Phenomenology of Spirit "makes oblique reference to Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel, Fichte, Fries, Novalis, perhaps Rousseau, and maybe even Hölderlin" [240n19] before ascribing centrality in Hegel's discussion to Jacobi's novel Waldemar. Oblique reference folds into a structure whose indeterminacy concerns both the freedom claimed by literary representations of the beautiful soul, and the inability of this freedom to amount to more than a confession of conceptual paralysis or impotence. The beautiful soul proves resistant to interpretation, a literary-philosophical compound that destabilizes conventions of referentiality. The beautiful soul threatens to dissolve philosophy from the perspective of an inward delicacy of moral feeling, claiming [End Page 63] [Begin Page 65] the authenticity of a subjectivity that will do no wrong and knows no other as an object on which to act. Philosophical interpretations are often too brusque with the reflexive irony through which the beautiful soul is represented, or insufficiently literal-minded to capture its content as form. In turn, the self-critical claims of literary representation often dissolve into an ironic indifference to determinate consequences.The beautiful soul, however, can hardly be said to have existed outside its representation in writing. It recurs in manifold guises more as an aspiration to be, or appear, morally sensitive but incapable of action. Donald Phillip Verene sketches its background in the Romantic movement but suggests that: "The beautiful soul is not difficult to understand, as Hegel sketches it in the several pages he devotes to it. We are familiar in ordinary experience with types of persons that approximate to the stance of the beautiful soul, that is, if we keep polite company and associate from time to time with delicate people" [100-01]. Anyone who has spent time with aesthetes or poets who claim a delicacy of moral insight without feeling the need of justification or labor to actualize their insights knows the ills this shape of... (shrink)

This chapter reflects on the existential import of thinking about politics. It proposes that the existential import of thinking about politics is a double confrontation with the nothing. In short: for Arendt, politics is the relating of human beings to one another around the space of the world—the empty center of the polis—and hence a confrontation with the nothing. Thinking itself is engaging in the activity of dissolving, and—particularly in modern times—a dwelling in the gap between past and (...) future, and hence itself a confrontation with the nothing. Thinking about politics carries with it this double negative, which gives it its meaning, or existential import. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the beginnings of an answer to the question of the meaning of thinking about politics lead back to Kant and to the negativity that belongs to his thought: the refusal of absolutes tied to the embrace of the absolute. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:OBEYING BAD ORDERS AND SAVING LIVES: THE STORY OF A FRENCH OFFICER Pierre d'Elbée Société Caminno, Paris The story is told that during the Paris riots of 1 848, a military officer received an order to evacuate a certain square by firing upon the "rabble." He left the garrison with his troops and started for the square to be cleared. Upon his arrival, he took up a position with (...) his soldiers who raised their guns to fire upon the crowd. In the profound silence that ensued, he cried: "I have received the order to fire upon the rabble; but as I perceive before me many honest people, I ask them to depart so that I may execute this order." In a few moments, the square was vacant. In circumstances such as these, a decision that saves both others and oneself is not easy to achieve. In such a repressive framework where legal violence is permitted, it is the duty of an officer to obey the order of his superiors, and when we hear or read this story for the first time, we do not see how a happy outcome is possible. The story ought to be dramatic, but what is astonishing is precisely that it is not. We expect the worst, which is what usually happens, the most optimistic among us perhaps hoping secretly for a happy end. But happy endings belong to the universe ofthe marvelous, and life does not resemble a story, as the pessimist murmurs within us. Still, it is the happy ending that in fact occurs, and our astonishment is bound to its improbability. Is it chance? Luck? Inspiration? Premeditation? No doubt there is something of all of this in the officer's decision, and his elegant intervention raises a smile in our skeptical hearts. It testifies that although not easy, one can discover a new way that responds to the secret hope of being really ourselves without getting caught within the web of necessity. Such an attractive path merits no doubt that we dwell on it a little more. 46Pierre d'Elbée Let us follow the officer and imagine we are in his place. It is clear that what is most striking in this story is the moment ofthe face-to-face between the officer and the crowd. It is worthwhile to back up a little, however. From the moment he receives his order to the moment of the face-to-face, the officer must live through some very bad moments: it is no little thing to fire upon a crowd even if legality is on our side. We all know that the worst crimes have been perpetrated under the cover of obedience. Such refuge within authority is rather a hell where one abdicates a part of oneself. The function ofan officer does not stop him from being equally a man, one with feelings, beliefs, values. He knows that the rioters, whatever their fight, cannot be reduced to the term "rabble." Rabble, "rabid," dog. These people deserve no doubt a bit more consideration than that. Who can assert that the riot does not express real sufferings, legitimate rights, slighted dignities? Who could feel comfortable executing the individual who claims his due? A praiseworthy indignation. From that point to justify an heroic ethics of non-violence, is only a small step. "No, I will not fire upon a crowd whose wrong or right deed is to be angry." The officer must undoubtedly have in mind similar thoughts. Inversely, perhaps he justifies himself by saying to himselfthat after all, the rioters disturb the public order. Ifone does not react vigorously and repressively, the riot could degenerate into a general revolution. The order is justified not only by legality but also by a morality ofthe common good. And anyway, ifhe does not empty the square by firing upon the crowd, someone else will. So he might as well do the dirty job himselfto avoid shifting the weight ofthis responsibility onto someone else. And thus, to the devil with such qualms. Life is sufficiently complicated as it is. Let us put it simply: my job as an officer is to obey orders? I obey. On... (shrink)

I argue that there are no plausible non-representational explanations of episodes of hallucination. To make the discussion more specific, I focus on visual hallucinations in Charles Bonnet syndrome. I claim that the character of such hallucinatory experiences cannot be explained away non-representationally, for they cannot be taken as simple failures of cognizing or as failures of contact with external reality—such failures being the only genuinely non-representational explanations of hallucinations and cognitive errors in general. I briefly introduce a recent computational model (...) of hallucination, which relies on generative models in the brain, and argue that the model is a prime example of a representational explanation referring to representational mechanisms. The notion of the representational mechanism is elucidated, and it is argued that hallucinations—and other kinds of representations—cannot be exorcised from the cognitive sciences. (shrink)

themes among the essays resurface and resonate. Though our request for essays was broad and open-ended, we found that topics such as seeing, authenticity, interpretation, wholeness, care, and dwelling ran as undercur rents throughout. Our major hope is that each essay plays a part in revealing a larger whole of meaning which says much about a more humane relation ship with places, environments and the earth as our home. Part I. Beginnings and directions At the start, we recognize the (...) tremendous debt this volume owes to philosopher Martin Heidegger (1890-1976), whose ontological excavations into the nature of human existence and meaning provide the philosophical foundations for many of the essays, particularly those in Part I of the volume. Above all else, Heidegger was regarded by his students and colleagues as a master teacher. He not only thought deeply but was also able to show others how to think and to question. Since he, perhaps more than anyone else in this century, provides the instruction for dOing a phenomenology and hermeneutic of humanity's existential situation, he is seminal for phenomenological and hermeneutical research in the environmental disci plines. He presents in his writings what conventional scholarly work, especially the scientific approach, lacks; he helps us to evoke and under stand things through a method that allows them to come forth as they are; he provides a new way to speak about and care for our human nature and environment. (shrink)

This paper presents a theory of empty names that is consistent with direct-reference theory and Millianism.

_ Source: _Volume 47, Issue 3, pp 366 - 387 In this article, I focus on Heidegger’s conception of hospitality in his first and final lectures on Hölderlin’s _Germania_, _Remembrance_, and _The Ister_. I argue that the hospitality of the foreigner for Heidegger is the condition of possibility of dwelling understood as the happening of history.In the first section I analyze the notions of hospitality in Levinas and Derrida. The second section unpacks some of the senses of the earth (...) in Heidegger as the site of man’s historical dwelling, whereas in the third section I focus on holy mourning as the disposition that reveals the earth as the uncanny ground of history. In the final section, I spell out Heidegger’s conception of hospitality, the greeting, and the foreign guest. (shrink)

Emptiness means that all entities are empty of, or lack, inherent existence - entities have a merely conceptual, constructed existence. Though Nagarjuna advocates the Middle Way, his philosophy of emptiness nevertheless entails nihilism, and his critiques of the Nyaya theory of knowledge are shown to be unconvincing.

This paper focuses on empty mind, transitional space and the dissolving of the self object function.

In his later work, such as “The Question Concerning Technology”, Martin Heidegger puts forward a critique of modern technology. Alongside this critique, Heidegger presents a kind of positive alternative through his discussion of “dwelling”. I put forward a reading of Heidegger’s critique of modern technology and his embrace of “dwelling”. On my reading, Heidegger’s thinking centers on the idea that modern technology’s form of “world-disclosure” prevents human beings from encountering (and then living in light of) our own essence. (...) In contrast, he takes “dwelling” to allow us to do that. When humans dwell, they also live in such a way as to (purportedly) allow other things (e.g. rivers) to exist in accordance with their own essence. I argue that, for Heidegger, the (purported) truth that humans should live in accord with our own essence is explanatorily prior to the (purported) truth that humans should let other things exist in accordance with their own essence. Following this interpretative argument, I reflect on some of the promises of this position that I attribute to Heidegger, along with some of the most pressing challenges facing those who might want to further develop it. (shrink)

This is an entry on Empty Names for the Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Language, edited by Delia Graff Fara and Gillian Russell.

The problem of empty terms is one of the focal issues in analytic philosophy. Russell’s theory of descriptions, a proposal attempting to solve this problem, attracted much attention and is considered a hallmark of the analytic tradition. Scholars of Indian and Buddhist philosophy, e.g., McDermott, Matilal, Shaw and Perszyk, have studied discussions of empty terms in Indian and Buddhist philosophy. But most of these studies rely heavily on the Nyāya or Navya-Nyāya sources, in which Buddhists are portrayed as (...) opponents to be defeated, and thus do not truly reflect Buddhist views on this issue. The present paper will explore how Dignāga, the founder of Buddhist logic, deals with the issue of empty subject terms. His approach is subtle and complicated. On the one hand, he proposes a method of paraphrase that resembles Russell’s theory of descriptions. On the other, by relying on his philosophy of language—the apoha theory, he tends to fall into a panfictionalism. Through the efforts of his follower Dharmakīrti, the latter approach would become more acceptable among Indian and Tibetan Buddhists. Dignāga’s Chinese commentators, who were free from the influence of Dharmakīrti, dealt with the empty term issue in three ways: (1) by adhering to Dignāga’s method of paraphrase; (2) by allowing exceptions for non-implicative negation; and (3) by indicating the propositional attitude of a given proposition. Among these, the third proved most popular. (shrink)

John Stuart Mill (1843) thought that proper names denote individuals and do not connote attributes. Contemporary Millians agree, in spirit. We hold that the semantic content of a proper name is simply its referent. We also think that the semantic content of a declarative sentence is a Russellian structured proposition whose constituents are the semantic contents of the sentence’s constituents. This proposition is what the sentence semantically expresses. Therefore, we think that sentences containing proper names semantically express singular propositions, which (...) are propositions having individuals as constituents. For instance, the sentence ‘George W. Bush is human’ semantically expresses a proposition that has Bush himself as a constituent. Call this theory Millianism. Many philosophers initially find Millianism quite appealing, but find it much less so after considering its many apparent problems. Among these problems are those raised by non-referring names, which are sometimes (tendentiously) called empty names. Plausible examples of empty names include certain names from fiction, such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’, which I shall call fictional names, and certain names from myth and false scientific theory, such as ‘Pegasus’ and ‘Vulcan’, which I shall call mythical names. I have defended Millianism from objections concerning empty names in previous work (Braun 1993). In this paper, I shall re-present those objections, along with some new ones. I shall then describe my previous Millian theory of empty names, and my previous replies to the objections, and consider whether the theory or replies need revision. I shall next consider whether fictional and mythical names are really empty. I shall argue that at least some utterances of mythical names are. (shrink)

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s seminal essay “Building, Dwelling, Thinking”, published in 1954, is one of the texts which has had most influence on architectural thinking in the second half of 20th and early 21st century. What much of modern and postmodern architectural thinking extracts from Heidegger’s text and revolves around is the understanding of building and dwelling as more or less abstract forms of being without taking into account the people inhabiting space. In these traditions little has (...) been said about what the Danish architect Jørn Utzon adds to the term “being” and announces as the most important aspect of architecture: Well-being understood as human well-being. The present paper means to re-interpret Heidegger’s text critically in order to rethink dwelling and building within an architectural context, presenting Jørn Utzon’s work and thinking as a lifelong search for the architecture of well-being. (shrink)

Abstract: In this paper I offer an account of a particular variety of perception of absence, namely, visual perception of empty space. In so doing, I aim to make explicit the role that seeing empty space has, implicitly, in Mike Martin's account of the visual field. I suggest we should make sense of the claim that vision has a field—in Martin's sense—in terms of our being aware of its limitations or boundaries. I argue that the limits of the (...) visual field are our own sensory limitations, and that we are aware of them as such. Seeing empty space, I argue, involves a structural feature of experience that constitutes our awareness of our visual sensory limitations, and thus, in virtue of which vision has a field. (shrink)

Three views of psychological emptiness, or xū, can be found in the Zhuāngzĭ. The instrumental view values xū primarily as a means of efficacious action. The moderate view assigns it intrinsic value as an element of one Zhuangist vision of the good life. The radical view also takes it to be an element of the ideal life, but in this case the form of life advocated is that of the Daoist sage, who transcends mundane human concerns to merge with nature (...) or the Dào. The instrumental and moderate views articulate a relatively commonsensical position, on which the agent continues to pursue at least some characteristically human projects. On the radical view, by contrast, the agent ceases to exercise agency and lives a life hardly recognizable as human. The three views thus signal a tension in Zhuangist ethics, and the unattractiveness of the radical view poses a potential obstacle to the application of Daoist ideas in contemporary ethical discourse. The paper argues that there are principled grounds within Zhuangist thought for detaching the instrumental and moderate views from the radical view and rejecting the latter. (shrink)

This paper considers the problem of assigning meanings to empty natural kind terms. It does so in the context of the Twin-Earth externalist-internalist debate about whether the meanings of natural kind terms are individuated by the external physical environment of the speakers using these terms. The paper clarifies and outlines the different ways in which meanings could be assigned to empty natural kind terms. And it argues that externalists do not have the semantic resources to assign them meanings. (...) The paper ends on a sceptical note concerning the fruitfulness of using the Twin-Earth setting in debates about the semantics of empty natural kind terms. (shrink)

This article deals with empty spacetime and the question of its physical reality. By “empty spacetime” we mean a collection of bare spacetime points, the remains of ridding spacetime of all matter and fields. We ask whether these geometric objects—themselves intrinsic to the concept of field—might be observable through some physical test. By taking quantum-mechanical notions into account, we challenge the negative conclusion drawn from the diffeomorphism invariance postulate of general relativity, and we propose new foundational ideas regarding (...) the possible observation—as well as conceptual overthrow—of this geometric ether. (shrink)

Philosophers and theorists have long been puzzled by humans' ability to talk about things that do not exist, or to talk about things that they think exist but, in fact, do not. _Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence_ is a collection of 13 new works concerning the semantic and metaphysical issues arising from empty names, non-existence, and the nature of fiction. The contributors include some of the most important researchers working in these fields. Some of the papers (...) develop and defend new positions on these matters, while others offer important new perspectives and criticisms of the existing approaches. The volume contains a comprehensive introductory essay by the editors, which provides a survey of the philosophical issues concerning empty names, the various responses to these issues, and the literature on the subject to date. (shrink)

When it comes to empty names, we seem to have reached very little consensus. Still, we all seem to agree, first, that our semantics should assign truth to negative singular existence statements in which an empty name occurs and, second, that names are used in such statements. The purpose of this paper is to show that ruling out that the names are mentioned is harder than it has been thought. I will present a new metalinguistic account for negative (...) singular existence statements in which an empty name occurs, and I will show that the account can deal both with the objections to the traditional metalinguistic account and with other objections that seem to target my new proposal. (shrink)

Toward post-constructivist epistemology -- Respecting common sense and first-person perspective -- On method -- Looking ahead -- Being is dwelling -- Dwelling grounds building and thinking -- The foundation of dwelling -- From epistemology to environmental ethics -- Response to a world in crisis -- On being rooted -- The earth does not move - literally -- The ground of the image -- Fostering the taking of roots -- On getting the earth to move -- Uprooting | (...) rooting -- Cultivating culture -- Cultivating (an interest in) science -- Nacherzeugung and nachverstehen -- Nacherzeugung, nachverstehen, and the cultivation of culture -- Emergence of the image -- An empirical case -- Recon/naissance: from first movements to symbolic gestures -- Ideation implies intersubjectivity and history -- Multiplicity, bifurcations, pregnance -- Movement and the birth of form -- Becoming aware -- Aspect dawning -- An empirical investigation -- A post-constructivist perspective on the coming of awareness -- The invisible body -- A mysterious illness -- Pathos and learning -- Our animate bodies and school learning -- Disappearance of the subject -- On theory and its relation to life -- Memorable moments of classroom life -- Inchoate living vs. an experience -- Life and its mimesis -- Concrete human psychology -- The subject-in-the-making -- The subject* as patient -- L'interloque -- The death of autopoiesis -- There is (a) life after constructivism. (shrink)

This volume collects Jay Garfield 's essays on Madhyamaka, Yogacara, Buddhist ethics and cross-cultural hermeneutics. The first part addresses Madhyamaka, supplementing Garfield 's translation of Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, a foundational philosophical text by the Buddhist saint Nagarjuna. Garfield then considers the work of philosophical rivals, and sheds important light on the relation of Nagarjuna's views to other Buddhist and non-Buddhist philosophical positions.

Sometimes a fact can play a role in a grounding explanation, but the particular content of that fact make no difference to the explanation—any fact would do in its place. I call these facts vacuous grounds. I show that applying the distinction between-vacuous grounds allows us to give a principled solution to Kit Fine and Stephen Kramer’s paradox of ground. This paradox shows that on minimal assumptions about grounding and minimal assumptions about logic, we can show that grounding is reflexive, (...) contra the intuitive character of grounds. I argue that we should never have accepted that grounding is irreflexive in the first place; the intuitions that support the irreflexive intuition plausibly only require that grounding be non-vacuously irreflexive. Fine and Kramer’s paradox relies, essentially, on a case of vacuous grounding and is thus no problem for this account. (shrink)

Millianism is the view that the semantic content of a proper name is its semantic referent. Empty names, names with no semantic referents, raise various problems for Millianism. To solve these problems, many have appealed to pragmatics, thus ‘Pragmatic Millianism’. Pragmatic Millianism employs the relation of association between names and descriptions as well as some pragmatic processes to substitute empty names with descriptions associated with. The resultant content should account for the intuitions raised by utterances of sentences containing (...) empty names. Here, I will try to argue against this picture: Names are associated with descriptions of different kinds in a number of ways. The complex nature of this relation is overlooked by Pragmatic Millianism. Neither the relation of association nor the pragmatic processes responsible for substituting a description or a cluster of descriptions for an empty name guarantee the fullness of what is pragmatically imparted. The moral is this: Regarding empty names, Pragmatic Millianism should be avoided. (shrink)

This paper excavates the practice-oriented background and therapeutic significance of emptiness in the Madhyamaka philosophy attributed to Nāgārjuna and Sengzhao. Buddhist emptiness unravels experiential and linguistic reification through meditation and argumentation. The historical contexts and uses of the word indicate that it is primarily a practical diagnostic and therapeutic concept. Emptiness does not lead to further views or truths but, akin to yet distinct from Ajñāna and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the suspension of assertion. This sense of emptiness as a practice can (...) be traced in the intercultural transmission of Madhyamaka from Nāgārjuna, its paradigmatic philosopher, to Sengzhao 僧肇, its first pivotal indigenous Chinese representative. (shrink)

In my dissertation (UCLA 2002), I argue that, by appropriating Fregean resources, Millians can solve the problems that empty names pose. As a result, the debate between Millians and Fregeans should be understood, not as a debate about whether there are senses, but rather as a debate about where there are senses.

This article argues that, as far as the problem of Confucian religiosity is concerned, there is an interpretative turn from Mou Zongsan’s moral metaphysics to Tu Weiming’s religious hermeneutics. Some concluding remarks are made: First, Tu’s hermeneutics is rooted in the ontology of self as interrelatedness, which is completely different from Mou’s theory of true self as transcendental subjectivity. Second, Tu’s hermeneutics of self can be better illuminated with the help of Heidegger’s notion of Dasein as Being-with (Mitsein). For Tu (...) and Heidegger, self cannot be seen as something separate from community. This article also points out that the paradigmatic shift is evidenced in another similarity between the four categories of self, community, nature, and the transcendent in Tu’s hermeneutics on the one hand, and the four symbols of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals employed by Heidegger to interpret the meaning of dwelling, on the other. In such a primordial situation of dwelling, gods are not supposed to be intellectually known; they are rather to be neighbors in community. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dwelling in the GapsGalen SanderlinHave you ever wondered what it would be like to be a mythical being? As a hermaphrodite, I exist in a culture that sees only male or female. Those of us who don’t fit into the rigid sex binary are left out of many of the protections offered to our cousins who more neatly fit the two categories. This leaves an enormous gap in (...) cultural definitions and societal acceptance of my fundamental being.My journey has three main threads: 1) My personal and often rocky self–development, as I have come to understand and accept what it means to be a hermaphrodite, and finding others of my tribe; 2) recognizing the harm done by my medical treatment and actively seeking to change how the medical system treats hermaphrodites, starting from birth onwards; and 3) identifying what was done to me as a human rights violation.I was born in January of 1975. No genetic test was done at the time. My body looked male and my assigned sex/gender was male. As a child, I gravitated toward “male” toys. In 1989, a rural– MD noted that I was not experiencing puberty like my peers and she recommended that my parents take me to a teaching hospital in Seattle for tests. A pediatrician referred me to the adolescent medical division, and from there I was referred to an endocrinologist. After conducting many invasive tests, including drawing blood and comparing my testicles to a bead ring of ersatz testicles, the endocrinologist diagnosed me with Klinefelter’s Syndrome and a karyotype of 47,XXY. I was prescribed testosterone injections to affirm and strengthen the male identity I was assigned at birth and to prevent my body from developing secondary female sex characteristics (breasts and hips).Soon after the shots started I bulked up, adding muscle and hair everywhere. I also became dangerously aggressive and moody. I began to have serious self–esteem issues and a drastic increase in risk–taking behavior as my body was subjected to medical intervention that my parents innocently followed.The prescribed hormone treatment fractured my psyche—what I know now to be a common defense mechanism experienced in trauma survivors. The portion of my consciousness that existed prior to testosterone became deeply buried to prevent harm, and I experienced the emergence of a new “entity.” With each change in prescription, new fractures occurred: testosterone cypionate to enanthate shots, to patches, to gels.The physicians did not consider my feelings or preferences during recommendations or treatment. I feel I was forced into a “male” body based on a medical emergency they created to ease societal concerns.Last February I decided to stop hiding. Tearing the mask off has brought a flood of emotions hidden behind old traumas. I’d been living openly as an intersex person, but still deeply closeted, if not from the public—worse, from myself.Here is the writing that came pouring out of me as I’ve been accessing my repressed memories:I felt the first stirrings of my existence in August of 1989, like a fleeting visage of a long lost lover passing just out of view. The timing of the universe—Out of the infinite we are born, but in this case the body we are to occupy was already housing many other souls. Is this some mistake? Asked to be patient I waited... Late in the year of 1989 I was borne on testosterone wings into an imaginary masculine role/body.Molded in the image of Adonis, Hermes was forced to submit. No longer sexless or ageless—lost in a sea of supposed pressures and roles. My assumed gender [End Page E10] was male. Why!?! Screaming, thrashing, and damaging all around me, no way to express the horror of being so brutally manhandled.My guide Galen/Juniper were excised from our psyche—lost behind a barrier. The only solace was a shared beat: 1,2,3,4 over and over. Was this the pounding of our heart? Thank god for our love of music least we lose ourselves entirely.Why do they insist on calling me Galen? I no longer knew who this was. I... (shrink)

What are the meanings of empty names such as ‘Vulcan,’ ‘Pegasus,’ and ‘Santa Claus’ in such sentences as ‘Vulcan is the tenth planet,’ ‘Pegasus flies,’ and especially ‘Santa Claus does not exist’?Our view, developed in Adams et al., consists of a direct-reference account of the meaning of empty names in combination with a pragmatic-implicature account of why we have certain intuitions that seem to conflict with a direct-reference account.

Nursing has a considerable history of theory development but has consistently struggled to reconcile theoretical reality and practice realities. Many authors have attempted to reconcile what has been called the “theory–practice gap,” but the space where these two realities enmesh has remained problematic and contentious (Aimei, Macau Journal of Nursing, 14, 2015, 13; Factor, Matienzo, & de Guzman, Nurse Education Today, 57, 2017, 82). The idea of the theory–practice gap has a significant history in nursing, but also continues to have (...) a significant presence within nursing literature and mythology up to the present (Aimei, Macau Journal of Nursing, 14, 2015, 13). In this paper, the space between theoretic reality and practice reality, as evidenced by the theory–practice gap, will be examined. A Heideggerian perspective of “dwelling” (Heidegger, 1971, Poetry, language, thought, New York, NY: Harper Colophon) will be used as a guiding discourse to move nursing away from this classic tension between theory and practice, towards a perspective where theory and practice are woven together as part of one reality. (shrink)

There has long been a politics around the way in which women are represented, with objection not so much to specific images as to a regime of looking which places the represented woman in a particular relationship to the spectator's gaze. Artists have sometimes avoided the representation of women altogether, but they are now producing images which challenge the regime. How do these images succeed in their challenge? The Emptiness of the Image offers a psychoanalytic answer. Parveen Adams argues that, (...) despite flaws in some of the details of its arguments, psychoanalytic theory retains an overwhelming explanatory strength in relation to questions of sexual difference and representation. She goes on to show how the issue of desire changes the way we can think of images and their effects. Throughout she discusses the work of theorists, artists and filmmakers such as Helene Deutsch, Catherine MacKinnon, Mary Kelly, Francis Bacon, Michael Powell and Della Grace. The Emptiness of the Image shows how the very space of representation can change to provide a new way of thinking the relation between the text and the spectator. It shows how psychoanalytic theory is supple enough to slide into and transform the most unexpected situations. (shrink)