bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Looking for Law in The Confessions of Nat Turner
Authors: Tomlins Christopher
Published: January 2020

From Harriet Beecher Stowe to William Styron and Sharon Ewell Foster, from Kyle Baker to Nate Parker and others, American popular culture has found Nat Turner endlessly fascinating. The fascination of course extends to historians. Particularly in recent years, scholars have dug deeply into the local history of what came to be called "The Turner Rebellion." The result is a greatly enriched archive. Still, much of what is known of the event itself and of its eponymous leader-and hence the manner in which both event and leader are portrayed-remains dependent on Thomas Ruffin Gray's famous pamphlet The Confessions of Nat Turner. Naturally one must ask whether a hastily written twenty-page pamphlet rushed into print by an opportunistic white lawyer, down on his luck and hoping to cash in on Turner's notoriety, actually deserves to be treated as empirically reliable access to the mentalités of those engaged in executing an "insurrectory movement." Should the pamphlet survive that test, a second question immediately surfaces: precisely what is it that the pamphlet evidences, and how? This essay seeks an answer through consideration of a number of recent literary analyses of the genre of Gray's pamphlet and through application of the concept of genre to Turner's own words.
A Vigil at the End of the World
Authors: Abrams Kathryn
Published: January 2020

An account of a vigil held by undocumented immigrants "at the end of the world," in the Arizona desert on a march to an immigration detention center, reveals how the voicing of emotional anguish contributes to a politics of bodily extremity used to engage the state. Immigration activists deploy tactics of historical human rights campaigns, like the bodily protests of Gandhi or Cesar Chavez, in order to contest state power. Similarly, the meaning of the vigil is shaped by the willed endurance of the early Christian martyrs and the "sacred suffering" of the enslaved invoked by antebellum abolitionists. Yet its ultimate target is secular: the Department of Homeland Security and, ultimately, the president. The most transformative claim of these activists denies the need for divine intercession: despite their lack of formal status, undocumented immigrants can make their case for redress of grievance directly to the political leaders of the nation.
Freedom
Authors: Crépon Marc , Martel James
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the most recurrent, extensive, and disturbing form of vulnerability in the world: famine. While Europe imposes production quotas to boost agricultural prices, others, beyond Europe's borders, die of hunger on a massive scale. Famine epitomizes the axiom according to which the world is without meaning if people make exceptions to the assistance they bring to the vulnerable and mortal other. In other words, because there is no more extreme form of abandonment than consigning others to ineluctable death, famine divests globalization of any possible meaning—other than consent to mass murder. The chapter then looks at the depiction of famine in the works of Vasily Grossman and Emmanuel Levinas. Famine reduces freedom to powerlessness in two ways. First, famine is an element in the arsenal of weapons that tyrants count on to subdue freedom. It cultivates fear and in the end suffocates all resistance. Moreover, famine turns most of those whom it spares into spectators, passive witnesses, and even accomplices in the abandonment that it reveals. What is each and everyone's freedom worth if it proves incapable of assisting the hungry—if freedom proclaims that it is powerless, that famine is not its concern or responsibility, but instead the fault of a climate, of governments, of globalization?
Antonin Scalia, Bernhard Schlink, and Lancelot Andrewes
Authors: Fish Stanley
Published: January 2020

Addressing textualism in its various manifestations, this chapter argues, in critique of Schlink and Scalia, that genuine interpretation is governed by the attempt to determine the author’s intention. Examining Scalia’s divergence from this hermeneutic norm, Fish argues not only that his theory as exemplified in Heller is bad, but also that as an interpretative practice, it is evil.
Law against Justice and Solidarity
Authors: Rosenfeld Michel
Published: January 2020

Law and justice are in crucial ways against nature as well as against solidarity. As David Hume proclaimed, justice is an “artificial virtue” in contrast to the social bonds of family and community, which are affectively grounded in solidarity and manifestations of mutual sympathy. Law as a self-standing normative order propelled by its own inner logic remains too abstract to command heartfelt internalization or commitment. Moreover, law often stands against justice, as some laws are unjust and full justice ever elusive. Accordingly, difficult questions arise for jurisprudence. Derrida and Agamben confront these difficulties in the context of the nexus between the singular, the universal, and the plural. For Derrida, law cannot achieve justice, as there is tragically no way to reconcile the universal and the singular. For Agamben, in contrast, the gaps become masked by a ceremonial spectacle of religiously inspired harmony and acclamation by those subject to law and an unbridgeable gap between law and administration. This chapter situates and compares Derrida’s deconstruction of law with Agamben’s reconstruction, focusing on whether they complement one another and on whether they point to solutions that may open a way beyond despair or artifice.
Appearing under Erasure
Authors: Feldman Allen
Published: January 2020

Derrida distinguishes the accidental contretemps—the singular accidentality of the accident—from the essential contretemps; the latter is the “nonaccidental” accident. As a structuring anomaly the needful accident overturns the philosophical dicta that the perfection of substance is far more perfect than the objective perfection of the accident. Engaging with doctrines of collateral damage and programs of enforced disappearance, this essay anatomizes the political deployment of the contretemps as the time out of time of wartime that fractures any polemological idea of progress, just war, and accountability. The contretemps in its peripheral errancy constitutes a temporal counterweight to any continuist model of sovereign power, crosscutting the latter with shape shifting and empowering indeterminacy. The aphoristic naming and enframing of adversaries, targets, and victims are the protological contretemps and essential accident that occurs at and as the inception of war.
Allegorical Fanaticism
Authors: Lerner Ross
Published: January 2020

Chapter 1 turns to Spenser’s use of allegory to represent the ambiguous fanatical transformation of person into divine instrument. If allegory in The Faerie Queene works by analysis, parsing complex motives and essences into their discrete parts, fanaticism proposes an undifferentiated divine violence that threatens to obliterate allegory’s distinctions. Reading The Faerie Queene as an engagement with fanaticism demonstrates that the poem is fundamentally uneasy with divinely inspired action. If, in Book I, The Faerie Queene momentarily achieves an allegorical representation of Redcrosse as an “organ” of divine might, the poem grows progressively more worried about its capacity to distinguish between true instruments of the divine and false prophets like the Anabaptist Giant of Book V. Representations of fanaticism in the poem suggest that allegory in its purest form, void of all difference, may itself be a form of fanaticism, the emptying out of a character so that it might incarnate divine will.
Introduction
Authors: McCance Dawne
Published: January 2020

During the 1975–76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar titled La vie la mort at the Paris École Normale Supérieure (ENS). At the time, Derrida was teaching at the ENS as an agrégé-répétiteur preparing students for the agrégation de philosophie exams. As I suggest in the ...
Introduction
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

Beginning with an epigraph from Nietzsche that calls philologists to the essential but often overlooked task of setting forth philology “as a problem,” the introduction poses the same challenge to Jewish Studies and its practitioners—from its philological and historicist origins in nineteenth-century Germany to its current state in North American colleges and universities. Two animal fictions by Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog” and “A Report to an Academy,” as personalized by two Jewish Americanists in professions of critical faith, jointly set the stage for an exposition of the book’s twofold title. This is followed by a brief history of the field and an initial consideration of its several dilemmas in content as well as form. The chapter concludes with four overarching questions posed to and for JS and a brief outline of the rest of the book.
Interchapter I JS Davka
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

“The Questionnaire,” a now staple feature of the biannual AJS Perspectives magazine, poses this roving reporter–like question in its Spring 2012 issue: Why did you go into Jewish Studies? The responses from a range of scholars in disciplines like history, religious studies, and Hebrew literature narrate accounts of being both placed and displaced (some even linked specifically ...
Interchapter IV Speaking of JS; and Its Vicissitudes
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

Speaking of JS to JS can be hit or miss. Two occasions on which I was asked to do so offer instructive lessons. The first talk was pitched to a composite audience of colleagues in Jewish Studies and literary studies. Such conditions of “bilingualism” stand out most starkly at institutions where an affiliative history bridging two distinct constituencies remains only emergent. The presentation was built on the central figure of reading as a tactile practice: books as the felt objects of palpable hands in relation to interpretive will and the rabbinic tradition, more specifically, where the question also intersects intriguingly with criteria for canonicity....
Bildungsheld or Pícaro, Canon and List: A Heterotopology for JS
Authors: Newton Adam Zachary
Published: January 2020

This chapter foregrounds an extra-disciplinary structure for “Jewish Studies” outside the bounds of the University proper. British rabbinics professor Philip Alexander’s mordant observation about JS is especially pertinent here: “Jewish Studies has emerged as an autonomous field that is strictly speaking neither secular nor religious, but academic.” The chapter turns, therefore, to the precedent of Franz Rosenzweig’s Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus Frankfurt, whose short heyday in the 1920s has bequeathed a model for extra-academic Jewish education, subsequently refashioned by others. What would JS look like if it weren’t tied to the institutional vicissitudes of academicized knowledge practices, if the reproduction of the academic system and social field, the magister-discipulusrelation, were not its determinative economy? Is, or can Jewish Studies be, a kind of heterotopia within the university’s borders? What would it mean for JS—as Rosenzweig envisioned for his students in Lehrhaus—to bring the outside in? As counter-example to Neusner’s essays in chapter 3, Rosenzweig’s essays determine this chapter’s focus. Implications of the chapter’s title, with its tension between hero and adventurer and closed or open catalogue, are taken up in the concluding pages.
The Cartesian Objection and the Nature of the Problem
Authors: Plessner Helmuth , Bernstein J. M.
Published: January 2020

Since Descartes it has been customary to divide reality into res extensa (the extended, the physical, the body) and res cogitans (the mental, the mind). This assumption is now recognized to have extremely problematic effects, yet no satisfactory substitute is available. Among the problems generated by the Cartesian dichotomy between the mental and the physical is the association of nature with the quantitative and measurable and the association of qualities with the “subjective.” Likewise, the dichotomy entails an unbridgeable gap between the “inner” (mental, experiential) and the “outer” (physical). Even other subjects (other I’s) are inaccessible to a single subject’s knowledge according to the Cartesian view. Finally, the Cartesian assumption restricts the theory-generating resources of biological research—for instance, comparative psychological research—too narrowly: namely, to behavior construed as entirely extensional. In the interest of preserving and explaining the possibility of forms of knowledge and objects of knowledge characteristic of biology, the study of nature in general, and human and animal activity in everyday experience, we must find a substitute set of ontological assumptions to those in the Cartesian dichotomy. This substitute set must nonetheless still explain the appearance of a dual aspect in ourselves and other living things.
Thinking with Adorno
Authors: Richter Gerhard
Published: January 2020

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoervice Gaze is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—which is to say, both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from one’s orientation in the work of art and the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one to the primacy of the object and beyond. Along the way, the book makes vivid the notion that Adorno can best be understood through the lens of his highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze.” This gaze designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: it moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it. As this book also shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased historical predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.
A Theology of Failure
Authors: Rose Marika
Published: January 2020

Everyone agrees that theology has failed, but the question of how to respond to this failure is contested. Against both radical orthodoxy and deconstructive theology, Rose proposes that Christian identity is constituted by, not despite, failure. Rose shows how the influential work of Slavoj Žižek repeats the original move of Christian mysticism differently, yoking language, desire, and transcendence to a materialist rather than a Neoplatonist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the Dionysius, Derrida, and contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, Rose’s critical theological engagement with Žižek helps makes possible a materialist reading of Christianity. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite’s uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius’s legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth-century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek’s account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek’s work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.
Introduction: Failing
Authors: Rose Marika
Published: January 2020

Whichever way you look at it, theology has failed. This chapter explores the problem of theology’s failure, placing it within the context of the linguistic turn in continental philosophy—which raises the question of language’s failure—and the problem of economy. Suggesting that Žižek’s work represents a return to the central ontological—rather than linguistic—concerns of Christian apophatic theology, this introduction sets out the overall structure of the book, which positions Žižek’s work in relation to first, the Christian mystical tradition that begins with Dionysius and second, contemporary debates about continental philosophy and negative theology. Via Žižek, it proposes a materialist model of faithfulness to the Christian tradition that is inescapably bound up with failure, with infidelity.
Ontology and Desire in Dionysius the Areopagite
Authors: Rose Marika
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on a discussion of the work of Dionysius the Areopagite, a key figure in the formation of the Christian mystical tradition. The chapter explores Dionysius’s work, its distinctive characteristics—which arise principally from Dionysius’s idiosyncratic coupling of Christian theology and Neoplatonism—and the mixed legacy he bequeaths to his theological offspring. The chapter sketches the key contours of the Dionysian problematic to which subsequent discussions in the book will return, focusing in particular on his conjunction of eros and ontology and the consequences of this marriage for his account of freedom, materiality, hierarchy, and universality. This Dionysian legacy contains crucial antagonisms with which his intellectual descendants must grapple: the structural homology of creation and fall, the dual desire to escape and to affirm the material world, the problematic association of the hierarchies of ecclesial authority and being itself, and an account that simultaneously denies and embodies the transformation of Christianity by the encounter with that which is foreign to it. As a result, it is not straightforwardly—if at all—possible to be simply faithful to Dionysius’s work, which is itself internally inconsistent.
The Gift and Violence
Authors: Rose Marika
Published: January 2020

Both ancient and contemporary discussions about the nature of desire and ontology (and the relationship between the two) have been driven by economic concerns. Both the relationship between God and the world and that between the individual and the world have been conceived as economic problems, as have the questions of freedom, evil, creation, and teleology. The centrality of the economic question to the discussion of ontology and desire is particularly apparent in the debates that have taken place around the nature of “the gift.” This chapter explores the debates between Jacques Derrida and Jean Luc Marion over the nature of the gift and examines Slavoj Žižek’s relationship to these debates. It goes on to explore the theme of violence, which—as I argue—is a key term in Žižek’s work for the economic problem of the gift, and offers a reading of Žižek’s understanding of violence in relation to Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence.
Divine Violence as Trauma
Authors: Rose Marika
Published: January 2020

This chapter addresses key questions about Žižek’s divinely violent ontology of failure: first, how to specify the difference between “good” aneconomic violence and “bad” economic violence and, second, a broader question about how to address the limitations of Žižek’s analysis when it comes to accounting for the complex intersections of gender, class, and white supremacy in the systems and structures whose ordinary violence Žižek wants to interrupt. First, I argue that the divine violence Žižek advocates might be usefully understood in relation to the psychoanalytic notion of trauma. Second, I explore the specifically gendered nature of Žižek’s violent rhetoric via Grace Jantzen, Julia Kristeva, and Marcella Althaus-Reid. Finally, I draw on the work of Lee Edelman, Frank Wilderson, and Linn Tonstad to address some of the key weaknesses of Žižek’s analysis.
For the Love of Psychoanalysis
Authors: Rottenberg Elizabeth
Published: January 2020

For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida is a book about what exceeds or resists calculation—in life and in death. It is a book about what emerges, and perhaps only emerges, from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Part I, “Freuderrida,” opens with a nontraditional Freud: a Freud associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and symbolization, but with accidents and chance. It begins with the accidents both in and of Freud’s writing, the unexpected insights that simultaneously produce and disrupt our received ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured as a “foreign body,” as “traumatic temporality,” as “spatial unlocatability,” or as the “death drive,” it points to something that is neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither psychically nor materially determined. Where Part I, “Freuderrida,” leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing, Part II, “Freuderrida,” addresses itself to what transports us back and limits the openness of our horizon. And here the example par excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating decision. If “Freuderrida” insists on the death penalty, if it returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of Freud’s death drive.
For the Love of Psychoanalysis
Authors: Rottenberg Elizabeth
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores Jacques Derrida’s complex and ambivalent relation to the discourse and practice of psychoanalysis. It argues that there is, in Derrida’s work, not only a contradictory but also a somewhat cruel way of treating psychoanalysis (in particular the work of Jacques Lacan). It proposes that we read this cruelty not as something gratuitous but as Derrida’s desire to reawaken psychoanalysis to its own most radical possibilities. What if cruelty was, this chapter asks, an essential part of the revolutionary and irreversible legacy of psychoanalysis? Could one not say, then, that the “friend” of psychoanalysis was expressing his love for psychoanalysis by treating it cruelly?
Alfonso VIII: An Introduction
Authors: Ruiz Teofilo F.
Published: January 2020

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of Alfonso VIII's role in the development of Castilian and European society. Born in November 1155, the son of Sancho III of Castile-León and Blanche of Navarre, Alfonso VIII ascended to the throne in 1158 on the death of his father. His minority was a troubled period. Noble factions fought for control of the regency, seeking to appropriate as much of the royal prerogatives and domain as possible. Once he came of age and assumed control of his kingdom, it took Alfonso VIII a great deal of his adult life to recover the lands illegally seized by his uncles and to diminish the influence of noble factions. However, threats came from other sources. By the middle of the twelfth century, the Almoravids fell to the rising Almohad power. By the second half of the twelfth century, the Almohads built an expansive and successful Western Mediterranean empire. In many respects, Alfonso VIII's reign would be defined by his defeats at the Almohads' hands and by his eventual victories over them, culminating with the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212.
Selling Castile: Coinage, Propaganda, and Mediterranean Trade in the Age of Alfonso VIII
Authors: Todesca James J.
Published: January 2020

This chapter discusses one of Alfonso VIII's paths to solidifying and advancing his kingdom—his monetary policy. As did his contemporaries throughout Latin Europe, Alfonso VIII struck silver-alloyed denarii to serve as coins of daily exchange in an expanding monetary economy. He also introduced a high-value gold piece, derived from the dinar of his Muslim neighbors, which was more suitable for long-distance trade. In the early 1170s, Alfonso VIII took the monetary initiative that helped put Castile on the European map; he began striking the gold morabetino alfonsino in Toledo. Unlike some of Alfonso VIII's early billon, his morabetino shows no sign of being a short-lived propaganda piece. Its persistent appearance in charters, both in Castile as well as in Aragon-Catalonia and Navarre, shows it filled an economic niche. Indeed, Alfonso VIII's gold morabetino played a prominent role in the Mediterranean economy.
Alfonso VIII and the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa
Authors: Gómez Miguel
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa—and the campaign which preceded the Christian victory—is certainly the most famous event of Alfonso VIII's lengthy fifty-six years on the Castilian throne. It was recorded far and wide in chronicles and histories across Europe, and became in time a semi-legendary episode of immense importance in the collective memory of Christian Spain. The battle, and the conditions which made it possible, were the culmination of years of effort and work to position Castile as the most powerful kingdom in Spain. It was also the result of steady effort by the Church, and especially the papacy, to encourage the Castilian monarch and his fellow rulers to set aside their preferred political rivalries in the name of the much more difficult work of defending and expanding the borders of Christendom. By 1212, Alfonso VIII was the most successful crusading monarch of his generation.
Lives of the Dead Poets
Authors: Swann Karen
Published: January 2020

Biography has played an important role in the canonization of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise wasted in indolence; with reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world; and with stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—preserved by circles and then sometimes circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus. Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still, willy-nilly, trigger associations with biographical detail in a way that sparks pathos and produces intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even in readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus “posthumous” in Keats’s evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. This book takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the posthumous lives of the prematurely arrested figures of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry’s allotted period, biographical fascination opens us to poetry’s modes of survival from the time of the romantic period, when it began to receive the first of its many death sentences, into our own present.
Shelley’s Pod People
Authors: Swann Karen
Published: January 2020

This chapter engages contemporary accounts of Shelley as a visitant only tenuously connected to life and brings this biographical material into conversation with his The Witch of Atlas. In that poem, the Witch and her Hermaphrodite (the poetical character and the poetic figure) are radically withdrawn entities that solicit the attachments of others. The poem invites us to imagine poetry persisting into the future in the form of immured deposits, banked or planted without promise of return or future growth. The Witch of Atlas, in the manner of contemporary accounts of Shelley himself, speaks to a poetry that endures into the future by virtue of a ruthless rebuff of the human interest it in this way also captivates.
Coda
Authors: Swann Karen
Published: January 2020

By virtue of an ostentatious turning away—the turn, Benjamin reminds us, that is at once that of the aesthetic object and of the commodity—the biographical figures of the dead poets of this study bring into view the costs of these two related regimes. In the period that stretches from Wordsworth’s time to our present, poetry’s strange life, the life of the virtual trope or figure, continues as it has always done. What changes are the conditions of life for its makers and readers: the increasing reach of a commodity capitalism that would conscript singular existence into the aesthetic or commodified image; the consequently threatened sacrifice or loss of what was “human in the past” to this regime; the human condemned to a failure to thrive. These are the conditions that the poetry of second-generation romanticism dramatizes and to which its biographical figures attest.
Incipit
Authors: Usher Phillip John
Published: January 2020

… the voice-less things once placed as a décor surrounding the usual spectacles, all those things that never interested anyone, from now on thrust themselves brutally and without warning into our schemes and maneuvers.

—Michel Serres, Le contrat naturel

Humans in the sixteenth century did not observe things with a cold eye, with a detached gaze. They felt wholly bound up with them....
Demonic Mines
Authors: Usher Phillip John
Published: January 2020

This chapter shifts attention from the hillsides to the shafts and galleries that miners hollow out underground. Via a close reading of Agricola’s De animantibus subterraneis (On Subterranean Creatures) and of sections of De re metallica not discussed in the previous chapter, as well as works by French writer François Garrault and by Paracelsus, this chapter asks if it is possible to understand “belief” in mining spirits as colluding with the chemical realities and medical dangers for humans connected with extracting matter. From this section, it thus emerges that for early modern humanists extraction of matter ex terrawas never just a question of human agents yielding extractive and controlling mastery over inanimate hillsides and underground rock faces.
Geomedia
Authors: Usher Phillip John
Published: January 2020

This chapter focuses on limestone in the context of the Normandy town of Caen, which is largely built atop and indeed from that stone. Caen is thus at once extraction site and extracted matter. Discussing both buildings within the city and the texts of a local historian, Charles de Bourgueville, which describe them and their destruction at the hands of Protestants during the Wars of Religion, this chapter seeks out some of the ways in which humans long for that stone’s endurance while also worrying about its fragility. Putting geological and human timelines into dialogue, the chapter thus situates the exterranean at the intersection of extraction, longing, and fear.
Dying Badly
Authors: Vinter Maggie
Published: January 2020

This chapter traces how arts of dying migrate from devotional texts into homiletic dramas and finally to the commercial playhouse between 1570 and 1590, around the same time that anti-theatrical condemnations of the stage as inherently blasphemous come to cultural prominence. Theater constitutes an important site of religious instruction and theological investigation not despite, but rather because of, its blasphemous potential. William Wager’s Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, and Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus all employ parodies of ars moriendi ideas to represent evil action. Parody arts of dying help dramatize a predestinarian cosmos where distinctions between the elect and the reprobate are fundamental, yet invisible to humans. The bad deaths in these plays function like negative theologies, manifesting and explicating divine will through attempted departures from it. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe brings the reprobate parodist into focus alongside the divine parodied and makes the magician’s vicious death a site for analyzing human agency. As practices of dying are inverted into theatrical arts of dying badly, Elizabethan dramatists discover occasions to explore the nature of action and the forms of agency available in situations of extreme constraint or privation.
Studying Parishes
Authors: Ammerman Nancy T.
Published: January 2020

While Catholic parishes are distinctive in culture and polity, they also share organizational characteristics with American congregations. Borrowing tools and concepts developed over the past thirty years in “congregational studies” can provide a useful resource to a revitalized study of American Catholic parishes and important comparative data on American religious life. This chapter argues that parishes can be better understood by paying attention both to the cultural toolkits parishioners bring from outside (ethnicity and social class, for example) and to the way they shape the larger tradition into their own local ways of doing things through their “artifacts,” “accounts,” and “activities.” In addition, the study of parishes can benefit from attention to the external social context and internal dynamics such as size, commitment, and power.
The Corsi Affair
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

This chapter explores tensions surrounding the administration of the Refugee Relief Act. Immigration conservatives attempted to limit the liberalizing aspects of the Refugee Relief Act by administering the program in an arguably overly restrictive manner. When the Eisenhower administration appointed an Italian American immigration reform advocate, Edward Corsi, to reform the failing program, he was red-baited and chased out of office by the leading immigration restrictionist in Congress, Francis Walter. But Corsi vehemently protested his ousting. His counterattack sparked a public debate about the nature of the program and also prompted discussions about the relative inclusion of ethnic Italians in the United States. This chapter examines how boundaries of racial and ethnic inclusion continued to be contested in the postwar period and further explores how those debates impacted the construction of American immigration policies.
The Deep Roots of White Ethnicity, 1965 and Beyond
Authors: Battisti Danielle
Published: January 2020

The conclusion examines the impact Italian American involvement in immigration reform campaigns and interactions with Italian newcomers had on their racial and ethnic identities in the postwar period. The prevailing literature in the field contends that white ethnic revivals in the late twentieth century emerged primarily as a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement as groups like Italian Americans attempted to distance themselves from the nation’s history of racial oppression and articulated their culture of white ethnic grievance in response to minority rights movements. This chapter, however, suggests an earlier chronology and more diverse origins for the roots of those ethnic revivals.
George Akropolites and the Counterexample(s)
Authors: Demacopoulos George E.
Published: January 2020

This chapter studies aspects of George Akropolites's History, which was a chronicle of the Byzantine successor state in Nicaea covering the years 1204–61. More than anything else, what can be learned from Akropolites with respect to the concerns of this investigation is that there were a great number of Greek Christians who did not believe that the Latin Church should be sacramentally isolated from the Greek Church even if the Latins were an inferior race and their presence in the East had caused devastation to the Byzantine community. Akropolites presents the Latin occupation of Constantinople as just another of the many political challenges that befell an empire that had lasted more than a millennium. He certainly does not present the Latin occupation of Byzantium in terms of the existential and epistemic rupture that most modern historians of Eastern Christianity believe it to be. Nor does he present the Byzantines as any kind of backward or inferior society that needs the rejuvenation provided by its colonial masters. In these ways, Akropolites appears to offer an important counterexample to some of the very assumptions that underlie the framework of this book.
The Chronicle of Morea
Authors: Demacopoulos George E.
Published: January 2020

This chapter assesses The Chronicle of Morea, which contains some of the most intriguing aspects of the colonial encounter of the Fourth Crusade. The Chronicles of Morea provides a series of discursive juxtapositions between the Franks and the Greeks. Although it has a very complicated textual history, The Chronicles of Morea tells the multigenerational story of the Frankish Villehardouin dynasty, which ruled the Peloponnese in the centuries after the conquest of 1204. This text reveals not only the way that colonizer and colonized eventually came to work alongside one another but also the way that the prolonged encounter between Greeks and Franks transformed the means by which both understood their sense of identity and religious commitments. It is precisely because of these aspects of this text that the insights of postcolonial analysis help one to understand the many complexities that they convey.
The Phenomenological Method of Eidetic Intuition and Its Clarification as Eidetic Variation
Authors: Lohmar Dieter
Published: January 2020

This chapter investigates phenomenology’s “eidetic” methodology, which, when applied to the essential structures of consciousness, opposes an empirical psychology that must rest on empirical generalizations. It clarifies the sense in which eidetic intuition is a form of cognition and how it yields knowledge of a priori (necessary and universal) structures without falling into a kind of Platonism that hypostasizes what is essential to a type. It also explores the intimate connection between “free phantasy” or imaginative variation and the resultant eidetic intuition. In concluding, it discusses a series of potential difficulties with the notions of eidetic variation and intuition.
Objectifying and Nonobjectifying Acts
Authors: Melle Ullrich
Published: January 2020

This chapter examines the distinction between objectifying and non-objectifying acts. The latter, in reacting to the objects presented in objectifying acts, reveal further, nonmaterial determinations of objects, most notably, the value of the objects or states of affairs presented, which values, in turn, motivate desires and choices. The chapter explores the distinction and relations among the three classes of experience (logical-cognitive or intellective, evaluative, and practical) in order to reveal how Husserl tried to navigate between two theories of reason, a pure intellectualism on the one hand and a pure emotivism on the other, and how these two views of reason affected Husserl’s accounts of the three domains of reason (logical-intellective, axiological, and practical), each with its own form of justification. Husserl envisioned these three domains of reason in a determinate relationship: axiological reason is grounded in and dependent upon logical-cognitive reason, and practical reason is grounded in and dependent upon axiological reason.
Husserl’s Phenomenology: Philosophia Perennis in the Crisis of European Culture
Authors: Ströker Elisabeth
Published: January 2020

This essay takes up a recurring theme in Husserl’s phenomenology: the crisis of European culture and, more specifically, the crisis of reason that manifests itself in the failure of the positive sciences to understand their origins and their lack of a fully scientific methodology. Husserl’s phenomenology attempts to return to those origins—to things and states of affairs simply as they present themselves to experiencing subjects—and to proceed with a rigorous methodology to examine them and articulate their essential structures. Only in this way are we able to understand higher-order cultural achievements of the sort we find in the positive and formal sciences. The chapter notes how Husserl extended his analyses to consider the formation and transmission of traditions, including the dangers lurking in tradition when we passively accept its results without actively appropriating their truth.
Allied Encounters
Authors: Escolar Marisa
Published: January 2020

Allied Encounters: The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy is the first-ever monograph to analyze cultural representations of Allied-occupied Italy, one of the war’s most unstable spaces. While the U.S. military viewed itself as a redemptive force, competing narratives emerged in the Italian imaginary. Both national paradigms, however, are deeply entangled with the gendering of redemption long operative in Anglo-American and Italian discourse, emerging from a Dantean topos that depicts Italy as a whore in need of redemption. Tracing the formation of these gendered paradigms and pointing to their intersection with sexualized and racialized identities, this book examines literary, cinematic, and military representations of the soldier-civilian encounter, by Anglo-Americans and Italians, set in two major occupied cities, Naples and Rome. Informed by the historical context as well as their respective representational traditions, these texts—produced during and in the immediate aftermath—become more than mirrors of the intercultural encounter or generic allegories about U.S.–Italian relations. Instead, they are sites in which to explore other repressed traumas—including the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and European colonialism, as well as individual traumatic events like the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the mass civilian rape near Rome by colonial soldiers— that inform how the occupation unfolded and is remembered. In addition to challenging canonical interpretations of emblematic texts, this book introduces several little-known diaries, novels, and guidebooks.
“Liberated” Rome beyond Redemption
Authors: Escolar Marisa
Published: January 2020

This chapter analyzes the seminal Italian representation of the gendering of redemption in “Rome,” the third episode of Roberto Rossellini’s Paisà (1946). It reads “Rome” in terms of its relationship to the novels All Thy Conquests (1946) and The Girl on the Via Flaminia (1949), by Alfred Hayes, a Rossellini collaborator who wrote the “Rome” episode. All three texts express sympathy for the Italian woman turned prostitute, at once an individual who faces material consequences and an allegory for the nation. They position her fall at the start of a national trajectory that masculinizes redemption: for Rossellini, the northern partisans who fall to their deaths at the end of Paisà; for Hayes, the soldier tourist who returns to postwar Italy in search of pleasure. Furthermore, All Thy Conquests points to the strategic use of melodrama in “Rome.” Set during the trial of Pietro Caruso, a fascist involved in the massacre at the Fosse Ardeatine near Rome, All Thy Conquestsexplicitly represents what Rossellini eschews. By focusing on the conventional gendered redemption narrative, Rossellini is able to repress the traumatic events surrounding the trial, when a Roman mob lynches Donato Carretta, a witness for the prosecution, threatening Italy’s redemption in the eyes of the world.
Introduction
Authors: Gallagher Gary W. , Varon Elizabeth R.
Published: January 2020

The introduction describes each of the essays and how they work together in the volume to argue for the importance of understanding different interpretations of what the Union meant to many northerners during the Civil War.
Introduction: Solomon’s Difficulty
Authors: LaZella Andrew
Published: January 2020

The title derives from Scotus’s gloss of a passage from Ecclesiastes, which frames the general problem of the book. Things are difficult, Scotus tells us, because language and thought inadequately grasp the structure of reality. To remedy Solomon’s difficulty, proper division is required. As the remainder of the work shows, proper division occurs by means of a univocal concept of being and ultimate differences. The introduction establishes this general problematic with respect to the perennial philosophical problem of “cutting being at its joints.” Through the lens of Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and others, the introduction looks at the fit between language, thought, and reality and how divisions in one might reflect or obscure divisions in the other. For Scotus, the inadequacy of language and, to a greater extent, thought to grasp the structure of reality prompts a need for a univocal concept of being. Whereas language can gain some traction, thought stalls even more, given its acquaintance with only sensible accidents. Hence, we must engage in proper division as best as we are able. This means making conceptual maps that do not mimetically correspond to things, but rather intensionally fracture what God and angels behold in a single, unruptured, intuitive gaze.
The Real Concept of Being
Authors: LaZella Andrew
Published: January 2020

Chapter 2 continues the discussion of the previous chapter by examining Scotus’s claim that being is a real concept. The chapter asks: How is being a real concept (i.e., a concept about things, not about concepts) without corresponding to a real common element shared between God and creatures and between each of the categories? The first section begins with an examination of what Scotus means by real concepts, in addition to several related factors. These include: conceptual simplicity and complexity; simple-simplicity and non-simple simplicity; distinct and confused cognition; and abstraction and division. The second section shows how Scotus expands the more limited Porphyrian scope of quid and quale to include being as transcendental quid and ultimate differences as transcendental qualia. With these factors in play, the third section turns to the issue of the double primacy of being and resolves the ever so important question of how univocal being relates to ultimate difference. That is, they are not beings, but they are not nothing. The fourth section shows how Scotus solves the various problems surrounding univocity raised in the previous chapter. The extent to which ultimate differences avoid vain repetition leads into a more extended discussion of these transcendental principles.
Ultimate Difference
Authors: LaZella Andrew
Published: January 2020

Chapter 3 offers a systematic treatment of ultimate differences and provides a list of their functional characteristics. The first section sets up the Aristotelian background of the term against which Scotus’s deepening and broadening can emerge. This is followed in the second section by an explanation and defense of the characteristics associated with ultimate difference. They are: (1) expressed by a simply-simple concept, which (2) contains only a qualitative (but no quidditative) element; (3) primarily diverse from one another and from being; (4) differing in terms of themselves and not on account of something else; (5) extra-categorial/transcendental; and (6) terminative of a quidditative order. The third section explores the extra-categorial status of ultimate differences such that they cannot be located in any category or with anything falling under a category. The fourth section explains their primary diversity and shows why such vague alterity cannot be reduced to opposition, contradiction, or contrariety. A contrast is made to Aquinas, whose identification of being with ipsum esse subsistens reduces diversity to a relative opposition between being and nonbeing in all creatures. The fifth section explains the final feature of ultimate difference: termination of quidditative orders.