‘A Cock for Asclepius’

1993 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn W. Most
Keyword(s):  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Single Body ◽  
Past Life ◽  
The One ◽  
Final Closure

In any list of famous last words, Socrates' are likely to figure near the top. Details of the final moments of celebrities tend anyway to exert a peculiar fascination upon the rest of us: life's very contingency provokes a need to see lives nevertheless as meaningful organic wholes, defined as such precisely by their final closure; so that even the most trivial aspects of their ending can come to seem bearers of profound significance, soliciting moral reflections apparently not less urgent for their being quite unwarranted. From earliest times, this fascination with last moments has come to be concentrated in particular upon last words: situated at that most mysterious of borders, between life and death, they seem to look backwards and forwards at once, judging the speaker's own past life from the vantage-point of a future realm he is about to attain and hinting at the nature of what awaits us all from the perspective of that past life he still – however tenuously – shares with us. A moment earlier, and there is no reason to privilege any one discourse of the speaker's above another; a moment later, and his lips are sealed for ever. Only in that final moment can he seem to pass an unappealable judgement on himself, to combine in a single body two incompatible subjectivities, the one suffering and extremely mortal, the other dispassionate and transcendent. If he is a thinker or a man of action, this is his last chance to summarize a lifetime's meditation or experience in a pithy, memorable aphorism.If he is a celebrated poet, he can be imagined to have composed his own epitaph; if he is a Hellenistic poet, he may even in fact have done so.

scholarly journals Van wie zegt de profeet dit? Een een-voudige vraag en een meervoudig antwoord

2005 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rein Bos
Keyword(s):  
Old Testament ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biblical Criticism ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Christian Perspective ◽  
Practical Theological ◽  
The One ◽  
Christian Congregations ◽  
Single Question

Of whom does the prophet say this? A single question and a multifaceted answerTheologians seeking to preach Old Testament texts meaningful way in Christian congregations face a great challenge. On the one hand, very little has been written in homiletical textbooks about hermeneutical problems facing those who wish to read the Old Testament from the perspective of Christ’s life and death. On the other hand, advances in biblical criticism seemed to have made any such attempt problematic to begin with. In this article, the author attempts to provide a practical-theological contribution to this hermeneutical challenge by reconsidering the heuristic value of mediaeval fourfold interpretation of scriptural passages. By focussing on the servant song of deutero-Isaiah (53) in light of its reinterpretation in Acts 8, this paper aims to provide some suggestions on how Christological interpretation of the Old Testament can be done in a way that takes the original context seriously and is able to read the text from a Christian perspective without the one reading infringing on the other.

scholarly journals ‘Between life and death’: On land, silence and liberation in the capital city

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan F. De Beer
Keyword(s):  
Social Movement ◽  
Mission Statement ◽  
The Other ◽  
Capital City ◽  
Capital Cities ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
University Of Pretoria ◽  
The One ◽  
The University ◽  
The City

This article reflects on the unfinished task of liberation – as expressed in issues of land – and drawing from the work of Franz Fanon and the Durban-based social movement Abahlali baseMjondolo. It locates its reflections in four specific sites of struggle in the City of Tshwane, and against the backdrop of the mission statement of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Pretoria, as well as the Capital Cities Research Project based in the same university. Reflecting on the ‘living death’ of millions of landless people on the one hand, and the privatisation of liberation on the other, it argues that a liberating praxis of engagement remains a necessity in order to break the violent silences that perpetuate exclusion.

Development of drawing abilities in a distinct population: Depiction of perceptual principles by three children with congenital total blindness

2003 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amedeo D’Angiulli ◽  
Stefania Maggi
Keyword(s):  
Initial Phase ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
Distinct Population ◽  
Congenital Blindness ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Blind Children ◽  
Total Blindness ◽  
The One

We studied the development of spontaneous tactile drawing in three 12-year-old children with congenital total blindness and with no previous drawing tuition. In a period of 9 months, from an initial phase in which they were taught to draw tangible straight and curve raised lines, the three blind children went on making spontaneous raised outlines representing edges, surfaces of objects, vantage point, and motion. The corpus of drawings produced by these children shows that several aspects of outline pictures can be implemented through touch. The perceptual principles represented in these drawings are comparable to those commonly found in sighted children. On the one hand, this convergence indicates similarities in the way vision and touch mediate the acquisition and the conceptualisation of spatial information from objects and the environment. On the other hand, it reflects the influence of cross-modal plasticity typically associated with early or congenital blindness. This study suggests that drawing development in general does not depend on learning pictorial conventions. Rather it seems driven by natural generativity based on children’s knowledge of space and perceptual principles.

Segmentary State Formation and the Ritual Control of Water Under the Incas

1993 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 480-514 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gose
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Political Organization ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Plant Life ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The One ◽  
Divine Kingship

There is a strange and unacknowledged paradox in the historiography of the Incas. On the one hand, few would deny that theirs was a typically theocratic archaic state, a divine kingship in which the Inca was thought to.be the son of the Sun. On the other hand, the standard descriptions of Inca political structure barely mention religion and seem to assume a formal separation between state and cult.1I believe that these secularizing accounts are misguided and will show in this essay that the political structure of the pre-Columbian Andes took form primarily around a system of sacred ancestral relics and origin points known generically ashuacas. Each huaca defined a level of political organization that might nest into units of a higher order or subdivide into smaller groupings. Collectively they formed a segmentary hierarchy that transcended the boundaries of local ethnic polities and provided the basis for empires like that of the Incas. However, these huacas were also the focus of local kinship relations and agrarian fertility rituals. The political structure that they articulated therefore had a built-in concern for the metaphysical reproduction of human, animal, and plant life. Political power in the pre-Columbian Andes was particularly bound up with attempts to control the flow of water across the frontier of life and death, resulting in no clear distinction between ritual and administration.

scholarly journals Raden Saleh's Resistance to Colonialism in the Painting "Between Life and Death" (1848)

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 219-232
Author(s):  
Mochamad Fauzie
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Postcolonial Theory ◽  
Cultural Orientation ◽  
The Other ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Paradoxical Situation ◽  
Colonial Expansion ◽  
The One ◽  
Theory Research ◽  
The 19Th Century

Romanticism became a new cultural orientation in Europe in the 19th century. Through the exploration of tradition and history, romanticism gradually aroused nationalism, giving rise to a paradoxical situation: on the one hand, it fueled colonial expansion, on the other hand, aroused the spirit of resistance of colonized society. Raden Saleh was in Europe in this situation and became famous as a Romantic painter. This research departs from the assumption that Romanticism encouraged Raden Saleh to develop resistance to colonialism in painting. This study aims to prove the existence of signs of resistance to Colonialism in Raden Saleh's painting, entitled "Between Life and Death" (1848). This goal was achieved by analyzing the painting with CW Morris Semiotics, with the approach of Psychoanalysis Theory and Postcolonial Theory. Research shows that there are signs of resistance to Colonialism in the painting.

scholarly journals 'The Shadow of One’s Own Head' or The Spectacle of Creativity

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 685
Author(s):  
Susanne Valerie Granzer
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Crucial Aspect ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Intimate Connection ◽  
Artistic Experience ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The Subject ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One

When acting, the actor/actress experiences a complex regime of signs in his/her body, mind, mood and gender. These signs are both disturbing and promising. On the one hand, the act of creativity makes a wound obvious which has been incarnated within man. It tells him/her that he/she is not the sole actor of his/her actions. On the other hand, precisely this way acting on stage becomes an event. The act of this event reveals a way of be-coming in which one acts while at the same time being passive, in which the actor/actress is both agent and patient of his/her own performance. This complex artistic experience catapults actors/actresses into an open passage, into an in-between where they are liberated from the illusion of being the sole actors of their performances. One might even say that by this turn an actor/actress experiences a change, an “anthropological mutation” (Agamben). Or, to have it differently: the artist suffers a kind of “death of the subject”.It is remarkable that this loss of the predominance of subjectivity is a crucial aspect of acting which may affect the audience in a particularly intensive way. Why? Perhaps because it updates an extremely intimate connection between audience and actors/actresses which vicariously reflects the in-between of life and death. A passage by which life presents itself as itself? Life – by its plane of immanence?

Either/Or: The Therapeutic Disciplines versus Philosophy and Religion

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-27
Author(s):  
Lydia Amir ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Practical Philosophy ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Tacit Assumption ◽  
Philosophy And Religion ◽  
The One ◽  
Main Ideas

I trace Shlomit Schuster’s main ideas about the practice of philosophy, and fol­low with a critical characterization of her thought which bears on philosophy’s relation to psychology and psychiatry, on the one hand, and to religion, on the other, as well as on her basis of claiming philosophy’s suitability for non-philosophers. I argue that Shlomit could be unnecessarily uncompromising in implementing her either/or yet not sufficiently discerning of philosophy’s difference with religion. The most conspicuous tenet of Shlomit’s thought – the relation between philosophy and the therapeutic disciplines – has been abundantly debated within the practical philosophy movement. As far as I know, the tacit assumption of her thought regarding the relation of religion with philosophy and its prac­tice, in contradistinction, has not been addressed within this movement. Shlomit’s life and death urges us to tackle this delicate yet significant subject.

scholarly journals Your sister in Babylon sends her love: Towards prophetic solidarity in post-apartheid South Africa

2014 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Maarman S. Tshehla
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
The One ◽  
The Church

How does a self-respecting Christian from Galilee who now finds himself based near the seat of empire relate to power in light of his faith? How are his admonishments, especially those which relate to the public arena, to be appropriated by those living on the periphery of the empire? I reflect on these questions from the vantage point of a South Africa in which on the one hand erstwhile prophets are being haunted by the vagaries of power and on the other the Church is apparently as powerless as never before.

scholarly journals Michelangelo, Leibniz and the Serpentine Figure

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-72
Author(s):  
Sjoerd van Tuinen
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Art History ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
The Other ◽  
Single Body ◽  
Body Without Organs ◽  
The One

In his lectures from 1987, Deleuze draws an analogy between Michelangelo's figures and Leibnizian substances by claiming that neither are essences but rather sources of modifications or manners of being. The best way to explore this analogy, I argue, is by focusing on Michelangelo's preference for serpentine shapes. By putting key passages from The Logic of Sensation, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque and What is Philosophy? in resonance with the Leibnizian accounts of corporeal aggregates and possible worlds on the one hand and art history on the other, I will try to develop a Deleuzian concept for the typically Mannerist ideal of the serpentine figure. Although Deleuze usually prefers to speak in musical terms of refrains and counterpoints by which various blocs of sensation resonate with each other, in the visual arts it is the serpentine figure that renders visible sensory becoming as a rhythmic counter-positioning of possible worlds within a single body without organs.

scholarly journals Die saamspeel van hand, oog en passie: gedagtes oor erotiek en estetika

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 199-225
Author(s):  
DP Veldsman
Keyword(s):  
Religious Experience ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Communication Structure ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The One ◽  
Basic Communication

In critical dismissal on the one hand of the viewpoint of Augustine on original sin, and on the other hand of a proposed viewpoint with regard to a theology of God’s good creation, this article explores the intimate interwoveness of aesthetics, erotism and religious experience. The basic communication structure of sender-message-receiver is taken as vantage point and translated into questions regarding the artist, the medium and  the enjoyer of art / art critic. Against a historical-terminological background of aesthetics and erotism from Plato and Aristotle to contemporary views, a theological viewpoint is developed  in playful metaphoric utilization of the concepts hand, eye and passion. Passion is acquitted in this viewpoint in which hamartological short-sightedness is replaced by loving far-sightedness.

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