Can anything be reclaimed from the self-denigrating rhetoric of medieval women in the Christian tradition? This article investigates how feminists might retrieve the Christian virtue of humility by journeying through nine of its functions in the work of the thirteenth-century German beguine, Mechthild of Magdeburg. As a rhetorical strategy, authorizing tactic, and tool of moral formation, Mechthild's `sinking humility' retains a surprising relevance for feminist women and men today.

This paper presents the structural connections between eroticism and mysticism on the basis of two text sources: there are some texts of ‘The flowing light of the Godhead’ of Mechthild of Magdeburg and the Song of Songs 5: 2–8. Both texts represent a call for transgressions, since without these the experience of God is not possible. Eroticism as well as mysticism strives for the transcendental experience of union. This is however only to be attained in ecstasy, in a (...) state of the Ego out of itself where the border separating one from the other is transgressed. This results in an unexpected and incomparable experience where no more boundaries between ‘You and Me’ are perceivable. Therefore eroticism is a sort of sacred reality that leads to the experience of the transcendent and divine and through it to the existential transubstantiation of the person. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Frühmittelalterliche Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 301-320.

This paper examines the relation of body, soul, and God in the context of spiritual desire. It connotes a gendered relationship with the nature of divinity. A prime exponent of this mode of realization is Mechthild of Magdeburg, who longingly reaches for God, and employs vivid imagery in describing her quest.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of PhilosophyLorraine CodeCatherine Villanueva Gardner. Women Philosophers: Genre and the Boundaries of Philosophy. Boulder, CO: Westview, 2003. Pp. xv + 198. Paper, $22.00.In a tradition which "trains us to read purely for content" (xii), Catherine Gardner wonders how to read the philosophy of five women who write in "non-standard philosophical forms" (xiii): Mechthild of Magdeburg's poetry, Christine de Pisan's allegory, (...) Catharine Macaulay's epistolary form, and Mary Wollstonecraft's and George Eliot's fiction. Asking how these authors' gender and their works' genre bear on their exclusion from canonical philosophy with its reliance on rigorous argument unsullied by stylistic considerations, she argues that form is integral to understanding philosophy, and can impede its recognition as philosophy. Specifically, she wonders what these historical writings can offer present-day feminist ethics?Gardner's readings and her thesis about style and genre as conditions of philosophical legitimacy are provocative. She urges "reading past" forms deemed inhospitable to moral truth—such as Macaulay's epistolary style (44-45)—to encounter the author as moral philosopher, and explain her invisibility as such. Eliot's philosophy "demands the form of a novel" (123), she proposes, and Wollstonecraft's principles of style "are ultimately principles of morality as well" (92). More complex is the poetically articulated moral epistemology in Mechthild's The Flowing Light, with God, speaking through Mechthild, as its author (154-56). Because these forms—epistolary, allegorical, mystical-poetic, fictional—have been most accessible to women, Gardner urges feminists to consider how these authors' gender bears on their exclusion from moral philosophy. Owing to women's "greater capacity for emotion and... weaker capacity for reason" (155), mystics such as Mechthild were deemed well-suited to write as they did; yet works attributed to God stand immune to philosophical argument. Macaulay's thoughts on government and social reform were judged secondary to her "feminine" ones about educating women for marriage and domesticity (26-27). Gardner is persuaded and persuasive about the philosophical stature of the works she discusses. Yet if a thinker's gender denies her philosophical status, how can she bypass those exclusionary structures—even if, like Eliot, she chooses a male name? If a work's genre removes it from the sustained argumentative debate that is the hallmark of western philosophy, how can it claim a place there?There are no easy answers, but the questions spark numerous others. Perplexing is Gardner's contention that these women are ignored because they defy norms of style and method. But how would she classify Plato's dialogues, Voltaire's Candide, Pascal's and Nietzsche's aphorisms, Wittgenstein's numbered propositions,or Sartre's, Camus' (and Beauvoir's) philosophical novels, given their maverick styles? Style alone cannot effect or explain the exclusions she deplores. More puzzling are Gardner's conceptions of standard method and dominant form (e.g., 24, 120, 175), since she does not elaborate, apart from indicating that both require rigorous prose argument. But formal and methodological orthodoxy varies historically, as in the influence of scholasticism, for Christine, which receives no mention, or Gardner's ahistorical suggestion that the absence of a "normative subject as an independent, autonomous individual" (171) is a lacuna in Mechthild's work. Why would a thirteenth-century writer presuppose an Enlightenment subject? These issues demand attention in a work of historical scholarship.A different question troubles the method discussion. The author regrets certain women's exclusion from the canon despite the philosophical nature of their work, maintaining that [End Page 215] works whose styles/forms diverge from the standard count, nonetheless, as philosophy. These women demonstrate that philosophy need not be couched in formal argument: poetry, allegory, novels can also articulate philosophical theories. But—if my reading is correct—here Gardner is inconsistent. She commends the philosophy in Macaulay's Letters, claiming it "can and does contain the sort of sustained argument... uncontroversially identifiable as... philosophical" (44), and makes similar claims for Wollstonecraft and Eliot. But in legitimating these works by received standards of argument after all, Gardner weakens the force of her claims that philosophy—good philosophy—need not be presented in orthodox form, thus... (shrink)

Within medieval women's literature it is worthwhile mentioning the poetess Hrotsvit (10th c.), Hildegard of Bingen (12th c.) and, in the 13th century the nuns of the monastery of Helfta: Mechthild of Hackeborn, Gertrude the Great and Mechthild of Magdeburg. Although the motives for writing were diverse, their works express a rich content and literary quality.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Bataille and Mysticism: A “Dazzling Dissolution”Amy Hollywood (bio)Within Georges Bataille’s texts of the late 1930s and 1940s, in particular those later brought together in the tripartite Atheological Summa, he repeatedly suggests that his primary models for writing and experience are the texts of the Christian and non-Western mystical traditions (often represented, in Bataille, by women’s writings) and those of Friedrich Nietzsche. 1 Inner Experience opens with evocations of Nietzsche, (...) and the final volume of the trilogy, On Nietzsche, is “devoted” to his work. References to mystical writings occur throughout Inner Experience and Guilty, and significant portions of both texts can be read as providing “guides” for inner experience analogous to the “itineraries” of Angela of Foligno (d. 1309) and Teresa of Avila (d. 1582) or as spiritual daybooks like those of Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1275). These models are, I think, the key to understanding Bataille’s own writing strategies in the Atheological Summa. 2 Despite their apparent divergence, moreover, Bataille insists that mystical and Nietzschean texts reflect and are constitutive of the same experience and writing practice.Like both Nietzsche and the mystics, Bataille’s “antigeneric” writing mixes genres and styles within and between texts. 3 Throughout the course of his career, experience and writing are in a constant state of movement, flux, or chaos (to echo Bataille’s self-description in On Nietzsche). The Atheological Summa encapsulates within what purport to be three unified books the diversity of genres and styles that run throughout Bataille’s corpus as a whole. They contain ample quotation of Nietzsche’s texts and those of the mystics—undigested hunks and fragments of these allusive writings 4 —together with philosophical reflections, confessional meditations, diary fragments, letters, and, at the end of On Nietzsche, a set of six brief historical and theoretical appendices. Anything broaching traditional textual commentary is reserved for the margins of these nonbooks. Like many mystics, particularly women who were denied access to the traditional genres of sermon, biblical commentary, and philosophical or theological treatise, and like Nietzsche, who eschews and subverts traditional genre distinctions, Bataille comments and critiques through practice rather than exposition. Although Bataille acknowledges the oddity of his coupling the mystics and Nietzsche, he also rigorously defends it, arguing for a mystical and ecstatic experience in Nietzsche’s work. 5 As I hope to show, Bataille’s [End Page 74] experience of the failures of mysticism and of Nietzsche speak to each other and lead to Bataille’s necessary apostasy as his true discipleship.Repetition of the divergences between Bataille and the mystics, first stated by Bataille himself in Inner Experience, has become something of a commonplace, yet his claims have not been sufficiently explored or challenged. So, for example, Alain Arnauld and Giséle Excoffon-Lafarge unproblematically assert that despite all proximities between Bataille’s texts and those of the mystics, they differ in their aims or aimlessness. Michel Surya joins a host of other scholars whose primary concern is to demonstrate (against the insinuations of Sartre, made now almost fifty years ago) that Bataille was not a Christian. Whereas the mystics’ path ends with the divine encounter, Bataille renounces all objects, aims, or end for his quest and his desire. 6 Most importantly, he rejects all idealism and any hope for salvation. Bataille himself insists on his divergence from the Christian mystics in Inner Experience and Guilty. At the same time, his citations and mimings of central texts from the Christian mystical tradition show that what fascinates him within these writings is precisely the moment in which the soul desires “to live without a why,” embracing the suffering of hell—understood as the absence of/from the “object” of desire—as desire. 7 In a move later echoed by Jacques Lacan, Bataille claims that some medieval mystics attained that beyond of which he writes, but without knowing anything about it: “Exuberance is the point where we let go of Christianity. Angela of Foligno attained it and described it, but didn’t know it.” 8Commentators follow Bataille in resisting his identification with the mystics, then, whereas Nietzsche is a less troubling model for Bataille and his readers. In fact, Bataille... (shrink)

Este artículo analiza la obra de dos beguinas del s. XIII pertenecientes a la denominada teología vernácula. Se propone caracterizar las obras de Matilde de Magdeburgo,La luz que fluye de la divinidad, y de Margarita Porete, El espejo de las almas simples, a fin de determinar las notas más distintivas de las autoras. En ambos trabajos el amor es central, a la vez que está íntimamente vinculado con el conocimiento. Aun así, la lectura de los textos y su detenido examen (...) permite proponer que la obra de Matilde está principalmente relacionada con la literatura del amor cortés mientras que la de Margarita, a la vez que incluye estos elementos, está más enraizada en la mística de la nada, que será luego ampliamente conocida en la tradición por el trabajo de Meister Eckhart. Por esta razón, el lugar otorgado a los sentidos y la corporalidad adquiere mayor relevancia en la obra de Matilde, mientras que en Margarita la experiencia amorosa unitiva es puramente espiritual. Estos matices en las caracterizaciones de la unión con la divinidad deben ser leídos en su contexto histórico, dado que durante el s. XIII y el siguiente se desarrolló una polémica sobre el carácter afectivo o intelectual de la unión mística. Estas diferentes maneras de entender el amor que encontramos en los trabajos de estas autoras medievales representan otro modo de abordar la idea y la función del eros, que desde Platón en adelante ha sido uno de los temas centrales de la reflexión filosófica. (shrink)

본 연구의 목적은 현자의 사변을 강조하는 에크하르트의 신비주의와 직관적 체험에 근거한 여성 신비주의를 비교 검토함으로써 중세 그리스도교적 신비주의의 일면을 고찰하는 것이다.BR 에크하르트에 따르면 인간의 영혼은 신의 본성 안에 있는 모든 것으로 만들어진 것이기에 신의 본성을 부은 것이라 할 수 있다. 인간이 신에게 이르는 길은 인간이 자신의 형상을 벗어나 자신을 신의 형상으로 변형시켜야 한다. 이를 위해 인간은 자기 자신과 모든 사물로부터 떠나서 자유로워져야 한다. 에크하르트가 말하는 ‘영혼 속에 신의 탄생’은 신과 영혼이 하나임을 의미한다.BR 힐데가르트에게 주어진 근원적인 신비 체험은 경건한 자들에게 주어지는 (...) 영적 계시로서 신과의 합일이라는 복된 체험이다. 메히트힐트에게 있어서 신과의 신비적 합일은 ‘사랑’이라는 개념으로 나타나며, 정열적인 남녀의 사랑으로 형상화 된다. 카타리나에 따르면 그리스도는 인성을 입은 덕택에 천상에서 지상까지 다리를 놓을 수 있었다. 그러므로 인간의 영혼은 사랑 안에서 신과 하나가 될 수 있다.BR 에크하르트의 신비주의는 ‘영혼 속에 신의 탄생’이라는 사변적인 모습으로 나타나지만, 여성 신비주의는 그리스도 예수와의 혼인이라는 이미지를 통하여 내가 그리스도 안에 있는 조화로운 합일을 강조하며 신비적인 체험에 머무는 것이 아니라 이웃에 대한 사랑이라는 활동적 삶으로 나아간다. (shrink)

Moulages are contact media – images made by contagion in the most literal sense: their production relies on a process in which the object to be reproduced is touched by the reproducing material. In the case of dermatological moulages, the plaster touches the infected skin of the sick and, once dried, serves as the negative form for the waxen image of a disease. Focussing on the collection of the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, the article situates the production of dermatological moulages (...) within the visual culture of 19th-century medicine and raises the question how an ancient technique of image production could become such a prevalent tool for the documentation of skin diseases during a period usually associated with the rise of scientific medicine and a reconsideration of theories of contagion in medical aetiology. (shrink)

Masking the Abject traces the beginnings of the malediction of play in Western metaphysics to Aristotle. Mechthild Nagel's innovative study demonstrates how play has served as a 'castaway' in western philosophical thinking: It is considered to be repulsive and loathsome, yet also fascinating and desirable. The book illustrates how play 'succeeds' and proliferates after Hegel—despite its denunciation by classical philosophers—entering Marxist, phenomenological, postmodern, and feminist discourses. This work provides the reader with a superb analyisis of how the distinction between (...) the serious and the playful has developed over time, charting play's changing ontological status, and ethical and aesthetic dimensions, from the logocentric to the bacchnalian. (shrink)

In this much-anticipated work, distinguished authors Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer present an accessible introduction to the philosophy of the thirteenth century Franciscan John Duns Scotus.

Prisons & Punishment focuses on cross-national perspectives about penal theories and empirical studies. It brings together African, European and North American social philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, legal practitioners, prisoners and abolitionist activists. The contributors reflect on carceral society, most notably in the United States, and on the re-conceptualisation of punishment.

This book brings together a collection of social justice scholars and activists who take Foucault’s concept of discipline and punishment to explain how prisons are constructed in society from nursing homes to zoos. This book expands the concept of prison to include any institution that dominates, oppresses, and controls. Criminologists and others, who have been concerned with reforming or dismantling the criminal justice system, have mostly avoided to look at larger carceral structures in society. In this book, for example, scholars (...) and activists question the way patriarchy has incapacitated women and imagine the deinstitutionalization of people with disabilities. In a time when popular sentiment critiques the dominant role of the elites, the state’s role in policing dissenting voices, school children, LGBTQ persons, people of color, and American Indian Nations, needs to be investigated. A prison, as defined in this book, is an institution or system that oppresses and does not allow freedom for a particular group. Within this definition, we include the imprisonment of nonhuman animals and plants, which are too often overlooked. (shrink)

Dancing with Iris engages with Iris Marion Young's prolific writings in political theory and in phenomenology. Contributors discuss her work from a variety of disciplines, including philosophy, political science, human rights law, cultural geography and dance studies.

Bernard of Clairvaux lives in a geographic region and in a century, where politicians and intellectuals both look upon the Islam and its supporters as a religious and military danger for Western Europe and its culture. Unlike many contemporary theologians and philosophers Bernard does not engage in an intellectual controversy with Islamic positions. Even the explicit invitation of his friend, Peter the Venerable, who has let the Koran be transited into Latin, does not encourage him for such an effort. On (...) the contrary he accepts the papal order to promote the second crusade. Why does act Bernard in this way? The article wants to show that Bernard's theological basic assumptions, especially his epistemological convictions make it impossible, to defend the truths of the Christian religion by the help of rational arguments. (shrink)

In this essay I describe how my involvement in the political struggles of an immigrant domestic workers' collective inspired me to hang out not only with the workers, but also with the writings of María Lugones and Hannah Arendt. The essay invites the reader to engage in a playful rereading of Arendt's notion of the worldlessness of laboring in the private realm by putting her into dialogue with Lugones's notion of the hangout that defies the public–private split Arendt adamantly insists (...) on in all her writings. By following the complex physical, mental, and emotional itineraries of immigrant domestic workers to, from, and in-between a number of places and spaces, I demonstrate how their stories blur the line between public and private, and therefore also between the unfreedom of the body and the presumed escape into the political public. I describe the women's experiences as the living promise of a world that allows for an embodied fluid movement between labor, work, and the freedom “inherent in action” (Arendt 193, 153). (shrink)

Concepts for sustainable bioeconomy systems are gradually replacing the ones on linear product chains. The reason is that continuously expanding linear chain activities are considered to contribute to climate change, reduced biodiversity, over-exploitation of resources, food insecurity, and the double burden of disease. Are sustainable bioeconomy systems a guarantee for a healthy planet? If yes, why, when, and how? In literature, different sustainability indicators have been presented to shed light on this complicated question. Due to high degrees of complexity and (...) interactions of actors in bioeconomy systems, trade-offs and non-linear outcomes became apparent. This fueled the debates about the normative dimensions of the bioeconomy. In particular, the behavior of actors and the utilization of products do not seem to be harmonized according to the environmental, social, and economic pillars of sustainability. Potential conflicts require a new conceptual framework that is here introduced. It consists of a ‘sustainability’ cylinder captured between an inner-cylinder, representing order, and an outer-cylinder for chaos, based on the laws of physics and complex adaptive systems. Such a framework permits (bioeconomy) systems to propagate in the sustainability zone only if they follow helical pathways serving as the new norms. Helices are a combination of two sinusoidal patterns. The first represents here the sustainable behavior of interacting actors and the second the balanced usage of resources and products. The latter counteracts current growth discourses. The applicability of the conceptual cylinder framework is positively verified via 9 cases in Europe, which encompass social-organizational and product-technological innovations. –. (shrink)

For the Introduction of a Conceptual Perspective in Mathematics: Dedekind, Noether, van der Waerden. „She [Noether] then appeared as the creator of a new direction in algebra and became the leader, the most consistent and brilliant representative, of a particular mathematical doctrine – of all that is characterized by the term ‚Begriffliche Mathematik‘.“2 The aim of this paper is to illuminate this “new direction”, which can be characterized as a conceptual [begriffliche] perspective in mathematics, and to comprehend its roots and (...) trace its establishment. Field, ring, ideal, the core concepts of this new direction in mathematical images of knowledge, were conceptualized by Richard Dedekind (1831–1916) within the scope of his number theory research and associated with an understanding of a formation of concepts as a “free creation of the human spirit”3. They thus stand for an abstract perspective of mathematics in their entirety, described as ‘modern algebra’ in the 1920s and 1930s, leading to an understanding of mathematics as structural sciences. The establishment of this approach to mathematics, which is based on “general mathematical concepts” [allgemein‐mathematische Begriffe]4, was the success of a cultural movement whose most important protagonists included Emmy Noether (1882–1935) and her pupil Bartel L. van der Waerden (1903–1996). With the use of the term ‘conceptual’, a perspective is taken in the analysis which allows for developing connections between the thinking of Dedekind, the “working and conceptual methods” [Arbeits‐ und Auffassungsmethoden]5 of Noether as well as the methodological approach, represented through the thought space of the Noether School as presented under the term “conceptual world” [Begriffswelt]6 in the Moderne Algebra of van der Waerden. This essay thus makes a contribution to the history of the introduction of a structural perspective in mathematics, a perspective that is inseparable from the mathematical impact of Noether, her reception of the work of Dedekind and the creative strength of the Noether School. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the meaning of Du Bois’s concept of “abolition democracy” and on the ideology of the abstract rights-bearing subject. In Abolition Democracy, Angela Y. Davis calls for the abolition of oppressive institutions, such as U.S. prisons, in order to engender abolition democracy. She also questions how subjects appear before the law, which justifies and normalizes inhumane practices, such as the death penalty. In conclusion, the paper explores ideas on how to conceptualize thinking “beyond” the prison industrial complex (...) not only in North America but globally. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: I II III IV V VI VII VIII.

Margaret McLaren’s ethnographic study that is ostensibly about Indian women’s activism also presents a nuanced critique of liberal human rights discourse and advances a relational cosmopoli­tanism. Her defense of Tagore’s decolonial worldview has much in common with an African Ubuntu ethics, which also eschews pos­sessive individualism in favor of a sociocentric social justice praxis philosophy. McLaren’s book provides an important contribution to questions of women’s empowerment, women’s rights, cultural rites, and situated knowledges.

Using Habermas’s latest major work Between Facts and Norms (1996), this paper contrasts his explicit views on jurisprudence in the Occident with implied statements about the native Other. I wish to show that there’s an embedded agonistic (combative) — if not imperial — theme, not only in his theory of communicative competence, but also in his larger project of critical theory.

A materialist feminist approach to the ethics of care.

Contesting Carceral Logic provides an innovative and cutting-edge analysis of how carceral logic is embedded within contemporary society, emphasizing international perspectives, the harms and critiques of using carceral logic to respond to human wrongdoing, and exploring penal abolition thought. With chapters from scholars across many disciplines, people in prison, as well as penal abolition activists, the book explores what a future without carceral logic would look like, as well as how such a future is to be developed. The book is (...) also an exploration of penal abolition thought as it is developing in the twenty-first century. Diverse geographical, cultural, identity and experiential frames inform the book's themes of analysing carceral logic as it harms disparate people in disparate places, creating anti-carceral knowledge, exploring case studies pointing to radical alternatives, and to contesting carceral logic from below. Ultimately, Contesting Carceral Logic provides the reader with an alternative and critical perspective from which to reflect on carceral logic, the punitive state and the criminalizing systems that almost exclusively dominate across the world. Finally, it raises the questions of how we are to build communities as well as transform our response to human wrongdoing in ways that are not defined by racism/ethnocentrism, class war and heteropatriarchy. Contesting Carceral Logic will be of great interest to not only scholars and activists, but also provides an introduction to key carceral issues and debates for students of penology, criminology, social policy, geography, politics, philosophy, social work and social history programmes in countries all around the world. (shrink)

Despite the intransigent nature of many of the problems discussed, the contributors to this volume demonstrate the possibilities for developing a viable alternative politics.

Andrew Fitz-Gibbon in Pragmatic Nonviolence: Working Toward a Better World argues that a principled form of pragmatism—pragmatism shaped by the theory of nonviolence—is the best hope for our world. He defines nonviolence as “a practice that, whenever possible seeks the well-being of the Other, by refusing to use violence to solve problems, and by having an intentional commitment to lovingkindness.” In the first part of the book, Fitz-Gibbon asks what a better world would look like. In the second part, he (...) covers what is the greatest obstacle to that better world: violence. In the third part, he examines philosophical theories of nonviolence. The fourth part examines pragmatism as a philosophy of “what works” (William James) through the lens of the principle of maximizing well-being through nonviolent practice. In response to Fitz-Gibbon’s work, critic Danielle Poe asks what a nonviolence response looks like to the Other whom we have wronged and wonders how nonviolence responds to systemic violence. Sanjay Lal asks whether pragmatism and nonviolence can be synthesized given the popular conception that the pragmatic possible seems at odds with the ideal of absolute nonviolence. William C. Gay affirms much of the text and suggests its uses in teaching. Mechthild Nagel wonders if Fitz-Gibbon’s pragmatic nonviolence is too anthropocentric and questions the absence of a consideration of systemic violence in the criminal justice system. Fitz-Gibbon then responds to the critics. (shrink)

This essay provides an analysis of the theme of power in the text of the mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg, The Flowing Light of the Godhead. The author examines how this mediaeval woman learned to be an adroit shaper of power in her own life; how she understood the effects of corrupt clergy who persecuted her; how she directly faced corrupt power figures; how she used the rhetoric of femininity to subvert the more obvious power structures; how she gathered male (...) friends and clerics around her to legitimate her work; and how she skilfully negotiated the complex religious labyrinth of orthodoxy in her day. This essay provides an analysis of her engagement and entanglement of power relations, whether through her actions, her mystical work, or her direct discourse on the topic in Book VI of her text. (shrink)

To examine whether high moral reasoning competence of adolescents is associated with low levels of bullying, and to understand whether moral disengagement mediates or moderates this relationship, 925 German children ranging from 11 to 17 years of age (M = 14.18, S = 1.21) completed questionnaires on moral reasoning competence and moral disengagement in surveys at three different schools. The children were classified according to their bullying role, based on a peer- nomination procedure. Multinomial logistic regression analyses showed that moral (...) reasoning competence negatively predicted whether a student took an aggressive role. Moral disengagement partially mediated this relationship. Corresponding effects for defenders and outsiders were not found. These results extend previous findings about the effect of moral reasoning on bullying in primary school. The implications for the prevention of bullying are discussed. (shrink)