The author contextualizes the Problem of Evil in Open Theism system, listing its main theses, primarily the logic-of- love-defense (and free-will-defense) connected to Trinitarian speculation. After evaluating the discussion in Analytic Philosophy of Religion, the focus is on the personal mystery of evil, claiming that, because of mystery and vagueness, the Problem of Evil is undecidable. Recalling other schools of thought (Pareyson: ontology of freedom; Moltmann: Dialectical theology; Kenotic theology; Original Sin hermeneutics), the author tries to grasp their common insights. (...) One of them is the evident explanatory failure of theodicies, expressed in the antinomian statements ‘God is not innocent’. The author follows these insights, developing the concept of Eternal Immolation (Bulgakov), arguing that, without a proper understanding of its mystery (what is, and what is not), theistic theodicy could remain compromised. ‘Eternal Immolation’ is considered consequent – or already present – in recent speculations, it stands or falls when we accept that these reveal some unresolved points in Christian doctrine. Hence, ‘Eternal Immolation’ becomes a coordinating-concept, able to bring together their assumptions: several kinds of kenosis, the ontology of freedom with a logic-of-love defense, strongly linked to a libertarian human freedom, and the acknowledgement of the unresolved mystery of evil. (shrink)

Se muestran los rasgos generales de la noción posmoderna de sujeto moral en Vattimo desde la interpretación que hace de Nietzsche y Heidegger, según la cual la continuidad entre estos pensadores solo se da en el horizonte de una nueva ontología. Esta se especifica con el hilo conductor de la noción de don que desarrolla Bataille, lo que la hace una ontología nihilista del don. Por su parte, el sujeto se determina como agente del don, capaz de recibir el don (...) del ser como llamado del pasado y, a su vez, mediar una respuesta que se configure como don para el futuro. Ese sujeto solo puede ser tal si primero se desustancializa o, según la noción de don de Bataille, se autoinmola. The article shows the general features of the postmodern notion of moral subject in Vattimo's work following his interpretation of Nietzsche and Heidegger, according to which the continuity between these thinkers only occurs on the horizon of a new ontology. This ontology is specified with the conducting thread of Bataille's notion of gift, which makes it a nihilist ontology of the gift. Furthermore, the subject is defined as an agent of the gift, capable of receiving the gift of being as a call of the past and, simultaneously, capable of mediating a response configured as a gift for the future. This subject can be such only if it is de-substantized, or, according to Bataille's notion of gift, self-immolated. (shrink)

_Starve and Immolate_ tells the story of leftist political prisoners in Turkey who waged a deadly struggle against the introduction of high security prisons by forging their lives into weapons. Weaving together contemporary and critical political theory with political ethnography, Banu Bargu analyzes the death fast struggle as an exemplary though not exceptional instance of self-destructive practices that are a consequence of, retort to, and refusal of the increasingly biopolitical forms of sovereign power deployed around the globe. Bargu chronicles the (...) experiences, rituals, values, beliefs, ideological self-representations, and contentions of the protestors who fought cellular confinement against the background of the history of Turkish democracy and the treatment of dissent in a country where prisons have become sites of political confrontation. A critical response to Michel Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_, _Starve and Immolate_ centers on new forms of struggle that arise from the asymmetric antagonism between the state and its contestants in the contemporary prison. Bargu ultimately positions the weaponization of life as a bleak, violent, and ambivalent form of insurgent politics that seeks to wrench the power of life and death away from the modern state on corporeal grounds and in increasingly theologized forms. Drawing attention to the existential commitment, sacrificial morality, and militant martyrdom that transforms these struggles into a complex amalgam of resistance, Bargu explores the global ramifications of human weapons' practices of resistance, their possibilities and limitations. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 123-125.

Throughout the Homo Sacer series, Giorgio Agamben takes seriously the political and philosophical significance of Christian ritual in his archaeology of Western political discourse. In Opus Dei, Agamben argues for the sacrifice of the Mass as the paradigm for the ontology of effectivity, an ontology he sees as still regnant in the West. This ontology depends on the discourse of duty or office, and it begins with the priestly office. The priest’s duty is to be an “animate instrument” in the (...) Mass. However, Agamben’s archaeology contains a massive gap between scholastic theology and Enlightenment political theory—the Protestant Reformation. I argue that Agamben’s hypothesis requires attending to the reformation of the Mass. Examining the works of Luther and Zwingli, I show that in spite of their rejection of the priesthood, the discourse of duty and operativity not only persists but expands through their respective sacramental theologies. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000) 127-150 [Access article in PDF] They Who Burned Themselves for Peace: Quaker and Buddhist Self-Immolators during the Vietnam War Sallie B. KingJames Madison UniversityNhat Chi Mai was a lay disciple of Thich Nhat Hanh and member of the Order of Interbeing, an Engaged Buddhist order founded by Nhat Hanh. On May 16, 1967, Vesak, the celebration of the birth of the Buddha, she burned herself (...) to death outside the Tu Nghiem Temple, a nunnery. An idealistic young student with much to live for, she sacrificed herself in an effort to bring the war to an end. In a letter to the U.S. government she wrote, I offer my body as a torch to dissipate the dark to waken love among men to give peace to Vietnam the one who burns herself for peace. 1In her farewell letter to Thich Nhat Hanh she wrote, "Thay, don't worry too much. We will have peace soon." 2On November 2, 1965, Norman Morrison, a devout Quaker and ardent pacifist, drove from Baltimore to Washington and burned himself to death at the Pentagon, at a spot estimated to be 40 to 100 feet from the window of Robert S. McNamara, then Secretary of Defense and one of the chief American prosecutors of the war. Shortly before his death, he wrote to his wife, "For weeks even months I have been praying only that I be shown what I must do. This morning with no warning I was shown.... Know that I love thee but must act...." 3 Morrison took his baby daughter, Emily, along with him and held her in his arms as he prepared for his act. Somehow--accounts differ as to how it happened--she was separated from her father before the flames engulfed him and she emerged entirely unharmed, though her clothing smelled strongly of the kerosene with which Morrison had soaked himself. 4There were others who burned themselves to death during the war in Vietnam. The venerable Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc was the first. On June 11, 1963, [End Page 127] at a downtown crossroads in Saigon, he sat in the lotus posture and, in a state of meditative control, burned himself to death in protest of the Diem regime's repression of the Buddhist religion. Many Vietnamese Buddhist monks and nuns followed his example; I do not know all their names, or exactly how many they were.In America, to my knowledge, eight people burned themselves to death during the war. Two were Quakers: Norman Morrison and Alice Herz. Roger LaPorte, a former Trappist seminarian who had become a Catholic worker, burned himself to death one week after Norman Morrison. The others were: Hiroko Hayasaki, a Japanese-American Buddhist; Erik Thoen, a student of Zen Buddhism; another university student, George Winne; a high school student, Ronald Brazee; and Florence Beaumont, described as a "housewife." A number of others attempted self-immolation but survived. 5In this paper I will focus upon the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai. I will also have a few comments on Thich Quang Duc. My remarks are intended, however, to have relevance to all the Buddhist and Quaker self-immolators. 6Let us now consider in more detail some of the features of the self-immolations of Norman Morrison and Nhat Chi Mai, and some of the issues they pose to the Quaker and Buddhist communities, respectively. Precipitating Events While neither act was the result of a moment's impulse, we still would do well to ask what events most proximately precipitated the two self-immolations. In Norman Morrison's case, the precipitating events were two. The morning of the day he immolated himself he read a report of the American bombing of a village in Vietnam. Paris Match had published an interview with a French priest, recuperating in a Saigon clinic, who had witnessed and survived the bombing raid. The priest said, "I have seen my faithful burned up in napalm.... I have seen... (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 8, August 2020, Page 119-120.

The Zhuangzi is one of the richest early Chinese sources for exploring conceptualizations of the visceral human form. Zhuangzi presents the human frame as a corpus of flesh, organs, limbs, and bone; he dissects it before the reader's eyes, turning it inside out and joyfully displaying its fragmented joints, sundered limbs, and beautifully monstrous mutations. This body is a site of immolation and fragmentation that ultimately evokes a larger wholeness and completeness. Drawing and quartering the body, Zhuangzi paradoxically frees (...) it from ordinary mortality. -/- Sommer explores the fields of meaning of different terms for the human body found in the Zhuangzi: the body might appear there as a gong body 躬, a sanctimonious ritualized body; as a shen body 身, a site of familial and social personhood; or as a ti body 體, a complex, multilayered corpus of multiple parts, each of which is consubstantial with the whole. Most commonly, however, the body in the Zhuangzi is the xing 形, an elemental or structural form. Zhuangzi enlivens and develops the xing form in ways that are not seen in other early Chinese texts. He mutilates and mutates it such that boundaries between form and formlessness disappear, and the physical frame becomes incorporated into a larger common body that includes all of life and death. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the complex ethical dynamics of violence and nonviolence in Mahāyāna Buddhism by considering some of the historical precedents and scriptural prescriptions that inform modern and contemporary Buddhist acts of self-immolation. Through considering these scripturally sanctioned Mahāyāna ‘case studies,’ the paper traces the tension that exists in Buddhist thought between violence and nonviolence, outlines the interplay of key Mahāyāna ideas of transcendence and altruism, and comments on the mimetic status and influence of spiritually charged texts. (...) It is the contention of this paper that violent scriptural metaphors can create paradigms of enactment that are paradoxically illustrative of the core ‘non-violent’ Mahāyāna virtues of compassion, giving, patience, and vigor. The discussion will show that these virtues are underpinned by the Mahāyāna philosophical mainstays of non-duality, bodhisattvic transcendent altruism, skillful means, and dependent co-origination. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of SacrificeElisabeth Arnould (bio)When, at the very center of his Inner Experience, Bataille arrives at what he calls the “uppermost extremity of non-meaning,” he stages for us one of the principal scenes of his “sacrifice of knowledge.” It depicts Rimbaud, turning his back on his works, making the ultimate and definitive sacrifice of poetry. This scene, which complements two (...) other representations of the “supplice” of the experience—the crucifixion of God and the oncoming madness of Hegel—rounds out the triple sacrificial vocation of an experience of nonknowledge, at once “a-theological,” “a-gnoseological,” and “a-poetological.” It extends to poetry and language the critical and sovereign imperative of an experience that can only be called “inner” insofar as it renounces truth, knowledge, and, ultimately, speech.What exactly, however, does this sacrificial renunciation of words represent for Bataille and why did he choose to load it with all the transgressive weight of the experience of nonknowledge (“non-savoir”)? Why place the self-sacrifice of poetry at the very center of a book that would be annulled by an immolation of speech? Indeed, why make this final “supplice”—a sacrifice of words performed and dedicated “to” “nothing”—into the core of the book’s interior rapture? Isn’t this figure of death and silence incurably equivocal? Does it not attribute the traditional traits of a “nothingness” to this “rapturous heart” of finitude that Bataille always wanted to designate as the “impossible” object of his experience? And is it not, therefore, condemned to appropriate, through this representation, the nonmeaning of a finitude that Bataille, far from conceptualizing as simple nothingness, usually prefers to designate ambiguously as “nonknowledge”?Such are the questions I shall address in reevaluating Bataille’s concept of sacrifice in light of Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique. In his article “The Unsacrificeable,” Nancy was the first to point out the problematic nature of the sacrificial model in Bataille’s conceptualization of finitude. According to Nancy, sacrifice, including the self-sacrifice of Rimbaud so important to Bataille, is the vehicle of an “ontotheological” appropriation. And it is through sacrifice that Bataille’s reflection on finitude attempts to domesticate death while claiming to abandon it to the aporetic enunciation of a “nonknowledge.”I shall thus examine the problematic figure of poetry’s self-sacrifice in order to expose, with Nancy, the equivocality of its conceptual appropriation. In light of Bataille’s multiple stagings and interpretations of this figure, however, I shall also attempt to demonstrate how his writing on and of sacrifice already contains the seeds of its own critique and attempts to exceed itself. Bataille did not simply want to reveal, in Rimbaud’s self-sacrifice, the inexpressible truth of finitude; he also wanted to denounce the comical lie of the sacrificial appropriation. And it is this double valence of the Rimbaldian self-sacrifice that I shall try to bring forth. [End Page 86]Before elucidating the meaning and function of this figure in the specific context of Inner Experience and questioning its possible duplicity, one must examine the general notion upon which it is modeled. Poetry’s self-sacrifice is the “consummate” form 1 of a sacrifice that we find in the form of stagings and commentaries in Bataille’s work. As is well known, the question of sacrifice has always occupied a central place in Bataille’s thought. He has not only studied this protean ethnological phenomenon we call “sacrifice” but has also wanted to give sacrifice, beyond traditional “ontotheological” interpretations and recent anthropological reconstructions, a meaning that far exceeds these restricted determinations. Sacrifice is not simply, for Bataille, a theoretical object. A paradigmatic manifestation of the sacred and its transgressions, it marks rather a limit to conceptualization and constitutes a stumbling block to thought. As such, it is, for Bataille—or, as he himself maintains, for all thought—the locus of an interruption. Cross-culturally, sacrifice delineates the limit thought comes up against when it faces what it cannot think.As the negation of our corporeal and intellectual limits, as the bloody excess that erupts before the fascinated eyes of a spectator, sacrifice “represents,” for... (shrink)

Can the Transsexual speak? I investigate this question through the case of Ella Nik Bayan who self-immolated in Berlin (Germany) on September 14, 2021. I first argue that this self-immolation is unreadable within the current frameworks of Western democracies. The case, however, paradigmatically demonstrates that emancipation within the confines of neoliberal capitalism can only be read under the pretense of a toxic protection. I then move on to claim that Ella Nik Bayan’s self-immolation calls for a completely different (...) political order from the one we currently inhabit, which, with Namita Goswami, I call “ heterogeneous.” I argue that heterogeneous politics is a politics of radical hospitality that opposes institutions of private property in particular. Unlearning private property means to pre-enact a world without the kind of racist, transmisogynist, and antisemitic violence that killed Ella Nik Bayan. Anti-capitalist hospitality sets out to create the social and cultural resources that enable a world beyond (such) violence. (shrink)

Sunohara Yuuri and Akita Masami’s series of six seppuku films (1990) are solely constituted by images of fictionalized death, revolving around the prolonged self-torture of a lone figure committing harakiri. I contend that the protagonist’s auto-immolation mirrors a formal death, each frame ‘killing’ the moment it represents. My analysis aims to explore how the solipsistic nature of selfhood is appositely symbolized by the isolation of the on-screen figures and the insistence with which the six films repeat the same scenario (...) of protracted agony across the cycle. The centralization of suffering, I argue, parallels the distance between viewer and image with the isolating nature of embodied existence. Thus, this article seeks to probe the relationship between form and content, asking what the image of death reveals about the death of the image. -/- . (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the complex ethical dynamics of violence and nonviolence in Mahāyāna Buddhism by considering some of the historical precedents and scriptural prescriptions that inform modern and contemporary Buddhist acts of self-immolation. Through considering these scripturally sanctioned Mahāyāna ‘case studies,’ the paper traces the tension that exists in Buddhist thought between violence and nonviolence, outlines the interplay of key Mahāyāna ideas of transcendence and altruism, and comments on the mimetic status and influence of spiritually charged texts. (...) It is the contention of this paper that violent scriptural metaphors can create paradigms of enactment that are paradoxically illustrative of the core ‘non-violent’ Mahāyāna virtues of compassion, giving, patience, and vigor. The discussion will show that these virtues are underpinned by the Mahāyāna philosophical mainstays of non-duality, bodhisattvic transcendent altruism, skillful means, and dependent co-origination. (shrink)

This paper explores the theme of sacrifice as it appears in the writings of the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka from the 1970s on the subjects of history, metaphysics, and techno-civilization. The paper argues that the theme of sacrifice is best understood as part of an engagement with the problem of post-metaphysical philosophy, largely inspired by but also directed against the position of Martin Heidegger. These reflections are also best understood in relation to totalitarian resistance, exemplified by the self-immolation of (...) Jan Palach in the wake of the Soviet invasion in 1968, which remains a constant, if unacknowledged presence in the background of these writings. The conception of sacrifice that emerges, in contrast to mythico-religious forms, breaks with a reliance on patterns of exchange and reward in favor of an expression of metaphysical freedom, and in turn provides the fulcrum for Patočka’s commentary on the possibility of a “demythologized” Christianity. (shrink)

The pleasure of burning books consumed Montag, consumed him until the day the books burned back, their possibilities enflaming his curiosity to the point of existential immolation. Yet from these ashes, he rises. Fahrenheit 451 is a novel of ascent, an ascent to freedom that can be found only in knowledge. Superficially, the relationship between freedom and knowledge seems antagonistic; however, examining Bradbury’s novel in Plato’s light—particularly focusing on the images of the Cave and Line—can provide piercing insights into (...) the inherent harmony uniting knowledge and freedom, rendering this antagonism illusory. (shrink)

In 1960, in "The Problem of Method," which serves as the introduction not only to Critique of Dialectical Reason but to all of his recent work, Sartre enrolls himself solemnly under the banner of Marxism, which he considers the unsurpassable philosophy of our era. Today, a dozen years later, the Sartrean position has become open to challenge, it is true, because its deconstruction is underway, but it has not yet been dismissed as absurd. Existentialism, by immolating itself on the altar (...) of praxis, has taken with it phenomenology and the Existenzphilosophie that emerged from it. Heidegger, for example, can be read as the last defender of the bourgeois order fetishized as Being, forced by the triumphal march of the... (shrink)

David, king in Hebron.—Battle near Gibeon.—Murder of Abner.—Jerusalem.—State of Hebrew industry.—Conquest of Moab.—First war with the Zobahites.—Conquest of Edom.—Prosperity of David.—Ammonite war.—Destruction of the Ammonites.—Career of Absalom.—Death of Absalom.—Disgrace of Mephibosheth.—Immolation of Saul’s descendants.—The pestilence.—Conspiracy of Adonijah.—Death of David.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 30.1 (2000) 25-48 [Access article in PDF] Postcolonialism's Archive Fever Sandhya Shetty and Elizabeth Jane Bellamy Jacques Derrida. Archive Fever. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. ________. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1976. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988. 271-313. 1. (...) Reading the Subaltern Archivally--or, Back to Antiquity Many readers of "Can the Subaltern Speak?" have been disturbed by Spivak's controversial answer to her own question, which is that "no scene of speaking" can arise for the subaltern woman; no discursive space can emerge from which she could formulate an "utterance." 1 One way of rephrasing Gayatri Spivak's highly resonant question might be, Can there be such a thing as a "postcolonial archive"? The purpose of our essay is to demonstrate just how crucial the concept of an "archive"--perhaps even a "postcolonial archive"--is for a more sympathetic understanding of Spivak's now notorious "silencing" of the subaltern woman. The underread and scarcely commented-on third and fourth sections of Spivak's essay raise the question, Can we approach the gendered subaltern more productively if our project is to recover not "lost voices" but rather lost texts? In the process of unpacking the textual complexities underlying Britain's 1829 abolition of sati (the widow's self-immolation on her husband's funeral pyre), Spivak pushes us further back in time when she observes intriguingly that "the archival... work involved here is indeed a task of 'measuring silences'" [286, our emphasis]. 2 We contend that her [End Page 25] choice of the term "archival" is highly motivated and can serve as the long-overdue occasion for a return to the largely unread sections of "Can the Subaltern Speak?"We can think of at least two risks involved in our undertaking. For one thing, revisitations to well-known essays can often seem more regressive than innovative. We are well aware that we may have to overcome a certain indifference on the part of readers who, feeling confident that they know it well, judge that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (now over ten years old) has had its theoretical "moment" and should now give way to more current efforts to locate nonelite, subaltern subjectivity within a politics of resistance. A second concern is that because our project of reading the subaltern woman "archivally" must necessarily reexamine and justify Spivak's career-long engagement with Derrida and with deconstruction, we must be aware of the extent to which her deconstructive feminism has been prematurely and unfairly associated with the supposed political shortcomings of Derridean deconstruction, the regrettable result being an almost reflex aversion to her deconstructive theory within both feminism and postcolonialism. Despite these risks, however, we hope that our use of the archive as the governing principle for our return to Spivak's essay can pave the way for a more sympathetic reading of Spivak's "silent" subaltern. Our essay will argue that "Can the Subaltern Speak?" deserves a foundational or canonical status within postcolonial theory and should experience a "staying power" on the current critical scene as far-reaching and significant as Edward Said's Orientalism.Spivak's essay at one point refers quite literally to the concept of an archive, that is, the colonial "archive" of the East India Company, consisting of the "correspondence among the police stations, the lower and higher courts, the courts of directors, the prince regent's court," and so on [298]--all the documents instrumental in British law's recodification of sati from "ritual" to "crime" (also, we might add, the archive of subaltern historiography). 3 However, as Foucault's concept of the archive reminds us, the [End Page 26] archive is not just "that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive [in this case, legal] formation," but can also be conceptualized more abstractly as the "law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events... (shrink)

En vue d'une approche mystique de l'Apocalypse - qui n'est pas celle d'extases et de visions présumées - il faut tenir compte de la situation d'une expérience liturgique, du langage typique et du symbolisme de l'auteur qui réussit à communiquer ainsi un sens qui s'ajoute au discours conceptuel. On rencontre ainsi dans la première partie du livre le Christ ressuscité. Jean en a une expérience directe: la voix du Christ est «telle une trompette» et Jean se retourne «pour regarder la (...) voix»: l'expression symbolique, à première vue contradictoire, élève au-delà du niveau conceptuel, incitant à un contact face à face avec le Christ ressuscité qui parle, plus intense que celui des apparitions pascales et dans la ligne de la transfiguration. Dans la seconde partie, la «porte ouverte dans le ciel» met en contact avec Dieu «siégeant sur le trône» : l'auteur ne le décrit pas, mais il en inculque une expérience directe quand il affirme que le personnage assis sur le trône correspond, à le regarder, à l'aspect des pierres précieuses . Le Christ comme arnionsurpasse, par la présentation symbolique qui en est faite , le niveau conceptuel en ouvrant l'accès à une expérience directe: on perçoit que l'arnion, en tant que «au milieu du trône et des quatre animaux, au milieu des anciens» , exerce une fonction centrale dans l'histoire du salut; l'expression contradictoire, «un agneau se dressait qui semblait immolé» , inc. (shrink)

While suicide is typically associated with personal despair, people do sometimes kill themselves in the hope or expectation that their death will advance a political cause by way of its impact on the conscience of others, or in extreme cases simply as an expression of protest against a status quo felt to be unjust. Paradigm cases of such protest suicide may be public acts of self-immolation. This chapter distinguishes between instrumental and expressive protest suicide, examines the possible motivations behind (...) them, their possible moral justification, and their potential contribution to the meaning of the suicide’s life. It argues that when the value of the aim pursued by way of instrumental suicide is proportionate, killing oneself promotes it sufficiently, and other morally acceptable options are exhausted, instrumental protest suicide can be morally permissible and consistent with human dignity. It can even be an admirable act of self-sacrifice, provided that the agent’s motivations are suitable. Some of the standard moral objections to suicide don’t apply to such cases. But protest suicide remains morally risky, because one might be mistaken about the worth of one’s cause or the availability of alternatives, and because even these extreme acts typically have limited effect. (shrink)

National identity and attachment to national culture have taken root even in this era of globalization. National sentiments find expression in multiple political spheres and cause troubles of various kinds in many societies, both domestically and across state borders. Some of these problems are rooted in history; others are the result of massive global immigration. As US Secretary of State John Kerry tries to broker a new round of Israel-Palestine peace talks, the Israeli government continues expanding its settlements in disputed (...) territories. As this proposal is being written, Japanese citizens are debating whether their politicians should visit the Yasukuni Shrine (靖國神社), where the spirits of fourteen Class A war criminals from WWII and more than one thousand others convicted of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are honored with a distinguished resting place. As the Chinese government’s plan to bring economic prosperity to the Xinjian province unfolds, ethnic conflicts between Han Chinese and local Uyghur Muslims intensify. Tibetans still demonstrate to the Chinese government, some through the dramatic sacrifice of self-immolation, their determination to pursue a Tibet that is truly free and autonomous. The recent inflow of Muslim immigrants across Europa and North America forces those liberal democratic societies to rethink the meaning of multiculturalism. Should the state respect Muslim women’s freedom to wear burkas in public? What about other aspects of certain Muslim traditions such as arranged marriages or the honor killing of teenage girls who see boys their parents do not approve? Since these immigrants voluntarily moved from their homeland to a new society, do they have a duty to give up such practices, which conflict with their new societies’ fundamental commitment to individual autonomy? Eric Hobsbawm suggests that nationalism is a contingent phenomenon in history—it arises with important historical events such as industrialization and print journalism; eventually, it will disappear. Anthony Smith, on the other hand, argues that nationalism is deeply rooted in the human need for collective faith and dignity. How should we understand today’s nationalism? Is it a transient phenomenon that eventually will be eradicated from the world, or is it a timeless issue that confronts and will remain a challenge for every society? Is the conventional distinction between civic and cultural nationalism still relevant or helpful? The problems and ongoing challenges of nationalism are very much alive throughout East Asia where the myth of ethnically and culturally homogeneous nations is still paramount. In addition to the examples provided above, East Asian societies are increasingly multicultural, inevitably forcing their governments to come up with new immigration and border-control policies, revisit their laws regarding labor policies, sociopolitical discrimination, socioeconomic welfare, and, more fundamentally, rethink the constitutional make-up of the citizenry and the ideal of social harmony, one of their most cherished political values. Nevertheless, contemporary theoretical analyses, whether philosophical or empirical, of the phenomena surrounding nationalism, in all its forms, are almost exclusively focused on cases in western cultures and societies, preventing the East Asian people from developing a coherent idea of who they are or should be in a way that can track their deeply-held values and norms (such as Confucianism). One of the primary aims of this conference therefore is to address this ongoing neglect and explore new concepts and theories that are socially relevant in East Asia. Not only will this provide access to the particular experiences of nation, citizenship, and nationalism throughout East Asia but it will bring to bear philosophical concepts, approaches, and styles of reasoning about them that currently are not part of this critical debate. Providing an opportunity to hear these distinct and different East Asian voices and opening up these conceptual and methodological resources to scholars around the world will greatly advance the understanding and appreciation of nationalism. In addition to this primary aim, the proposed conference will achieve two other, novel, and important goals. First, by design, it will bring to bear a multi and interdisciplinary approach to the problems of nationalism. We are not privileging either conceptual or empirical studies in the organization of our conference and will bring together philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, and historians, making every effort to invite scholars who explicitly employ or are interested in exploring different and at times hybrid approaches. Second, we will draw together scholars from around the world: China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, North America, and Europe, including leading figures in the field, who will serve as keynote speakers for the conference. Combining these two additional goals will enable us to organize a uniquely diverse conference, both in terms of intellectual discipline and national origin. Along with our primary aim of introducing East Asian voices and theories, this will make our event original, distinctive, and unprecedented in value. Our age is one in which it is unavoidable for people of different cultural backgrounds to live together in many different places. For the sake of justice and stability, a comprehensive re-examination of nationalism is both urgent and necessary. (shrink)

"Si le bel Islam prêche le droit à l'indifférence et à la non-agression mutuelle, il faut croire que l'Homme, lui, est versatile, colérique et impétueux.", constate Malek Chebel. A travers cinq études percutantes, il nous montre à quel point la faute et la transgression sont omniprésentes dans le monde musulman contemporain. Cet Inconscient de l'Islam remonte aux racines de la religion et se nourrit de l'histoire de ses califats, pour mettre en évidence la folie actuelle d'une partie de la communauté. (...) Guerre sainte détournée, exacerbation de la figure du kamikaze, violence symbolique de la relation mère-fils, censure à l'encontre des livres, immolation au nom d'une purification : cette immersion dans le monde complexe des interdits et de leur transgression interroge les liens entre religion, politique et liberté dans le monde arabo-musulman. Plaidoyer autorisé pour la mise à nu d'un inconscient longtemps nié, cet essai percutant révèle les troubles d'un islam aux prises avec ses contradictions. (shrink)

? +? il annonce? c’est la dernière fois que nous participons à un exercice volontaire vis-à-vis de la Grèce? =? il y a un temps pour tout? le temps? du volontarisme est terminé? +? un défaut total de la Grèce serait tout à fait gérable pour la banque nationale de Paris Paribas? +? il affirme? la banque se laisse une belle marge de manœuvre pour rémunérer ses actionnaires? +? sur le visage d’Ernesto? est visible le visage de Palden Choetso? nonne (...) tibétaine? elle s’immole par le feu. (shrink)

A persistent worry in the ethical literature on care and empathy is that the agent is prone to self-sacrifice by the requisite state of engrossment in or engagement of the other. Addressing this worry particularly as expressed in feminist philosophy, I argue that the standard conceptions of self-sacrifice conflate four distinct relations of the self to its autonomous will: self-immolation (destroying one’s own autonomy), self-abnegation (disowning one’s autonomy), self-effacement (devaluing one’s autonomy) and self-donation (dedicating one’s autonomy). The latter, far (...) from being vicious, is from an ethical standpoint the highest realization of autonomy; this claim finds echoes in Robin Dillon’s work on self-respect as well as the personalist philosophy of John Paul II. Self-immolation, self-abnegation, and self-effacement, on the other hand, are characterized by detachment from responsibility, corruption of the boundaries between self and other, and suppression of self-understanding. (shrink)

A persistent worry in the ethical literature on care and empathy is that the agent is prone to self-sacrifice by the requisite state of engrossment in or engagement of the other. Addressing this worry particularly as expressed in feminist philosophy, I argue that the standard conceptions of self-sacrifice conflate four distinct relations of the self to its autonomous will: self-immolation (destroying one’s own autonomy), self-abnegation (disowning one’s autonomy), self-effacement (devaluing one’s autonomy) and self-donation (dedicating one’s autonomy). The latter, far (...) from being vicious, is from an ethical standpoint the highest realization of autonomy; this claim finds echoes in Robin Dillon’s work on self-respect as well as the personalist philosophy of John Paul II. Self-immolation, self-abnegation, and self-effacement, on the other hand, are characterized by detachment from responsibility, corruption of the boundaries between self and other, and suppression of self-understanding. (shrink)

Over the last few decades there has emerged a small, yet influential eco-Buddhism movement in South Korea which, since the turn of the millennium, has seen several S?n Buddhist clerics engage in high-profile protests and activism campaigns opposing massive development projects which threatened widespread ecological destruction. This article will survey the issues and events surrounding three such protests; the 2003 samboilbae, or ‘threesteps- one-bow’, march led by Venerable Suky?ng against the Saemangeum Reclamation Project, Venerable Jiyul’s Anti-Mt. Ch?ns?ng tunnel hunger-strike campaign (...) between 2002 and 2006, and lastly Venerable Munsu’s self-immolation protesting the Four Rivers Project in 2010. This article will additionally analyze the attempts by these clerics to deploy innovative and distinctively Buddhist forms of protest, the effects of these protests, and how these protests have altered public perceptions of the role of Buddhist clergy in Korean society. This study will additionally highlight issues relevant to the broader discourse regarding the intersection of Buddhism and social activism, such as the appropriation of traditional Buddhist practices as protest tactics and the potential for conflict between social engagement and the pursuit of Buddhist soteriological goals. (shrink)

Because the fauna of the world possess a blood-driven vitality so comparable to that of people, they serve as an unwitting resource in the anthropocentric quest to ward off the ravages of death and decay, to create a cornucopia of human life amid the caprices of the cosmos. Fueled by the human fear of the grave, the “Gilgamesh complex” is the ensemble of beliefs and desires underlying a spectrum of zoocidal practices ranging from religious immolation to scientific experimentation. The (...) name of the complex draws its textual inspiration from the Babylonian epic of the warrior-king Gilgamesh, who lays waste to beasts of forest and field in his quest for immortality. From a psychological perspective, the epic of Gilgamesh pierces the veil of submerged desires and muddled behaviors that most people in modern society are loath to recognize. The Gilgamesh complex is also among the most culturally and historically encompassing of psychological complexes, penetrating to the barest of human existential concerns—the preoccupation with death. (shrink)

How things were a decade ago: The largest rain forest of our planet abides in the Amazon Basin, a tenth of the entire world biomass. It is one of the last great frontiers on earth; only the bottom of the sea presents terra incognita on so rich and grand a scale. Perhaps half the planet's species dwell in Amazonia, most of them still unknown to our own technological encampment. No mere ocean of green, this community is so intricately interwoven as (...) to constitute a single vast organism, the one true Leviathan, outweighing all the whales in all the oceans of the world that have ever lived. It is the last and greatest forest on earth, and now it is disappearing before it has been discovered: At nearly an acre a second, the TransAmazon highway system and the land clearing operations it has enabled are extinguishing the forest before it can be explored. From space, Landsat pictures show the burned-over patches spreading with the highway network year by year, magenta sores in the false-color images. We, the voracious Lilliputians now, antlike, are dismantling the greatest biochemical engine on earth at a scale so vast that the carbon dioxide economy of the entire planetary atmosphere suffers. In a century of genocides, perhaps the penultimate great extinction unfolds, prologue to the threatening self-immolation of our own species. (shrink)

Because the fauna of the world possess a blood-driven vitality so comparable to that of people, they serve as an unwitting resource in the anthropocentric quest to ward off the ravages of death and decay, to create a cornucopia of human life amid the caprices of the cosmos. Fueled by the human fear of the grave, the “Gilgamesh complex” is the ensemble of beliefs and desires underlying a spectrum of zoocidal practices ranging from religious immolation to scientific experimentation. The (...) name of the complex draws its textual inspiration from the Babylonian epic of the warrior-king Gilgamesh, who lays waste to beasts of forest and field in his quest for immortality. From a psychological perspective, the epic of Gilgamesh pierces the veil of submerged desires and muddled behaviors that most people in modern society are loath to recognize. The Gilgamesh complex is also among the most culturally and historically encompassing of psychological complexes, penetrating to the barest of human existential concerns—the preoccupation with death. (shrink)

As scholars have recently suggested, rhetoric has long been remiss when it comes to nondiscursive concerns beyond its traditional purview. While many have sought to broaden rhetoric's scope, no one has yet undertaken a nondiscursive rhetorical investigation of social change in an effort to reconcile the tension between a critique of agency and the perception of human responsibility. This article undertakes such a critique through Alain Badiou's concept of the event, a concept that, I contend, offers the discipline a means (...) of rethinking the opposition between relativism and flat ontology. Analyzing the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi through the frame of the event, I regard Bouazizi's act as an ontic occurrence exerting influence over protestors across the Arab world while demanding collective recognition to emerge as an event. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 O presente Artigo tem como centro de sua reflexão a espiritualidade centrada no dinheiro. O referido objeto é “ferramenta de Deus” presente nos cultos diários das igrejas neopentecostais. E como tal compõe o arsenal das coisas ofertadas em altar. É símbolo religioso a costurar a relação vertical Deus-igreja-fiel. Mas, não está selecionado como objeto qualquer a tomar parte, como mediação, dessa relação. O dinheiro não é danação ou algo considerado como tal, mas é (...) santificado, quando imolado para se tornar oferta e, assim, contribuir para multiplicar as obras de Deus. Alguns textos – e contextos – tenderiam a afirmar que a penetração do dinheiro, no campo do sagrado, seria para profaná-lo, destruí-lo. Seria verdadeiro ? O dízimo é dinheiro, é algo que pertence a Deus. Percebe-se uma mística que se desenvolve a partir de um processo constante de ressignificação. A perspectiva simbólica compõe a análise compreensiva desse objeto chamado dinheiro que, no espaço de culto neopentecostal, ganha importância e expressividade na fé dos que buscam vitória, conquista, prosperidade. PALAVRAS-CHAVES : Espiritualidade; Dinheiro; Neopentecostalismo; Vinculo social; Dádiva.This Article is centered, in its reflection, SPIRITUALITY CENTRALIZED IN MONEY. The above-mentioned object money is an instrument in god’s hands, present in Neo-pentecostal churches daily cult. And in such a perspective, it – money – coumponds things arsenal, offered at altar. It is a religious symbol fitting to sew GOD – CHURCH – FAITHFUL vertical rapport . But it is not selected as any object at all in order to take part, as a kind of mediation, in this rapport. Money is not a curse, but, sanctified, when immolated to be offered and to multiply the work of God. Some would tend to say that, the entry into the money into the space of the sacred would be to profane God, to destroy him. Can this be so? The tithe is money. It is something that belongs to God. One perceives a certain Mystic, developed fron a resignification constant process. Symbolical perspective compounds this object, called, nominated money, comprehensive analysis, money that, in neo-pentecostal cult space, increases in inportance and expressiveness in faith regarding to those ones who look for victony, conquest, prosperity. KEYWORDS: Spirituality; Money; Social Bond; Gift; Neopentecostalism. (shrink)

While suicide occurs in numbers across countries, it has rarely been used as a form of collective action. In South Korea, however, a total of 107 protesters died from the act of committing suicide, most notably by means of self-immolation, in protest against injustice in the country. While they are regarded as political "martyrs," it remains unclear why they committed suicide and what they wanted to achieve with this highly unusual and costly form of protest. The paper addresses this (...) largely neglected issue by examining the suicide notes left by 48 Korean suicide protesters. The findings reveal that at least in Korea suicide protest was used not only as a from of protest and resistance, but also as an unusual form of micromobilization of mobilizing "consensus" and "action" among halfhearted activists and apathetic bystanders, by accusing the political and economic system as unjust and illegitimate, by identifying the apathy and inaction of the people as the main culprit for persistent injustice, and by urging and shaming the target audience to join a movement. The model presented here of suicide protest as a form of micromobilization provides a useful conceptual framework with which to compare seemingly diverse incidents of suicide protest across countries. (shrink)

This two-part, semi-gothic literary essay seeks a provisional definition of “benevolent capital” and a working description of types of artistic and scholarly work that have no value for Capital as such. The paradox observed is that such works may actually appeal to a certain aspect of Capital, insofar as present-day capitalism has within it forms of pre-modern political economy that may actually save Capital from its mad rush toward self-immolation.

This two-part, semi-gothic literary essay seeks a provisional definition of “benevolent capital” and a working description of types of artistic and scholarly work that have no value for Capital as such. The paradox observed is that such works may actually appeal to a certain aspect of Capital, insofar as present-day capitalism has within it forms of pre-modern political economy that may actually save Capital from its mad rush toward self-immolation.