In this paper, I tend to the concept of “immemorial past” and argue that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s turn in The Visible and the Invisible—a turn toward the conceptualization of time as chiasm and an ontology of the invisible—provides a rich resource for theorizing sexual difference. More precisely, I argue that acknowledging the different kind of temporality of life that the immemorial institutes—a temporality that is generative of meaning and signification—invites us to investigate gender’s “immemorial past.” Shifting attention from (...) the sedimentation and presence of gender habits to the fecund lack that grounds such sedimentation allows us to account for the structure that makes gender production, institution, and differing possible in the first place. Such a structure is a “fecund negativity,” a polymorphous field or depth, that points to the inherent instability and multiplicity of gender, to the fact that gender formation can be traced back to a plural and ambiguous ground that comes to expression in cultural-historical-linguistic manifestations.Dans cet article, je m’appuie sur le concept de « passé immémorial » et montre que le tournant merleau-pontien du Visible et l’Invisible – vers la conceptualisation du temps comme chiasme et d’une ontologie de l’invisible – constitue une riche ressource lorsqu’il s’agit de théoriser la différence sexuelle. Plus précisément, je montre que reconnaître les différents genres de temporalité de vie que l’immémorial institue – une temporalité qui est génératrice de sens et de significations – nous invite à examiner le « temps immémorial » du genre. Passer de la sédimentation et de la présence des habitudes de genre au manque fécond qui fonde une telle sédimentation nous permet de rendre compte de la structure qui rend possible la production, l’institution du genre et de différer le possible à la première place. Une telle structure est une « négativité féconde », un champ ou une profondeur polymorphe, qui souligne l’instabilité inhérente et la multiplicité du genre, le fait que la formation du genre peut être retracée jusqu’à un fond pluriel et ambigu qui s’exprime dans des manifestations culturelles, historiques et linguistiques.Nel presente articolo, intendo elaborare il concetto di “passato immemoriale” e mostrare come la svolta di Merleau-Ponty nel Visibile e l’invisibile – una svolta verso una teorizzazione del tempo come chiasma e verso un’ontologia dell’invisibile – costituisca una risorsa particolarmente ricca per pensare la differenza sessuale. In particolare, vorrei sostenere che comprendere i diversi tipi di temporalità della vita che l’immemoriale istituisce – una temporalità generativa di senso e significato – ci porta a considerare il “passato immemoriale” del gender. Spostare l’attenzione dalla sedimentazione e dalla presenza delle abitudini di genere, alla mancanza feconda che sottende una simile sedimentazione, ci permette di prendere in esame la struttura stessa che rende possibile la produzione, istituzione e differenziazione del genere. Una tale struttura corrisponde ad una “negatività feconda”, un campo polimorfo o profondità che fa segno verso l’instabilità e la molteplicità inerenti al gender, ovvero al fatto che la formazione del genere può essere rintracciata in un orizzonte plurale e ambiguo, che si esprime attraverso manifestazioni culturali-storico-linguistiche. (shrink)

Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau‐Ponty's Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau‐Ponty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and (...) irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage. (shrink)

Eternal return is the paradox that accounts for the interplay between difference and repetition, a dynamic at the heart of Deleuze's philosophy, and Blanchot's approach to this paradox, even and especially through what it elides, further illuminates it. Deleuze draws on Blanchot's characterisations of difference, forgetting, and the unlivable to depict the ‘sense’ produced via eternal return, which, for Blanchot, is where repetition implicates or ‘carries’ pure difference. However, for Deleuze, difference and the unlivable are also developed by the living (...) repetition or ‘contraction’ of habit, which results in his distinctive characterization of ‘force’, ‘levity’, and sense in eternal return. (shrink)

Immediacy and Meaning seeks to approach the odd uneasiness at root in all metaphysical meaning; that the human knower attempts to mediate what cannot be mediated; that there is a pre-cognitive immemorial immediacy to Being that renders its participants irreducible, incommunicable and personal. The dilemma of metaphysics rests on the relationship between the spectator and the player, both as essential responses to the immediacy of Being. Immediacy and Meaning is an attempt to pause, but without retreat, to be a (...) spectator within the game, to gain access into this immediate Presence, for a moment only perhaps, before the signatory failure into metaphysical language returns us to the mediated. J. K. Huysman's semi-autobiographical tetralogy anchors this book as a meditation, neither purely poetic nor only philosophical; it claims a unique territory when attempting to speak what cannot be spoken. The unnerving merits of nominalism, the difficulties of an honest appraisal of efficacious prayer, the mad sanity of the muse, the relationship between the uncreated and the created, and an originary ethics of antagonism, each serves to clarify the formation of a new epistemology. (shrink)

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture is to be a highly focused exhibition/folio of works by perhaps 12 artists (preferably little-known or obscure), with precise commentaries denoting the discord between the autonomous object (the artwork or architectural object per se) and the larger field of reference (worlds); inference (associative magic), and insurrection (against power and privilege) – or, the Immemorial. Engaging the age-old “theological apparatuses” of the artwork, the folio is intended to upend the current fascination with (...) personality, celebrity, and fashion to reach the timeless horizon of the subject of Art and Architecture as the subject other than the subject of Art and Architecture proper. Word as image, and image as word, is the central paradox given to this discord – an elective, yet universal condition that also makes certain art and architectural works heedlessly existential-metaphysical (and, therefore, “theological”). This paper, as part of the essay “White Paper: Gray Areas and Black Zones,” is a preliminary investigation of the conceptual architecture for the overall, ongoing exhibition/book project. (shrink)

In one of his more recent works, Paul Ricoeur attempts to re-instate the philosophical discussion of memory at the very center of a more general discourse on human existence. In his exposition, Ricoeur relies upon what he himself characterizes as a phenomenology of memory. It is the aim of the present article to supplement the phenomenological account of memory discussed by Ricoeur with a hermeneutics of memory conscious of its own limitations. Such a hermeneutical supplement would not only be of (...) complementary value but also provoke a rethinking of the relation between key concepts in the western discourse on memory, such as image, imprint, and trace. In this regard, the proposed hermeneutical reconfiguration of memory exceeds its own limitations and overflows into an investigation of the primordial passive and past ground, which motivates and allows the hermeneutical activity in the first place. Following the analyses of Emmanuel Lévinas, I will argue that this immemorial past must be conceived in terms of a responsibility that cannot be fulfilled. (shrink)

The debt and responsibility toward what thus withholds itself in any heritage will become clearer once we focus on the irreducible remainder in the double memory of Europe, in particular, within its Greek memory. Indeed, in the context of Derrida elucidation in “Faith and Knowledge” of the notion of the “most barren and desert‐like” abstraction, two names are invoked, the Greek name “khōra,” and the Jewish name of the “messianic”. This chapter reconstructs, at least in a very succinct manner, the (...) arguments that impel the invocation of these two names. Like “the messianic without messianicity” in one part of the double memory of Europe, khōra in its Greek part is an immemorial remainder that withdraws from what it renders possible. According to “Faith and Knowledge,” “this Greek noun [khōra] says in our memory that which is not reappropriable, even by our memory, even by our ‘Greek’ memory. (shrink)

What is the theological logic of the particular textual apparatus of the Summa theologiae, and what kinds of implications arise when the text is adapted to a modern format? In this essay, I argue that the peculiar use Thomas makes of the quaestio protests against any attempt to reify the “responses” of Thomas into self-contained monologues, as is often done in recent attempts to render the Summa intelligible to modern readers. Yet doing so undermines not only the historical contexts of (...) the work, but much more importantly, it transforms what is essentially an itinerary of the soul’s return to God into a panoptic map of the commonplaces of theology. I suggest that for Thomas, the ordo disciplinae of the Summa corresponds to the circuit of the reader’s return to God as the source and end of all that is. The textual form, therefore, is not separable from the manuduction of the soul towards beatific vision. (shrink)

The immemorial and recollection -- The reserve of forgetting -- The unforgettable -- The sudden and the unhoped for -- Retrospection.

Visit the author's Web site at www.11PicsOfTime.com Time is a mystery that has perplexed humankind since time immemorial. Resolving this mystery is of significance not only to philosophers and physicists but is also a very practical concern. Our perception of time shapes our values and way of life; it also mediates the interaction between science and religion both of which rest fundamentally on assumptions about the nature of time. C K Raju begins with a critical exposition of various time-beliefs, (...) ranging from the earliest times through Augustine, Newton and Einstein to Stephen Hawking and current notions of chaos and time travel. He traces the role of organised religion in subverting time beliefs for its political ends. The book points out how this resulted in a facile dichotomy between 'linear' and 'cyclic' time, thereby inaugurating a confusion which, according to the author, has handicapped Western thought ever since, eventually influencing the content of science itself. Thus, this book daringly asserts that physical theory, traditionally regarded as amoral and objective, has depended on cultural beliefs about time. The author points out that time beliefs are again being manipulated today as the credibility of science is being exploited to promote a picture of time and, hence, a pattern of human behaviour which is convenient to the agenda of globalisation of culture. The linkages between modern theology and this 'brave new physics' are traced against the wider context of the so-called 'clash of civilisations', and the attempts to remake the world order. The conclusions point to the need to de-theologise time. The author challenges Einstein's understanding of relativity theory and suggests that a 'tilt in the arrow of time', or a small tendency towards cyclicity, will help repair the prevalent confusion about time. A 'tilt' also enables a physics that permits both memory and creativity, so that purpose and spontaneous growth of order are returned to human life. The book ends with a vision of Man as Creator, surprising God. Extensive research in physics, the history of science, comparative religions, and sociology lend weight to the important and challenging conclusions reached by the author. Written as a rejoinder to Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, this book goes much further and, unlike any previous book, it gives a critical exposition of various world religions-Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, and Jainism-while exploring their intricate links, through time beliefs, to current physics on the one hand, and to global political and economic trends, on the other. This book will appeal to scholars and laypersons equally. It will fascinate anyone who reads it and will teach its readers to question the unquestionable. (shrink)

Why should some essential properties of geometry (i.e., infinity, symmetry, and dimensionality) be both necessary and desirable in the way that they have been constructed albeit with different modifications over time since time immemorial? Contrary to the conventional wisdom in all history hitherto existing, the essential properties of geometry do not have to be both necessary and desirable. This is not to suggest, of course, that one has nothing to learn from geometry. On the contrary, geometry has contributed to (...) the advancement of knowledge in many ways since its inception as a field of knowledge some millennia ago. The point in this book, however, is to show an alternative (better) way to understand the nature of geometry, which goes beyond human conception, intuition, and imagination, together with worldly experience of course, as its foundation, while learning from them all with theoretical implications for time travel, hyperspace, and other important issues. If true, this seminal view will fundamentally change the way that the nature of abstraction in the thinking process is to be understood, with its enormous implications for the future advancement of knowledge, in a small sense, and what I originally called its "post-human" fate, in a large one. (shrink)

From the immemorial humans have lived together in groups. What it means to be a human being has no other basis than the interactions that take place in these groups. Politics then is the shaping of the necessary fact of social interaction. This volume concerns itself with the role of the individual in this social and political order. Including selections from both classical writers such as Plato, and contemporary scholars such as George Kareb, Michael Sandel, and Donna Haraway, the (...) work examines one of the most fundemental questions of human society: what part do individual desires and concerns play, and what part should they play, in political society? How can we negotiate the relation between individuals and society, between the will of one and the mandate of the multitude? Strong's lengthy introduction provides an excellent framework that serves to unify these semial writings. (shrink)

Phenomenology’s attention to the theme of animality has focused not on animal life in general but rather on the animal dimension of the human and its contested relation with humanity as such. Phenomenology thereby reproduces Agamben’s “anthropological machine” by which humanity is constructed through the “inclusive exclusion” of its animality. The alternative to this “inclusive exclusion” is not a return to kinship or commonality but rather an intensification of the constitutive paradox of our own inner animality, understood in terms of (...) the anonymous, corporeal subject of perception that lives a different temporality than that of first-person consciousness. Consequently, non-human others speak through our own voices and gaze out through our own eyes. We first consider the proximity of Merleau-Ponty’s early work with that of Max Scheler, who paradigmatically reduces human animality to bare life. Merleau-Ponty differentiates himself from Scheler, in The Structure of Behavior, by insisting that life cannot be integrated into spirit without remainder. Merleau-Ponty’s later work thinks this remainder as the ineliminable gap and delay in the auto-affection of the body and as a chiasmic exchange that anticipates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming animal.” This remainder of life within consciousness is the immemorial past of one’s own animality. It follows that our “inner animality” is neither singular nor plural but a kind of pack that speaks through the voice that I take to be mine. Furthermore, in the exchange of looks between myself and a non-human other, the crossing of glances occurs at an animal level that withdraws from my own reflective consciousness. (shrink)

A non-classical logic is proposed that extends classical logic and set theory as conservatively as possible with respect to three domains: the logic of natural language, the logcal foundations of mathematics, and the logical-philosophical paradoxes. A universal mechanics of consciousness connects these domains, and its best witness is the liar paradox. Its solution rests formally on a subject-object partition, mentally arising and disappearing perpetually. All deep paradoxes are paradoxes of consciousness. There are two kinds, solvable ones and unsolvable ones. The (...) solvable ones disappear by proper partitions, the unsolvable ones arise by inevitably improper partitions enforced by the natural worldview. The categorial distinctions of subject and object, certainty and truth, consciousness and being, inner freedom and outer constraint, psyche and physis, mental practice and formal theory indicate an immemorial mystical monism of consciousness without which mathematical Platonism could not survive. (shrink)

The artist understands his work as intimately connected with the life and symbolism of plants. Art, thus, demands an attunement to life’s elemental operations, the thrust “into dimensions far removed from the conscious process.” The first part of the present essay aims at recovering what is implied in the imagery of trees, delving into ancient archives of dormant collective memories and immemorial imaginal stratifications. The second and third parts, deploying the re-energized figure of the tree, explore the theme of (...) the relation between art and life, indeed, what Klee calls the “art of life.” By reference to Klee’s 1924 Jena lecture and the artist’s diaries, the discussion addresses the intersecting themes of artistic formation, mindful self-formation, the vital importance of worldly roots, and the transcendent fragrance of flowers and fruits. (shrink)

Following Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer states that the primordial way we experience the past is through forgetting rather than memory. This essay seeks to explore the various senses of forgetting as it appears in Gadamer’s thought with a particular emphasis on how forgetting and memory structure the unique temporality of the work of art. This exploration reveals that the interplay between forgetting and remembering is more complicated than mere opposition; this interplay is specifically revealed in Gadamer’s analyses of the epochal (...) transition and the transmissive event of history. In both cases, forgetting is revealed not as a lack or lacuna, but as a dynamic generating structure that elevates the work of art from its original past—constituting the immemorial dimension of the work. This essay concludes by gesturing toward the repercussions of forgetting on subjectivity and a theory of time in Gadamer’s hermeneutics. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

For ages one phase of Indian thought has grappled with exactly this problem. To be in the world is to be subject to limitations--conditionings--of power, of knowledge, and of freedom. So man's suffering is a result of his being in the world--of his being a link in this chain of becomings. His suffering is tied up with temporality and illusion--with mäyä. Suffering is a cosmic necessity; it is one of the modes of reality, a law of worldly existence. If so, (...) what are the limits of the various forces that condition man--that bind and fetter him? If we know this, then man can be deconditioned, freed from suffering and temporality and taken into another mode of existence, where he enjoys spontaneity and freedom. Thus universality of suffering need not lead to a philosophy of pessimism, for realization of it is a necessary condition for emancipation. The quest for the beyond, for transcendence, will start only when this world and this mode of life are depreciated and rejected. The quest presupposes that there is something beyond becoming, temporality, and suffering; and that it is possible for man to decondition and free himself completely. The immemorial experience of the sages who have gone beyond and reached "the other shore," after discovering the ford and the ferry which will sail them across this ocean of suffering and becoming, testifies to the reality of transcendence and complete freedom. Such was the conclusion reached by one trend of Indian thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 35.1 (2005) 136-146MuseSearchJournalsThis JournalContents[Access article in PDF]The Christian Bain de Diane, or the Stakes of an Ambiguous ParatextPatrick AmstutzTranslated by Gerald MooreUpon its publication, Le bain de Diane elicited few reactions on the part of criticism. Klossowski's name was still a secret and, despite its note among writers such as Bataille, Beauvoir, Camus, Parain, and Sartre and their public following, the number of readers to have read this (...) fifth work remained confined to those already familiar with Klossow-ski the essayist (Sade mon prochain, Méditations bibliques de Hamann), or the novelist (La vocation suspendue, Roberte, ce soir). The discreet silence that characterized the first reception of Le bain de Diane would last until the end of the seventies, despite a reedition in 1972 by the same publisher. During this time three important moments made Le bain de Diane resurface at the heart of the literary world: first, in fictional form, thanks to a subtle but explicit homage paid by Henri Thomas [Le promontoire]; second, in the form of a penetrating commentary article by Michel Foucault ["La prose d'Actéon"], and finally, at the hands of René Micha and Catherine Backès-Clément, key contributors to the issue that the review L'Arc dedicated to the writer. The reedition of Le bain de Diane by Gallimard1 would significantly relaunch interest in this work which, one comes increasingly to realize, is a major text in the Klossowskian oeuvre: offering a reflection on the image and writing, it was Gilles Quinsat who would open this new period of critical reception.An Uncertain IdentityQuinsat emphasizes the "series of 'tableaux' that glazes Le Bain de Diane" in accordance with a "circular" descriptive movement, he says, "from vision to commentary, attributed to the deferral without end of signs, and which feeds the entire work of Pierre Klossowski" [95]. And if he borrows the term "exegesis" from Foucault to describe the genre of the work, he immediately associates it with that of "narrative." A quarter of a century earlier, a commentary in the new Nouvelle revue française had already underlined the "disconcerting" character of Klossowski's book, by accentuating not only the strangeness of its thematic, but also the difficulties posed by the uncertainty of its generic belonging (which is echoed by the absent mention of a paratext): the critic, hesitating, suggested somewhat confusedly a typological kinship with philosophical commentary, theological scholasticism, prose poetry, series of paintings, historical narrative and even the analysis of myths [Amer 144]. In fact, this mythological "reverie," neither an essay nor a narrative, is, from this point of view, a typically Klossowskian [End Page 136] book, as Ian James has more recently reminded us [143]. Le bain de Diane mixes erudite commentary and narrative discourse so well that it entices its commentators into the traps of scholarly, historical, and philological annotation. Yet this would be to forget, as Maurice Blanchot has observed [92–94], that the written oeuvre of Klossowski belongs fully to the field of literature, even more so than to those of philosophy, theology, or psychoanalysis.When it comes to discerning the literariness of this literary object, which the different paratextual and intertextual stakes and levels underline, the principal difficulty consists in not losing oneself in a mythological labyrinth and innumerable variants of the cult of Artemis, which was one of the most significant, oldest, and popular cults of the Greco-Roman era and which plunges into a world on whose complexity historians and philologists have insisted on many occasions. The study of Klossowski's sources could lead one through multiple disciplines (philology, mythography, psychoanalysis, the history of religions, history of art, French literature—all centuries cobbled together, and so on) to overly vast inquiries: the goddess "of a thousand names" assumes a properly vertiginous semiotic richness, and the cult of Artemis, before being linked to that of Apollo, stretches back to time immemorial where, behind Artemis, can be glimpsed the Asiatic figure of a Great Mother Goddess, whose... (shrink)

Since time immemorial, the phenomenon of leadership and its understanding has attracted the attention of the business world because of its important role in human groups. Nevertheless, for years efforts to understand this concept have only been centred on people in leadership roles, thus overlooking an important aspect in its understanding: the necessary moral dimension which is implicit in the relationship between leader and follower. As an illustrative example of the importance of considering good morality in leadership, an empirical (...) study is conducted in which a good performance of the "leader-follower" relationship is reflected when individuals perceive ethical leadership in higher hierarchical managerial levels. To be precise, findings of this study demonstrate that follower job response is improved through an ethics trickle-down partial effect from the Top Manager to the immediate supervisor, and also reveal both key aspects and managerial level on which the practice of ethical leadership should rest upon to have a stronger effect on the follower positive job response. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are finally presented. (shrink)

The world, as a unifying nexus of significance, is inherently precarious and constitutively destined toward its own unraveling. Our fascination with a future end of the world masks our realization that the world as common and unified totality is already disintegrating. What remains after the end of the world is also what pre-cedes it, the geomaterial elements, which condition the world without being reducible to things within it. Through our participation in elemental materiality, we encounter the abyssal vertigo of deep (...) time as an anachronistic rupture of lived and historical time. The geological memory of stone situates it at the threshold of world and non-world, while our liability to an immemorial prehistory situates us at the intersection of incommensurable durations, those of the ancestral past as well as the apocalyptic future.El mundo, como un nexo de significado unificador, es intrínsecamente precario y está constitutivamente destinado a su propio desenredo. Nuestra fascinación por un futuro final del mundo enmascara nuestra comprensión de que el mundo como totalidad común y unificada ya se está desintegrando. Lo que queda después del fin del mundo es también lo que lo precede, los elementos geomateriales, que condicionan el mundo sin ser reducibles a las cosas dentro de él. A través de nuestra participación en la materialidad elemental, nos encontramos con el vértigo abismal del tiempo profundo como una ruptura anacrónica del tiempo vivido e histórico. La memoria geológica de la piedra lo sitúa en el umbral del mundo y del no mundo, mientras que nuestra responsabilidad ante una prehistoria inmemorial nos sitúa en la intersección de duraciones inconmensurables, tanto del pasado ancestral como del futuro apocalíptico. (shrink)

Water, the most represented substance in the human body, is a trace of the primordial sea where life originated. Its virtues may be represented by the Venus of Botticelli coming out from the sea, as well as by Velasquezs water seller and by Aristophanes chant of the clouds. Water has been connected with medicine from time immemorial and is a common good.

From immemorial time, many Tyrrhenian places of ancient Sicily and Italy were identified with the main stages of the return of Ulysses. Some Hellenistic critics assumed that it was from the various ancient and pre-Homeric myths that Homer drew inspiration, in the same way that he did with the myth of the Trojan War, which certainly occurred before him. Thus, the voyage of Ulysses, after his losing the course because of the storm at Cape Malea, had to be located (...) in those sites. But how can one explain the fact that Homer places the voyage from Circe to the Hades over the Ocean? Is it only a pseudogeographic poetic touch, aimed to magnify the exploit? Crates of Mallus did not think so: in his opinion, only some of the numerous adventures had taken place in the Tyrrhenian Sea, whereas Homer had purposefully placed some other exactly on the Atlantic Ocean, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. Whichever of the two models one chooses, the route of Ulysses seems to be completely unlikely, both from the point of view of objective reality and from the point of view of poetic imagination. It appears to be a senseless coming and going that takes the shape of some sort of a labyrinth. Furthermore, the navigation times suggested by the text do not accord at all with the distances among the real sites. For this reason, Eratosthenes held that, from Cape Malea onwards, Ulysses switched from the real world to that of fantasy, or better still to the world of some narrative fable that does not heed geography at all. The modern critics are inclined to agree with him and this thesis is nowadays the most popular one. Yet, a very serious objection can be raised here: the myth and the epos, are strictly linked to the geography and the topography as well – they are radically refractory to a narrative fable that totally contradicts the then realities of time and space. Why should Ulysses plunge from Cape Malea onwards straight into the Neverland kingdom? If we combine Odyssey’s data with those we can reconstruct for the earliest form of the Argonautic saga, then we get the solution that neither the ancient nor the modern critics have guessed correctly: up to around the middle of the 8th century B.C., the Greeks thought the Ocean to flow just after the Sicily Channel, essentially coinciding with the so-called Tyrrhenian Sea, still completely unknown at that time. This new perspective can well justify the objective disorder of Ulysses’ route. Above all, it also bears a deeper poetic sense: the Hero had the chance to know and to experience not only some far and exotic countries in general terms, but he also met the very boundaries of the surfacing lands and the rushing waters which encircle the terrestrial disc, bordering the external cosmic abyss. Ulysses came back home alive. He was able to tell the stories about the lands where no human being could ever sail. This borderline that geographically is clearly located marks at the same time the insurmountable chasm between the physical and the meta-physical world. (shrink)

In The Geographer′s Art, Peter Haggett expounds his view of the nature and purpose, philosophy and methodology of the discipline and practice of geography. Ranging over every aspect of the subject, he considers the attractions, opportunities and responsibilities of life as a geographer and tries to answer some of the basic questions facing the discipline. The result is a highly individual look at geography and geographers, illustrated throughout from his own research and experience. Geography is immemorial and universal: it (...) touches us in many ways, in many forms and frequently in a manner neither fully perceived nor understood. Today interest in geography is booming: both the need for greater geographic awareness and the geographer′s vital role in understanding the processes and consequences of global and environmental change have received widespread recognition throughout the world. Yet the nature of the subject and the role of geographers remain little known to non–geographers and have yet to penetrate many hallowed academic and government halls. Just what do geographers do? What fires their imagination? Why are they so devoted to their subject? How can geography be used? Do we need more or less geographers, and how should they be educated? These and many other issues are addressed by Peter Haggett as he ranges over every aspect of the subject, theoretical and applied, physical and human, in order to explain the essence and importance of this multi–faceted subject. Few books can have conveyed so convincingly and so vividly the intellectual challenge of working in the field and the vital relevance of the discipline to contemporary human and environmental problems. (shrink)

The epic, one of the oldest forms of poetic expression, came into being and evolved in time immemorial, long before the appearance of writing - the advent of which, while helping to fix oral traditions since the dawn of history, has at the same time sapped these traditions of their freshness. Not until methods of recording and reproduction were perfected was the oral epic restored to its full compass as a work of enduring dimensions.

The proliferation of criminal laws in different legal systems has made legal practitioners and scholars deliberate upon the present day relevance of old age principles and concepts. The maxim ignorantia juris non excusat (ignorantia juris hereinafter) also falls in this category. The application of criminal law is said to rest on the maxim ignorantia juris, meaning ignorance of law is no excuse. The application of the maxim has from time immemorial been defended on grounds of convenience, utility, and community (...) interests. At the same time it has been challenged on grounds of legality and morality. The application of the maximin criminal matters is secured through penal laws. These laws are further validated through judicial pronouncements. Penal statutes and judicial pronouncements have largely been the basis to determine the exceptions and scope of the maxim. -/- Breaking it down to a single case in hand, several factors come into picture including the nature of the crime in question, the mental state of the person accused, the conduct of the accused person, the objective or public utility of the criminal legislation or provision, and the reasons or justifications offered for its rigid or qualified application. The single case is viewed in light of the general provisions of criminal law of the legal system in which the case is being tried. The uniqueness of each case and the criminal statutes of legal systems make it both complex and conducive to generalize or conclude on the true import and application of the maxim ignorantia juris. (shrink)

The Story of Philosophy is a brand new and highly ambitious survey of the thinkers and ideas that have perplexed humanity from time immemorial. Accessible writing, brilliant scholarship and over 150 colour illustrations combine to form a richly informative and highly entertaining work of narrative history. Starting with the most important figures in the Greek era, including Thales of Miletus - often referred to as the first philosopher - Pythagoras and Plato, the story continues with the great religious thinkers (...) of medieval Europe such as Augustine, Aquinas and Maimonides, key players of the Enlightenment such as Descartes, Hobbes and Voltaire, their successors in the Romantic era such as Marx and Nietzsche, and concluding with a survey of 20th and 21st century philosophy. (shrink)

Beyond the dragon of the tales, reduced to its function as an adversary, most Celtic dragons are linked to a site, most often in relation to the water regime: flood plains, confluences, torrents (the Drac). In Christianised versions, a saint, rather than exterminating them, is responsible for leading them back to their maritime or underground origin. Princes use it differently. Their confrontation with the dragon is a qualifying fight wich allows them to appropriate the monster’s strength. Represented on their sword (...) or their shield, or even integrated into their name (Uther Pendragon), the dragon becomes a talisman. Cities and nations (Wales) make it their emblem. In time, dragons are linked to the four great Celtic calendar festivals. The fight of two dragons, split ouroboros, symbolises the two seasons of the year, alternately dark and light. In space, the dragon maintains a privileged relationship with the notion of central place, leading back to the problem of the omphaloi (Delphi) or the Gallic Mediolanum. At the astronomical level, the constellation of the Dragon, where the Greeks saw the metamorphosis of the dragon (and the river) Ladon, becomes in Breton Avank Du, “the black Beaver”, allowing us to imagine a monstrous beaver blocking the waters as the Vedic Vrtra. Active in the three functions, present at the three levels of the world in verticality, the Celtic dragon thus joins its congeners from other mythologies, attesting to its immemorial origin. (shrink)

The ending of neither story [Heart of Darkness] nor film [Apocalypse Now] is confused, just bifocal. In Coppola we find writ large, for Willard as well as for us, what Conrad seems to keep from Marlowe by ironic distance: that the return to civilization from primitive haunts can never lay the ghostly image of that bestial horror lurking within us, the horror that finds such kinship, regressed beyond any ethical restraint, in the jungle's heart of darkness. It is a horror (...) which the tropical rain droning on the sound track as the film's last trace can scarcely wash clean. For just before, staring straight at the camera and through it at us for one final time, confirming earlier suggestions of the universal complicity in evil, Willard's disembodied face - the reflective mind as if unmoored from its whole self, decapitated - slides out of view to the right behind the dead but deathless carved image. With the film's narrator absorbed into the immemorial icon of that anthropomorphic vanity and villainy which has comprised his tale, Kurtz's "horror" comes onto the sound track as a primal echo in the soul, an echo drenched from without by the sounds of a world that outlasts but cannot quench it. Garrett Stewart, professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Dickens and the Trials of Imagination. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "Modern Hard Times: Chaplin and the Cinema of Self-Reflection," appeared in the Winter 1976 issue. (shrink)

In a 1951 debate that marked the beginnings of the analytic-continental divide, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sided with Georges Bataille in rejecting A. J. Ayer’s claim that “the sun existed before human beings.” This rejection is already anticipated in a controversial passage from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, where he claims that “there is no world without an Existence that bears its structure.” I defend Merleau-Ponty’s counterintuitive position against naturalistic and anti-subjectivist critics by arguing that the world emerges in the exchange between perceiver (...) and perceived. A deeper challenge is posed, however, by Quentin Meillassoux, who argues that the “correlationism” of contemporary philosophy rules out any account of the “ancestral” time that antedates all subjectivity. Against Meillassoux, and taking an encounter with fossils as my guide, I hold that the past prior to subjectivity can only be approached phenomenologically. The paradoxical character of this immemorial past, as a memory of the world rather than of the subject, opens the way toward a phenomenology of the “elemental” past. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of the absolute past of nature and the anonymity of the body, as well as Levinas’ account of the elements at the end of the world, I argue that our own materiality and organic lives participate in the differential rhythms of the elements, opening us to a memory of the world that binds the cosmic past and the apocalyptic future. (shrink)

From the time immemorial thinking men have sought an answer as to wether or not the world is actually what it appears to be. Delving into the fields of science, medicine, and philosophy, answers to this question are sought in this book by the famed Mount Wilson astronomer. Advancing the concept that life and mind can be understood only in terms of the nonphysical, he explores the ultimate nature of our own thought, the existence of a universal Mind-God-and life (...) after death. Here is a new world to explore, a world that is much greater that you ever imagined. As you search through the dynamic and enlightening ideas in The Searchers you will come to a new appreciation of the nature of things as they really are. (shrink)

The philosophic notion of human vulnerability cannot be pinpointed as such in the corpus of classic philosophy. Nevertheless, death and suffering as essential philosophical and theological problems make reference to the dimension of vulnerability inherent to the human condition. Since times immemorial, the fear of death, the avoidance of suffering, or the crisis situations of human existence have laid at the basis of philosophical and religious systems. According to Freud, in the futile pursuit of happiness humans often face misery, (...) which stems from a suffering that threatens them from three different directions: their own body, the outside world, and the relationships with other people. Starting from this angle, the present article furthers the notion of vulnerability by identifying its archetypal themes in relation to human life and its conditions of existence. Two main concepts will guide this study of human vulnerability: a vulnerability inherent to human subjectivity, and one consubstantial to the process of human socialisation. For Levinas, vulnerability has become alike an obsession for others, a full responsibility, which leads to the following formula: it is only a vulnerable person who can love one’s neighbour. In accordance with Habermas, the manner in which a human being leaves natural law and accesses social justice is here re-examined, as it stands for a vulnerability structurally determined by the forms of socio-cultural life. (shrink)

The historical dimension of alimentary practices is sufficiently emphasized today in publications dealing with the past development of European societies. And yet there is still surprise at the discovery that at the end of the Middle Ages, olive oil did not have the importance in Provence one is tempted to attribute to it since time immemorial in this region. Or the connoisseur of cassoulet in the southwestern part of France might be surprised to learn that his ancestors were unable (...) to enjoy this dish until after the discovery of America and the introduction of the Phaseolus variety of beans in Europe. (shrink)

The voice of Orpheus symbolizes the everlasting importance of music and poetry in the animus of man. According to the ancient legend, Orpheus by his very gift of music tills the radical sense of enjoyment in us all and enables entire nature to dance in delight. Music resonates the most primordial and invariant mood of man in his harmony with the universe (uni-verse) from time immemorial. On the basis of the image of “roundness” derived from the auditory model of (...) space, an “ecotopia” or a new orientation of ecological ethics is projected. By affirming man as the responsible caretaker of the Earth, it rejects both speciesism and individualism -the antitheses of social principle. (shrink)

The voice of Orpheus symbolizes the everlasting importance of music and poetry in the animus of man. According to the ancient legend, Orpheus by his very gift of music tills the radical sense of enjoyment in us all and enables entire nature to dance in delight. Music resonates the most primordial and invariant mood of man in his harmony with the universe from time immemorial. On the basis of the image of “roundness” derived from the auditory model of space, (...) an “ecotopia” or a new orientation of ecological ethics is projected. By affirming man as the responsible caretaker of the Earth, it rejects both speciesism and individualism -the antitheses of social principle. (shrink)

The book demonstrates for the first time that transculturality – the mixed constitution of cultures – is by no means only a characteristic of the present, but has de facto determined the composition of cultures since time immemorial. This is demonstated using examples from the arts across all cultures and continents.

According to Fondane, rationalist philosophy implies arguments that aim at a separation of the intelligible and the sensible which, in the Platonic tradition represents a degradation of the de-signified individual. Supporting itself on Lévinas’ thematization of the ethical as a prime philosophy, the interpretation regards the nucleus of the strong relation between morality and religion. Following the Christic example, the moment man is emptied of himself, he may free himself from his fake central placing. A radical passivity of a de-moralized (...) conscience that, having nothing to do, gives itself to the Good from before its possibility of choosing it. A humiliated ethics, invisible to transcendence, in the light of which it is not primordial to do something good, but to let oneself be made by the immemorial Good. (shrink)

Nicolas Abraham (1919–75) rethinks the symbol as the very fabric of being. The author examines how this notion challenges the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology and its reliance on a transcendental ego that can apprehend hyletic data in its purity. For Abraham, the symbol is worldly and resonates with its emergence from intersubjective foundations to constitute subjectivity impurely as a Dyad. It is born from trauma, a cut that differentiates Ego from Other but also generates anxiety (and Time) to keep its (...) operation unfinished. This projection into the future implicates intention (agency) that builds upon origins that are opaque and immemorial. Abraham denotes this origin as the Arche, conceiving of it as a primary symbolism that renders the traumatic cut but without temporal or structural guarantee. It is a beginning that is beyond the phenomenal, requiring exploration through a radical transphenomenological perspective derived from psychoanalysis. Here, trauma is both the debilitation of the symbol and (potentially) the impetus for its transformation, (re)iterating structures of subjectivity that have greater complexity and degrees of freedom. This is, of course, as circumstances allow. Abraham’s construction of symbolic subjectivity is stratified as the symbol negotiates levels of existence from basic Ego-integration to sophisticated social organizations, none of which can individually capture its operation. The journey to a fulfilling existence is riddled with obstructions that could be physiological, relational, cultural or otherwise. The author highlights this multivalence as a complexity that must be carefully navigated – especially when there is suffering – by attending to the symbol and its resonances where creative transformations cannot be mapped in advance. (shrink)

No memory can follow the traces of the past. It is an immemorial past—and this also is perhaps eternity, whose signifyingness obstinately throws one back to the past. Eternity is the very irreversibility of time, the source and refuge of the past. (Levinas, “Meaning and Sense,” 30)Keeping the senses alert means being attentive in flesh and in spirit. (Irigaray, Ethics of Sexual Difference, 148).

Since time immemorial, pastoral ministry has been physically present in church buildings, homes and public places, providing face-to-face care and reassurance of God's love and accompaniment. The tragic outbreak and speedy spread of COVID-19 from China triggered unprecedented challenges, dramatically led to restrictive national lockdowns, closure of physical meetings, fundamentally unsettled routine ways of doing ministry and demanded total digitalisation of the gospel, which eventually rendered the ministry of physical presence absent. While doing ministry online seemed to have been (...) working well in other countries, it has been a uniquely different trajectory in Zimbabwe predominantly because of financial, material, human incapacitation as well as cultural and other contextual factors. Scholarly research on online pastoral praxis in Zimbabwe is scanty. Applying Osmer's methodology, this study reviewed lived experiences and challenges of pastors in ministering virtually since the beginning of lockdowns early 2020 hitherto late 2021. It interrogated the ministry of presence and understanding of digitalisation. Amidst a plethora of social, political and economic drawbacks, this article unearthed erratic capability, affordability, availability, connectivity and feasibility of digitalised shepherding. Taking physical presence as incarnation of the triune God, demonstration of love, care and accompaniment as indispensable in pastoral ministry, this article stressed the significance of physical presence. However, considering the prevailing COVID-19 and contextual constrictions, it recommended that pastors should appreciate and submit their congregants to the ubiquitous and indispensable spiritual presence of God while redoubling efforts in ministering through contextually feasible ways until lockdowns end. CONTRIBUTION: This article provides a critical biblical and scholarly review and analysis of the ministry of presence during the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe. This will provoke pastors, churches and church bodies to rethink and reconsider progressive strategies towards contextually effective pastoral theology, ministry and ecclesiology in times of pandemics in the context of economic volatility. (shrink)

Since time immemorial, pastoral ministry has been physically present in church buildings, homes and public places, providing face-to-face care and reassurance of God’s love and accompaniment. The tragic outbreak and speedy spread of COVID-19 from China triggered unprecedented challenges, dramatically led to restrictive national lockdowns, closure of physical meetings, fundamentally unsettled routine ways of doing ministry and demanded total digitalisation of the gospel, which eventually rendered the ministry of physical presence absent. While doing ministry online seemed to have been (...) working well in other countries, it has been a uniquely different trajectory in Zimbabwe predominantly because of financial, material, human incapacitation as well as cultural and other contextual factors. Scholarly research on online pastoral praxis in Zimbabwe is scanty. Applying Osmer’s methodology, this study reviewed lived experiences and challenges of pastors in ministering virtually since the beginning of lockdowns early 2020 hitherto late 2021. It interrogated the ministry of presence and understanding of digitalisation. Amidst a plethora of social, political and economic drawbacks, this article unearthed erratic capability, affordability, availability, connectivity and feasibility of digitalised shepherding. Taking physical presence as incarnation of the triune God, demonstration of love, care and accompaniment as indispensable in pastoral ministry, this article stressed the significance of physical presence. However, considering the prevailing COVID-19 and contextual constrictions, it recommended that pastors should appreciate and submit their congregants to the ubiquitous and indispensable spiritual presence of God while redoubling efforts in ministering through contextually feasible ways until lockdowns end.Contribution: This article provides a critical biblical and scholarly review and analysis of the ministry of presence during the COVID-19 pandemic in Zimbabwe. This will provoke pastors, churches and church bodies to rethink and reconsider progressive strategies towards contextually effective pastoral theology, ministry and ecclesiology in times of pandemics in the context of economic volatility. (shrink)

We have learned to be suspicious of the claim that a serious account of knowledge must begin at the Cartesian starting point, that is, with private data of consciousness serving as a basis for outward inferences to the world, these inferences proceeding on the security of one or another kind of epistemic collateral ranging from the goodness of a deity to the bruteness of the given. But the good reasons we have for dismissing the egocentric predicament as our motive for (...) epistemology are not good reasons for dismissing a different predicament, one with which it is too often confused: namely, our finitary predicament, the fact that our powers of perception, memory and reason, even when co-operatively applied, are limited. For even if we are bound to conceive of general knowledge as the outcome of fundamental kinds of conceptual co-operation, the fact remains that our knowledge claims are underdetermined by the evidence we have for them; and that the framework, however collectively established, of what Quine calls our ‘immemorial theory’ of the world does not therefore protect particular knowledge-claims from defeasibility. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Lily of the Valley, or Love as Breathing in the ScentChantal Jaquet (bio)The Lily of the Valley, published by Balzac in 1836, can be considered as a standard in olfactory literature since the novel is entirely built on the perception of odors and the central role of breathing in romantic relationships. As the title indicates, it is in the floral and olfactory registers that the essence of love (...) expresses itself. Perfume presides over the birth of love, the recognition of the other, and the definition of the woman's identity. We can read it as a poetics of breathing that tells another story and re-enchants the world. The Lily of the Valley offers a powerful antidote to the impediments to breathing nowadays. I try here to interpret it like an ode celebrating another way of inhaling the world through love and perfumes.Love at first scentThe Lily of the Valley tells the story of the platonic love of a young man, Felix, for a married woman, Madame de Mortsauf. From the beginning, their first meeting takes place under the auspices of breath and perfume. During a party, Felix, who is extremely bored, finds refuge on an abandoned bench; a woman, taking him for a child, sits next to him. Felix is then immediately drawn to the stranger's perfume and is pulled out of his sullen torpor to feel an unparalleled fascination:Immediately, I smelt a woman's fragrance which shone in my soul as oriental poetry was to shine later. I looked at my neighbour and was more dazzled by her than I had been by the ball.(15)Perfume thus triggers love and becomes the very essence of the beloved woman. Before he perceives any visual detail, Felix is flooded with an olfactory emotion, which will be taken over and amplified by the poetic evocation of the Orient and its fragrances. The woman's scent, which re-enchants his morose universe, dazzles him with its brilliance and eclipses vision by taking possession of its attributes. It is only afterward that he begins to examine the shoulders, bosom, and hair of the woman with the luminous perfume. It is the act of inhaling her perfume that triggers his [End Page 34] love at first sight and wrests the following confession from him: "All of a sudden, I was in love" (16).This primacy of olfaction and breathing continue to hold true in the absence of the beloved when the latter is no longer smelled, but simply evoked: "At the thought that my queen-elect lived in Touraine I breathed the air with delight [...]" (16). The feelings that develop even before a second meeting takes place do not belie the first romantic olfactory sensation, but strengthen it following a process of crystallization that transforms the soulmate into a fragrant flower. The stranger, under the influence of Felix's poetic imagination, becomes the lily of the valley, a symbol of beauty and purity. Despondent over the disappearance of the woman he loves, whose name he does not even know, the young man, pressured by his family to seek distraction, travels to Touraine, to the Château de Frapesle, to stay with a friend of his mother's. He discovers a magnificent valley near Montbazon, which, in his eyes, can only be where his beloved resides. Here we see the perspicacity of the lover who picks up the scent of his beloved and sees her face in the landscape:She lived there. My heart had not misled me. [...] She was, as you already know, though you know nothing yet, THE LILY OF THIS VALLEY, where she grew for Heaven, filling it with the perfume of her virtues.(18)The olfactory dimension of the lily prevails here over floral vision. It is the perfume of her virtues exhaled in the valley that defines the beloved permanently and immemorially, and makes her into a celestial creature with the odor of sanctity. The use of the imperfect tense in "she was the lily" evokes the magic of a love story that seems like a fairy tale. She was the lily, because once upon a time there was a woman who... (shrink)

Religion and diversified religious experiences are always held suspect and not spared from apprehensions regarding its value, its ethics, its revelatory claims and its approaches. Time immemorial religion and religious experiences have played a pivotal role in building up society for betterment and also for deterioration. Man’s intellectual activity throughout the history was on the line of religion. The sacred in religion has always empowered man in many paths of his life, say, to bring social reformation, be it environmental (...) concern or women empowerment. The sacred in religion have brought wonders in human life. (shrink)

Before any attempt is made to solve the problem with which this paper deals, it is necessary to convince the reader that the problem exists. Much is written and said to-day about class distinctions, both by those who announce with satisfaction their growing disappearance, and by those who half guiltily admit their existence, but it never seems to occur to such writers that the nature of these distinctions is itself something of a mystery. We take it for granted as one (...) of the most obvious and commonplace facts of daily life. It seems hardly likely that the examination of a thing so ubiquitous and immemorial will yield anything new. My object will be to maintain that this attitude is mistaken, and that the idea of “class” is not really self-explanatory, but deserves a closer analysis than it usually gets. And if this proves to be the case, it must be admitted that the subject is of importance. Many political and social problems are deeply involved in the fact of class distinctions. Many who believe in a possible regeneration of human society would gladly surrender much to secure a world where poverty should be no more, yet hesitate before the prospect of a loss, through diffusion, of cultural values which they feel to be infinitely precious, and which give to the existing order a greater claim to permanence than it would otherwise possess. We most of us hardly know our own minds in this matter. We yield social distinctions their place, but we do so shamefacedly, as though confessing to a mere unjustified conservatism. (shrink)