scholarly journals Revisiting the Absurd: Posthuman Affects in Samuel Beckett’s Theatre

2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Chang Chen
Keyword(s):  
Gender Studies ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
English Department ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theatre Of The Absurd ◽  
The Face ◽  
Human World ◽  
The Relationship

The ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, the popular label for Samuel Beckett’s theatre, has been challenged over the past decades before its implications were fully explored. This article reconsiders the ‘absurd’ with respect to Beckett and the human/nonhuman relations in the Anthropocene. It draws upon affect theory and posthumanism, arguing that the absurd in Beckett’s theatre takes root in the theatricalization of posthuman affects, which connect the human body and the non-human world. Posthuman affects subvert human sovereignty and disintegrate humans into nothingness. Yet they also give birth to a different cosmic ontology, which involves a call for change in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. Revisited from the perspective of posthuman affect, the absurd in Beckett’s theatre acquires new complexities that bring glimmering possibilities of endurance and comfort in the face of catastrophe. Chen Chang is an assistant researcher of the English Department at Nanjing University, where she recently completed her PhD dissertation on Beckett and the posthuman body. She has published several articles on Beckett as well as in gender studies.

scholarly journals Reviving Traditional Food Knowledge Through Food Festivals. The Case of the Pink Asparagus Festival in Mezzago, Italy

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele F. Fontefrancesco ◽  
Dauro M. Zocchi
Keyword(s):  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Crop Production ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Traditional Food ◽  
The Past ◽  
Food Knowledge ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Relationship

The article investigates the link between food festivals and traditional food knowledge and explores the role played by tourist events in disseminating local agricultural and gastronomic knowledge. This article presents the ethnographic case of the Pink Asparagus Festival in Mezzago in Italy, analyzing how the festival supported the continuation of crop production and its associated traditional knowledge in the village. In the face of a decline of asparagus production, the article highlights the role of the festival in fostering a revival of local food knowledge, which is also able to embrace modernization, at the same time maintaining a strong sense of the past and Mezzago's legacy. Thus, the article suggests that festivals are not just events aimed at commodifying local knowledge, but can be important tools to refresh and maintain local expertise, which is vital and pressing in the context of modern society, and strengthen and expand the relationship between members of the community, thus converting the festival into an endeavor to foster sociocultural sustainability.

Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Elsky
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
English Renaissance ◽  
Renaissance Literature ◽  
Renaissance Art ◽  
Legal Concept ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature

Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature argues that, ironically, custom was a supremely generative literary force for a range of Renaissance writers. Custom took on so much power because of its virtual synonymity with English common law, the increasingly dominant legal system that was also foundational to England’s constitutionalist politics. The strange temporality assigned to legal custom, that is, its purported existence since “time immemorial,” furnished it with a unique and paradoxical capacity—to make new and foreign forms familiar. This monograph shows that during a time when novelty was suspect, even insurrectionary, appeals to the widespread understanding of custom as a legal concept justified a startling array of fictive experiments. This is the first monograph to reveal fully the relationship between Renaissance literature and legal custom. It shows how writers were able to reimagine moments of historical and cultural rupture as continuity by appealing to the powerful belief that English legal custom persisted in the face of conquests by foreign powers. Custom, Common Law, and the Constitution of English Renaissance Literature thus challenges scholarly narratives in which Renaissance art breaks with a past it looks back upon longingly and instead argues that the period viewed its literature as imbued with the aura of the past. In this way, through experiments in rhetoric and form, literature unfolds the processes whereby custom gains its formidable and flexible political power. Custom, a key concept of legal and constitutionalist thought, shaped sixteenth-century literature, while this literature, in turn, transformed custom into an evocative mythopoetic.

Artificial Intelligence in the Era of Transhumanism Smart Phones

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Okan Aksu
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Smart Phones ◽  
The Past ◽  
Human Dna ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
Controversial Topic ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship between humans and machines has been a controversial topic throughout history. In the past, technology was viewed as a mere change in people's living conditions while today it is evident that it affects the nature of humanity itself. This very change can range from microscale structures, such as human DNA, to bigger structures, such as limbs. We have been aware that it is just the beginning for this change. According to the theory of transhumanism, further changes on the human body are expected with the rapid developments in technology. These changes will naturally not be limited to the human body. The increasing amount of interaction between humans and machines will result in the execution of more complicated and difficult tasks by machines instead of humans, which is the focus of the present study. There are many points where the humans and machines meet with technological developments, one of which is the thinking function of humans and its possible transfer to machines. The thinking capacity of machines is known as artificial intelligence.

scholarly journals Contratti a lungo termine e rimedi correttivi

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Lucchesi
Keyword(s):  
Case Law ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Civil Code ◽  
European Contract ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Operation ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
European Contract Law

In long-term contracts the topic of contingencies and corrective remedies is particularly important. The BGB (§ 313) and texts that derive from supranational bodies, such as The Principles of European Contract Law, the UNIDROIT Principles and the Draft Common Frame of Reference set out remedies in order to adapt the contract in the event of contingencies and other preconditions. Similar forms of protection are not provided for by the Italian Civil Code, whose remedies in the face of events stemming from a contingency often do not manage to meet the interest to preserve the relationship. The development of the sources highlights in particular the remedy of compensation and specific enforcement of the obligation to conclude a contract set out in art. 2932 of the Italian Civil Code, with important new features with respect to the past. After the direction taken by case law which accepts compensation for damage in the presence of a concluded and valid contract, the compensation remedy assumes the function of correcting the contract and not just upholding the economic operation. In short, what emerges from the compensation and specific protection are facts and operating techniques that justify and enable correction of a contract.

Re-Membering in Action: Liturgy and Healing of Hurt Memories

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-113
Author(s):  
Mabvuto Felix Phiri
Keyword(s):  
Theological Reflection ◽  
Past Event ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Face ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church

We experience around us situations of violence, pain, suffering, and injustice. Some of these experiences often leave individual and/or communal memories hurt in many different ways. The consequence is that when these hurt memories live with us they begin to shape our identity and selfhood from the perspective of wounded persons. Overlooking these experiences or burying them to amnesia can lead to the denial of what we are truly called to be. Remembering well these memories with hope for a better future in the presence of the risen Lord would be a source of healing for both individuals and communities. This essay posits liturgy as the means by which we can re-member the past to the present and so look to the future with hope of healing. This is so because liturgy has the capacity to bring the participants in the ritual to the past event as a present encounter. Through symbols, gestures, words, songs, and materials used in the ritual, in a concrete manner the participants receive what they are ritualizing in reality. In this way liturgy can give a body to memory, say what words cannot master to say, and to hope for what would be hopeless: healing of hurt memories. This is a theological reflection on the relationship between liturgy and healing of hurt memories through the path of forgiveness. It posits that through liturgy, forgiveness can be given a body and so through forgiveness the Church can offer new life in the face of horrifying hurt memories.

scholarly journals The Paleolithic imagination:Nature, science, and race in Anthropocene fitness cultures

2021 ◽  
pp. 251484862110043
Author(s):  
Gavin Weedon ◽  
Paige Marie Patchin
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Consumer Capitalism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Race Science ◽  
Paleo Diet ◽  
Politics Of Race ◽  
The Relationship

The widespread uptake of the Anthropocene concept over the past two decades has seen a concomitant rise in cultural forms that trade on nostalgia for Paleolithic life. Mud running, CrossFit, and the Paleo diet exemplify this trend, with the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer at the center of their popular prescriptions for healthy living. In this article, we identify these practices as embodying the anxieties of the Anthropocene as well as its historical and racial elisions. By focusing on the oblique and subtle racializations of Anthropocene health and fitness cultures, we contribute to understandings of the cultural significance of the human body in the Anthropocene and the relationship between the biopolitics of health and geological life, arguing that the body is a key site through which the tensions and inequalities of the Anthropocene are played out. And by unraveling how the Paleolithic imagination is rooted in a distinctly capitalist, Euro-American attitude to the body in nature, we show the Anthropocene to be defined by uneven distributions of health as self-optimization, and health as environmental risk. The Paleolithic imagination demonstrates the tangled politics of race, science, and nature in the twenty-first century, in which global ecological instability, the biopolitics of health, the shadows of colonialism, and consumer capitalism converge.

Galen und Asklepios

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Brockmann
Keyword(s):  
Human Body ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
Close Link ◽  
Therapeutic Method ◽  
Precise Knowledge ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
The Face ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis paper examines the ties between temple healing and the scientific practice of medicine and healing in Antiquity as exemplified in the writings of Galen of Pergamon. This prominent physician, while representing a medical science based on rational principles, seeking precise knowledge of all the workings of the human body and aiming to establish a well-founded and comprehensive therapeutic method, nevertheless considers himself a disciple of Asklepios. Galen’s reference to “our fatherly god Asklepios,” invoking their common Pergamene home, attests to his respect for and close link to the deity. In the face of rare or particularly challenging illnesses or impending vital decisions, Galen the scientist recurs to divine counsel, received from Asklepios by way of dreams. In closing, this paper contrasts the relationship of the scientific practitioner of medicine to his art’s god with the enthused, all-encompassing and directing devotion to Asklepios as extolled in the works of the orator Aelius Aristides, particularly in his

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Jan-Melissa Schramm
Keyword(s):  
Legal Protection ◽  
The State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Scrutiny ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

Sacred theatrical performance has always attracted the strong scrutiny of the state. Consequently, one focus of this study is the relationship between sacred aesthetics and the law: what practices are considered in need of legal protection (or proscription), and how does that agenda change over time? But another is the way in which tradition (in this case, the long history of sacred drama in England) is constantly contested and revised, involving a profound interrogation of the extent to which the inheritances of the past shape the present or indeed the present predetermines our reading of the past. The Introduction alerts the reader to both these dynamics—the persistence of certain forms in the face of state censorship, and the ways in which that very narrative of continuity must be subject to critical scrutiny.

Demand for God and Government: The Dynamics of Religion and Public Opinion

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Habel ◽  
J. Tobin Grant
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Government Spending ◽  
Public Support ◽  
The United States ◽  
Government Services ◽  
The Past ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Face ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractWe explore the relationship between religiosity and public support for greater government services. We theorize that increases in religiosity and public opinion both reflect demands from citizens in the face of insecurity. We argue that religiosity is comprised of two factors: responses to insecurity; and long-held preferences for religion, or secularity. We show that previous studies that have observed increased religiosity leading to decreased support for government spending have not distinguished among religiosity as driven by secularity versus insecurity. To test our theory, we first estimate a series of simulations, and we then turn to the dynamics of aggregate religiosity and public opinion in the United States over the past fifty years, an environment where long-held preferences for religious goods have remained relatively stable. Consistent with our theory, religiosity and public opinion respond to insecurity; the series are positively correlated, move together through time, and react in similar ways to changes in GDP per capita. Our findings indicate that during times when there is greater insecurity, both religiosity and demand from government increase.

Chasing the Past: Geopolitics of Memory on the Margins of Modern Greece

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pierre Sintès
Keyword(s):  
Current Crisis ◽  
The Balkans ◽  
Greek Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Current Affairs ◽  
Close Observation ◽  
The Face ◽  
And Migration ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Of Greece

Since 2008, Greece has been at the centre of European current affairs due to the financial and economic crisis. However, it should not be forgotten that before the current crisis the political upheavals of the early 1990s and the collapse of Marxist-inspired regimes had already radically transformed the face of the country. These transformations have been seen as a return of the Balkans’ question, raising issues of border disputes and migration, minorities and national inclusion. They have had far-reaching consequences on the relations between Greek society and its peripheries, and what some have deemed to be its destabilising diversity. In this context, the material presented in this book examines the strengthening of discourses of belonging which draw legitimacy from a glorification of the past and tradition. The fieldwork carried out over the past 15 years on the fringes of Greece has focused on groups who were stigmatised and distanced from standard definitions of Greekness. It provides an original perspective on the changes that the country has undergone in recent decades. The question of the nation-state’s future is raised through close observation on the local scale, leading to a debate about the relationship between areal and reticular territory within the framework of globalisation. This book also aims to provide non-Francophone readers with access to research carried out on these issues in France, shifting the focus of Balkan Anglophone specialists for whom French publications remain a distant province.

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